Op. 21
THE IMPORTANCE OF TECHNOLOGY
Philosophical Dialogues and
Aphorisms
Copyright © 2013 John
O'Loughlin
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CONTENTS
PART ONE: DIALOGUES
1. The Importance of Technology
2. Two Kinds of Writer
3. Philosophical Truth
4. Towards Ultimate Oneness
5. Three Types of Decadence
6. Apologia Pornographica
7. Literary Equivalents
PART TWO: APHORISMS
8. Aphorisms (1–84)
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PART ONE: DIALOGUES
THE IMPORTANCE OF TECHNOLOGY
GRAHAM: Isn't the dialogue genre a little out-of-date now, and
therefore unlikely to appeal to a mass public?
KENNETH: I doubt whether it's out-of-date, but you may be right in
supposing that it won't appeal to a mass public. Ordinarily the masses are more interested in
fiction than in fact, in illusory entertainment than in truthful
enlightenment. They have little taste
for philosophy or higher thought.
Consequently they tend to prefer novels to dialogues. But that is no reason why dialogues shouldn't
be written. One is simply appealing to a
more intelligent public.
GRAHAM: Yes, but who honestly writes dialogues these days anyway?
KENNETH: Khrishnamurti, for one. I, for another. There are doubtless others as well, though I
don't make a point of reading them.
GRAHAM: And do you regard the dialogue as viable a means of
expression as the essay?
KENNETH: I would say that a dialogue which contains original
thought or pertains to higher truth is no less worthy of attention than an
essay which does the same. It isn't so
much the genre that matters as ... what one does with it. Even a prose poem can be something well-worth
reading if the man who writes it is a poetical genius and can tell you things
that no-one else could. The writer makes
the genre, not vice versa. Better to
read a dialogue by a genius than an essay or novel by a mediocrity!
GRAHAM: I take your point!
So presumably you appertain to the category of dialogists of genius?
KENNETH: That's not impossible.
After all, I have a philosophy to expound, and that helps somewhat. My philosophy goes equally well into
dialogues, essays, short prose, novels, or aphorisms. When I become tired of one genre I gravitate
to another, thereby maintaining my taste for philosophy and preventing it from
going stale or sour or whatever.
GRAHAM: And what, pray, is this
philosophy?
KENNETH: That evolution is essentially a struggle from alpha to
omega, as from the Devil to God.
GRAHAM: Is that all?
KENNETH: I was putting it as succinctly as possible. I haven't told you how I conceive of the
Devil, nor what God will be?
GRAHAM: Then please do!
KENNETH: The Devil is the sum total of primal stars in the
Universe and is therefore divisible. God
will be the pure spirit that emerges from human spirit at the climax of our
evolution, and will therefore be indivisible.
The Devil is Manifold, but God will be One.
GRAHAM: I see! And what about Jesus Christ?
KENNETH: Christ is the anthropomorphic, dualistic deity relative
to an egocentric stage of human evolution.
Christ is man as God. Yet He
isn't literally and ultimately God, but a humanistic deity coming in-between
two absolutes - the alpha absolute of the Cosmos and the omega absolute of the
Holy Spirit, which is in the process of evolution throughout the world and, in
all likelihood, the Universe as a whole.
God as such doesn't exist. Only the Devil.
GRAHAM: So you are evidently an atheist?
KENNETH: Precisely! I don't
confound the Creator with God, which, by contrast, will be the ultimate
creation ... of man. I realize that the
Creator is God's antithesis, since the alpha absolute.
GRAHAM: Why absolute?
KENNETH: Because beneath the dualistic compromise between
sensuality and spirituality which is found in organic life, particularly human
life. The stars are sensual absolutes,
and so the Devil, being synonymous with the stars, is the alpha absolute,
existing through its own means independently of external assistance. Our sun, which is but a component of the
Devil, produces energy through the so-called proton-proton reaction which
converts hydrogen into helium, the gas of hell. Other stars follow a similar process,
burning up in the course of time. None
of them can last for ever, since they are the antithesis of Eternity, which
will be manifested in the Holy Spirit.
This latter manifestation will expand throughout the Universe through
all eternity, eventually replacing the stars, and so bringing the Universe to
perfection. If the alpha absolute is
beneath dualism, then the omega absolute will be above it.
GRAHAM: And so God is beyond man, never
something that is a part of him or anterior to him.
KENNETH: Yes, strictly speaking!
We are not God and neither do we have contact with God. If we are spiritually earnest and therefore
dedicated to the cultivation of spirit, we have contact with that, in
ourselves, which is spirit and not with the omega absolute, which will
eventually arise out of it ... at the climax to our evolution. God is not in us but only what is potentially
God, which is spirit, the essence of the superconscious.
GRAHAM: So, presumably, no man can claim to be God or one with
God?
KENNETH: Not with absolute justification! We can only build towards the establishment
of God in the Universe, not personally identify with Him.
GRAHAM: But how will we build towards such a divine establishment?
KENNETH: By continuing our evolutionary progress along lines
designed to free us from nature's influence and enable us to cultivate as much
spirit as possible - in a word, by the further development of
civilization. For nature is the main
offspring of the Devil. It is a wholly
sensuous, subconscious phenomenon. Now
it seems to me that we are here to battle against it and eventually attain to
the supernatural. This would seem to be
our privilege and responsibility as men.
We may stem from the Diabolic Alpha to the degree that we are dependent
on and under the influence of nature, but we also aspire towards the Divine
Omega by striving to overcome nature and, more importantly, cultivating
spirit. We are 'born under one law [but]
to another bound', as Huxley was fond of reminding us, quoting from that poem
by Fulke Greville, I think
it was. Thus there are two ways of
building towards God - the indirect way, which entails a struggle against
nature, and the direct way, which entails the cultivation of spirit. Broadly speaking, one might argue that the
West has hitherto given priority to the former and the East, by contrast, to the
latter. Yet both ways are absolutely
necessary and equally important! By
themselves, in isolation, neither of them can effect a future transformation to
the supernatural. The coming together of
both the East and the West into a unitary synthesis is the cardinal fact of our
time, the inevitable evolutionary step beyond the independent existence of the
two approaches to salvation. In sum, the
indirect approach of striving to overcome nature through technological, industrial,
urban, scientific, and social progress must be put to the service of the direct
approach ... of cultivating spirit through transcendental meditation. Only then will we be on a direct course for
the millennial Beyond.
GRAHAM: And presumably this direct course will be a consequence of
the fusion of East and West into a new civilization?
KENNETH: Yes, the transcendental civilization of post-dualistic
man. However, we are still quite a way
from such a civilization at present, especially in the West, where dualistic
criteria continue to prevail. Obviously,
it will be necessary to outgrow and clear away the existing civilization before
another and better one can be put in its place, yet this won't happen
overnight. I foresee the triumph of
socialism to pave the way for this new civilization. Socialism will lead to transcendentalism, and
that, in due course, will lead to the millennial Beyond.
GRAHAM: How, exactly, will it do that?
KENNETH: By making transcendence possible. As I said, there are two ways of building
towards God, and both of them are absolutely necessary. Let us start where dualistic civilization
leaves off, with the indirect method ... of socialism. Here we witness the development of urbanization,
industrialization, science, and technology to unprecedented heights, as man
struggles to overcome nature and thus free himself
from its clutches. One might term this
phase of post-dualistic evolution the New Barbarism, since there is little or
no place in it for transcendentalism.
Here man builds towards God without necessarily realizing it, since
social and economic concerns are paramount.
The genuine socialist is an enemy of traditional religion in all its
guises, and wishes to rid the world of every last shred of religious
superstition. Salvation is in the hands
of man, and socialism is the means through which it will be realized. But the socialist doesn't think in terms of
salvation in a heavenly Beyond. On the
contrary, he thinks in terms of a classless society here on earth, in which men
live in harmony with one another and with their environment. This is what the typical socialist, be he
European or Asian or anything else, thinks about salvation, and instead of
Heaven he uses the term 'Millennium', which is intended to designate - over and
above epochal parameters - the coming time of happiness on earth. This attitude, which is perfectly logical in
its context, I call the New Barbarism, and it signifies a transitional phase
between the end of dualistic civilization and the beginning of the
transcendental one to-come. With the
birth of the latter, however, socialism will embrace transcendentalism, and so
make feasible the direct method of building towards God. This method should become the post-dualistic
religious norm, and it would differ from traditional transcendentalism by being
the inheritor of the technological, industrial, and social progress to which
the predominantly socialist stage of evolution had given a boost. Meditation would not then be impeded in its
efficacy for cultivating spirit by the natural body, but should become
progressively freer of such an impediment through the assistance of technology,
which would gradually replace the natural organs with artificial ones,
eventually making for a situation where the brain was artificially supported
and no-less artificially sustained.
Hence the overcoming of nature would not just be confined to the
impersonal environment, but would have extended into the personal environment
of the body, thus freeing the spirit from sensual constraints. Technology wouldn't simply free man from the
burden of cultivating animals and crops for their food-value; it would free him
from the necessity to eat and drink, thereby rendering him completely
independent of nature. Oxygen could be
supplied to the brain via special containers, whilst a mechanical heart, or
pump, would keep the blood flowing through the brain via plastic tubing. Ultimately nothing would be left of man
except the brain, and most probably just the so-called new brain, the most
advanced part of the brain, with a consequence that he would be able to
dedicate himself exclusively to the attainment of salvation in the millennial
Beyond.
GRAHAM: What a staggering prospect! The gradual phasing-out of the body until
nothing remained but the brain?
KENNETH: Indeed! And one
might argue that, with the gradual 'withering' of the state as a compromise
between socialism and transcendentalism, something analogous to a 'communist'
Millennium would have properly arrived as the final phase of the transcendental
civilization, in which everything was geared to man's eventual attainment of
spiritual transcendence. For once man
had been rendered incapable of rebelling against progress,
there would be scant need of a security apparatus to ensure the prevention of
counter-revolutionary 'wrecking' tendencies.
A man elevated to the status of an artificially-supported brain could
hardly be expected to wreck anything, least of all the technology at his
disposal! So the state would inevitably
'wither away' as a coercive and supportive agent, once its goal of maximum
security had been reached. People would
no longer be thinking in terms of how to perfect the machinery of state while
simultaneously protecting the cultural or religious achievements of the
transcendental civilization, but be exclusively concerned with attaining to
definitive salvation at the climax of evolution. Religious concerns would completely supplant
political ones, in this latter phase of post-dualistic civilization. Inevitably, man would become God, become part
of the omega absolute, and thus leave the material world behind him, as would
his counterparts elsewhere in the Universe.
Such is the ultimate implication of Teilhard
de Chardin's convergence to the Omega Point, as
expounded in Activation of Energy.
Each individual spirit would tend towards maximum unity in the Oneness
of the Holy Spirit, as it abandoned the separate brain of the individual meditator at the moment of transcendence.
GRAHAM: And soared heavenwards, like a comet or rocket?
KENNETH: I don't know about
that! But certainly it would gravitate
towards its destination in space at a suitable remove from the sensuous
presence of individual stars, which constitute Hell. Perhaps for thousands or even millions of
years Hell and Heaven would coexist in the Universe. But eventually, following the inevitable
collapse of all the stars, only Heaven would prevail, bringing the Universe to
perfection.
GRAHAM: So you don't object to the concept of Heaven, but are of
the belief that it will one day become a reality?
KENNETH: No, I don't object to it!
What I object to is the Christian way of conceiving of it, a way which
is inherently egocentric, and related to the idea of a posthumous salvation, or
salvation following death. These days
such a conception is no longer valid because the world is tending in an
increasingly post-egocentric direction.
One would indeed be deluded to imagine that, after a life of sensual
self-indulgence or attention to natural obligations like drinking and eating,
never mind urinating and defecating, one was entitled to absorption into a
realm of pure spirit! Believe me, Heaven could not be entered so easily! No, at death the spirit is overcome by the
flesh and simply dies. It isn't saved.
GRAHAM: Then how are we to save it?
KENNETH: By gradually getting rid of the
flesh and prolonging the duration of life, as I have already said. At present we lack the requisite technology
to save the spirit, although we are nevertheless increasing the average life-span
of man, which is a step in the right direction.
Yet no amount of pampering or doctoring the body will prevent it from
eventually succumbing to the fate of old age, which is dissolution and
death. So the ultimate solution to
prolonging the life of our spirit must reside elsewhere - namely in the
phasing-out of the natural body through technology. Only then will the human life-span be
considerably extended, thereby providing man with sufficient time for the
cultivation of an advanced degree of spirituality, a spirituality which will culminate
in transcendence.
GRAHAM: Even with the existence of the old brain?
KENNETH: No, as I intimated earlier, the old brain would probably
have to 'go the way' of the rest of the body if spirit, which reposes rather
more in the new brain, as superconsciousness, was to
be cultivated to a transcendent degree.
There may well be a period of time when the old brain won't be subject
to technological interference, in response to both an inability to successfully
deal with it technologically and the course of events inevitably having to
proceed by degrees rather than in leaps and bounds. One must envisage an initial coexistence of
the different brains in which some form of egocentric consciousness will be
retained, and the subconscious accordingly continue to exist. Meditation will assist in the cultivation of
the superconscious, or spirit, and so, too, should
synthetic drugs like LSD, which make for transcendent visionary experience in
the lower regions of the superconscious.
GRAHAM: But not, apparently, in the subconscious?
KENNETH: No. The
subconscious appertains to the sensual realm of dreams and sleep, not to the
realm of transcendent visionary experience.
To approach it in a waking-life context it's only necessary to take one
or another of the natural drugs, like tobacco, hashish, opium, et cetera, which
stem, in a manner of speaking, from the sensuous roots of the world in nature,
and so facilitate varying degrees of downward self-transcendence, to coin a Huxleyite phrase.
However, no transcendental civilization could encourage the consumption
of such drugs, and so it would be to the lower regions of the superconscious that synthetic drugs appealed, expanding
consciousness upwards in the direction of pure spirit. Of course, one cannot run before one has
learnt to walk. Consequently a period of
acclimatization to the lower regions of the superconscious
would have to precede complete absorption into its higher regions. The eventual separation of the new brain from
the old brain would doubtless further this end, but one could only be led to it
by degrees, as one gradually learnt to adjust to upward self-transcendence and
simultaneously acquired greater control over the subconscious influence of the
old brain. No-one can escape from his
past all at once, especially when that past is a psychic/organic one which has
lasted for many thousands of years. One
must first be weaned away from sensual consciousness in the milk of a synthetic
drug like LSD, before one can hope to face the light of the higher superconscious and, ultimately, the Supreme Being itself,
as one's spirit merges into it, following transcendence. Otherwise one would experience the fate of
Huxley's Eustace Barnack, one of the leading
characters of Time Must Have a Stop, who, following death, was
unable to tolerate absorption into the Clear Light of the Void, in consequence
of having the burden of his past egocentric consciousness upon him. Now although the concept of such a posthumous
encounter with the Clear Light ... is no better than the Christian belief in a
posthumous heaven, the situation which Aldous Huxley
describes isn't without some applicability to what I have just said about the
need to approach salvation by degrees, considering that Barnack
was somewhat less than psychically prepared for Eternity. He would inevitably be obliged, in the moral
nature of these things, to return to the world in the guise of a new-born
infant and work towards his self-improvement, before any possibility of subsequent
unification with the Divine could be expected.
