October 11, 2007

NOSTALGIA OF THE WORDSMITH INTELLECTUALS

"...With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch; They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things...

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know..."
-Rudyard Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Copybook" is the British for Notebook; a "Copybook heading" was a proverb or other essential truth that a teacher assigned to his class to write an essay on. The "Gods of the Market" do not refer to the Free Market (there was still little government intervention in Kipling's time), but to fashionable utopian wisdom.

When I was a medical student, assigned to the surgical ward, I had an elderly Russian émigré patient, who underwent major abdominal surgery, followed by multiple bleeding episodes requiring more operations. He remained in the hospital a very long time, during which we spent many hours together. He told me tales of Mother Russia, its people and his own hair-raising saga of survival. Since my own ancestors came from Russia, one step ahead of the pogroms, I was naturally interested in his stories. To a young student living comfortably in America, these were real life, harrowing tales of narrow escapes from fanatical and blood thirsty revolutionaries bent on exterminating the old aristocracy, into which he’d been born. I’d read about such people in Joseph Conrad novels, but to meet an actual living, breathing one was fascinating. Among other things, he was unusually tolerant of physical pain and suffering, regarding this latest threat to his physical survival with equanimity; his attitude seemed to be “I have survived worse.” He had. He deeply loved and appreciated America. When I asked him what he thought was the appeal of revolutionary Communism, he smiled as if he had given the question much thought, then replied: “nostalgia”. I have never forgotten that answer, though at the time I forgot to ask “nostalgia for what?”. Now I think I know.

Many have wondered why the socialist dream is impossible to slay, despite its failures in the real world. Communism itself seemed to die ignominiously with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it survives now in an idealized form, seen almost daily in the NYTimes obituary pages fulsomely describing the death of local old Stalinists. Nostalgia. It lingers on their editorial pages which yearn for an imposible to attain egalitarian state run by liberal empaths, ensuring that everyone with a grievance gets an affirmative action program. More nostalgia.

Stalin’s songbird, Pete Seeger at age 88, has finally acknowledged that he should have condemned the Gulags, not celebrated Uncle Joe all those years while millions were murdered, but nevertheless he remains faithful to the dream of socialism. Throughout the world, socialist movements survive on a dream, the promise of egalitarian care for everyone from cradle to grave, perhaps postponing death itself by making longevity a government guaranteed ‘right’. A secular Garden of Eden to the tune track of Pete Seeger. Nostalgia.

The engine driving the utopian dream is indeed, fueled by nostalgia, and at the wheel are the wordsmith intellectuals. From philosophers like Rousseau, to Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Derrida, and Herbert Marcuse, intellectuals continue to yearn for a world of perfection—as defined, naturally, by wordsmith themselves. In the sphere of imaginative writing, novels and plays, from H.G. Wells to Norman Mailer, from Arthur Miller to Harold Pinter, these spinners of fantasies cater to the universal human longing for utopia, a prelapsarian time of bliss. They share contempt for the world of capitalist democracy, and scorn for the workers who make it run. Men of letters are of course the preeminent arbiters of the good and true in their own, self-created ideal world.

Among the many left liberal writers, H.G. Wells is an interesting example of wordsmith utopianism, a utopianism which was challenged by George Orwell. Wells, when not writing futuristic utopian fiction, was a socialist who minimized the horrors of the Russian Revolution and then topped that stupidity by trivializing the dangers posed by Hitler. Orwell possessed an understanding of human nature that Wells lacked, and composed dystopias that have outlasted Wells’s utopias. In 1940, Wells was still apologizing for the Soviets and minimizing Hitler’s threat. Orwell's words could apply as accurately today to the entire crowd of “creative” artists, in the literary, academic and media world. Just substitute Saddam for Stalin and Ahmadinejad for Hitler and see how little has changed---except unfortunately we have no Churchill:

“…There survives somewhere or other an interesting controversy which took place between Wells and Churchill at the time of the Russian Revolution. Wells accused Churchill of not really believing his own propaganda about the Bolsheviks being monsters dripping with blood, etc., but of merely fearing that they were going to introduce an era of common sense and scientific control, in which flag-wavers like Churchill himself would have no place. Churchill's estimate of the Bolsheviks, however, was nearer the mark than Wells's. The early Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an inverted form in Wells's attitude to the Nazis. Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good... Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his own works are based. The war-lords and the witch-doctors must fail, the common-sense World State, as seen by a nineteenth-century Liberal whose heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, must triumph. Treachery and defeatism apart, Hitler cannot be a danger. That he should finally win would be an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration…”
--George Orwell, Wells, Hitler And The World State
Orwell added that Wells “…has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swashbuckling side of life…”

Our wordsmith utopians disavow their own aggression. They feel, they care, they empathize, they are concerned about the children. They understand other cultures and wouldn’t think of using force to defend ours. They’d deploy overvalued, magically invested words to resolve all conflicts. Their own sense of identity is sentimental. They weep, they deeply sympathize, they admire themselves for being virtuous. When utopian tyrants—Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro-- behave murderously, it is rationalized as a temporary measure in pursuit of noble goals. Anyway, utopia requires scapegoats to blame for its failure to materialize. Just as Wells trivialized Hitler and Stalin’s violence, so do contemporary leftists minimize jihadi violence and blame Israel.

