Marcuse's Utopia

In 1971 John Lennon released his famous song Imagine. It is a song that calls on us to imagine a certain kind of utopia, one in which there are no nations and no religions but only a global solidarity, a brotherhood of man. 

From what intellectual milieu did this song spring from? It's hard to ignore the influence of a leading intellectual of this period, Herbert Marcuse. 

Marcuse was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1898, studied Marxism as a young man, came under the influence of Heidegger, before joining the Frankfurt Institute. He ended up emigrating to the United States in 1934. He was a leading theorist for the New Left in the 1960s, but his influence subsequently waned. 

Herbert Marcuse

Marcuse was a self-proclaimed leftist utopian. As such, he stands in a tradition that goes back to at least the later 1700s. Marcuse absorbed a great deal of thought from the past. Evident in his writing is the influence not just of Marx, but of Freud, Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill and Hegel, amongst others.

Leftist utopianism has certain common characteristics. It often involves a belief that you can achieve an absolute form of autonomous individual freedom, of perfect equality and lasting peace; that you can and should have solidarity between people, but only at a universal, global level; that human nature can be remade to make possible these achievements, so that you bring into being a New Man; and that human nature is currently corrupted by the institutions of civilisation, so that change requires an attack on these institutions and a subverting of culture and religion.

It is interesting to me just how similar the basic underpinnings of Marcuse's worldview of the 1960s are with that of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the 1810s. Marcuse's ideas considerably overlap with Shelley's, albeit expressed in the language of Marx and Freud. Leftist utopianism has been remarkably stable over a long period of time.

The aims

What was Marcuse aiming for? He did not present this in an entirely systematic way, but it's possible to identify certain themes. 

First, he believed in "liberation", by which he meant, in part, absolute individual autonomy. He wrote:

Liberty is self-determination, autonomy...It stipulates the ability to determine one's own life: to be able to determine what to do and what not to do

This is a standard aim across most modernist political currents. It's noteworthy that Marcuse, who identified as a socialist, should share this belief with liberals of all stripes. 

If you want to be completely free as an autonomous individual, then there will be nothing that might limit what you determine for yourself. Nor will you be defined by anything outside of your own individual choice. You will not be defined by nation or class, nor by family or sex. You will not be limited in your choices by religious belief. There will be nothing above you and nothing below you. There will just be you, a discrete individual, existing on the same plane as everyone else and everything else.

Here is how Shelley puts his vision of the new autonomous man:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains/ Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man/ Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,/ Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king/ Over himself

However, Marcuse did not entirely reject the idea of solidarity. But the only kind of solidarity that was permissible was a global, universalist one, that of humanity. He wrote of how the revolution had the aim of "creating solidarity for the human species" and said of happiness that "its validity depends on the real solidarity of the species “man,” which a society divided into antagonistic classes and nations cannot achieve".

He used Freudian concepts to try to make this scientific. Freud had claimed that Eros represented a life force that aimed at higher unities of life. Marcuse used this theory to argue that prior to all social forms of morality, there was a biological, instinctual one that aimed to create unities at the highest level possible (i.e., ultimately at the universal level, that of humanity):

Prior to all ethical behavior in accordance with specific social standards, prior to all ideological expression, morality is a “disposition” of the organism, perhaps rooted in the erotic drive to counter aggressiveness, to create and preserve “ever greater unities” of life. We would then have, this side of all “values,” an instinctual foundation for solidarity among human beings – a solidarity which has been effectively repressed in line with the requirements of class society but which now appears as a precondition for liberation.

But solidarity was not, in Marcuse's view, to impinge on our individual autonomy. He praised the student rebellion of the 1960s for not creating any hierarchy of leadership or any stable forms of organisation:

Socialist solidarity is autonomy: self-determination begins at home…. There is a strong element of spontaneity, even anarchism, in this rebellion, expression of the new sensibility, sensitivity against domination: the feeling, the awareness, that the joy of freedom and the need to be free must precede liberation.

Another angle to liberation for Marcuse was that surrounding the Marxist concept of alienation. Marcuse followed the idea that man is formed through his productive labour, but that he is alienated from this self-formation under the conditions of capitalism. His labour is treated as a kind of commodity, and he does not control the conditions of his labour, nor does he receive all of his productive output. He is forced to spend his life toiling for others. 

Marcuse thought there was a way out of this. Modern capitalism had raised industrial output to such a level that if this output was distributed more equally, there could be a great reduction in the need to work for necessity. 

The general aim here of reducing working hours is easy to support. The issue is whether Marcuse's political orientation was likely to help achieve this aim or not. My own belief is that he unintentionally made things worse (I will explain this further on). I would just note, for now, that one component of Marcuse's ideal of liberation, and the achievement of individual autonomy, was overcoming alienation from our labour.