However, reincarnation isn't a doctrine to which I literally subscribe,
since I contend that, at death, the spirit simply dies. But Huxley was expounding Hindu belief and
apparently believed in it himself, as his own experiment with a dose of LSD,
while dying, would seem to confirm. He
imagined it would assist his passage into the Beyond(!),
and so died in the egocentric tradition of short-term, or posthumous,
salvation. He might as well have
remained a Christian, as experimented with oriental religion!
GRAHAM: Yet it does have some applicability to the future, doesn't
it?
KENNETH: Insofar as meditation is concerned, yes, I believe it
does. But, then, so
does Christianity, to the degree that it posits salvation in the Beyond as the
goal and true resting place of human striving. Where it is mistaken, in my view, is in its
short-term, egocentric view of the Beyond.
So the time has come when a new religious orientation, compatible with a
long-term or millennial view of the Beyond, must arise to supersede the old
one. The genuine Christian will contend
that Heaven already exists, since composed, as it were, of the risen presence
of Christ. Such an egocentric, quasi-mystical
view is upheld, for example, by Teilhard de Chardin, despite his long-term philosophy of the Omega
Point. But, of course, Christ is simply
an anthropomorphic deity relative to a humanistic stage of evolution, not the
omega absolute as such, and so we can be certain that he doesn't literally
reside there, since he would have lacked access to the technology which makes
transcendence truly possible, just as we do some 2,000 years later. Even as a symbol for our future
transcendence, the concept of the Risen Christ is inadequate in this post-egocentric
age, seeing as its anthropomorphism is incompatible with spiritual
transcendence as such, which could not have bodily form.
GRAHAM: You mean that pictorial or aesthetic representations of
the Ascension exclusively appeal to an egocentric consciousness, in which the
body has as much importance as the spirit, and are accordingly irrelevant to a
more evolved mentality?
KENNETH: Yes, precisely!
The truly modern man cannot take such anthropomorphic representations
seriously. And when that man is a
socialist he is inclined, in consequence, to turn against the whole concept of
heavenly salvation, as though the Christians were simply deluded to conceive of
it in the first place. But they were not
madmen or fools to adhere to this concept for the better part of two millennia,
and we would be oversimplifying the issue to assume otherwise! They were on to something important all
right, but necessarily regarded it from an egocentric standpoint. However, we are now in a better position and
therefore ought to be able to find room in our minds for a more objective,
long-term view of Heaven ... as something that will follow the
Millennium-proper, as the spiritual culmination to evolution. But by 'we', I don't mean pedantic upholders
of Christianity, wherever they may be in the world. I refer to those who are still evolving and
capable of changing with the times; those who are destined to work at
constructing the transcendental civilization, no matter how indirect or
materialistic their current approach to God-building may happen to be. I have no time for opponents of progress!
GRAHAM: I begin to understand what you said, at the start of our
discussion, about a dialogue being as good as its writer. If all dialogues were like yours, I would
read nothing else.
KENNETH: How flattering!
But I never said I was just a dialogist!
TWO KINDS OF WRITER
CHRISTOPHER: I recently read a journal by Eugene Ionesco, in which Jean-Paul Sartre was described as petty
bourgeois, and as a petty bourgeois, moreover, who was envious of the grand
bourgeoisie. Would you agree?
CHRISTOPHER: What do you mean by 'of a different kind'?
LAWRENCE: Just this: that there are always two kinds of
bourgeoisie, which, at the risk of oversimplification, we may call the
spiritual kind and the materialist kind - those in the former category
including priests, teachers, artists, writers, judges, et cetera, and those in
the latter category including businessmen, doctors, scientists, technologists,
politicians, et cetera. The spiritual
kind live in the realm of ideas and produce books, sermons, lectures, lessons,
papers, et cetera, whereas the materialist kind live in the realm of concrete
phenomena and produce or uphold a variety of material products ... ranging from
pills and lotions to vacuum cleaners and computers. Sartre, being a writer and thinker, appertained
to the spiritual category of bourgeois, even though, within that category, he
was more of a materialist or, at any rate, had a materialistic bias, as his
copious political writings adequately attest.
He belonged to a subcategory composed of writers like Koestler, Camus, and Orwell,
rather than to that of writers like Gide, Huxley, and
Hesse, in whose books religious concerns tend to
preponderate.
CHRISTOPHER: And you would say he was a grand bourgeois?
CHRISTOPHER: I see! He was
a grand bourgeois in relation to lesser or younger writers. But where would that place him, in your
estimation, with regard to a materialistic grand bourgeois, like a wealthy
businessman?
LAWRENCE: I would say that, since the spiritual should take
precedence over the material in any morally objective appreciation of the world
or of the people in it, the spiritual kind of bourgeois is generally a superior
kettle-of-fish to his materialist counterpart, in consequence of which a writer
of Sartre's standing should be regarded as a higher kind of man than a
businessman, no matter how successful the latter may happen to be. Whether he should also be regarded as such in
relation to an outstanding statesman ... is another matter; though I would be
inclined to grant him the benefit of the doubt!
There is only one category of man to whom a truly great writer may feel
inferior, and that is the priestly category, especially those in the upper echelons
of it. A holy man, or sage, is superior
to a writer, although this doesn't necessarily apply to a Christian priest who,
even when well-advanced in his vocation, may well be inferior because what he
stands for, namely the Christian religion, is becoming increasingly
anachronistic or irrelevant, and the role of spiritual or moral leadership has
accordingly passed elsewhere. It is
somewhat unlikely that a man like Sartre, who was a
Marxist-turned-Existentialist, would regard any of the upholders of Christianity
as his intellectual or moral superiors!
On the contrary, if he looked up to anyone at all, it would have been to
certain statesmen of a revolutionary stamp, like Mao or Castro. For he was, after all, a
predominantly materialistic, and therefore political, type of writer.
CHRISTOPHER: Yes, I entirely agree! But how therefore would he compare with those
writers, such as Huxley, Hesse, and Gide, whom you have dubbed predominantly spiritual, and
hence religious? Would a similar
distinction apply?
CHRISTOPHER: So you would regard Huxley, for example, as a
superior type of writer to Sartre, because he gave greater importance to
essence, or the spirit, in his writings?
CHRISTOPHER: As, I should imagine, were you, whose bias is towards
the spiritual, and who may well become a grand bourgeois in your own profession
one day, assuming you become world famous.
CHRISTOPHER: I am almost disposed to believe it! Though one must also bear in mind the nature
and quality of any individual master's works, surely?
CHRISTOPHER: No, I guess not.
But you can always go beyond Miller by improving on the quality of your
truth.
PHILOSOPHICAL TRUTH
GARY: Someone told me, the other day, that you don't believe in
sexual equality, being of the opinion that it is a sort of modern myth.
OLIVER: She was right to tell you that! I don't believe in it.
OLIVER: Very well! Men and
women are fundamentally different creatures, and so they must remain until such
time as technology may decide otherwise.
Women signify appearance over essence and men, by contrast, essence over
appearance.
GARY: Which means, I take it, that women are more beautiful than
men, and men more intellectual than women. The former are more sensual, the latter more
spiritual.
OLIVER: Yes, generally speaking, that is indeed the case! One might argue that whereas women stem, in their
greater sensuality, from the diabolic roots of life in the Cosmos, men aspire,
in their greater spirituality, towards the divine blossom of life in the
Beyond. Women remain rooted in
appearances, in accordance with the dictates of their natural beauty.
OLIVER: No, but we must ignore the exceptions in the interests of
an overall rule. Philosophy deals with
the general, not the particular.
OLIVER: Traditionally men and women are contrary phenomena, and
therefore unequal.
We habitually speak of 'his better half', but, in reality, the reverse
is usually the case, insofar as women are less spiritual than men. Custom, however, dictates otherwise, male
vanity requiring the illusion of female superiority for convenience's
sake. To admit the truth would be
demeaning for a man and humiliating for a woman.
OLIVER: Quite so! However,
now that we have acknowledged the traditional dualism between men and women, we
are obliged to come more up-to-date and thus face-up to the contemporary
situation, in which the sexes are increasingly being regarded as equal. Why is this?
OLIVER: Because, my dear chap, we no longer live in a balanced
environmental context between nature and civilization but are becoming
increasingly lopsided on the side of civilization - in other words, because we
live in a world which is no longer dualistic but post-dualistic, growing
estranged from the sensuous influence of nature.
OLIVER: On the contrary, this is
something to be grateful for, especially if one is a man, since it confirms the
fact that we are gradually evolving towards the supernatural with the help of
our expanding urban environments. Yes,
we are progressing towards God, and because of this we live in a society which
is becoming ever more spiritual, ever more biased towards essence. Small wonder, therefore, if men and women are
increasingly being regarded as equal!
For women are also experiencing the consequences of civilized evolution
and becoming less sensual and correspondingly more spiritual, as they grow
isolated from nature in our great cities.
They are gradually being regarded as 'lesser men' rather than simply as
women, in deference to the post-dualistic status of the age. We treat them as equals because they are no
longer, in the main, what they used to be, no longer diametrically opposed to
us in the context of a less-evolved, and therefore more natural,
civilization. They want to wear the
pants, to work outside the home, to become professionals, to buy themselves
what they like, to travel abroad at will, to prevent traditional marital
obligations from dominating them, to subvert nature through contraception, to
participate in sports, to drive their own cars, to cut their hair short - oh,
to do so many things which suggest a spiritual rather than a sensual
turn-of-mind. And this is a good thing, this is something we men can be proud of, since we
are largely responsible for the development of civilization to a point where
women are virtually obliged to behave like men.
And so we treat them as equals.
Not many men would automatically offer their seat to a woman in a
crowded bus or train these days, and this, believe it or not, is a reflection
of the fact that we are inclined to regard women as equals, as 'lesser men',
rather than to emphasize a distinction between the sexes, as formerly.
OLIVER: Ah, you've anticipated my argument! I admitted to you earlier that I don't
believe in sexual equality, and I stand by what I said. We treat women as equals because of the
post-dualistic status of the age, which makes it both logical and expedient to
do so. There is no reason why we
shouldn't, since they increasingly behave like men. However, as to a literal equality between the
sexes, it no more exists now than when dualistic distinctions were paramount. For that same evolutionary coercion, stemming
from the growth of cities, which has spiritualized women to the contemporary
level ... has further spiritualized men, thus making them even more aware, even
more intellectual, than they would otherwise be. Instead of a male stasis, as it were, while
women have progressed or, rather, been coerced away from their sensual
traditions, men have also experienced the influence of their changing
environments, thus progressing ahead of women into higher levels of
authority. One might say that whereas
women are now so many clerks, men are so many managers or executives. Thus instead of drawing closer together, the
sexes have progressed at equal distance apart along a post-dualistic region of
the evolutionary spectrum. Women are
therefore 'lesser men' and, on that account, not to be treated as women ... but
as equals!
OLIVER: So it might appear on the surface. And so for a relatively small minority of
exceptional women, like Emily Pankhurst, it doubtless
was and continues to be! But, overall,
this isn't really the case. The feminist
movement subscribes to a myth, a theology, in the sense that Schopenhauer would
have used the term, which is designed to coat the bitter pill of male coercion
with the sugar of self-willed progress.
Yet, really, a philosopher's task isn't to defend or expound the popular
myths of the age, but to reveal the truth for the benefit of that relatively
small percentage of higher minds who are capable of appreciating and coming to
terms with it. One is like Roland Barthes, exposing the popular myths in the interests of the
truth. Yet this isn't to say that one
wishes to force one's findings upon the masses.
As Schopenhauer well knew, they are as entitled to their various myths
as we philosophers to exposing them for the benefit of the Few, in order to
keep the light of truth alive. A myth
may be expedient to the Many for a given period of time, but it mustn't be
allowed to usurp the domain of truth.
The world could so easily become a madhouse, bumbling-on in the dark, if
no place, no matter how small, was reserved for the truth. We philosophers endeavour to lead the Few
towards truth, since we cannot lead everyone towards it.
OLIVER: And too humiliating, since the
masses, and women in particular, need their High Priests to soothe them with
the mitigating illusions and half-truths of contemporary myth. To some extent a High Priest should be
accessible to truth and not be entirely at the mercy of his theology. For a theologian who is completely the victim
of his illusions and delusions is not only a potential danger to the truth, but
a potential danger to the Few as well, and can easily become akin to a raging
lunatic. He must be restrained before
too much mischief is done at the expense of the higher men - a subject about
which Nietzsche had more than a few words to say, since priests have more than
once put philosophers to the stake for refuting their myths. Fortunately for philosophers, however, the
Christian myth is no longer anywhere near as influential as formerly, even where
priests are concerned, and so they don't have to worry so much about clerical
censorship these days. Instead they have
other myths to contend with, including the Marxist and feminist ones, which
pertain to contemporary 'theology'. For
theology, remember, appeals to the Many, philosophy to the Few. Theology is alpha, philosophy omega. Marx may have been a philosopher, but Marxism
is a theological simplification of Marx.
GARY: And yet, as evolution progresses
and one theology supplants another, surely there is more overall approximation
to truth?
OLIVER: There is indeed!
But then philosophy continues to evolve too, so that, at its furthermost
contemporary level, it is no less inaccessible to the Many than formerly. A contemporary theology can approach the
level of a previous philosophy, but it can't get to the level of contemporary
philosophy. Just as
men and women evolve apace, so do theology and philosophy, continuing to remain
unequal. Now just as, in Hindu
myth, a man who has lived egocentrically cannot unite, following death, with
the Clear Light of the Void, so a man of egocentric disposition, balanced
between the subconscious and the superconscious,
cannot relate to what the foremost philosopher is contending about his
particular grasp of truth. There is an equivalence here between a light which is too clear and a
truth which is too strong. Hence
theology is required, in order to convey a diluted version of the truth to the
masses. But such a version cannot arise
from nowhere. It must come from a
stronger, purer concept of truth, and thus from a philosopher originally. You can see how dangerous to evolutionary
progress it can be when theologians, wallowing in self-delusion, put
philosophers to death or otherwise impede them.
By disposing of philosophers they run the risk of cutting themselves off
from the truth and floundering, without a guiding light, in the relative
darkness of their particular theology.
Evolution can be set back decades, if not centuries. And this applies as much to Marxist
theologians as to any previous ones, who can all-too-easily make the same
mistakes, with similar fatal consequences!
GARY: Presumably those philosophers who live in Marxist states
should have access, through special depositories, to the Few, who will
accordingly be kept in touch with stronger doses of the truth than their
work-a-day theology would allow?
OLIVER: Yes, and not only those philosophers who live in Marxist
states but, more particularly, those who live outside them, whose truth may be
no less relevant, in the long term, as the basis for the subsequent development
of theology to a higher and more truthful level. No state, no matter what its official
theology, can afford to live without philosophers. For they act as a guiding light to the Few,
who, whether as statesmen or professors, scientists or economists, artists or
priests, must subsequently set about modifying the particular theology with
whose preservation they have been publicly entrusted. Thus there should be a continual interaction
between philosophers and leaders, so that the theology is constantly upgraded
and not allowed to become fixed in a permanent mould ... at the risk of
becoming stale and anachronistic. There
must be continual evolution.
