A THINKER AT LARGE

 

"You can't have the best of both worlds," Derek Reilly said, relapsing into an idiomatic truism.  "I would describe myself as a spiritually courageous person, but I have to pay for such courage with an unusual degree of physical cowardice.  So it is with most men of my stamp.  What you gain on the spiritual roundabout, you must lose on the material swings!"

      Very true!  And, knowing Reilly, he doesn't regret having lost anything on the latter, never having spent much time on them anyway!  His is an extreme constitution, and one very much in line with the bias of the times.  One can't do better than to be spiritually courageous.  Are not Mahler, Shostakovich, Martinu, Vaughan Williams, Honegger, and Prokofiev among his favourite composers?

 

* * *

 

"We shouldn't concern ourselves with bourgeois civilization," Pat O'Grady said, speaking to no-one in particular.  "As transcendental revolutionaries we needn't admire anything bourgeois, least of all such works of art or philosophy or whatever as were produced in fin-de-siècle Vienna or Paris or London!  We're proletarians who must think not only in terms of opposing such manifestations of bourgeois civilization as have invaded our island, but of developing and furthering proletarian civilization, as outlined in the works of our Leader and Teacher."

      To be sure, O'Grady is the kind of man who would be useful to have around in the proscription office of a revolutionary state, mercilessly castigating alien class-influences, and consigning to the rubbish bin of history all those works of literature or philosophy or whatever that would be irrelevant to the proletariat and of no consequence to the bureaucracy.  I can just imagine him saying: "Freud?  Away with him!  Huxley?  To the Devil with him!  Lawrence?  Down with him!  Wittgenstein?  Out with him!"  Soon our libraries and book shops would be purged of everything not essential to our transcendental integrity.

 

* * *

 

"A liberated female shouldn't be confounded with a barbarous female proletarian," Jennifer Hanlon said, amidst a flurry of surrounding laughter.  "The former is essentially petty bourgeois, and so pertains to an extreme relative civilization, whereas the latter exists in absolute states or, alternatively, as a manifestation of the barbarous majority within the confines of bourgeois/proletarian civilization.  Someone who's a barbarous proletarian, given wholly to external values, is unlikely to develop into a liberated female.  On the contrary, she's potentially a female superman, the post-sexist designation for women in an absolute civilization, such as will one day arise from the ruins of its barbarous precursor.  Only when the proletariat become truly civilized by adopting transcendentalism, or people's religion, will women effectively become female supermen ... in relation to male supermen, their masculine counterparts.  And, unlike liberated women, female supermen will be liberated even from sex, as traditionally understood and practised in relative terms."

      I have no doubt of that fact, since relativity of any description, including the homosexual, would be out-of-bounds in an absolute civilization, where people would indulge in personal sex, as involving some kind of absolute pornography or plastic inflatables/vibrators, depending on their basic sexual orientation and/or gender.  Propagation would thereby become an artificial matter, subject to administrative control.  Consequently there would be little or no sexual discrimination, since even female supermen must be treated like and regarded as men - unlike liberated females, who continue, despite their liberation from certain traditional constraints, to regard themselves as women.  In sexual relations, they're particularly prone to fellatio.  They may also be open, if cohabiting with a lower type of petty-bourgeois materialist, to periodic anal violation.  It's doubtful that very many of them would be into male pornography.  On the other hand, proletarian barbarians are more given, when not masturbating, to conventional heterosexual relations, though this may not exclude 'fringe' oral sex.  Their civilized successors, in the transcendental civilization to-come, will almost certainly be more partial to vibrator stimulation.

 

* * *

 

"You can't fight a modern war with antiquated weapons!" Derek Reilly cried, turning upon O'Grady with schoolmaster-like resolve.  "Bullets will become anachronistic before long, tanks and field-guns no less so.  What we should concentrate on developing are powerful laser beams and/or guns, with a range and accuracy, not to mention impact effectiveness, outclassing all materialist weapons.  To get the better of a reactionary enemy, now as before, it would be necessary to have a fighting force equipped with more sophisticated weapons and capable of using them to maximum effect, which is a question, after all, of technique."