A third aspect of Marcuse's utopia is more difficult to explain. Marcuse had a lifelong interest in aesthetics. It led him to the idea that in a utopia reality would be remade along artistic lines. He believed that if a repressive form of reason could be overturned that, "The rational transformation of the world could then lead to a reality formed by the aesthetic sensibility of man." Art would no longer be a separate sphere of life, the whole of life and reality would be art. In Marcuse's utopia, the distinctions between science and art, logic and imagination would no longer exist:

Technique would then tend to become art, and art would tend to form reality: the opposition between imagination and reason, higher and lower faculties, poetic and scientific thought, would be invalidated.

For Marcuse, the imagination was a liberating force. Reason by itself would not liberate people, because it was too bound to current conditions of life. Marcuse therefore strongly supported the surrealists, and thought that dreams and the poetic imagination could envisage a different and better way of life. He quoted a leading French surrealist, Benjamin Péret, who held that a poet "can no longer be recognized as such if he does not oppose himself by a total non-conformism to the world in which he lives." Marcuse felt that the libertarian possibilities of the revolution,

are “sur-realistic”: they belong to the poetic imagination

The ideal for Marcuse was a world in which "mediations" would,

...reside in modes of work and pleasure, of thought and behavior, in a technology and in a natural environment which express the aesthetic ethos of socialism. Then, art may have lost its privileged, and segregated, dominion over the imagination, the beautiful, the dream.

Note the similarity to the beliefs of Percy Bysshe Shelley back in the 1810s:

Shelley’s poetry often expresses a utopian vision of a better society...Shelley’s poetry reflects a profound belief in the power of the human imagination. He viewed the imagination as a force capable of transcending boundaries, inspiring change, and shaping the world. Through his writings, Shelley encourages readers to tap into their creative faculties, to dream, and to envision a more just and compassionate society. His emphasis on the transformative power of the imagination resonates with readers, reminding them of their capacity to bring about positive change.

And think too of John Lennon's song, with its title "Imagine" and the line "You may say I'm a dreamer/But I'm not the only one".

A fourth aspect of Marcuse's utopia was the idea that we could not really know what the utopia might be like. He ends his "Essay on Liberation" on this note:

And there is an answer to the question which troubles the minds of so many men of good will: what are the people in a free society going to do? The answer which, I believe, strikes at the heart of the matter was given by a young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do.

Marcuse was aware of the problem of describing his alternative vision. He refused to set out a blueprint for his utopia:

What kind of life? We are still confronted with the demand to state the “concrete alternative.” The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops.

He recognised, though, that it was reasonable for people to ask for some vision of the new before committing to destroying the old:

However, the question cannot be brushed aside by saying that what matters today is the destruction of the old, of the powers that be, making way for the emergence of the new. Such an answer neglects the essential fact that the old is not simply bad, that it delivers the goods, and that people have a real stake in it. There can be societies which are much worse – there are such societies today. The system of corporate capitalism has the right to insist that those who work for its replacement justify their action.

Marcuse did sketch out a vague and abstractly intellectual picture of what the organising principles of his utopia would be. But it is still striking how willing he was to subvert the traditions of his society, even what he terms the "most sublime manifestations of traditional culture", in favour of a roughly drawn, unlikely utopia.

How would Marcuse's utopia come about? Like other leftist utopians he thought that human nature was malleable. What was corrupting this nature was the influence of oppressive and exploitative institutions, and so there is much mention in his writings of the need to subvert these institutions.

He thought, as well, that it was both possible and necessary to create a type of new man and that this would not happen automatically as a result of institutional change. Marcuse suggested that if there were revolutionary changes to morality, that this might reach into the "biological" nature of man (by which he meant that the organism of man would be reconditioned so that it could only function along the lines of the new morality):

To the degree to which this foundation is itself historical and the malleability of “human nature” reaches into the depth of man’s instinctual structure, changes in morality may “sink down” into the “biological" dimension and modify organic behavior. Once a specific morality is firmly established as a norm of social behavior, it is not only introjected – it also operates as a norm of “organic” behavior: the organism receives and reacts to certain stimuli and “ignores” and repels others in accord with the introjected morality, which is thus promoting or impeding the function of the organism as a living cell in the respective society.

Marcuse did not believe that the working-class was likely to initiate revolutionary changes. He looked instead to social movements of his time, such as those of Black Americans and feminists. He placed particular hope in the feminist movement, because one other aspect of his utopia was the ideal of peace (Lennon: "Imagine all the people/living life in peace"). 

It makes sense for someone on the left side of modernity to emphasise peace. The original wave of liberalism had based its politics on an anthropology of conflict, making the starting point the claim that man in a state of nature would engage in a war of all against all. Marcuse makes reference to this in his Essay on Liberation, in which he notes the existence of classes and nations, and the absence of universal solidarity, and claims that,

As long as this is the history of mankind, the “state of nature,” no matter how refined, prevails: a civilized bellum omnium contra omnes [war of all against all], in which the happiness of the ones must coexist with the suffering of the others.