OLIVER: Only to the extent that the philosopher serves to
enlighten the leadership. For when a
philosopher takes it into his head to govern outright, as did Plato for a time,
the result is more likely to be chaotic than beneficial! Plato made the mistake of taking his own
advice too literally. But actual
governance must always be left to politicians, the Few, and not be usurped by
those whose provenance it is to remain at an intellectual remove from the real
world. Admittedly, there have been one
or two notable exceptions that, like Marcus Aurelius, were able to combine
theory with practice. But, as a rule,
this isn't the case. The philosopher's
proper sphere of influence lies in the theoretical domain, not the practical
one! He should leave the actual
governance of the state to others, since his duty is to understand the world
rather than to change it, even if his understanding of it may lead to considerable
governmental change.
GARY: What happens when the philosopher is so brilliant, his grasp
of truth so firm, that not even the Few can appreciate
or stomach it? I am especially thinking
of Nietzsche.
OLIVER: Such cases don't occur all that often, but, when they do,
a wise leadership will draw what truth it can from the philosopher concerned,
and leave the greater part of his teachings to posterity. That is preferable to dismissing him
outright, seeing that one day his truth, which should be roughly compatible
with the truth, will be fully intelligible and recognized at its true
value.
GARY: And this, I take it, also applies,
in some degree, to your own philosophy, which is occasionally too truthful for
even the strongest stomachs, or perhaps I should say minds, to digest? What you say, for example, about men and
women being unequal certainly isn't reflected by contemporary feminist
theology, is it?
OLIVER: No, but then there is little reason why it should be, at
this point in time. For my philosophy
appeals more to a few of the Few than to the Few as a whole, if you follow me,
and therefore isn't all that likely, at present, to have much influence on the
modification of contemporary theology.
That must come about in the future, as my work becomes more accessible
to the leadership. Currently it is known
only within the rather restricted circle of my friends and acquaintances, who don't hold responsible public positions. But I can bide my time.
GARY: Presumably without taking much interest in the High Priests
or, rather, Priestesses of feminist theology, who would appear to be the
biggest dupes of the age?
OLIVER: Quite! I leave them
to their rhetorical patter and attend to my affairs, in pursuance of higher
degrees of truth.
OLIVER: Oh, that society is tending in an increasingly spiritual
direction and, if all goes well, will continue to tend in such a direction in
the more distant future, inevitably reaching a point where women effectively
cease to exist, as appearance gives way to essence to such an extent ... that
nothing demonstrably sensual remains.
The subsequent climax of evolution, in which human spirit will become
transcendent and therefore divine, can only be a supermasculine
affair, devoid of even the faintest shred of sensuality. For irrespective of what the Pope may have
had to say about the probability of men and women retaining their sex in
Heaven, I, being a post-dualistic philosopher and not a humanistic theologian,
contend otherwise. Just as I contend
that Heaven will come at the climax of evolution rather than following
individual death. And, coming then, it
will not only be completely beyond women but ... completely beyond men as well,
since humanity will have become God, not be existing in any recognizably human
form within the presence of God as anthropomorphically conceived of by
Christians.
OLIVER: Yes, I believe that, from a post-dualistic standpoint, he
most certainly was! But, from a
Christian anthropomorphic standpoint, he was absolutely right, absolutely
consistent with the humanistic beliefs of dualistic civilization. He would have been wrong had he spoken like a
transcendentalist, and especially like a transcendental philosopher. For then one would be perfectly justified in
wondering what business he had being pope.
But, of course, he is consistent with Christian theology, and therefore
not an impostor. The fact that, as a
post-dualistic philosopher, one may not agree with his beliefs oneself ... is
another matter, and hardly one that we need enlarge upon here! Suffice it to say that my concept of the
Beyond is radically different from his.
It is closer to Nietzsche's.
OLIVER: Yes, transcendent spirit, to use a term I recently coined
as an alternative to holy spirit, which will arise
from the new brain following the period of intense cultivation of spirit which
I call the post-Human Millennium. We men
may be a long way from being actual candidates for Heaven at present, but we
are at least nearer to it, now, than any previous generation have ever been,
bearing in mind the increasingly post-dualistic development of the age. As Blake once wrote:-
'Till I turn
from Female Love,
And root up the Infernal Grove,
I shall never worthy be
To step into Eternity.'
Now what his concept of Eternity actually amounted to, I don't pretend
to know. But he was at least right to
contend that sex is incompatible with Heaven.
GARY: So, evidently, the spiritualization of the female is a step
in that post-sexual direction?
OLIVER: Yes. And so is our
gradual progress away from literal sex through the sublimation provided and
encouraged by various forms of erotica, which transfer sex from the body to the
head and thereby spiritualize it. Even
the recent growth-industry in plastic inflatables,
otherwise known as 'sex dolls', is indicative of a trend in the general
direction of overcoming the natural by the artificial and so transcending
traditional norms. Eventually there
won't be any sex at all, not even of the sublimated variety. For technology will have phased-out the
natural body in the interests of spiritual progress. Neither will there be any women, even if
women's brains or, rather, brains that may once have belonged to women are
retained. For it isn't so much the brain
which distinguishes a man from a woman ... as the psychology imposed upon it in
response to the possession of a given body.
Free a female's brain from her body and it will eventually become
spiritualized, conscious not of appearance over essence but of essence over
appearance.
GARY: And assuming appearance was reduced
to the physiological existence of the brain itself, in conjunction with an
artificial support/sustain system, there would presumably be a considerable
imbalance in favour of essence?
OLIVER: Indeed there would!
And in accordance with the supermasculine dictates
of a society evolving towards ultimate essence, which is nothing less than
God. At present, however, we must resign
ourselves to unisexual trends and the liberation of women from traditional
roles. We may be some way from a supermasculine society, but what we have now is certainly
preferable to dualism and its social concomitance of sexist
discrimination. If a majority of women
are still fundamentally appearance over essence, it is because, despite
dressing and acting increasingly like men, they retain their natural bodies,
and those bodies are sufficiently attractive to draw male attention and oblige
men to force consciousness of appearance back upon them at the expense of
essence. A man, on the other hand,
doesn't attract so much physical attention, since he wasn't meant to be
beautiful, but intellectual. He can
afford to cultivate essence to a greater extent.
OLIVER: Yes. Though, as I
have already said, it is important these days to treat women as if they were
equal to men, and this may sometimes involve one in not taking as much notice
of their beauty as may formerly have been the case ... in the heyday of sexist
dualism, so to speak. For what one is
really doing, in treating a woman as an equal, is looking upon her as though
she were a man, albeit a lesser one.
That is really what, in response to the post-dualistic nature of the
age, this drive towards sexual equality really amounts to, these days. However, not until the last vestiges of the
natural body have been artificially supplanted ... will women really become men
or, rather, supermasculine. Then a true equality will exist, because
transcending sex. Yes, an equality of
brains is really what we are tending towards, superior to that of bodies. And beyond that, my friend, lies the goal of
our evolution in spiritual unification with God. Transcendence!
TOWARDS ULTIMATE ONENESS
ROBERT: Religion is one of those subjects about which there can be
so much doubt and dissension, so many conflicting opinions and contradictory
arguments. For instance, there are
people, traditionally regarded as mystics, who maintain that one can have
direct contact with God and, conversely, others of a less mystical persuasion
who categorically deny this.
FRANCIS: I agree. There are any number of contradictory views on the subject, which
is but a reflection, I suppose, of different stages or degrees of religious
awareness among the disputants.
Personally, I side with those who maintain that we cannot enter into
direct contact with God. For, so far as
I'm concerned, God doesn't exist but is in the making, as it were, through the
development of human consciousness. Those
who assume the contrary would seem to be either deluded into mistaking their
own little quota of spirit for God or into equating God with the Universe, and
thus with some transcendent other with whom they can commune.
ROBERT: And you disagree with both attitudes?
FRANCIS: I do indeed! For,
in the first place, I wouldn't confound what, as human spirit, is potentially
God with God per se. And, in the
second place, I wouldn't confound God with the Universe, and thus imagine
myself communing with the stars, which are effectively the Devil. The Devil does, of course, exist in this
cosmic context, but not as something with which one can commune! On the contrary, stars don't bother
themselves about human prayers or wishes.
They are beneath consciousness, existing on a deeply subconscious level
of intense sensuality, devoid of thought.
We can never approximate to their primal level, no matter how hard we
may try. For, as men, we belong to a
much later and more evolved stage of evolution, in which sensuality is far less
intense. As men, we are on the way to
becoming God.
ROBERT: Yet, presumably, not entirely free of the Devil's
influence?
FRANCIS: By no means! We
have to continuously struggle against it or, more precisely, that which stems
from the Devil in the forms of nature and its sensuous offspring, including the
flesh. This is essentially what
evolution is all about - a struggle to free ourselves from the mundane and
attain to the transcendent, or that which, as pure
spirit, would be God.
ROBERT: I recently listened to a modern-jazz album on which people
were singing about being one with the Universe and dancing with the stars.
FRANCIS: Ugh, devil music!
I trust you didn't like it?
ROBERT: It was rather boring, to tell you the truth. But I wasn't quite sure what my religious
position was in regard to it at the time.
FRANCIS: Well, you can rest assured that there can be no unity
between man and the Cosmos, since stars are the Devil and, being antithetical
to God, appertain to separateness and diversity. A downward self-transcendence induced by a
potent natural drug or even by sleep may constitute a tendency in the Devil's
direction, so to speak, but can never actually bring you into unity with the
Devil. Nothing defies the idea of unity
more!
ROBERT: But what if, in experiencing a mystical state-of-mind, you
project a feeling of unity and togetherness onto the Cosmos, so that you
actually feel that the Universe really is One. I mean, surely such a state of mind,
experienced on a few occasions by no less a writer than Aldous
Huxley, is valid in itself?
FRANCIS: Doubtless it is!
And it constitutes the kernel of Wordsworth's mysticism, albeit as
applied rather more to nature than to the stars. But it hides the truth from its recipient by
inducing him to identify with that which is really the opposite of God. For the state of mind to which you allude
appertains to upward self-transcendence in the lower reaches of the superconscious and invariably induces feelings of Oneness,
in response to the spiritual, as opposed to sensual, nature of that mind. But when projected onto one's surroundings,
be they mundane or cosmic, such a state of mind can only lead the beholder to
the false assumption that they are one with him and he one with them. In reality, however, nothing could be further
from the truth! For stars remain stars
and nature remains nature, apart from man and an obstacle, fundamentally, to
his spiritual progress. An impartial,
objective viewpoint confirms this fact all too clearly, whereas, under mystical
pressures, one will incline to deceive oneself as to the unity of the whole.
ROBERT: And yet, even supposing what you
say happens to be true, the mystical state-of-mind is surely no less valid for
all that?
FRANCIS: Oh, absolutely!
For it inclines one in the direction of God, of ultimate spiritual unity
in the future Beyond, and necessarily causes the mind
to embrace what is foreign to it as kindred and congenial. Doubtless supreme divinity, when it finally
comes to pass, will co-exist with the stars without being in any sense aware of
their presence as a distinct force in the Universe, because it will be too
absorbed in the ultimate consciousness of its inner unity as transcendent
spirit. But man, being a long way from
such consciousness even in his occasional mystical states-of-mind, remains
aware of external cosmic or natural reality, and falsely assumes oneness with
it. Supreme being
... above egocentric or visual consciousness ... would be aware of nothing but
itself, and therefore it wouldn't take note of the diabolic components of the
Universe, be they stars or planets, moons or comets. Eventually everything that pertains to the
Devil would pass away, dissolving into dust and nothingness. God, however, would remain, and with His sole
existence the Universe would be brought to the perfection of spiritual oneness,
which even the last remaining star would deny so long as it continued to
exist. But God would of course be
oblivious of its presence and in no degree inclined to identify with the
remaining star or stars. The omega
absolute would be above what mystics habitually succumb to, in their egocentric
projections of higher states-of-mind onto external reality. With God, there is no consciousness of the
other. Only awareness
of the highest degree, which transcends opposites.
ROBERT: Yet, on a much inferior level, that is precisely what the
mystical experience enables people to do, by embracing the Devil, as it were,
as one with themselves.
FRANCIS: To be sure! But
such an experience is crude compared with the consciousness which is beyond any
form of identification of the not-self with the self. With God, there would be nothing but the
self, the not-selfs being outside and beneath the
picture, so to speak, which is composed of pure spirit and not diluted, to any
degree, by optical or visionary experience.
Man can never know that pure consciousness because he remains chained to
the phenomenal world through the senses, and therefore isn't able to completely
transcend visionary awareness. At best,
he may experience a momentary glimpse of the higher, non-representational
consciousness. But such a glimpse is
incompatible with the Divine per se, which would be transcendent and composed
of the entire superconscious mind of which the
evolutionary universe was capable of producing in an intensity of bliss far
beyond mortal experience or comprehension.
The individual mystic inevitably remains chained to his individuality,
his intimation of the Infinite necessarily limited to the capacity of his
psyche for upward self-transcendence. He
isn't communing with God when he experiences a mystical state-of-mind, but
simply with that which, as spirit, is potentially divine. Mystics have often deluded themselves on this
point, unconsciously belittling and reducing God to the relatively humble level
of their particular mystical experience.
We, however, should guard against making the same mistake! For, in reality, God doesn't yet exist in the
Universe, since we have still to transform ourselves from men into pure spirit
and thereby create divinity. This can
only happen in the future, following the phasing-out of the natural body
through technological means, which the further development of civilization to
increasingly-artificial stages of evolution inevitably presupposes. When we have dispensed with every last
vestige of the sensual world, both externally and internally, we shall be ready
for the transcendental Beyond.
ROBERT: To the extent that we on earth are still insufficiently
spiritually advanced to attain to the transcendent plane, and couldn't have
done so in the past, when technology was either non-existent or extremely crude
and, in any case, never used in the connection to which you allude, I agree
with you that we haven't yet created God in any ultimate sense - with
reference, in other words, to a divinity whose being is supreme. We have, of course, created God in the
anthropomorphic sense of endowing man with divinity and worshipping him, in the
person of Jesus Christ, as the Son of God ... the Father, which you would
doubtless agree was a step in the aforementioned direction?
FRANCIS: I would indeed! A step away from pagan identification with or propitiation of the
Creator, which is diabolical, towards the literal creation of God from human
spirit. An in-between egocentric
realm in which a diluted paganism is combined or alternated with a diluted
transcendentalism, and the paradoxical result is called Christianity. That was certainly a stage on the road to our
ultimate salvation from the flesh, which has still to come.
ROBERT: Yes, but what makes you sure that no other people
elsewhere in the Universe have gone way beyond us in evolutionary terms and
already literally created God, so that a degree of transcendent spirit
currently exists somewhere? I mean, you
haven't even raised the possibility of advanced life forms on other planets, so
how can you be sure that God doesn't exist?
FRANCIS: A good question, and one that demands an equally good
answer. Consequently let me say I very
much doubt that, assuming intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the
Universe, any other people, as you say, would already have evolved to a truly
transcendental status. For we have
neither seen nor heard anything of them, and that would surely be improbable
where truly-advanced peoples were concerned!
As you doubtless know, what applies on the microcosmic level also
applies, to varying extents, on the macrocosmic one, and vice versa, so that
the tendency on earth of evolutionary progress to manifest itself in a gradual
struggle towards world unity and uniformity of belief should also apply to the
Universe as a whole where, to coin Teilhard de Chardin's phrase, a 'convergence to the Omega Point' would
presumably be in simultaneous operation.