      So it is, though I would rather have a good army equipped with traditional weapons than a poor one equipped with revolutionary ones!  However, Reilly has a point, and I would be the last to deny the potential value of laser weapons for defensive warfare.  Ships, of course, are a shade time-worn, but planes, particularly jet fighters, shouldn't be underestimated, since, unlike tanks and artillery pieces, they suggest some degree of technological transcendentalism.  I would certainly put more store by a corps of jet fighters equipped with air-to-ground missiles.  Better still if they had laser beams to-hand.  As for laser guns, I would ensure that the nation's revolutionary corps were given priority over the regular army in the supply of such weapons!

 

* * *

 

"When people say that transcendentalism is no different from yoga or Buddhism, they're talking nonsense," Pat O'Grady said, somewhat later that evening and to everyone within range.  "There's no concern with petty-bourgeois happiness or yoga exercises with transcendentalism, which, by contrast, corresponds to an absolute stage of spiritual development in the cultivation of self-awareness, as pertaining to the future proletariat.  Besides, transcendentalism implies knowledge of the limitations of meditation on the human plane to achieve total transcendence, and therefore couldn't lead to the kind of ascetic fanaticism so characteristic of oriental sages traditionally.  People would be given an evolutionary perspective as to exactly where 'humanist' meditation fits in and by what it will be superseded, come the post-human millennium.  They won't suffer from false expectations concerning their prospects of salvation through naturalistic means of cultivating spirit alone.  They will learn that man is but a link in the evolutionary chain who must some day be 'overcome', to coin a Nietzschean term, once technological progress makes possible the establishment of his millennial successor, the Superman, who will in turn be superseded, and so on, until evolution attains to a climax in the Omega Absolute, the ultimate spiritual transcendence."

      All very true!  Transcendentalism isn't simply Buddhism or Hinduism in a new guise, but potentially a true world religion transcending all so-called world religions ... of a provincial cast.  People will do regular stints of transcendental meditation (meditation which transcends feelings in its exclusive concern with self-awareness) in specially-designed meditation centres, where they will be supervised by meditation masters, the proletarian successors to petty-bourgeois gurus.  They will also acquire an evolutionary perspective, as O'Grady wisely calls it, and thereby learn some facts about the nature of religious evolution and its future transformations, embracing post-human life forms.  To keep them in ignorance about much of this would be to treat them as if they were irresponsible, dull-witted children.... Though it wouldn't be necessary or indeed possible to impart everything that was known or written about transcendentalism to them.  For those who were especially keen to learn, there would, I am sure, be no shortage of relevant information available.  For the rest, a basic grounding in transcendentalism should suffice.  And I am confident that additional cultural ingredients, as it were, along the lines of some atonal electronic music, abstract poetry, and non-representational holography ... would prove appropriate, provided, however, that they were kept in subordination to the essential ingredient - namely, spiritual contemplation.  Probably these cultural aspects of transcendentalism would be scaled-down and superseded, in the course of time, by a more puritanical approach to self-realization, as involving meditation alone.

 

* * *

 

"Naturally, a state moving towards proletarian civilization would have to take measures, sooner or later, to curb and possibly terminate human indulgence of animals, particularly pets like cats and dogs," Colin Dunphy said, in response to a remark made by Jennifer Hanlon about dog's noise in her neighbourhood.  "While the pagan root remains intact, as it effectively does throughout the duration of bourgeois/proletarian civilization, it's of course natural and socially acceptable for people to indulge a love of animals.  But a society that was evolving towards a transcendental framework could not encourage any such indulgence, because where there is, or will be, an exclusive orientation towards the Divine Omega ... conceived as transcendent spirit, there can be no sympathy for that which stems from the Diabolic Alpha in animality - the pagan root having been, or in the process of being, extirpated from human affairs, as transcendental man turns his back, so to speak, on 'the Creator' and aspires ever more ardently towards the attainment of an ultimate creation.  So one would not encounter anyone walking a dog down the street in the transcendental civilization, since such a mode of behaviour, which betrays commitment to an animal, would be incompatible with transcendental ethics and morality."