And this is where his excitement about the radical feminist movement comes in. Marcuse believed in the Freudian idea that Eros, or libidinal energy, was the Life Instinct, that was locked in battle with aggressive energy, the Death Instinct. Marcuse identified feminine qualities (receptivity, sensitivity, non-violence, tenderness) with the Life Instinct and masculine ones (aggression, dominance, performance, assertiveness, competitiveness) with the Death Instinct. He hoped that the feminist revolution would ultimately make traditionally feminine qualities universal, thereby ushering in an androgyny, in which men and women were equally feminine:

No other rational meaning can possibly be attributed to the idea of androgynism than the fusion, in the individual, of the mental and somatic characteristics, which in patriarchal civilization were unequally developed in men and women, a fusion in which feminine characteristics, in cancellation of male dominance, would prevail over their repression.

Marcuse was aware of the disorder and pain that such a transition would involve: "This will be struggle permeated with bitter conflicts, torment and suffering (mental and physical)". But it was his answer to the issue of creating an anthropology of peace - human nature would be remade to be universally feminine. 

A brief reply

Marcuse's utopia can be criticised from many different angles. I want to focus on just one, his concept of solidarity.

Marcuse thought that you could position solidarity at the universal level of humanity, rather than, say, at the level of family or nation. I would argue that this is not realistic and is ultimately detrimental to the good of individuals.

Marcuse believed in the concept of reification, i.e., that under capitalism people are treated more as objects or things, and that relationships between people are treated as relationships between things. Marcuse was also critical of the "performance principle" in which the norms and values of a society are geared toward economic competition and acquisition.

I would argue that the family used to put certain limits on these things. Yes, the family has had a certain economic function in history, either as a household economic unit or, at the aristocratic level, via the arranging of marriages for economic and social advancement. 

The family, however, has also been held up as a haven from the competitive pressures of the outside world, particularly following on from the industrial age. A well-functioning family was envisaged as being, ideally, a place where a certain kind of peace might be sought. 

Rather than being "reified", relationships between family members were to be highly personalised, and based on mutual loyalty and natural affection. There was to be a self-sacrificing commitment to the common good of family life, rather than a competitive and self-seeking dynamic between family members.

The solidarity of family life, based on mutual support, was intended to help buffer individuals against the indifference of the outside world, and to make them less vulnerable to exploitation and poverty.

The feminism of the 1970s, which Marcuse championed as "liberation", pushed things in the wrong direction. It emphasised the idea of men and women as contending political classes, which not only undermined solidarity between the sexes, it represented a shift toward aggression and competitiveness in human relationships rather than away from it. It destabilised family life, with the rise in unmarried adults rising from 28% in 1970 to 47% by 2019. These adults do not have the same level of economic or emotional support (for instance, a married couple will accrue three times more household wealth than an unmarried adult, similarly 80% of married women express confidence in being able to retire comfortably compared to only 50% of unmarried and divorced women). 

Nor did 1970s feminism push back against reification. If anything, this has intensified. Consider the feminists who complain about having to "perform" what they call "emotional labour" in marriages. 

It seems likely, as well, that relationships between the sexes have become more, rather than less, transactional since the 1970s. It is not uncommon now to hear women argue that, as they don't really need a man (economically), that they will only consider a man who is able to "add value" to their lives. It has become less common to hear either sex talk about a loving spousal union as a primary aim of life. 

It is a similar story when it comes to nation as a source of solidarity. National solidarity places limits on certain types of exploitation. For instance, open borders mean that the workers of one nation must compete for jobs with other workers around the world. If employers have no solidarity with the workers of their own country, they are free to employ whoever will work the longest for the least money. It is noteworthy that wages have stagnated since 1980 whilst GDP growth has continued to rise:

In other words, the share of national wealth going to the working classes has fallen over time as national solidarity has waned. This, in Marcusian terms, means that the alienation of labour has increased - it has gone in the wrong direction - as national solidarity has been undermined. 

Again, when a country has a stable sense of national identity, then relationships between individuals involve a sense of a shared history and culture, with a deeply held connection to place and to a particular tradition. Relationships between people are not mediated as strongly by economics, by a sense of living in a society marked by labour and consumption on a mass scale, of existing within a kind of global entrepôt. In this way, too, national solidarity places limits on the reification that Marcuse so opposed.

The position I am arguing here is that Marcuse's utopia was self-defeating. By making solidarity universal, he increased the degree of alienation and reification, rather than overcoming them.

Which leads me to one final criticism of Marcuse. Marcuse thought that he could abolish the "performance principle", by which reality was shaped by norms of competition and acquisition, by making men and women equally feminine, and therefore androgynous.

Marcuse seems not to have adequately considered the way that women contribute to the drive to acquire material things. One of the reasons that men "perform" is to attract a wife. There are plenty of men who are kept hard at work to afford the renovations or the holidays or the house that their wife desires. Left to themselves, some of these men would most likely choose to live more simply. It is therefore unlikely that abolishing the masculine, if this were possible, would overcome the drive within human nature to be materially acquisitive.