Our struggle towards salvation in the transcendental Beyond leads us to
concern ourselves with the entire world population, not just a tiny percentage
of it, and this must surely be true of other civilized peoples in the Universe
as a whole, assuming such peoples to exist.
When more is known about the Universe than at present, and we have
regular contact with people or whatever from other planets, we shall be in a
better position to gauge the extent of a 'convergence to the Omega Point' with
regard to the Universe in general, rather than to just one tiny fraction of it
in particular. At this point in time,
however, I doubt whether any other 'people' have literally created God. For we haven't been brought into contact with
a superior alien civilization, and therefore we have no reason to believe that,
at present, such a civilization exists or, indeed, has ever existed. So I remain an atheist with regard to the
assumed existence of the Supreme Being, absolutely convinced that, so far as
man is concerned, we haven't created ultimate divinity, and relatively
convinced that no-one else has either.
Besides, one could argue that even if, by some remote chance, an alien
civilization considerably more advanced than us had evolved to
a transcendental culmination, the resultant globe of pure spirit which now
existed somewhere in the Universe wouldn't be God as such, but only the
beginnings of God - a relatively small globe of spirit composed of all the spirit
which that particular civilization had made transcendent but, nevertheless, a
long way short of the total assimilation of spirit into a uniform globe towards
which the potentially transcendental civilizations in the rest of the Universe
would eventually contribute, and hence to the completion of God.
ROBERT: This argument is becoming slightly too academic for my
liking! What you're saying, I take it,
is that God wouldn't really exist in toto
until such time as every advanced civilization throughout the Universe had
contributed their share of transcendent spirit to its total spiritual mass, so
to speak.
FRANCIS: Yes, that is approximately my argument, and it is a
pretty complicated one, I'll concede.
But, then, the Universe is a pretty complicated place, and so is
the evolutionary struggle. There are
also further complications concerning its final nature. For when we bear in mind the immense scale of
the Universe and begin to consider the possible number of habitable planets in
it, we cannot, surely, bring ourselves to believe that we will gradually get to
know about every single one of them and become familiar with all of their
various life forms. It stretches the
imagination to its limits to believe that, one day, we will know everything
about and everyone in our own galaxy, never mind the Universe in general, in
which there are literally millions of galaxies.
So let us assume that we won't come into contact with the inhabitants of
remote galaxies, but will be confined, instead, to exploring and unifying, on a
spiritual level, this galaxy. Now other
intelligent life forms in it would probably be doing something similar, and so
a 'convergence to the Omega Point' would be put into effect on the level of the
Galaxy and, in all probability, of individual galaxies generally, where similar
criteria may be assumed to apply.
ROBERT: There is always the alternative possibility that we will
be content to live in the united world we have created for ourselves on this
planet and mind our own business, as we dedicate ourselves to the cultivation
of pure spirit.
FRANCIS: True. But, knowing
man, I rather doubt that he will be entirely immune to the lure of discovery
and exploration, where other planets are concerned. Of course, life on earth will doubtless
continue to progress and therefore concern itself less and less with
appearances, no matter how fantastic, and more and more with essences; less
with the outer and more with the inner.
Yet that shouldn't rule-out the possibility of interplanetary
communication. For man wouldn't want to
turn his back on the rest of the Galaxy at the risk of leaving himself exposed
to alien invasion. He wouldn't relish
having what progress he had achieved put in jeopardy as a
consequence of alien interference.
However, let us confine our argument to long-term progress and assume
that transcendence, when it eventually comes to pass, will occur on a galactic
rather than a universal level, so that instead of converging to a common
central area of the Universe, spirit will tend to form locally, as it were, and
thereby exist, in the region of this particular galaxy, as a part of ultimate
divinity or, better, a potential component of ultimate divinity rather than as
the Omega Point itself, which would of course be ultimate Oneness.
ROBERT: In other words, you are contending that, because the
Universe is so vast, the convergence towards the Omega Point will more than
likely take place by degrees even on the transcendent plane where, presumably,
various galactic contributions of spirit would co-exist independently of one
another, following their respective births, so to speak, on a local level. What that doesn't tell one, however, is how,
having evolved to so many separate globes of pure spirit, these potential
components of the Omega Point will subsequently merge into ultimate Oneness.
FRANCIS: Ah, you've anticipated my argument! I was going to contend that spirit is
inherently expansive and convergent, and that each separate galactic
contribution to the ultimate establishment of God would tend to converge
towards other such contributions in a continuous process of convergence and
expansion until, with the successive mergings of
individual globes of spirit into larger wholes, the time finally came when even
the most originally distant contributions were fused together, and the Omega
Point was thereby established. Only
then, once ultimate Oneness had come to pass, would God actually exist, in
complete contrast to the innately separative,
divergent, contractive nature of the innumerable stars, which correspond, so I
contend, to the Devil. Yet, by then, I
wager that most if not all stars would have collapsed and disintegrated,
leaving the Universe to the spiritual perfection of God's Oneness. For, having come fully into being as the
end-product of manifold convergence, God couldn't continue to expand
indefinitely through the infinity of space if the Devil was in the way, so to
speak, and thus an obstacle to His divine expansion. As spirit expands in the
Universe, so the stars contract, burning-up at the phenomenal rate of millions
of tons of their matter a second.
Inevitably they must contract out of the Universe altogether, leaving
room for the continuous expansion of transcendent spirit, and ultimately God,
in the blissful being of its pure indivisibility.
ROBERT: A very interesting theory!
And one, moreover, which, despite its mystical pretensions, leads me to
assume that God would make the Universe increasingly precious, as more and more
space became filled, as it were, with His blissful
presence. We are, indeed, a long way
here from traditional theories of the Beyond, especially where you contend that
the Omega Point wouldn't properly exist until the establishment of ultimate
Oneness, and that such an establishment would be more likely to come about by
degrees rather than all at once, given the immensity of the Universe.
FRANCIS: Yes, and also the fact that evolution proceeds by stages
anyway, so that a leap from this world or even this galaxy to an ultimate
merging with spiritual globes from other galaxies would seem to be rather
drastic, to say the least! We would, I
think, be wiser to vouch for a gradual 'convergence to the Omega Point' in the
transcendental Beyond, as separate globes of transcendent spirit slowly
converged towards one another from all quarters of this immense Universe, with
the objective, one might say, of establishing supreme being in all its final
Oneness. These individual globes of pure
spirit wouldn't be aware that they each constituted only a potential component
of God, as they converged and expanded. For transcendent spirit, from whichever corner of the Universe,
would be totally self-absorbed in the contemplation of its own spiritual
perfection and, consequently, unaware of anything outside itself, whether of
the diabolic or the divine. One
might suppose, however, that with each additional accumulation of transcendent
spirit from other regions of the Universe, the overall condition of any
particular spiritual globe would not only become more perfect but more blissful
as well, so that expansion acquired fresh incentive, in heightened awareness,
for further expansion, and so on, until all such globes became One, and thus
attained to an optimum perfection in the ultimate awareness of the Omega
Point. Perhaps, after that, expansion
would not so much intensify the level of being as ... spread it over ever wider
and deeper areas of space, as more space became available, following the
contraction and eventual dissolution of the stars.
ROBERT: The mind fairly boggles at the thought! It is as much as I can do to imagine a tiny
globe of transcendent spirit emerging from the brain or whatever of a
meditating person, never mind the larger galactic globes to which a vast
combination of such transcendences would apparently give rise! I cannot even imagine what transcendent
spirit would look like, never having seen human spirit.
FRANCIS: Something rather pure and centripetal, I suspect, in
marked contrast to the impure, centrifugal light of the sun. But by the time we attain to the
transcendental Beyond, you can be sure that nothing recognizably human will be
left of us. For, with transcendence, man
will become supernatural and thus completely independent of the natural world,
knowing nothing but the bliss of total salvation. And that bliss can only become more perfect,
as the transcendental Beyond becomes ever more unified in continuous
expansion. That is the promise of the
transcendental future.
ROBERT: You have convinced me, as no-one else could, that the
Christian civilization must be superseded by a civilization leading straight to
Heaven through the literal creation of pure spirit.
FRANCIS: Yes, we won't be worshipping the diabolic Almighty or the
humanistic Christ in the future, but be directly aspiring, through
self-realization, towards the divine Holy Spirit. We shall be God-builders in the highest, most
true sense of the word.
ROBERT: Verily have you spoken!
THREE TYPES OF DECADENCE
HENRY: I have often heard the word 'decadent' used in connection
with the arts and, in particular, the art of painting, but I am still not
absolutely sure what it signifies. After
all, there are various interpretations of the decadent, including that which
pertains to a turgid, obscure style of painting.
FRANK: Yes, though the most significant interpretation of it is
undoubtedly that which suggests a falling-away from something higher, a decline
in standards. That is what I usually
think of when I hear the word 'decadent'.
HENRY: And what type of art would you classify in this manner?
FRANK: Basically non-Christian art which has little relation with
its time.
HENRY: I'm afraid that I don't quite follow you.
FRANK: Well, let's divide the history of Western art into three
phases, viz. an aristocratic, a bourgeois, and a proletarian. The first phase came to a head with the gothic,
and resulted in the early-Christian art of the Middle Ages. One thinks of Martini, Giotto,
Van der Weyden, Van Eyck, Memling, Bosch, et al., as
representative of the flowering of Christian art in the aristocratic phase of
Western civilization, which stretched from approximately the 11th-15th
centuries. However, with the Renaissance
we arrive at the first manifestation of Western decadence, and are accordingly
confronted by a rediscovery of and return to ancient classical art. The intrusion of paganism into the Christian
culture marks the aristocratic decadence, which was to last into the sixteenth
century and take the form not only of a partial resurrection of ancient Graeco-Roman paganism but ... a fresh interest in Old
Testament themes as well. One might cite
Michelangelo, Botticelli, Raphael, Correggio, and Giorgione as
leading practitioners of this first decadence, even though their work was by no
means exclusively decadent.
HENRY: Yes, I agree! The
return to pre-Christian subjects or themes can only be interpreted in terms of
a falling-away from the high achievements of early-Christian art, which you
characterized as gothic. But,
presumably, we next enter a phase of bourgeois art?
FRANK: Indeed we do! Now
this phase, beginning with the Reformation and stretching into the eighteenth
century, may be characterized as baroque and be regarded as a predominantly,
though far from exclusively, Protestant phenomenon. For there were indeed many Catholics of the
Counter Reformation at work in this second phase of religious production, not
the least of whom were Titian, Tintoretto, Poussin, and El Greco.
Yet even Catholicism undergoes modifications under the influence of
Protestant criteria, so that it increasingly approximates to a Protestant
humanism, and gives rise to a correspondingly optimistic art, eschewing the
earlier emphasis on sin and death in favour of life and salvation. However, it is primarily to the northern
countries like Holland and Belgium that we must turn for the most outstanding examples
of bourgeois Christian art, as manifested in many of the traditionally-inspired
pictorial works of Rembrandt and Rubens, as well as in the uniquely puritan art
of masters like de Witte and Saenredam, whose best
works, focusing on church interiors, shine with the light of Protestant
purism. In
HENRY: And what would you generally
consider the pre-Raphaelites, whose works appeared later in the century, to
have been?
FRANK: Essentially bourgeois decadents, because so often returning
to the Middle Ages in their rebellion against contemporary industrial
civilization. In a sense, they were
misguided progressives rather than strictly decadent, since they wished to
escape from bourgeois materialism and champion spiritual values. But instead of progressing towards the
higher, non-representational spirituality in art which an industrial society
makes possible, they regressed to an attempted resurrection of medieval
spirituality, albeit purged of gothic pessimism and elevated to the Protestant
neo-gothic optimism of Victorian society, in which the pleasant side of
medieval life, as envisaged through nineteenth-century eyes, tends to
predominate. But while their volte-face
is preferable to a wholesale immersion in Graeco-Roman
or Old Testament antiquity, it is certainly less good than the strictly
contemporary spirituality being developed by, amongst others, Turner and the
Impressionists, who were aligned not so much with bourgeois decadence as with
the new proletarian phase of religious evolution in art. With the development of abstraction under
Turner and the nebulous disintegration of the material world which
Impressionism presupposes, we are in the third and highest phase of aesthetic
production, in which the religious tends to prevail over the secular. The battle in
HENRY: And presumably in England, Alma-Tadema, Lord Leighton, Poynter,
and other such painters of pagan antiquity were the Academicians' decadent
counterparts?
FRANK: Indeed they were! So
you can see that bourgeois decadence is really quite different from what it is
generally considered to be in countries, for example, where Soviet Communism
has officially prevailed. It is
something that pre-eminently pertains to the nineteenth century, and then only
to those artists who specialized in pagan themes, not to those who, like
Turner, Constable, Monet, and Van Gogh, pioneered proletarian
transcendentalism.
HENRY: A transcendentalism, I take it, which has subsequently
become the mainstream movement of twentieth-century art?
FRANK: Yes, at any rate in the Western world. In the (former) Soviet East, however, it is
the secular, utilitarian art of Socialist Realism which has traditionally
prevailed, as relative to the materialist side of proletarian revolution. Because a political revolution occurred in
HENRY: So an unofficial spiritual revolution exists within the
West which is tolerated and even encouraged by the bourgeoisie because it
doesn't directly threaten them, as would a political revolution?
FRANK: Yes, precisely! This
is why we have the paradoxical situation of avant-garde art being produced in
the West and, on that account, mistakenly regarded in the East, traditionally,
as a manifestation of bourgeois decadence.
Yet the fact that this art exists in the West is by no means a guarantee
that it's bourgeois. On the contrary, it
testifies to a proletarian transcendentalism which co-exists with bourgeois
civilization, but always in the role of an outsider. Strictly speaking, there isn't any modern
bourgeois art. For with the decadence of
a given class-stage of aesthetic evolution, one arrives at the end of the
particular contribution of that class to the arts. After the sterile academicism of fin-de-siècle
decadence had run its dreary course, the evolution of art continued, with the
twentieth century, in increasingly proletarian terms.
HENRY: Even as regards Modern Realism, which eschews the abstract
in favour of contemporary representation?
FRANK: Yes, even then! For
the secular is no less legitimate than the religious, and consequently entitled
to a place in the development of modern art.
Provided the artist concentrates on subjects or themes pertinent to
contemporary industrial society, his art is relevant to the age and takes its
place on the secular side of proletarian art as a kind of Western equivalent to
Socialist Realism. A lesser type of
aesthetic production to transcendental art the result may be! For, in any objective scale-of-values, the
religious should take moral precedence over the secular. But it is by no means irrelevant to the age,
just because it takes a representational form.
If non-representational painting preponderates in the West, it is
because we live in an unofficially religious age, one that was initiated,
during the last century, by the spiritual revolution introduced into art by
painters like Turner, Monet, Van Gogh, and Pissarro. The political revolution introduced into
Russia by Lenin, Trotsky, and the lesser Bolsheviks, early in the twentieth
century, subsequently gave rise to an official secular age in which Russia
existed until the collapse of the Soviet Union, and which caused the
representational to preponderate. In the
East it was official means that prevailed.
In the West, by contrast, unofficial ends. Consequently the one tended to contradict and
castigate the other, each of them thinking poorly of the opposite type of
art. Just as
representational artists in the East tended to be critical of avant-garde
artists, so avant-garde artists in the West tended to have a poor opinion of
representational artists. Yet
they were but two sides of the same coin - the coin of proletarian art in both
its spiritual and materialist manifestations.