      I am sure he is right, though if anyone did have the nerve to be seen with a dog after such behaviour had been rendered morally unacceptable, he would run the risk of drawing police attention and of having to pay the penalty in consequence - possibly internment for corrective education.  Certainly all 'unnecessary' animals, or those which weren't considered strictly essential to human survival, would be put under ban and duly removed, as evolutionary requirement dictated, and Dunphy may be right to suggest that such a radical policy ought to be carried through while the revolutionary state was evolving towards a transcendental civilization rather than actually in the civilized framework.  After all, all forms of liquidation correspond to a mode of barbarous behaviour.... As to the animals concerned - dogs, cats, hamsters, mice, rabbits, budgerigars, parrots, etc.,  it might be more expedient to ban them by degrees rather than all at once, beginning, say, with fierce or large dogs and proceeding to the less conspicuous pets in due course.  Whether one could impose the same transcendental criteria on the rural areas as on the towns and cities ... must remain open to conjecture; though I, for one, would be prepared to allow country folk to hold-on to such pets as they may possess longer than their proletarian counterparts in the cities, if only on the understanding that, eventually, all such pets would have to be abandoned, especially with the elevation of greater numbers of country-dwellers to a proletarian status as villages were expanded into towns and towns into cities, due to a combination of local development and decentralized urban accretions designed to speed-up the urbanization, as it were, of villages and towns.  A more enlightened generation, some decades hence, would probably think no worse of the liquidation of a dog or a cat than contemporary generations think of the elimination of troublesome insects, like flies or wasps.

 

* * *

 

"One thing that our revolutionary proletarian state will have to do, before long, is to ban horse-racing and greyhound-racing," Terry Shannon said, turning to Derek Reilly, who happened to have an ear conveniently cocked to the same wavelength.  "Neither of those naturalistic sports, employing animals, could be encouraged in a society gravitating towards an exclusively transcendental framework, with no respect for the pagan roots of life.  Artificial sports would, however, be another thing, and probably some form of motor-racing will survive and continue to exist for many decades hence.... Though even that, together with all types of competitive sport, would be subject to gradual curtailment and eventual proscription, as proletarian humanity evolved further along the road of co-operative transcendentalism, scorning all forms of competition, particularly when physical.  However, as for horse- and greyhound-racing, we need not expect them to survive the relative epoch of bourgeois/proletarian civilization."

      I wouldn't want to disagree with that assumption, since, like pets, these sporting animals could be described as 'unessential' to human survival and incompatible with a society exclusively orientated towards the Divine Omega.  Personally, I take no interest in either horse- or greyhound-racing, and would no more be seen at a race meeting than in the company of a dog.  The spectacle of so many beasts thundering round a racecourse has always struck me as infinitely boring, unworthy of the attention of anyone with claims to spiritual insight or intellectual originality!  I would much rather watch a motor race, where the artificial predominates over the natural and proceedings consequently have the ring of modernity about them.  Curiously, Shannon made no mention of athletics, which involves natural force no less than animal sports, and in which category I include boxing and wrestling.  Should athletics survive a relative, bourgeois/proletarian epoch, I wonder?  If I had any say in the matter, I would be no less inclined to put athletics under censorious scrutiny than animal races, deeming it incompatible with the artificial, co-operative criteria of a society moving towards or actually in a transcendental context.

 

* * *

 

"But what you don't seem to realize, Sean," Jennifer Hanlon said, responding to a remark I had just made, "is that most people can't listen to music unless it is humanized by some vocal ingredient of utilitarian import, usually romantic or sexual, which becomes the focal-point of attention.  Purely instrumental music generally fails to arouse their interest, because it demands more aesthetic sophistication than most people, with their utilitarian integrities, possess, being, in essence, transcendental.  They have to hear something they can relate to their everyday sexual lives, and nothing serves this need better than a love song."

      "Nothing serves this limitation better, would be nearer the mark," I commented on a ruthlessly objective note.  "Though with me it's just the opposite, since I can't relate to love songs but have to listen to instrumental music - the purer and more serious, the better!  And I have to listen to it through headphones, which give one the impression that the music is taking place in one's head rather than coming at one from outside.  Nowadays I despise stereo speakers, deeming them too 'apparent'.  Indirect meditation through focus of awareness on aural stimuli cannot be better served than via headphones, and the aural stimuli cannot do better, in my opinion, than to be electronic and, preferably, atonal, albeit of an atonality serialized according to strictly classical principles."

      I could tell that Jennifer was puzzled by this contention, though she did her best to appear impressed.  What I hadn't told her, however, was that such music would only be created on a consistent and regular basis in the future, when the transcendental civilization got properly under way and all forms of acoustic tonal music, not to mention its atonal counterparts, had effectively been rendered obsolete.