And, to the extent that men do have a provider instinct, this is mostly a beneficial aspect of the masculine. A man might leverage some of his "aggression" to succeed in this role, but it is motivated by his love for, and commitment to, his family and it helps to create material comfort and security for his wife and children. To abolish the masculine would mean a loss of this provider instinct and the benefits to family life that go with it.

But, most importantly, the masculine cannot be reduced to these material functions. At its best, the masculine is able to discern the higher ordering within reality and then frame society in a way that is most conducive to human flourishing. 

It is true that this creates a kind of hierarchy, as it involves a serious engagement with the vertical dimension of reality, where not all things are equal, but where we can aspire to higher things within our nature and within the nature of the reality we inhabit. It also requires a serious engagement with forms, with the essences of things, and therefore with their distinct natures and ends. 

It is true, I think, that men need a certain type of receptivity, a quality identified as feminine by Marcuse, to best perform this highest of masculine tasks. In other words, if a man were entirely unreceptive he would find it difficult to discern "logos" - the ordering principles within reality. However, this is a refining of the masculine, rather than a turn to androgyny. 

Men have largely been lacking in recent times in contributing this sort of masculine leadership. Perhaps part of the reason is that the New Left and second wave feminism, both influenced by Marcuse, managed to successfully malign the masculine, and to stamp it with negative associations, as being merely a social construct that unleashes aggression into society and that represses the life instinct.

It is time to move beyond Marcuse and the intellectual frame he helped to create.

Their reasons why

There has been a big focus on transgenderism over the past few years. The official account of this is that there are large numbers of young people who are trapped in the wrong body and who therefore should "transition" into the right body, either by a change in outward appearance or, more radically, through the use of hormones and surgery.

There are now some young people, however, who have gone through this process and have regretted it to the point of choosing to detransition. It is worth the effort to read through their accounts of what led them to adopt a trans identity, because they do not match the official explanation. I read two such accounts on the weekend; I'll summarise them below, but the message is probably better imparted by reading the originals. 

a) Tree

"Tree" begins his account by pointing out, with some skill, the contradictions of the ruling "gender ideology". He then explains how he came to adopt a trans identity. It began when he was fifteen and became involved in a left-wing Tumblr online community:

When I was fifteen years old, I adopted a kaleidoscopic, schizophrenic ideology patched together from hundreds of individual posts talking about feminism, disability, gender identity, queerness, race, capitalism, and leftism. I didn't have the context for any of it, and neither did any of the other teenage kids on Tumblr at the time–of which there were many...We took this stuff in and internalized it. We believed it.

The underlying belief was that gender was socially constructed by the patriarchy to oppress women and that without the patriarchy all would be equal. But if gender is socially constructed why would the young people following this ideology want to transition to the opposite sex?

According to Tree, many of the trans people he knew did not really believe that they were born into the wrong sex:

Radical transsexuals will admit, to trusted cult members, that they believe gender is socially constructed. They'll admit that they weren't born trans, but chose to become trans.

But why choose to become trans? Tree describes very ably what he calls the "metaphysics" behind the movement - a set of assumptions about the world and human ends. It sounds very much like a modern Gnosticism. If you are familiar with the concept of "immanentizing the eschaton" you will recognise it in his account of the trans philosophy.

In short, Tree describes a vision of the world in which the world as it exists is wicked; in which souls are trapped in bodies ("corrupted material forms"); in which knowledge of evil allows us to be special, to be virtuous; in which this knowledge leads ultimately to a victory over the evil ones and the radical transfiguration of the world into a place of utopian equality and freedom.

He describes the trans philosophy he adopted as a young man as follows:

The world is wicked, and it is that way because it was made wicked by the Enemy...[the "White Supremacist Capitalist Cis-Hetero-Patriarchy"]

One has to understand the nature of the world’s evil before one can repair it. The first step in obtaining that knowledge is realizing that our bodies are not us, but things which we're trapped inside of. We're not humans; we're ghosts haunting rotting corpses. To stop the Enemy, trans people need to make us all understand that our true selves don’t exist in our corrupted material forms. This is what gender identity actually means: We are not our bodies.

This is a view of the material world as fundamentally evil and corrupt which is commonly associated with Gnosticism. It encourages the idea, as Tree points out, that "we are not our bodies" - which then makes possible the disconnect between our physical sex and our personal identity. 

The next step is to believe that some people are marked out in a special way to transcend this corruption. According to Tree, it is those who are most marginalised through their embodiment who, via their suffering, rise to virtue:

Virtuous souls have been unjustly trapped in profane flesh. The most virtuous are those who suffer most from their embodiment: women, “queer” people, the disabled, those lower in the hierarchy of the racial caste system...These are the Marginalized. The Marginalized are the chosen people. They are chosen because they suffer. 

Trans people are especially virtuous within this schema because they choose their own marginalisation: 

If you aren’t Marginalized, you can become Marginalized by deciding to transition. If you’re already Marginalized, you can become even more virtuous through transition...trans people are the converts who have voluntarily accepted Marginalization. They choose to suffer more from their involuntary embodiment. Because of this, they become virtuous. They are saved.