HENRY: So the modern age isn't decadent after all, at least as far
as art is concerned, but intensely youthful and progressive?
FRANK: Not as youthful as 60-70 years ago, when abstract art was
relatively new, but certainly maturing into a higher spirituality, as confirmed
by the most recent experiments in light art - that quintessentially
transcendental genre. Indeed, with the
acceleration of evolution which modern life has engendered, we have already
witnessed the appearance of proletarian decadence in one or two exceptional
cases.
HENRY: Such as?
FRANK: Oh, the neo-Christian works painted by
HENRY: And yet, when Western artists call themselves Communists
but continue to produce avant-garde art, as did Picasso and a number of
Surrealists, surely there is a contradiction involved?
FRANK: Of course there is!
For Communism pertains to a materialist society founded on the canons of
Marxism-Leninism, and Communists should therefore eschew all contact with
spiritual or avant-garde trends. Being a
Communist is, in effect, to be a modern barbarian, outside the pale of
civilization. But being a
Transcendentalist isn't to be a bourgeois, as some orthodox Communists seem to
think, but a proletarian revolutionary within the Western
context. For the only revolution to have
occurred in the West, outside the domain of technology, is the spiritual one
initiated by the leading painters of the late-nineteenth century, which has
resulted in the development of an unofficial art in the avant-garde context. Naturally, Socialist Realism would also be
unofficial in the West. But for most
proletarian artists it is both safer and financially more expedient to remain
in the avant-garde camp, without undue risk of bourgeois repression. Also one could argue that, from the historical
standpoint, it is more natural to do so, insofar as the development of
Transcendentalism in the West is the obverse of Socialist Realism in the East,
and follows as a logical consequence from the absence of a political
revolution. A Western social realist,
like Lurçat or Fougeron, is
by definition as much an outsider in relation to the tradition of revolutionary
spiritual art in the West ... as an Eastern avant-garde artist, like Stepanov or Bitt, in relation to
the tradition of revolutionary materialist art in the East. Consequently it is expedient for a majority
of artists to remain within the confines of their respective proletarian
traditions, rather than to go against the grain of their particular society. The fact that a number of avant-garde artists
in the West have considered themselves Communists is just another of those
ironical paradoxes of the twentieth century.
Obviously they weren't Communists in any strictly Marxist-Leninist
sense, for their art betrays the fact.
They were simply Transcendentalists with communist sympathies, which
isn't an uncommon situation among the Western revolutionary proletariat! Considering that Picasso was at work in an
avant-garde context long before the October Revolution (1917) and subsequent
endorsement, by Stalin, of Socialist Realism as the only acceptable art in a
communist state, one cannot be surprised if, having already gained a reputation
in the West for his particular contribution to art, he continued to produce
work of an avant-garde nature, in preference to Socialist Realism, during the
latter part of his career. One might say
that habit and conditioning were against his doing anything else, as must also
have been the case for most of his contemporaries. Besides, when he did make a somewhat belated
attempt at producing Socialist Realism in the rather benign form of a portrait
of Stalin, the Soviet authorities judged the result technically inadequate and
rejected it. A man who had spent so much
time distorting faces in his semi-cubist portraits could hardly be expected to
produce one that matched-up to the eulogistic requirements of Socialist
Realism! So, despite his political
sympathies, he remained a Transcendentalist.
HENRY: And what about his art in relation
to proletarian decadence - I mean, did he produce any decadent works as well?
FRANK: Yes, but scarcely of a neo-Christian order! Being in many respects a typically
Mediterranean type, he preferred to relapse into
neo-pagan themes from time to time, as confirmed by his drawings of nymphs, satyrs,
and Graeco-Roman heroes. Not that he treated this return to pagan
antiquity in a bourgeois manner. On the
contrary, he always employed a modern technique - as, for example, in the
series of drawings depicting pagan orgies and heroes, which are very minimalist. Thus he remains, in these works, an exponent
of proletarian decadence, even if a rather untypical and, as far as
subject-matter is concerned, slightly bourgeois-oriented one. However, the majority of his pictorial works
aren't decadent but distinctly modern, especially the semi-cubist Expressionist
portraits of his late period. There is
nothing decadent about distortions of the natural, irrespective of what
reactionary philistines of an overly objective or autocratic nature may like to
think. Rather, such distortions
correspond to a perfectly legitimate function of that branch of modern art
which, whether in the context of Expressionism or Surrealism, would seem to be
encouraging a break with the natural-world-order and consequently facilitating
man's progress towards the transcendent.
Now this particular branch of modern art may not be the highest, but it
is certainly far from being superfluous or irrelevant! Time will, no doubt, vindicate its
evolutionary status, in the development of proletarian art, as both an integral
and progressive manifestation of post-dualistic criteria.
HENRY: That I can well believe!
Though, to be honest, I still find it difficult to reconcile myself to
the view that modern art is essentially proletarian, perhaps because I regard
artists coming from a middle-class background, like Dali and Picasso, as
effectively bourgeois.
FRANK: It isn't the social background of an artist that matters,
but the kind of art he produces. If it
is post-dualistic or transcendental, then it is proletarian art, and he should
be regarded as a proletarian artist. The
age of bourgeois art, properly so-considered, has long since passed and can
never be resurrected. The present and
the future belong to proletarian art, and in the ultimate civilization this art
will be official, not, as is currently the case in the West, unofficial and
therefore outside the pale of institutionalized proletarian religion. Essential art will take its rightful place
above apparent art, as the religious art of the future proletariat. But contemporary artists won't be cheated out
of their aesthetic contribution towards the formation of this transcendental
civilization! They shouldn't be mistaken
for decadent bourgeois artists in their concentration on avant-garde art. They should be seen in their true light - as
Western revolutionaries. And even
proletarian decadence, to the limited extent it now exists, shouldn't be
confounded with its bourgeois precursor.
For, in truth, there is a significant difference between the
neo-Christian works of
HENRY: Not to mention between Picasso's neo-pagan works and those
of the fin-de-siècle academicians you mention.
FRANK: Oh, absolutely!
APOLOGIA PORNOGRAPHICA
VINCENT: I can't help feeling that too many people are perverting
themselves through pornography of one sort or another these days. You can't enter a newsagent’s shop without
encountering various manifestations of magazine pornography, from soft to hard or,
at any rate, moderately hard. For many
men, such magazines must be a glaring temptation!
MICHAEL: Indeed! And I have
been tempted by various magazines myself, in the past.
VINCENT: Doubtless with the fatal consequence of perverting
yourself thereafter!
MICHAEL: Primarily to avail myself of the pictorial services of
such sublimated whores as caught my eye, if you must know.
VINCENT: Sublimated whores?
MICHAEL: Yes, the modern type of prostitute par
excellence, the one who offers her physical charms to all who are prepared
to pay to see them, though only, of course, on a sublimated basis. No longer woman in the flesh but woman in the
photo, whom one experiences indirectly, as an abstraction, through the eyes. Pornography is the medium through which the
contemporary prostitute reveals herself.
VINCENT: And what about the traditional
type of prostitute, whose body is to be had in the flesh?
MICHAEL: She is fast becoming obsolete, an anachronism which the
age protects itself against through the law.
She is becoming a member of that old-fashioned club of social
dinosaurs. She no longer commands the
prestige of her professional ancestors.
Rather, it is the modern or sublimated whore who stands in the sexual
limelight, to be admired by literally millions of men right across the
globe. No traditional whore could boast
of such an achievement, not even the great Sarah Bernhardt, who is reputed to
have been loved by thousands, taking the word 'loved' in its physically operative
sense.
VINCENT: Frankly I have no taste for whores, ancient or
modern! My wife is all I need and,
fortunately, she prevents me from following the example of those millions of
men who buy pornography and inevitably pervert themselves, becoming voyeurs,
masturbators, and hell-knows-what-else besides!
MICHAEL: Permit me to say that your standpoint is quite misguided.
VINCENT: Oh, in what way?
MICHAEL: You look upon proper, sane behaviour from a naturalistic
point of view, and are consequently led to infer that any deviation from the
natural, no matter how exciting or engrossing, is a perversion, to be avoided
at all costs. But such a point of view
is only compatible with a rural or provincial mentality, a mentality which has
been shaped by nature's abundant proximity ... in the guise, needless to say,
of assorted vegetation. It is
incompatible, if I may say so, with an urban mentality, or one shaped by the
comparative scarcity of external nature and the corresponding abundance of the
artificial, as manifested in the man-made.
VINCENT: True. But to live
in the city is to live in a perverted context and not to assess life through
nature's immutable criteria. If it leads
to one's treating perversions of the natural as a mark of progress, as your
standpoint would seem to imply, then all I can say is that one would be better
off living in the country, like me, where nature is never very far away and one
can therefore relate to what is, after all, the most sensible and sane view of
life.
MICHAEL: I'm sorry, Vinny, but this
bourgeois complacency of yours just doesn't work with me! What you're effectively saying is that to
live in the country is to live as man should live - not cut off from
nature. But such a point of view is at
best relative, at worst downright mistaken!
Evolution, you see, is a fact, and because life is essentially an
evolutionary struggle, those evolving are the ones who really live. The others, tied to their rural or provincial
environments, become in the course of time social dinosaurs, with views that
reflect not evolving man but static man - man who has reached a certain point
and refuses or is unable to go any further, largely because his environment
conditions his thinking and thereby prevents him from taking a more progressive
stance. You would appear to be one such
man, trapped, through force-of-habit, in your provincial conditioning. Rather than viewing pornography as a
manifestation of sexual progress, a means of transcending the natural, your
environmental conditioning and background lead you to view it as a manifestation
of sexual perversion, to be spurned in the interests of 'correct living'. Given the circumstances under which you live,
you are perfectly entitled to this view.
But considered from any higher and more radical standpoint, one can only
conclude it to be severely limited, in accordance with the relative criteria of
static man.
VINCENT: All right progressive man, since you are resigned to your
city perversions and have no use for provincial criteria, what exactly is it
about these pornographic magazines that renders them
agents of progress?
MICHAEL: Precisely what one of my earlier statements led you to
infer - namely, that they contribute towards the overcoming of the natural and
are relevant to an environment in which nature, in its external forms, has been
largely overcome, in any case. What one
gets from the alluring spectacle of pornographic images is the substitution of
sublimated sexuality for concrete sexuality and the consequent elevation of sex
from the body to the head, which is to say, from the flesh to the intellect.
VINCENT: How can you possibly speak of the 'consequent elevation
of sex from the body to the head'?
MICHAEL: Because I live in an environment which enables one to
grasp the meaning of life from a post-dualistic rather than a dualistic angle,
and thus to see what the necessary outcome of evolutionary progress must be. And that outcome, believe it or not, must be
the complete overcoming of the flesh ... in the attainment of the
transcendental Beyond. For if there
isn't a spiritual climax to evolution, then evolution is a mockery - nay, a
myth, a fiction! Fortunately for
evolving humanity, however, evolution isn't a fiction but a fact, and one that
presupposes our evolving away from the flesh in the direction of greater
degrees of spirituality. Pornography is,
I believe, a stage in this direction, and the more men experience 'sex in the
head', to use a phrase the reactionary D.H. Lawrence found so abhorrent, the
less they will experience it in the body, and the closer will they draw to the
complete overcoming of sex in the future post-Human Millennium.
VINCENT: Including, presumably, the sublimated variety?
MICHAEL: Yes. For, at that
more fortunate juncture in time, men will have been programmed for the
transcendental Beyond and accordingly be elevated to the blessed status of so
many static units of potential transcendence, freed from everything but the
brain and, ultimately, just the new brain, which will be artificially supported
and sustained through the agency of a highly-sophisticated technology. Without a body, even sublimated sex would
cease to be relevant, and so, eventually, the mind would be purged of sexual
preoccupations.
VINCENT: The mind positively boggles!
MICHAEL: Doubtless yours more than mine, since we live in somewhat
different environments. But I sincerely
believe that my prophecies will be vindicated.
For there is only one way to attain to salvation, and that is by
overcoming the flesh.
VINCENT: And how do you suppose these artificially-supported
brains will be arranged at that 'more fortunate juncture in time', when man is
set directly on course for his Final End?
MICHAEL: Not separately but collectively, in accordance with the
tendency of evolutionary progress to manifest itself in increasing degrees of
approximation to the projected unity of the transcendental Beyond. I envisage entire clusters of brains being
supported and sustained from a single central source, so that the analogy with
a Christmas tree comes to mind, in which the tree's branches act as supports
for the many coloured lights being sustained from a single external
source. One can view the Christmas tree
as an intimation of things to come, a projection of post-Human Millennial life. The
brains will correspond to the electric lights, their supports to the tree's
branches, and what sustains them to the electricity source. They will be clustered together as the
closest possible approximation, on earth, to the envisaged spiritual unity of
the transcendental Beyond, and will doubtless have a greater capacity for
cultivating spirit on this collective basis than ever they would have on a
separate or individual one. Thus the
linking-up of numerous brains in this Christmas tree-like fashion will result
in a being far superior in essence to a man, with his single brain, and
therefore closer to the Supreme Being which transcendence will ultimately
engender - a supreme level of being composed of all the
transcendent spirit the evolving Universe can furnish. Furthermore, there is a distinct technological
advantage to be gained from linking numerous brains together on a single
support apparatus, which is that everything can be run from one energy source,
thus minimizing or even eradicating the possibility of individual malfunctionings ... such as might accrue to separate
sustains. Besides, evolutionary progress
presupposes centro-complexification, to use a term
favoured by Teilhard de Chardin,
so it is virtually inconceivable that numerous separate sustains would be
brought into action when one central sustain-system could do the job so much
more efficiently, thereby making possible the closer arrangement of the
individual brains on a single, many-branched support.
VINCENT: One is reminded of a light sculpture by Otto Peine, the German artist, in which numerous small
electric-light bulbs, sprouting from a central support, form a kind of large
globe of light.
MICHAEL: Yes, I think I know the work you are alluding to, and a
fine example it is, too, of the way in which contemporary art, when truly
significant, anticipates the future, serving as a guide to subsequent
development. If you substitute brains
for light bulbs, then you have an inkling of what highly-civilized life will
amount to in the millennial Beyond, that precondition of the transcendental Beyond.... Not that there will be only one large support for
our envisaged conglomeration of brains.
In all probability, there will be many such supports right across the
world, each city having its own support or supports, depending on the size of
the population and the number of brains any given support can manage, not to
mention the number that can reasonably be sustained from a central
sustain-system peculiar to each support.
VINCENT: And if the support would be a kind of many-branched
apparatus, of what, exactly, would the sustain be
comprised?
MICHAEL: Principally a large powerful artificial heart, or pump,
which would serve to pump blood, or some substitute thereof, through the brains
via artificial blood vessels, or plastic tubing, which would convey fresh
oxygen to the brains from oxygen tanks positioned in the immediate vicinity of
the support. Whatever nourishment, in
the form of synthetic stimulants, the brains required could also be pumped into
them in this manner.
VINCENT: And who would supervise these arrangements to ensure that
nothing broke down or that the oxygen containers didn't run out?