In closeup encounters with human nature, as a psychoanalyst, I have observed the universality of utopian longings, and their intensity. For example, all patients say they wish to change, yet all are quite resistant to real change. What they mean by ‘change’ is often an unrealistic fantasy, of permanent happiness, free of all inner conflict, something like the old Henny Youngman joke wherein a man with a broken arm goes to his doctor asking if he’ll be able to play the violin when it heals. The doctor answers, ‘certainly’ to which the patient replies ‘that’s great Doc, I never could play before.’ Internal conflict can never be resolved this side of the grave; it's part of being alive. Behavior can definitely be modified—without any internal change at all. Give me an electric cattle prod and I’ll modify your behavior quickly. Internal change, shifting the way a person handles conflicts, is slow, difficult and limited. It requires an honesty many find hard to achieve. It’s always easier to assign blame—to fate, one’s parents, bad luck, etc. As Eric Hoffer once said, “There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.”

It is pretty apparent that most verbal creativity comes from depths of unhappiness. Most contemporary artists are aggrieved at a society that fails to appreciate them sufficiently, but the grievance goes deeper. Ernest Hemingway, when asked what it took to be a novelist said: “First, have an unhappy childhood.” Writers, when they’ve been exposed to psychotherapeutic treatment often worry that they’ll lose their creativity. Correctly so, because their literary productions are often attempts at self-healing, and if they actually solve their problems, the need to write about themselves, in fictional disguise tends to fade away. The novelist Somerset Maugham wrote a great novel, a thinly disguised history of his own miserable enslavement to women in Of Human Bondage. The self therapeutic effort, the attempt to make sense of his irrational misery is palpable. Maugham’s novel depicted the self imposed misery some men find seeking perfection, a lost world of narcissism in which all needs were instantly met by a loving maternal woman. Again, the yearning for lost perfection. Nostalgia.

The world of words is a marvelous one; a novelist can reject what’s painful in this world and create an alternative world, peopled with his own creations. This often seems amazing to the rest of us, and authors tend to think of themselves as possessing uniquely magical creative skills. They don’t. They have a specific skill with words, limited like any other, no more remarkable than the creative skill of a businessman, athlete, scientist or salesman, in fact of each of us, as we try to solve the problems of everyday life, draws on our creativity to do so. Writers do frequently possess a deeper sense of grievance and entitlement than the rest of us. Rarely do they possess common sense or wisdom beyond their particular skill, especially because as children they were made to feel superior by virtue of their skill with words. We overvalue the writer’s creativity primarily because writers tell us how profoundly important and gifted they are and leave the written records that highlight their own historical importance.

Writers often have difficulties with reality, usually with its most basic aspects. Reality doesn’t value any of us as much as we valued ourselves as young children, and this is especially painful to wordsmiths. Most of us utilize creativity in verbal and non-verbal ways to solve the problems and conflicts of everyday life, but we don’t give ourselves the title of ‘artist’. It is frustrating to the grandiosity and narcissism of the infant to discover there are differences—of strength, intelligence, power and fortune. Perhaps the most difficult blow to a young person’s self centeredness is the realization that other people exist and that there are differences between the sexes and the generations. To future wordsmiths this is especially painful so they set about creating verbal pictures of worlds where such differences don’t exist. Some like the Marquis de Sade transgress the incest taboo and the boundaries between the generations. Some write novels in which men and women change sex. Many create worlds in which superior verbal wit prevails, or nonaggressive goodness triumphs.

Non-fiction wordsmiths develop ideologies which emphasize the unfairness of Capitalist democracies wherein differences of sex, intelligence, talent and looks are acknowledged and welcomed. The Freudo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse attacked the institution of the family as the transmitter of oppressive capitalist morality with its emphasis on competition and striving for success. Most importantly, the unhappy wordsmiths of childhood think it unfair that they don’t reap the rewards of the active doers, the ones who grapple with differences and derive pleasure from them. Most feel undervalued in the real world, as measured against their own self-assessment.

To return to my patient and that unasked question. I think I have the answer now. Utopians are nostalgic not for anything real, but for a fantasy, a garden of Eden in which painful differences of talent, looks, fortune, do not exist, an egalitarian paradise where sexual and aggressive conflicts don't exist and all problems are solvable with words. As long as human beings feel injured by their very condition, their own mortality, their own vulnerability, as long as reality includes blows to one’s sense of childhood grandiosity and entitlement, the fantasy of socialist paradise will persist.

We can easily understand now, why there is such an alliance between leftists and Islamists. Both are in the grip of nostalgia for a world that never really existed. Both yearn for a fantasied perfect world they were forced out of long ago. Left-liberal wordsmith intellectuals, having been good little boys and girls, are terrified and fascinated by aggression and ready to submit when the head choppers come calling. They secretly admire their willingness to blow up the world to bring about utopia. Why the alliance between leftists and Islamists? Like good little masochists, the left utopians are prepared to submit to the unconstrained sadism of the Islamists. Each group has severe difficulties coping with the basic facts of reality, that there are two sexes. Liberals seek to contain the threat by denying the differences; Islamists try to contain the same threat by controlling and enslaving women. In truth, both groups seek to overcome their fear of sexual difference by returning to a mythic time, a womb-like fantasy, before differentiation existed. This is why they can't tolerate differing views on any important issues. Difference itself is an unacceptable part of the real world. Both Muslims and leftists are harshly intolerant of differing views, clearly because such views deeply threaten their belief systems.

While wordsmith intellectuals control much of the media, universities, entertainment industry, they are outnumbered by adults dealing with the real world. They can do much damage, for as Churchill once said: “The worst difficulties from which we suffer...come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage earners, they come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength.”

Fortunately there are vast numbers of citizens, living outside of Hollywood and the Upper West Side of Manhattan who are not intimidated by their supposed intellectual betters. I personally believe that, like my Russian emigre patient, the 'wage earners' deeply and patriotically love this country and will resist the siren call of utopia.