According to Tree, this underlying philosophy leads trans people to be highly motivated activists for the cause, rather than simply wanting to integrate into society. The ultimate aim is the familiar modernist one of maximum individual autonomy, where we can do as we will and where distinctions between individuals have been erased:

The dream of the trans movement is of a world where no one has to do anything they don't want, where no one is forced to work, where everyone can indulge their every desire without fear or shame, where all distinctions between people have been abolished and we're all completely equal. In a word: Utopia.

 b) Helena

Helena's account is longer and more personal, but it overlaps with the previous one. She begins by asking:

But what leads a girl with no history of discomfort with stereotypical “girl” toys and clothes, or even the slightest desire to be a boy in childhood, to want to be a “man” through hormonal injections as she approached adulthood?

She did not have as happy a family life as might have been desired and so at age fifteen found herself on Tumblr as part of an online community of disturbed teenage girls who were prone to self-harm and eating disorders.  

This community was also dominated by intersectional politics, in which being a "cishet white girl" meant having to be apologetic:

On Tumblr, the situation was such that any claim to being “oppressed” would accumulate social credibility, while any unfortunate “privileged” status was justification for verbal abuse. As a “privileged” person, you were expected to constantly grovel and apologize, you had no right to speak on any issue involving the group you were “oppressing”, and you could not object in any way to any mistreatment hurled against you because of your race, gender, or sexuality.

I found myself in a bit of a double bind. On one hand, I had found what felt like the perfect group of friends who understood me on an intuitive level, who I was able to talk to openly about the things I liked and made me “weird” in real life, but on the other hand I was a “cishet white girl” in an environment where that was one of the worst things to be. Since Tumblr users are mostly biological females, the “cishet white girl” holds the position of most privileged and therefore most inherently bad group. In this climate, you are made to feel guilty and responsible for all the horrors and atrocities in the world...

Its understandable that any young person exposed to this kind of belief system would grow to deeply resent being white, “cis”, straight, or (biologically) male. The beauty of gender ideology is it provides a way to game this system, so that you can get some of those targets off your back and enjoy the camaraderie of like-minded youths. You can’t change your race, pretending to have a different sexuality would be very uncomfortable in practice, but you can absolutely change your gender, and it’s as easy as putting a “she/they” in your bio. Instantly you are transformed from an oppressing, entitled, evil, bigoted, selfish, disgusting cishet white scum into a valid trans person who deserves celebration and special coddling to make up for the marginalization and oppression you supposedly now face. Now not expected to do as much groveling and reaffirming to everyone how much you love checking your privilege, you can relax a little and talk about your life without wondering if you are distracting from the struggles of or speaking over marginalized groups, because you are marginalized too. With the new pronouns often comes a wave of positive affirmation from friends and followers, and the subconscious picks up quickly that there’s a way to make the deal of being on Tumblr even sweeter.

So by putting a "she/they" in her bio, she put herself in a much better position within the Tumblr community she belonged to.

From here she started to make rationalisations. She had body image issues and so rationalised that it must be because she didn't like her body being female. She did not have a lot of offline friends, and so rationalised that it must be because being a girl wasn't her authentic self and so on. 

She also became heavily involved in fanfiction, in which the main characters were boys and she began to identify obsessively with their lives; she was too bashful to see herself at this time as developing real life relationships with the opposite sex (she provides evidence here for the idea that trans identity is sometimes motivated by wanting to become the sex you are attracted to).

She provides this well-written summary of the pressures that led her toward a trans identity:

My perception of myself as trans formed in the intersection between overwhelming emotional struggles, heavy fantasy, emotional and intellectual infatuation with males (real people, fictional characters, and the idea of males generally), fanfiction, social and ideological incentives to be trans, and insulation from experiences and perspectives that might have challenged the views I was developing about myself and the world.

She went as far as taking testosterone for a period of time, but this made her emotional and psychological condition only worse and so she decided to detransition. It took several years for this process to take effect, but you can see from the photo below how she has recovered.

It may not be the case that all young people who seek to "transition" do so for the same reasons as the two people I have discussed in this post. Even so, these two accounts should give us pause for thought when it comes to how we approach transgenderism and transitioning.

Russia, nihilism, utopia

I am currently reading Nihilism Before Nietzsche by Michael Allen Gillespie. The first section is not an easy read, and not a good entry point into philosophy, as it deals with the difficult ideas of German idealist philosophers like Fichte and Hegel. The book, however, is an important one as it ties the ideas of these philosophers to the political nihilism that came later in the nineteenth century.

We often think of nihilism in terms of a depressed person who doesn't find meaning in life. But German idealist philosophy, particularly that of Fichte, had a complex reading of human consciousness in which an "absolute I" attempted to negate the phenomenal or empirical aspects of self and the world around it. So the act of negation becomes central to the activity of self.