MICHAEL: Presumably everything would function autonomously under
the supervision or, rather, surveillance of special computers assisted, where
necessary, by robots. There would be
scant need for men to concern themselves with the proper functioning of the
sustain apparatus, at any rate, since theirs would be the brains being
supported. All they need concern
themselves with would be the cultivation of pure spirit in the superconscious and the eventual attainment to
transcendence. They wouldn't be
conscious of their physical environment in this more advanced stage of the
post-Human Millennium, since egocentric consciousness would have been outgrown
following the surgical removal of the old brain, which, in psychological
parlance, may be equated with the subconscious.
But getting to that more advanced stage would take some time; it
couldn't be brought about overnight. A
state of mind approximating to the clarity of the transcendental Beyond
couldn't be embraced prematurely, as oriental mysticism has adequately
confirmed through the twin doctrines of reincarnation and karma - doctrines
which, though not to be taken literally, do underline, in a metaphorical kind
of way, the necessity of gradual self-improvement. However, gradual self-improvement isn't
something that can be effected though meditation techniques alone. One must also bring technology to bear on the
problem, so that self-improvement may be seen to extend to the gradual
phasing-out of the natural body through artificial replacements. The Orient has been traditionally too lax in
this matter, stressing the spiritual at the expense of the technological. The Occident, in developing technology, has
taken the opposite course. Only the
coming together of the two approaches to life into a higher synthesis, with
scope for mutual development, will make the goal of evolution in spiritual
transcendence possible. Too exclusive a
concentration on either the one or the other, meditation or technology, will
simply result in failure.
VINCENT: All this takes us rather a long way from the subject of
pornography, doesn't it? For me, a
static man of the provinces, it is all rather baffling and against my
middle-class grain. I cannot force
myself to share your opinions, even though there may be some truth in
them. I haven't experienced that Nietzschean ‘revaluation of all values’ which living in the
city apparently encourages. I still
belong to that old world in which nature remains the touchstone for evaluating
conduct, and the artificial isn't allowed to intrude to any great extent -
certainly not to the extent that it displaces the natural and becomes the
leading string, so to speak. I cannot
look upon pornography with the satisfaction you evidently feel on the basis of
the fact that it signifies a negation of the natural and, consequently, a mode
of sexual redemption. To me, it remains
a temptation to perversion.
MICHAEL: Then I am sorry for you, Vincent. You are simply a social dinosaur, a man who
refuses or is unable to evolve. Your
opinions are gradually being overruled by those of us who live in the majority
context, the city, and accordingly feel obliged to carry on the struggle to
attain to the supernatural. You shut
yourself off from the city and all it stands for, because it is becoming
increasingly enigmatic to you, increasingly fearsome. You tell yourself, for the sake of a
comforting illusion, that the proletariat are poor unfortunate devils who have
no option but to live there, largely because they cannot afford such
suburban-style accommodation as you, with your bourgeois wealth, inhabit in the
country. Good, tell yourself that, if it
helps make your own position any easier to bear! But don't expect me to share your opinions,
as if I were a naturalistic country-dweller too! Long confinement in the city has taught me to
look at life from a more radical angle, and nothing could now convince me that
evolution can proceed in any other way than up through the city and city
humanity. The future belongs to the
proletariat, of that you can rest assured, even if the present is officially
under bourgeois control and to some extent still reflects dualistic values. Yet even you cannot entirely escape the city's
influence on the provinces. There are
aspects of your life, I am sure, which are no longer
quite middle class.
VINCENT: Maybe there are, but I never allow them to worry me too
much. I know my essential position and I
stick to it. Maybe that is because I
have no real option. Nevertheless it
suits me, given my provincial background.
I wouldn't wish to exchange my concrete sexual habits for the
sublimated, spiritualized sexuality to which you apparently subscribe.
MICHAEL: No, and I don't suppose you would wish to exchange your
church-going habits for a regular stint of transcendental meditation either?
VINCENT: I don't go to church all that often, actually.
MICHAEL: Really? I am surprised
at you! You consider yourself a
bourgeois and you don't go to church all that often? Bad form, old boy! The twentieth century would seem to have
undermined your class integrity and deprived you of an essential ingredient in
the composition of your nobility.
VINCENT: What-on-earth are you talking
about?
MICHAEL: Well, you know that bourgeois nobility is confirmed by
dual allegiance to parliamentary democracy and Christianity, particularly of
the nonconformist variety, don't you?
VINCENT: Do I?
MICHAEL: To be properly integrated as a
bourgeois noble, you’ve got to be both a dependable voter, preferably for the
Tories, and a regular church-goer, or Christian.
VINCENT: Then I'm afraid that I may not be properly integrated,
since I lack faith in Christ.
MICHAEL: Dear me! That can
only mean you are a decadent bourgeois, an all-too-prevalent species of modern
bourgeois who has fallen under the malign influence of neo-barbarism and
consequently come apart from the Church.
You cling to your class on the tenuous basis of property and a periodic
vote in the ballot box. But your
nobility is severely tarnished by the absence of the faith! One might almost say it no longer
exists. You are caught-up in the
evolutionary no-man's-land between past and future as a kind of religious
nonentity, hanging on the barbed wire of disbelief. The more orthodox members of your class would
certainly frown upon you. There are
still quite a number of fastidious bourgeois nobles around, believe it or not,
whose lifestyles would be incomplete without at least one appearance in church
a week. Their faith may not be as strong
now as it used to be, but at least they know who they are and what they must do
if they are to remain respectable members of their class. There is no-one who could point a finger at them
and say: 'You're no longer genuinely noble because tainted by
neo-barbarism!' They will always say
'Our Lord' when referring to Christ. For that is essentially what Christ is or should be - namely, the
religious focus of bourgeois nobility.
VINCENT: Well, perhaps I am a little
out-of-focus these days, since influenced by the city in some ways. How about you, are you in-focus?
MICHAEL: You know perfectly well the answer to that question,
since I lectured you quite extensively on the nature of future religion, which
will be a combination of high technology and meditation. Like you, I am also a lapsed bourgeois,
though, unlike yourself, I have spent so much time living in the city that I am
almost a proletarian; probably am a
proletarian, even though I never rub shoulders with the workers or speak with a
cockney accent spiced with four-letter expletives. My upbringing was strictly suburban, strictly
Christian.... Even now, I occasionally find myself slipping into middle-class
views. But I know that my nobility, if
ever it existed, no longer exists in any strictly bourgeois sense, and that
some time ago I joined the ranks of those who live in the evolutionary
no-man's-land between one nobility and another.
VINCENT: And what, exactly, will this
other nobility be?
MICHAEL: In a word, proletarian.
VINCENT: Proletarian?
MICHAEL: A type of nobility compatible with an urban environment,
which will only come into being with the future adoption, by the proletariat,
of transcendentalism as the complementary religion to the politics of
socialism. Until the people are regular
and earnest practitioners of transcendental meditation in an institutionalized
context, they won't be civilized but ... relatively uncivilized, which is to
say, less than noble - in a word ignoble or plebeian, with an overly objective
stance in life.
VINCENT: I see! Well, if
that's the case, they are likely to remain uncivilized for some time to come,
aren't they?
MICHAEL: Until such time, in fact, as the next civilization gets properly
and officially under way, which won't be until after the new Dark Ages of
materialist barbarism have passed and proletarian man turns away from the
materialistic view of life towards a view embracing religion. But when this final nobility comes to pass,
you can be certain that it will be superior to any previous kind of nobility,
whether bourgeois or aristocratic. It
will be a nobility from which transcendent spirit will
eventually emerge, a nobility leading directly to God. For man, remember, has always been a
god-builder, even if he hasn't always been able to build God literally. In his earliest, or pagan, stage of religion
he built towards God in materials - for instance, stone or wood - and took the
resulting statue for God, saw God in the statue. Because at that time life was more under the
Devil's influence than subsequently, his religious sense reflected the root
nature of evil by being aligned with many gods, numerous statues of different
gods. For the Devil, curiously, is
cosmic, and nothing could be more numerous or separate than the stars. Thus early man's endeavour to build towards
God was severely hampered by his close proximity to nature, as by the Devil's
influence, including that component of the Devil which is the sun, and could
hardly be claimed to reflect a direct, literal route to the Supreme Being, or
the creation thereof.
VINCENT: This is presumably during the aristocratic stage of
nobility, when allegiance to some form of paganism was required?
MICHAEL: Yes, though it also extends into the Christian stage
through early Catholicism, with, of course, the requisite political allegiance
to autocratic rule. Even today the
class-conscious aristocrat is more likely to be Catholic than Protestant. However, with regard to the ensuing Christian
stage of building towards God, it becomes apparent that man has acquired a
dualistic religious sense and therefore progressed away from the predominating
materialism of his pagan forebears. Now
that villages have expanded into towns he is no longer under nature's
influence, nor under the Devil's, to quite the same
extent, but can detach his worship from the statue and make do with fewer
gods. Thus instead of worshipping God in
the statue, the statue becomes merely an image of God, as
conceived by the Christians, which serves to remind the worshipper that God's
essence resides elsewhere, namely in post-resurrectional
Heaven, and should not be imputed to the statue in the manner of pagan idolatry
- a principle which also applies to the lesser deities of the Christian
pantheon, viz. the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, the leading apostles, et cetera.
VINCENT: So at that juncture in time man is set on course for
literally building towards God, because he has weakened the influence of
materialism over himself and thus found place in his devotions for a separate,
spiritual concept of the Divine?
MICHAEL: Precisely! And in
the ensuing Protestant stage of religious evolution man gains a further victory
over materialism by cutting-down still further on the number of deities, while
simultaneously reducing his dependence on the statue to a bare minimum - in
certain more radical sects virtually dispensing with the image altogether. However, this bourgeois stage of religious
evolution is precisely what proletarian man must subsequently transcend, as,
thanks in large measure to the extent of his remove from nature in the city, he
gets down to the honourable task of literally building towards God through a
combination of technology, to phase-out the natural body, and meditation, to
directly cultivate spirit. Thus you can
see that religious evolution still has quite a long way to go, and that the
inherent God-building tendencies in man will be put to their best, most
fruitful use in the future. Just as
Protestant man dispensed with a number of Catholic deities in his struggle away
from the manifold diabolic roots of the Universe, so transcendental man will
dispense with the remaining Protestant gods in his aspiration towards the
unified divine culmination of evolution.
There is a profound logic to life, and no-one, no matter how
reactionary, can ultimately deny it!
Vested interests in the worldly status quo won't prevent the truth from
triumphing in the end. For we live in an
age when the old gods are either toppling or being toppled, and must
accordingly avail ourselves of the truth if we are to survive. And by 'we' I especially mean the
proletariat, those city men who will form the final nobility. All credit to the bourgeoisie for what they
achieved in effecting religious progress.
But theirs is not the last say, believe me! Progress must continue.
VINCENT: Which presumably implies that city people should continue
to have recourse to pornography, as a means of gradually freeing themselves
from the natural and evolving towards a condition in which even sublimated sex
ceases to apply?
MICHAEL: Yes. They must
disentangle themselves from the sensual in the interests of spiritual
progress. Looking at photographic
reproductions of sublimated prostitutes may not be to everyone's liking, but it
will certainly suit those of us who are in the vanguard of evolution. It will suit those of us who don't imagine
that, by using such reproductions, we are perverting
ourselves but, on the contrary, simply experiencing a higher order of sexuality
- one purged, as it were, of sensual dross.
In this respect, sublimated whores are certainly more angelic than their
materialistic predecessors!
VINCENT: You have almost convinced me, decadent bourgeois that I
am, though I fancy that plastic inflatables, or
so-called 'sex dolls', would be more in my line.
LITERARY EQUIVALENTS
MARK: I used to believe, like Oscar Wilde and a fair number of
nineteenth-century intellectuals, that man was at bottom good. But these days I'm not so sure.
COLIN: To me, the idea that man is
naturally good is one of the worst illusions of the nineteenth century! For the more natural a man is, the more
correspondingly evil is he. At bottom,
man is anything but good. Rather, he is
sensual, lazy, mean, vindictive, mendacious, lecherous, violent, and quite a
number of other disagreeable things to boot!
No, if you want to discover what is good in man, you must consider what
progress he has made towards a more artificial state-of-affairs. You must look at the extent to which
civilization is manifest in him, consider what he has done to overcome and
transcend nature. The pernicious idea
that man is naturally good stems, in large measure, from Rousseau and his cult
of the 'noble savage'. Sheer nonsense,
of course! Nonetheless, a fair number of
people have seen fit to believe it.
MARK: Well, you and I evidently know better. We needn't make any rash attempts to return
to nature in order to purge ourselves, as it were, of civilized values, like
D.H. Lawrence.
COLIN: No, we must look to the progress of civilization as a means
to making us better, to gradually overcoming our baser self. Everything that is good has to be struggled
after, it doesn't come naturally.
MARK: So, presumably, all religious, political, aesthetic, social,
and scientific progress presupposes a struggle?
COLIN: Indeed it does! And
a very difficult one at times, too! Like
those fish that swim against the current, we have to struggle against nature if
we are to progress upstream, so to speak.
For that is the only way to get beyond nature and thus embrace the
supernatural, which is commensurate with salvation.
MARK: A statement that doubtless applies as much to literary progress as to any other?
COLIN: Certainly!
Literature is only meaningful to the extent that it reflects
contemporary progress away from earlier values and norms. Once literature was a matter of illusion,
with imaginary characters, settings, plots, et cetera, in an unashamedly
narrative unfolding. Now, on the other
hand, it is increasingly becoming, in the hands of the better writers, a matter
of truth, with autobiographical, philosophical, propagandist, and factually
descriptive content. It hasn't ceased to
be literature just because it now takes quite the opposite form it used to -
any more, for that matter, than art has ceased to be art with the development
of non-representational tendencies.
Rather, it is the highest kind of literature that has ever been written,
because factual rather than fictitious, subjective rather than objective. These days I dislike the term 'fiction'
immensely, since it connotes with something outmoded, anachronistic, bourgeois,
commercial.
Naturally it is still being written and read, but not by the more
enlightened or evolved people! If the
latter read literature at all, it's more likely to be of the factually
subjective variety, whereas the less enlightened require objective fictions,
since they are accustomed to being phenomenally selfless rather than noumenally selfish, and only really relate to the
objective.
MARK: No doubt, women figure prominently in the latter category?
COLIN: They do, which isn't altogether surprising since the
majority of women live a century or two behind men intellectually. For whereas men were into fiction in a big
way during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these days women are the
main readers and writers of fiction, men having, in the meantime, evolved to
more strictly intellectual, philosophical, factual works. That is basically as it should be. For there is ever a gap between men and
women, a gap which only the most mendacious or stupid of people would attempt
to deny! However, instead of being a
straight sexually dualistic gap, these days, it is one formed on the positive,
masculine side of the dualistic divide, so that the balance of the sexes has
tipped over, as it were, in favour of the male, and women are increasingly
being regarded as 'lesser men', actual men having effectively become, through a
corresponding evolutionary progression, 'greater men'.
MARK: And these 'greater men' are more likely to read novels by,
say, Henry Miller or Arthur Koestler than by Agatha Christie or Barbara Cartland,
and her cartload of books, are they?
COLIN: Oh yes, that has to be admitted! I, myself, waded through the bulk of Henry
Miller's literary oeuvre some years ago, and very fond of it I was too! As an artist, Miller undoubtedly ranks with
the most subjective writers of the century.
MARK: And do you really consider him an
artist, not just, as some people would contend, a writer?
COLIN: Most definitely! As
already remarked, the criteria of literature may undergo radical change with
the demands of contemporary life, but that doesn't prevent the result from
being literature in any higher sense, nor its creator from being an
artist. To be sure, Henry Miller may
have scorned the traditional criteria of novel-writing more consistently and
thoroughly than a majority of his contemporaries. But that is simply a reflection of his
greatness as a modern author, and shouldn't lead us to regard his work as bogus
literature - as autobiography rather than novel-writing. Autobiography there is certainly no shortage
of in Miller's work, but it tends to take the place of fictional narrations,
becoming their factual replacement. So,
of course, does the philosophical content, which becomes an intellectual
accompaniment to the autobiography, preventing the monotony that would
otherwise arise. Perhaps there has
always been a philosophical content in the best literature, which, if so, is to
be commended, since it testifies to a straining towards supernatural
subjectivity and, hence, the Holy Ghost.
With the twentieth century, however, it has gradually expanded, and to
the point, in novels like Huxley's
MARK: Yes, I entirely agree!
But literature continues to progress and presumably the more
autobiographical and/or philosophical it becomes, the higher it stands in
relation to the past.
COLIN: Yes, that is my view
at any rate! Henry Miller's novels
continued to develop in subjective terms, showing little or no interest in
traditional criteria. Curiously it is
often the way with Americans that they latch-on to new trends with an eagerness
and thoroughness which Europeans rarely if ever experience, or only come around
to gradually ... after the Americans have paved the way. Miller's novels stand head-and-shoulders
above those of the majority of his contemporaries and are scarcely bettered
even now, some decades after his last important work. In England, there was Huxley who, though less
radical than Miller, showed a willingness, with time, to expand his novels
philosophically, so that his late-period works, written, interestingly enough,
in America, rank as his best.
MARK: Though, in England, we don't seem to have an equivalent of
Henry Miller, do we?
I mean, we haven't yet produced an artist with such a radically
autobiographical and philosophical style.
COLIN: I disagree! As the
British equivalent to Henry Miller I would suggest the late Malcolm Muggeridge, who, curiously enough, was Miller's exact
contemporary. Now, as an artist, he is
underrated by the literary conservatives, which isn't altogether surprising,
since they cannot conceive of literary excellence in factually subjective terms
but are all the time measuring artists according to the fictional yardstick of
the past. And yet, from the contemporary
autobiographical and philosophical standpoint, there can be few writers, in
MARK: And yet there is also about Muggeridge
something of the enfant terrible, the rebel, the outsider, the guilty conscience
of his class which, even now, prevents him from being entirely respectable from
a middle-class point of view. It is as
though his public reputation largely rested on notoriety in controversy, and had
to be sustained on that basis, so that, as you implied, his Christianity was
rather unorthodox and he remained something of a rebel even in old age.
COLIN: An opinion which may also be said
to apply to Henry Miller who, as an American, represented a still more radical
deviation from the norms of bourgeois propriety. Yet even though neither of them could be
wholly tamed and forced into the fold of complacent bourgeois respectability,
nonetheless they remain firmly anchored to their class and are now regarded as
honourable, distinguished members of it.
No doubt, every class requires internal critics and guilty consciences
to keep it in check or, at the very least, remind it of what it's doing to
itself by rejecting spiritual values, and the middle class are clearly no
exception! How long it will be before
the working class acquire their Millers or Muggeridges
remains to be seen. Though, if
Solzhenitsyn is anything to judge by, it won't be for some time yet - not,
anyway, until they are wholly triumphant.
MARK: Assuming they ever will be!
COLIN: Frankly, I have no confidence in the presumed permanence of
bourgeois civilization! And neither, may
I add, did Malcolm Muggeridge, whose controversial
reputation enabled him to suggest possibilities for the future transformation
of Western society which no orthodox, right-thinking bourgeois would even have
countenanced, let alone uttered! The
notion, for instance, that Western civilization is destined to be superseded by
some experiment in collective living ... is far from alien to Malcolm Muggeridge's mind, which was well furnished not only with
Marxist scholarship, but with Spenglerian scholarship
moreover. He was certainly no stranger
to The Decline of the West.
MARK: Neither, incidentally, am I, though I disagree with Spengler on a number of counts, and am more inclined, in
light of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, to identify experiments
in collective living or other significant social changes which may be in store
for Western civilization with closer European integration and the development
of a federal Europe. However, the real
trouble with the West, and particularly England these days, is that it is too
negative, shying away from progress and change as from a nightmare or fearsome
obstacle. A man like you, who in many
respects is too intellectually lucid to be content with the usual welter of
platitudinous beliefs and opinions, is virtually doomed to a living death here.
COLIN: I take your point with regard to myself, but I don't
entirely agree with your assessment of England, widespread though it tends to
be among the more adventurous spirits.
This country is by no means the negative place it is often regarded as
being. On the contrary, it is precisely
the opposite quality which makes it objectionable to you - namely, the fact of
its positivity.
For it is now resting on its laurels, so to speak, and availing itself
of what it has achieved in the past, making the most of its particular stage of
civilization. You see, positivity is aligned with passivity, not, as may at first and more naturally appear the case, with
activity or doing. It is precisely the
latter which is always negative. For it
stems from the infernal roots of life in the Cosmos, which constantly seethes
with external activity, and there is nothing more negative than stellar
energy. Now whereas positivity
tends to make for a passive or conservative society, in which revolutionary
change is frowned upon as an unwarranted interruption of the experience of
being ... compatible with the degree of civilization manifest there,
negativity, by contrast, presupposes an active or revolutionary society bent on
effecting widespread change, both internally and abroad. Of all the major countries in the world at
this juncture in time, Russia is undoubtedly the most negative, the most
active, while the Western nations, and Britain and America in particular,
remain the most positive, America doubtless more positive than Britain, given
its penchant for extremes - a penchant which led Henry Miller to embrace
Buddhism, the most being-orientated of all religions, whereas Malcolm Muggeridge was content to avail himself of the blessings of
Christianity, which has usually emphasized doing at the expense of being,
phenomenal selflessness at the expense of noumenal
self. Paradoxically, however, the
extremism of America can also mean that, in certain other contexts, there is
always more negativity prevailing there than is generally the case in Western
Europe, since it is more fiercely Jekyll and Hyde than the latter on account of
its 'communistic' culture, of which film is the epitome and effective nature of
the 'American dream'. But this fact
doesn't detract anything from my contention.
For, despite its negativity, America remains committed, through its
puritan roots, to dualistic civilization, and can thus be counted among the
ever-dwindling number of positive states.
It wasn't America that invaded Afghanistan, and the chances are that it
won't be America that invades any other country in the near future [This was
written some years prior to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq - author's
note]. America can only react to
invasion, as in relation to Communism in South-East Asia, and it will doubtless
continue to do so wherever Western interests are perceived to be under threat,
as was the case in the Gulf.
MARK: Curiously, I was reading a book by the American journalist
Janet Flanner the other day, in which she remarks
how, just prior to the Second World War, Europe was fundamentally divided into
two camps of conviction - the active Nazi/Fascist camp on the one hand, and the
passive Democracies of France and Britain on the other, the former regarding
war as a summon bonum, the latter, by contrast,
as a summon malum. The Nazi/Fascist camp still had something to
achieve, namely the conquest of Europe, whereas the Democracies, having long
since passed the belligerent or expansionist phase of their evolution, were
content to rest on their laurels, to use your cute phrase.
COLIN: Yes, which simply confirms what I have been saying about
the respective natures of positivity and negativity -
the former having passive associations, compatible with expiring civilization,
and the latter ... active associations, compatible with neo-barbarism. Hitler gambled on overthrowing Western
civilization and lost, largely because he made the fatal mistake of taking on a
stronger barbaric country in the process.
Had he not been so greedy in regard to Nazi ambitions, he might have
succeeded in destroying the Democracies, Britain included. But he wanted to destroy the Soviet Union as
well, ostensibly because Germans needed more living space but largely, I
suspect, because that country harboured an ideology directly alien to his own,
a sort of proletarian autocracy no less militarist, in its own fashion, than
was the bourgeois autocracy which Hitler forged in reaction to Communism, with
himself cast in the role of a sort of Western saviour with Cromwellian,
Napoleonic, and Bismarckian ancestry.
MARK: So you don't agree with Malcolm Muggeridge,
to bring him back into the picture, that Soviet Communism and National
Socialism were but two aspects of the same thing - the Slavonic and Teutonic
versions, respectively, of dictatorial socialism.
COLIN: Not quite, though I concede that Muggeridge
had a point if we substitute autocratic neo-barbarism for dictatorial
socialism, in that both regimes did represent
such a phenomenon in relation to democratic civilization. Yet although there were superficial analogies
between Stalin's 'Socialism in One Country' and Hitler's National Socialism, we
shouldn't be led to overlook or underestimate the profound differences that
existed between the two movements - differences, we may infer, which would have
become very apparent had either country succeeded in overrunning the
world. For whereas Soviet Communism,
even under Stalin, would have led to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and to
the gradual restructuring of capitalist economies in the proletarian interest,
German Nazism would simply have resulted in the subjugation of defeated peoples
in the German interest. There, if
anywhere, lies the essential difference between Soviet Communism and Nazism -
the one revolutionary in its social aspirations on behalf of the proletariat,
the other reactionary where Marxism was concerned and therefore harking back to
the age-old policy of conquerors to subjugate the conquered in their own
interests. Thus Nazi hegemony of Europe
would have resulted - and to a certain extend did result for
a limited period of time - in the transformation of the vanquished into so many
slaves of the 'Master Race'. Soviet
hegemony, on the other hand, was designed to free the masses from bourgeois
oppression and, consequently, to further the cause of a brotherhood of
man. That is no small distinction!
MARK: Though one may perhaps be forgiven certain doubts as to the
authenticity of whatever claims Stalin might have made as regards the latter
ambition. His was by no means orthodox
Marxism!
COLIN: To some extent that is perfectly true. Though it is easy, these days, to exaggerate
Stalin's discrepancies at the expense of his achievements, which, from an
historical viewpoint, were quite considerable. The concept of 'Socialism in One Country'
isn't as irrational or counter-revolutionary as some people, more usually
Trotskyite, have imagined. On the
contrary, it is the most realistic of attitudes to the development of
socialism, given the firm entrenchment of bourgeois power in traditionally
democratic countries like Britain and France, where private ownership tends to
be the prevailing norm. Lenin, himself,
was initially too idealistic with regard to the simultaneous spread of
Communism to various industrial countries in the West, as if industrial advancement
alone were sufficient to guarantee proletarian revolution! Trotsky shared the same misguided idealism,
though it was tempered, in his case, by the possibility of Soviet intervention
in foreign countries to assist the worker's struggle on the basis of 'Permanent
Revolution'. But the fledgling Soviet
Union was in no position to militarily involve itself in other countries'
affairs, following the traumatic experiences of both the First World War and
the Civil War, and so Stalin's concern for consolidating Soviet power at home
inevitably won the day over Trotskyite idealism. Internationalism is all very well as an
idealistic ambition, but it cannot be made the basis of world revolution.
MARK: No doubt, that is something Hitler must have realized when
he opted for nationalism as the means not only of effecting Germany's economic
recovery, but also of avenging Germany on France and the Democracies in general
for the humiliating consequences of the Versailles Treaty.
COLIN: Yes, one can only conclude that Hitler was first and
foremost a German patriot bent on securing German interests at the expense of
Germany's enemies, with scant regard, in consequence, for international
ideals. Internationalism would have
seemed to him somehow beside-the-point in the context of Germany's humiliating
treatment at the hands of its Western opponents, the willingness of German
communists to identify with their French or British counterparts being an
obstacle in the path of German vengeance on the Democracies. So, from Hitler's patriotic viewpoint, they
had to be got out of the way, as, on a similar though by no means identical
account, did the Jews. The fall of the
largest communist party in Western Europe, during the 1920s and early '30s, can
only be properly understood in light of Germany's Versailles humiliations and
the widespread sympathy with nationalism that duly followed. Vengeance rather than reconciliation would
have struck a deeper chord in the average German psyche, particularly when
acquainted, like Hitler or Goering, with the First
World War. And, doubtless, the rout of
Trotskyism in the Soviet Union had an influence on the course of political
events in Germany, making the Nazi/Soviet Pact of 1939 virtually
inevitable. The fact that Hitler was
opposed to Marxism, however, needn't surprise us, since Marx was a Jew and no
Jew could have served as Hitler's mentor!
This was undoubtedly another contributory element in the development of
Hitler's politics, and one of the reasons why he wanted to crush the Soviet Union
as a matter of course. That he ultimately
failed in his objective is no great cause for regret, in view of what a
long-term Nazi domination of Europe would have entailed. But he did succeed in liquidating the
majority of European Jews and thus, as Sabastian Haffner points out in his penetrating little book The Meaning
of Hitler, in fulfilling, or almost fulfilling, one of his major objectives
- a fact we may well regret! The
negativity of Nazi Germany certainly had its diabolical consequences.
MARK: And so, too, I suspect would the
negativity of Russia in any future war.
COLIN: Possibly, though we mustn't assume that negativity in a
nation inevitably leads to Hitlerian
consequences. It can be a factor in
world progress if used in the service of a liberating, revolutionary
ideology. Hitler's negativity, as we've
seen, was put to the service of an enslaving, reactionary one, the unfortunate
consequences of which are still, to a certain extent, with us. We must hope that, now that Stalinism seems
to have died from old age in Eastern Europe, the components of the former
Soviet Union won't degenerate into ethnic bumptiousness and chauvinism, like a
fascist state. Fidelity to the ideal of
a brotherhood of man will be the touchstone by which to evaluate the
authenticity of their democratic claims.
If proletarian autocracy is truly dead in Europe, then we shall have
real grounds for optimism concerning the future!
MARK: And presumably that applies to the
future of literature as well, which should continue to evolve to greater
heights of truthfulness.
COLIN: I sincerely hope so!
After all, we can't leave the last words with Henry Miller and Malcolm Muggeridge, much as we may admire them. Life must continue, and men grow better. Which is to say, ever more civilized and,
hence, artificial!
PART TWO: APHORISMS
1. The sun is not the Devil
but a component of the Diabolic - a part of the alpha absolute.
2. No man can see Hell in
its entirety, though he can usually see a part of it when he beholds the
nearest star and/or stars.
3. To look upon the Devil
as God is only permissible during a limited period of evolutionary time.
4. Likewise it is only
permissible to pay deferential respect to the Infernal, in the guise of the
Creator, for a limited period of evolutionary time.
5. The Father, being a
Christian anthropomorphic euphemism for the Devil - and most especially, I
contend, for that part of the Devil which corresponds to the sun - is deserving
of our respect throughout the duration of dualistic civilization, but not after
it has passed!
6. Thus although the planet
will continue to spin through space as formerly, and men feel that its cosmic
stability is still guaranteed in the future, they won't give thanks for this
fact to the Father. Rather, they will
exclusively turn towards the creation of God ... the Holy Spirit.
7. Post-dualistic
civilization will therefore be devoid of both unconscious paganism and
conscious Christianity. It will be
solely concerned, by contrast, with superconscious
transcendentalism.