Gillespie links this philosophy to the adoption by leading intellectuals of figures like Faust, Prometheus or even Satan as models who were at least partly admired. It's interesting to note that the young Marx fits into this mould. He liked to quote Faust that "Everything in existence is worth being destroyed" and he wrote a drama called Oulanem in which the title character declaims "If there is a something which devours, I’ll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins–the world which bulks between me and the abyss, I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses."

This emphasis on negation, i.e., on the belief that what exists, whether good or bad, needs to be destroyed, so that a higher aspect of self can be realised, effectively set the self against the existing nature of things. This formula played out in a variety of ways, but I want to focus on one particular instance that Gillespie describes in his book, namely that of the Russian nihilist Chernyshevsky. 

This story begins with a novel written by the famous Russian author Turgenev. Turgenev was influenced by the philosophy of his times, admitting once that "I prefer Prometheus, I prefer Satan, the type who revolts, who is an individual". In Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons the lead character Bazarov is a nihilist:

Bazarov is one of the great Promethean revolutionaries in modern literature...The negative character of Bazarov's greatness, however, is part and parcel of his nihilism. As he himself admits, he does not stand for anything. He wants merely to clear the ground...He is a monster of negation and of freedom...As a nihilist, he stakes out a position against not merely autocracy but nature itself, including his own human nature.

Turgenev portrays Bazarov as a flawed character, who is, as one contemporary critic put it, "destroyed in his destroying":

Bazarov is in rebellion against the world and indeed against life itself. Like Fichte's I, he is a monster of will but his will has no object other than freedom. He is thus a creature of pure negation, a destroyer and revolutionary...As sheer negativity, this will cannot construct a positive new reality...

Bazarov believes he is an autonomous, self-creating being, a Prometheus who has freed himself from the rock of political and theological despotism...Turgenev, however, tries to show us that this heroic Prometheanism is essentially tragic, because it rests upon a faulty understanding of man and nature...Bazarov's belief in his own autonomy leads him to violate "natural laws" and he must pay the price that nature extracts...he discovers he is not thoroughly autonomous but bound by nature in ways he cannot overcome.

Some nihilists admired the character of Bazarov, but others saw in him an attack on the nihilist movement. One of those in the latter group was Nicolay Chernyshevsky, who wrote his own highly influential novel What is to be done?, which was an attempt to show that it was indeed possible to organise love, family and social life so that the individual remained absolutely independent.

In the novel, Vera Pavlovna marries Lopukov, but she then falls in love with Kirsanov. Lopukov fakes his death and leaves Russia so that his wife is free to marry Kirsanov. Vera Pavlovna "is driven by a desire for autonomy, to live as she pleases".

This all sounds tawdry, but according to Chernyshevsky it represents the height of human nobility:

These people, according to Chernyshevsky...are only what all men would be if they were not deformed by corrupt social institutions. Jealousy and all the other emotions that degrade human nature are the result of the corrupt "order of things," that is, the existence of private property. He suggests that in a properly ordered society the ill-tempered will all become kind because it will not be contrary to their interests to be kind."

Chernyshevsky sees human nature as being regenerated to an extraordinary degree, as is described in a dream had by the character Vera Pavlovna:

There is nothing loftier than man; there is nothing loftier than woman...It was her own face, kindled with the brightness of love; more beautiful than all ideals left to us by sculptors of ancient time and by the great artists of the great age of art...I have the reverence for purity which "chastity" possessed. But in me it is not as it was in them, but fuller, loftier, keener...till I appeared, people had no idea of perfect enjoyment of freedom.

Gillespie goes on to describe Chernyshevksy's newly configured world as follows:

It is a world of aluminium and glass, a communal world in which almost all work is done by machines and in which there are few old men and women since they remain healthy and youthful until shortly before they die. There is only freedom, satisfaction, and enjoyment, "an everlasting spring and summer, an everlasting joy".

This reminds me of the vision of a new society by the poet Shelley. He too thought that by overthrowing power structures in society that you would radically regenerate human nature. Shelley wanted an Edenic condition of life and bitterly opposed Christianity for suggesting that man's nature was too fallen to realise such an ideal in this world. 

There is a difficult mishmash of incompatible visions in Chernyshevsky's novel. He wants absolute autonomy for the individual, so that we can do whatever we please. He also wants to maintain traditional European moral ideals, such as nobility of character, purity and faithfulness. But how can you have people acting egoistically and still maintain moral character? 

Chernyshevsky believes that the solution is partly technology (machines will do all the work) and partly social organisation (removal of private property will harmonise my own rational self-interest with a beneficence toward other people).

Even on his own terms, though, the results are hardly persuasive. We are supposed to believe that a young woman who is liberated to act however she pleases, and who therefore leaves her husband for her husband's best friend, is acting according to an unparalleled level of chastity and fidelity. 

And, in practice, we know how the attempt to maximise individual autonomy works out. It means, as a matter of logic, accepting that everyone's choices in life are equally valid. This means that the traditional moral structure collapses. There is no longer noble and base, pure or impure, loyal or disloyal. There is only a technocratic organisation of society for enabling the maximum satisfaction of individual desire. The moral ideals change substantially, to focus on non-discrimination, inclusion, openness and tolerance of whatever people choose to do or to be, rather than on the quality of the choices themselves.