8. What makes Christianity
unacceptable from a post-dualistic standpoint is the fact that it is
insufficiently transcendentalist; its dualism, in diluted paganism, curtailing
the degree of transcendentalism permissible.
9. To
say post-dualistic is equivalent to saying post-egocentric, meaning a
consciousness biased on the side of the superconscious,
not balanced between the subconscious and the superconscious
in dualistic egocentricity.
10. A consciousness biased
on the side of the superconscious only becomes
possible in an urban context, where the man-made has displaced the natural to
an extent that civilization preponderates over nature in the ratio of at least
3:1.
11. Civilization may be
regarded, in this urban context, as a manifestation of the materialistic
supernatural. Such a 'supernaturalism'
can only precede the spiritual supernaturalism which is its logical
consequence.
12. A profounder concept of
civilization is one that equates it with a society in which politics and religion
are complementary ... on a uniform level of evolution.
13. Thus civilization, in
this profounder sense, presupposes an official religion, even when that
religion has ceased to correspond to majority requirements or interests, and
the civilization in question is accordingly decadent.
14. Pitted against decadent
civilization is barbarism, which tends to its destruction. In the modern age, a barbarous country is one
in which religion has been officially dethroned and outlawed. This primarily applies to traditional
religion, such as Christianity or Buddhism, though it may also extend to
revolutionary religion, e.g. transcendentalism, and hence to 'God-building' in
general.
15. Being materialistic, a
Marxist-Leninist society is liable to make no distinction between traditional
religion and its revolutionary successor but, rather, to pronounce condemnatory
judgement on all religion, whatever its nature.
16. It is perhaps inevitable
that a Marxist-Leninist society should do this, given the materialistic basis
of communist ideology, which claims to be scientific.
17. A superior world-view to
Marxism-Leninism will distinguish between traditional religion and the
revolutionary, transcendental religion which is destined to replace it. This world-view would not therefore be
against religion per se.
18. For
it is not religion which is destined to perish, but a particular stage of
religious evolution.
19. If in the transitional
period between the death of an old civilization and the birth of a new one, there
exists an 'internal proletariat' of spiritual inclination and an 'external
proletariat' of materialist inclination, as Toynbee maintains, then it should
be noted that the converse of these antithetical manifestations of proletarian
life is also to be found, so that the West, for example, may be said to harbour
an 'external proletariat' of materialist inclination, and the East, by
contrast, an 'internal proletariat' of spiritual inclination. These latter proletariats will, however, have
been in the minority in their respective societies traditionally.
20. There is also, it should
be added, a proletariat which is neither 'internal' nor 'external', in the
strict Toynbeean sense of those terms, but simply
proletarian, i.e. devoid of either strong religious or political
convictions. Such a 'lumpen
proletariat' may well constitute a majority.
21. To criticize the
barbarism, especially in its physical manifestations, of barbarous countries
from a civilized standpoint ... is simply to project one's civilized criterion
into contexts to which it doesn't apply - in a word, to meddle.
22. The freer the society
the more truth it can take. Conversely,
the less free the society, the more does truth have to be diluted by illusion.
23. Dualistic society cannot
be expected to imbibe truth in strong doses.
Only a post-dualistic society can lead one to the ultimate truth which,
as Truth, would be God.
24. What makes the term
'God' so suspect, these days, is that it has been associated for so long with
the Devil, in the guise of the Father, and with Christ, the relative
anthropomorphic deity of the Christians.
25. And yet the term 'God'
can still have meaning and respectability, from a post-dualistic standpoint, if
exclusively associated with the Holy Spirit, and thus projected, as the goal of
human striving, into the future.
26. The Nietzschean
assertion that 'God is dead' should not be taken to apply to the Holy Spirit
(which in any case doesn't yet exist) but primarily to Christ, as god of the
Christians, and secondarily to the Creator, Who is no longer to be regarded as
God but simply as the Devil or, better still, the stars.
27. When we speak of the
stars we are using scientifically factual language. When, however, we equate the stars with the
Devil we are entering the realm of religion and using not fictional but
theological language, since theology has to do with metaphorical extrapolations
from the Given.
28. Everything returns to
religion; for at the end of the evolutionary road we shall be immersed in
transcendent spirit which, as God, would be at the furthest possible remove
from the stars.
29. Evolution is therefore a
journey, as it were, from the impure light of the stars to the pure light of
the transcendental Beyond, which is to say, from the sensuality of the alpha
absolute to the spirituality of the omega absolute.
30. Science can never
penetrate to the essence of nature but only deal in phenomenal appearances, the
reason being that the 'essence' of nature is apparent, not essential.
31. Essence is spirit, and can only come out of nature with the birth of
the supernatural at the climax of evolution.
To penetrate to the noumenal essence of the
supernatural, one must utilize the highest religious approach, which is to say,
the direct cultivation of spirit through transcendental meditation. Scientific inquiries are irrelevant.
32. One should not confound
what will be transcendent, in the transcendental Beyond,
with what already exists, in space, as the stars. There is nothing transcendent, i.e. beyond
nature, about the stars. For, as the
roots of nature, they are the most fundamental and primal of all existences.
33. One might liken the sun
of any particular solar system to the roots of a flower, the planets to the
stalk, and the highest life form to be found on those planets to the blossom. Eventually, however, this life form will
evolve beyond the blossom and thus become transcendent - wholly detached from
nature.
34. Science is a means of
investigating, understanding, exploiting, and overcoming the material
world. It has nothing whatsoever to do
with spirit, the development of which should be entrusted to religion. But it can indirectly assist the development
of spirit - through overcoming nature.
35. Thus arises the future
prospect of technological transcendentalism, or
science in the service of religion. The
phasing-out of the natural body will be entrusted to science, while religion
simultaneously attends to the development of spirit.
36. The crisis of
twentieth-century science stems, in the main, from the void left by traditional
religion and the futile attempts being made by science to fill it. Instead of concentrating on natural
appearances, science has felt obliged to substitute itself for religion in the
hope of coming to terms with supernatural essences. Such an obligation, however, can never be
fulfilled, and it is the dawn of this realization which has made for the
contemporary crisis. Needless to say,
the sooner science is freed from its existential perversions and enabled to
proceed to the service, no matter how indirectly, of revolutionary religion,
the better it will be for everyone, scientists included!
37. By
splitting the atom, man can destroy nature, but he cannot thereby create God.
38. Yet nuclear energy, in
whatever context, is an indisputable achievement of modern science. It is the only kind of energy fully
commensurate with contemporary life, an energy created by man rather than
wholly dependent upon nature.
39. Forms of energy
extracted from nature via the sun, the wind, the sea, the earth, fire, et
cetera, are but a stage on the road to energy being produced independently of
nature - through technological progress.
40. All natural forms of
energy are inherently inferior to artificial or, to revert to a term used
earlier, materialistically supernatural kinds of energy, and should be
superseded by the latter as a matter of evolutionary course.
41. The
exploitation of nature is undoubtedly a necessary process of human evolution,
but so, too, is the process of becoming independent of nature through the
development of technology.
42. Natural energy keeps one
the slave of nature, whereas artificial energy enables one to transcend it.
43. It is perhaps necessary
that the twentieth century, in developing socialism, should have also developed
- and still be developing - an alternative ideology with, nevertheless, certain
political affinities with socialism.
Necessary, above all, to the extent that, in rejecting materialism, it
should endorse a new religious sense - something, however, not always
guaranteed, as the examples of recent history attest!
44. Not that such an
alternative modern ideology should necessarily replace socialism. Rather, it should seek to co-exist with and
influence socialism for the better, which is to say, away from the closed
materialist view of history towards an open transcendentalism, such as would be
compatible with the next civilization.
45. Perhaps we should rather
distinguish between one mode of socialism and another, reserving for the
Stalinist mode the description of scientific socialism, or communism, while
allowing for the possibility not only of political socialism, but of religious
socialism, since socialism would seem to be one of those terms which are as generically
broad, in their ideological implications, as royalism
and liberalism.
46. Unlike
communism, socialism has strong economic implications, and it seems to me that
socialism stands to communism as capitalism to liberalism, or feudalism to royalism, with a strongly bureaucratic status.
47. The essential difference
between fascism and socialism, in its Marxist manifestation, is that whereas
the former would enslave the conquered for the benefit of the conquerors, the
latter should liberate the masses from bourgeois oppression, and thus further
the ideal of a brotherhood of man.
48. A political movement is
only as good as the man who leads it.
49. Politics is only
justified as a means to an end - the end of the State and the beginning of the
post-Human Millennium.
50. The
post-Human Millennium will only come fully to pass, however, when all men have
been programmed for transcendence in the exclusive spirituality made possible
by the artificial replacement of the natural body through extensive technological
progress.
51. As so many meditating
brains clustered together on artificial supports, the psychic components of the
post-Human Millennium would be at their closest possible approximation, on
earth, to the ultimate spiritual unity of the transcendental Beyond, completely
oblivious of their external surroundings.
52. The faith and confidence
which man now places in his machines will be considerably greater in the
post-Human Millennium. For his brain
will be entirely dependent on the proper functioning of the artificial
sustains, and would not survive without their functioning correctly.
53. Doubtless, computers
will be on-hand to verify the proper functioning of the
sustains and delegate appropriate tasks, where necessary, to
robots. Human brains will thus be
dependent on these technological marvels, with considerable confidence in them.
54. Even
now the confidence that man places in his machines is by no means
inconsiderable, and augers well for the future.
55. The old brain/subconscious
mind will eventually be disposed of, after the manner of the rest of the
sensual body, making possible the transcendence of egocentric consciousness in
the spiritual consciousness of the new brain/superconscious
mind.
56. Formerly, psychologists
conceived of the psyche as divisible into a subconscious and an ego, or
conscious mind. The idea was that the
ego sat atop the subconscious, like the tip of an iceberg showing above the
water, a tiny fraction of the entire phenomenon.
57. We must reject this
absurdity in favour of the contention that egocentric consciousness is but the
result of a fusion between the subconscious and the superconscious
which varies according to the extent to which either part of the psyche
prevails, in overall consciousness, at any given point in evolutionary time,
this variation being partly conditioned by changing environmental factors and
partly attributable to a variety of individual ones.
58. Thus arise three basic
types of human consciousness: the pre-egocentric, the egocentric, and the
post-egocentric.
59. The first type
corresponds to an environment in which nature prevails over civilization, i.e.
the man-made, in the ratio of at least 3:1, with a consequence that
consciousness tends to reflect a similar imbalance in favour of the
subconscious, and there arises a religious sense corresponding to the pagan.
60. The second type of
consciousness corresponds to an environment in which nature and civilization
are approximately in balance, giving rise to a consciousness in which the two
parts of the psyche form an egocentric equilibrium, and there arises a
religious sense corresponding to the Christian.
61. The
third type of consciousness corresponds to an environment in which civilization
prevails over nature in the ratio of at least 3:1, and there arises a religious
sense corresponding to the transcendental.
62. Before pre-egocentric
consciousness there is only the beastly consciousness of a psyche almost
entirely under subconscious dominion, as with the animals, and beneath that the
even more subconsciously-dominated (unconscious) 'psyche' of the plants.
63. Beyond
post-egocentric consciousness there is the possibility of pure consciousness,
or superconsciousness, leading on, via transcendence,
to the even purer consciousness of the Supreme Being.
64. To
conceive of a projected antithesis to the stars, which are antithetical to such
a consciousness, is to posit the pure spiritual consciousness of a supreme
level of being in the (future) transcendental Beyond.
65. To
conceive of a projected antithesis to the plants, which are unconscious, is to
posit the pure consciousness of the artificially-supported clusters of new
brains in the second phase ('communist') of the post-Human Millennium.
66. To
conceive of a projected antithesis to the animals, with their rudimentary
consciousness, is to posit the radically post-egocentric consciousness of human
brains artificially supported and sustained in the first phase ('socialist') of
the post-Human Millennium.
67. To
conceive of a projected antithesis to the pagans, with their pre-egocentric
consciousness, is to posit the post-egocentric consciousness of transcendental
man.
68. Thus degrees of
consciousness can be pin-pointed, as it were, along a spectrum of evolving consciousness
from A - Z, or alpha to omega, with correlative antithetical positions marked
on route.
69. When one contemplates a
tree or bush in blossom, one is effectively looking at the antithesis to our
projected cluster of artificially-supported new brains in the 'Communist'
Millennium. The artificial supports will
correspond to the branches of the tree, and the brains being supported to the
leaves on those branches. The tree
reflects the crude, sensual communism of the lowest life form; the cluster of
new brains, by contrast, will represent the refined, spiritual communism of the
highest life form - highest, that is to say, short of the formless transcendent
spirit of the omega absolute, which would be purely essential.
70. Likewise a Christmas
tree, suitably attired, provides one with an intimation of things to-come,
albeit on a much higher and more direct level than a natural tree. For whereas the leaves of the latter are
sustained naturally, through the agencies of sunlight, rainwater, et cetera,
the lights of the former are sustained artificially, through electricity, and
may thus be said to represent not so much an antithesis to the projected
Millennial context as ... a crude intimation of it. Better still when the Christmas tree's
branches are synthetic, making the overall effect more transcendent and
therefore closer, in essence, to a post-Human Millennium.
71. At Christmas, there
should be as many artificial lights in operation as possible. A time of spiritual intimations!
72. It would be a good thing
too if, in the future, synthetic drugs were to take the place of natural drugs,
so that people could experience a degree of upward self-transcendence in the
lower, visionary regions of the superconscious.
73. Synthetic drugs, like
LSD, would condition man away from his subconscious and thus slowly lead him,
in visionary rapture, towards the pure light of his superconscious.
74. This gradual break with
the subconscious would be the necessary prelude to the eventual removal, by
qualified technicians, of the old brain, as men matured into a transcendent
consciousness.
75. And
from transcendent consciousness to complete transcendence, or attainment to the
transcendental Beyond, would simply be a matter of time.
76. We cannot be absolutely
certain that transcendence would lead directly to the omega absolute, but,
assuming the immensity of the Universe precluded this, must rest on the
hypothesis that it would, at any rate, lead directly to the transcendental
Beyond - to a Beyond which could be one of a number of 'globes' of pure spirit
simultaneously converging - and expanding - towards other such 'globes' in a
process of bringing about the ultimate unity of the Supreme Being.
77. Only once the ultimate
unity of the definitive 'globe' of pure spirit was established, would God be
definitive, in complete antithesis to the separate, manifold constitution of
the Devil, or stars.
78. With
the eventual disintegration and disappearance of the alpha absolute(s),
the Universe would be brought to perfection in the indivisible unity of the
omega absolute.
79. A perfection which would
last for ever and continue to indefinitely expand throughout the void of
infinite space.
80. For
the omega absolute, in being the complete antithesis of the alpha absolute,
could only expand, never contract.
81. Thus the Universe,
composed of transcendent spirit, would grow ever more perfect as the
immeasurable extent of the omega absolute continued to expand.
82. No man can set limits to
the Supreme Being, which is the supreme level of being.
83. Yet no man would be
there to watch the Infinite expand through space, as men now watch the gradual
contraction and divergence of stars from their various observatories. All men or, rather, their post-human
successors would be experiencing the bliss of transcendence in their
supernatural manifestations.
84. For whereas one can only
investigate the appearance of the Diabolic through science, the Divine can only
be experienced, in its essence, though religion - alpha and omega, external and
internal, phenomenon and noumenon, Devil and God.