And we have had the liberation of sexual choices for women. It does not bring about the highest possible level of purity, chastity and nobility in either men or women. It does not even lead to people making judicious rational choices for their own longer-term interests. It is gradually having a disordering and dissolving effect, and not just because of the existence of jealousy. 

The main point I would emphasise here is the reliance of the nihilists and other revolutionaries of the time on the idea of a radical regeneration of human nature. They wanted radical autonomy and a pursuit of self-interest, alongside a higher realisation of traditional moral ideals. They pinned their hopes on the idea that something would change human nature so significantly that such an unlikely and seemingly contradictory utopia might be possible. Many hoped that the regeneration would take place once power structures were overthrown, whether these involved kings and priests, or capitalists (or, in today's language, whiteness and patriarchy).

Again, we had the overthrow of private property in Chernyshevsky's own nation of Russia in 1917 (and Lenin was a great admirer of Chernyshevsky). You would struggle, I think, to view the results as being "an everlasting joy" and a "perfect enjoyment of freedom" brought about by the creation of a loftier and nobler human nature.

Doris Lessing, feminism, secular religion

Doris Lessing was a celebrated novelist, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007.

She was born to English parents and grew up in Rhodesia in the 1920s. She moved back to England in the 1930s, got married, had children and then divorced in 1943, leaving the children with their father.

She became part of the great shift of Western intellectuals toward communism at this time, although she left the Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Later in life she became interested in Sufism.

I found an interview with Lessing in the New York Times from 1982 that raises some interesting themes.

The interview begins with Lessing distancing herself from feminism:

The idea that she has abandoned feminist concerns particularly irks her, since she never wrote from a consciously feminist point of view but was adopted by feminists in search of a heroine: ''What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, 'Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.' Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion.''

There are three themes here. First, Lessing identifies feminism as being hostile to men and as setting men and women apart from each other. I think that's worth noting as you sometimes hear the argument that feminism was somehow friendlier in the past than it is today. That is not how Lessing experienced it, despite being supportive of leftist causes herself.

Second, there is the utopianism of the radical left, the idea that human nature can be acted on, perhaps through education, or the dismantling of oppressive social norms or institutions etc., to create an ideal society  - a "golden dawn" in which an ideal of freedom and equality will be realised. This helps to explain the first theme - the hostility to men expressed by feminists. If it is men, acting through the patriarchy, that are the brake on achieving utopia, then men become the enemy of humanity and the villains holding back the realisation of humanity's ultimate purposes. Little wonder, given this world view, that feminists would be so hostile to the opposite sex.

Third, there is the idea that leftism is, to some degree, a kind of secularised religion. Lessing goes on to draw out this point:

''There are certain types of people who are political out of a kind of religious reason,'' she says, digging dirt ferociously out of the kitchen table. ''I think it's fairly common among socialists: They are, in fact, God-seekers, looking for the kingdom of God on earth. A lot of religious reformers have been like that, too. It's the same psychological set, trying to abolish the present in favor of some better future - always taking it for granted that there is a better future. If you don't believe in heaven, then you believe in socialism.

''When I was in my real Communist phase, I and the people around me really believed - but, of course, this makes us certifiable - that something like 10 years after World War II, the world would be Communist and perfect.''

''I was once an idealistic and utopian Communist,'' she said, ''and no, I am not proud of it. The real politicos are a very different animal, and I'm angry that I didn't notice that very evident fact.

I think it's worth pointing out here that the alternative to being a utopian socialist is not to be unconcerned with "the city of man". It is to recognise that human nature is flawed, and therefore social institutions and norms have an important role in limiting the ill effects of the baser aspects of our nature (as well as fostering the nobler ones). You do not make progress in society by abolishing all restraints on human nature; the task is a more complicated one of making some sort of good order out of the biological, social and spiritual nature of man, a task that draws more on the steady accumulation of wisdom, the making of culture, and the fostering of virtue than on simplistic political formulas.

Shelley & the descent of the left

An American teacher gave her students a test and asked them to identify "obstacles that keep people from moving ahead". One student gave the simple answer "white people".

Now, you might ask what this has to do with the English poet Shelley. As it happens, Shelley is part of a chain of thought on the left side of politics that ultimately leads to this answer.

In my last post I tried to explain why Shelley's concept of freedom was inseparable from a concept of equality. Shelley's political philosophy went something like this:

1. Human nature is not "tainted" in the sense of being fallen or having a fixed potential to do evil.
2. The reason why people do the wrong thing is because of existing political institutions which are based on some people having power over others (i.e. power structures).
3. Man can be regenerated if these power structures are abolished.
4. Power structures were those of the ancien régime, i.e. kings, aristocrats and priests.
5. This power structure should be replaced by democratic rule.
6. If power structures were replaced, then people would live an "Edenic" existence, i.e. a return to an idyllic, untainted existence as before the Fall.
7. Shelley, as a poet, unsurprisingly conceived this to be a kind of poetic existence within nature, with people living in complete freedom and equality, doing as they wanted, motivated by pure, selfless love, without jealousy or acquisitiveness etc.

This was how Shelley saw things in 1820. A generation later Karl Marx came along and made a key observation. Marx realised that you could get rid of the ancien régime, but in its place you would still have a power structure. The bourgeoisie would still hold power over the proletariat within a democratic system. Marx, cleverly in a way, revised the Shelleyan system, by noting that if the working class were to take power, there would be no other class below them to exploit. In other words, there would no longer be a class based power structure.

In that case, thought Marx, the power structure of society would be abolished, and you would have the kind of Edenic existence that Marx briefly sketched in his writings. His Eden was less poetic than Shelley's, but was similarly based on the idea of abolishing nations and families, and having people wander round as "unencumbered" individuals, doing whatever productive work they felt like doing (fishing, writing etc.).

Marxism is clearly a tweaking of Shelleyism, or at least of political ideas that were already in vogue.

And what of the modern left? Well, there has been a further tweak to the system. Even though Shelley did want to abolish sex distinctions, nations and marriage, he believed the key power structure to be overthrown was the class one (aristocracy). The same for Marx (the bourgeoisie). The modern left, though, focuses more on race and biological sex as power structures to be deconstructed (whiteness and the patriarchy). Only then will humanity reach its final destination of true freedom and equality.

So you can see why that school student dutifully answered that it was "white people" who were an obstacle to people moving ahead. That student is the end product of a current of thought that has existed within the left since at least the 1820s (probably earlier).

There are a few other things I should point out. First, there are other currents of thought which have also shaped the modern left. For instance, there is still the influence of the Fabians, who believed that progress would be led by a class of neutral experts employed by the state, i.e. by a technocracy ruling along scientific lines.

Second, it's interesting that the modern left no longer envisages the end point of history as a return to Eden. Perhaps that's a result of Christianity no longer shaping the mental landscape, even of those rejecting it, as much as it used to. What we are left with is a belief that white men are the privileged class upholding a power structure and that freedom and equality will finally be achieved when this power structure is defeated.

Third, it is noticeable that some of those pushing the modern version of Shelleyism are doing so to gain power for themselves, rather than to achieve a vision of utopian freedom. Middle-class feminists are often most interested in using "gender politics" to gain a competitive advantage in high status professions. They want status, money and power for themselves, rather than a system in which such things no longer exist. Similarly, it is clear that if whites become a minority in Western countries, that power will simply be passed to a new non-white majority rather than there being no power structure.

The main conclusion to draw from all this, though, is that it is the initial assumptions of Shelley that have to be challenged. Where did these beliefs of Shelley come from? I can't be exactly sure, but it's possible they go back all the way to thinkers like Hobbes and Locke. Shelley himself traced the intellectual journey of his ideas about human nature as follows (from his 1820 political manifesto):

the new epoch was marked by the commencement of deeper enquiries into the point of human nature than are compatible with an unreserved belief in any of those popular mistakes upon which popular systems of faith with respect to the cause and agencies of the universe, with all their superstructure of political and religious tyranny, are built. Lord Bacon, Spinoza, Hobbes, Boyle, Montaigne, regulated the reasoning powers, criticized the history, exposed the past errors by illustrating their causes and their connexion, and anatomized the inmost nature of social man. Then, with a less interval of time than of genius, followed Locke and the philosophers of his exact and intelligible but superficial school. Their illustrations of some of the minor consequences of the doctrines established by the sublime genius of their predecessors were correct, popular, simple and energetic. Above all, they indicated inferences the most incompatible with the popular religions and the established governments of Europe.

Shelley here praises Hobbes (and others) for having "anatomized the inmost nature of social man" and then praises Locke for having popularised the genius of thinkers like Hobbes.

So what was Hobbes' view of the nature of man? Hobbes began by imagining a state of nature in which men were free to do as they wanted. Hobbes then argued that in such a state of nature life would be short and brutish as individuals would attack each other and there would be no security of life or property. Therefore, argued Hobbes, individuals rationally made a social contract to give up part of their rights to government in return for such security. Hobbes used this argument in favour of the authority of kings.

The problem with this Hobbesian view is that it it undermines natural, uncontracted, prepolitical forms of human community, such as family and nation. The reality is that we don't begin as disconnected individuals, reluctantly combining via a social contract. We are by nature social creatures, and we express important aspects of our created natures within a social context.

It is possible that Shelley ran with the Hobbesian view, as it undermined the idea of a natural and/or divine order, but that he refigured it by challenging the idea that human nature was selfish and violent. In other words, Shelley built on some of the framework established by Hobbes (autonomous individuals in a state of nature) but made these individuals naturally good and therefore able to live a peaceful, free and equal coexistence, once the tainting influence of power structures was removed.

If we want to reject modern leftism in a principled way, it is possible that we have to go back all the way to the seventeenth century and reject the Hobbesian way of framing politics.