The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (16 page)

7. The sixth edition of The Columbia Encyclopedia states that “Gracián’s masterpiece is the allegorical and pessimistic novel
El criticón
(3 parts, 1651–57), which contrasts an idyllic primitive life with the evils of civilization. It brought him exile and disgrace.” Evidently, Gracian was only an outside observer of the devious ins and outs of civilized intercourse.

And anyone who champions a less complicated way of life to that offered them by society is bound for the margins of life in this world and probably extinction. An interesting example is that of the celibate sect of the Shakers, who at their peak attracted some six thousand adherents. At last count, there were four practicing Shakers living in 72

Maine. As breakaway members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), the Shakers followed the Mosaic Law against killing other human beings, which, along with their forbearance from breeding, secured their oblivion.

8. The emphasis here is on “news” in the sense of a report or conclusion based on data assembled from informed sources, and not on “bad” in the sense of evil—a moral category, for those who care—or an inequality between pleasure and pain in the world, something which can never be sorted out. The pessimist begins in disgruntlement and ends with a judgment: the Creation should not be because it is MALIGNANTLY

USELESS for conscious beings, the only ones for whom the Creation needs to be “right”

or “correct,” just as a good investigative news story must have its facts straight to justify its dissemination. (Of course, to speak about the “Creation” is to speak in error, as the Creation has no unfluctuating being but is an ever mutating mishmash of forms.) This is Zapffe’s Paradox: consciousness is a mistake, something that is wrong or incorrect, and can be made right only by the disappearance of humans from the Creation. Although disgruntlement remains for the pessimist, it does so only because his judgment is laughed off, travestied, and stamped as invalid by votaries of affirmation. Being refused a full hearing or a particle of credibility could explain the pessimist’s incendiary rhetoric and animosity toward the normal world. If you want to alienate someone whose pain you cannot see or do not understand, just tell him that the problem is all in his head. This works both ways, naturally, and ensures an abiding impasse between the disgruntled and the contented . . . as well as between any groups or individuals that do not see eye to eye with one another.

9. Catholic children are taught that while they may go to heaven, their friends and family may go to hell for infractions of “God’s laws” that they neglected to repent, should they even be aware that they were guilty of an act disagreeable to the Creator of the Universe.

This would seem to put a damper on eternal salvation. Yet Catholics do not squawk about this final solution for sinners. (Ask William F. Buckley, Jr.) Oppositely, Mahayana Buddhism has as its soteriological end-point the salvation of all “sentient beings.”

Without regard to the metaphysics of Catholicism versus those of Mahayana Buddhism, these two religions are mutually subversive on an earthly plane. One of them goes by the book to divide the sinners from the saved; the other’s work is not done until we are all joined together in a plenary salvation. Catholics and other Christian sects are legalistic, presuming that everyone has an equal chance to behave themselves and not be sentenced to an eternal stretch in hell. Or so goes the theory. This arrangement would not quiet the conscience of a Mahayana Buddhist nor any others whose consciousness extends beyond the gates of their own backyard. But heaven and earth seem to be full of people who can sit back and drink the tall cool ones while the rest shrivel on the searing coals both in life and in death.

10. To have one’s own pleasure decimated by the guilty knowledge that others are suffering is more often an indicator of a pathological hypersensitivity than of real compassion, that is, identification with those whose suffering exceeds our own.

Extreme cases of this neurosis are few and far between due to a protective narcissism which, because it is so ingrained and common to human beings, is not on any list of pathologies. Without such protection, especially in the forms that Zapffe names in “The Last Messiah,” we may only “laugh—but smile no more,”

as Poe ends his poem “The Haunted Palace.” This laughter, we know, is infernal.

No pleasure quickens it. Those most far gone into pessimism are protected from 73

the infernal, and their heads are unaffected by what would spoil their pleasures.

They feel merry even while they are in mind of the horrible. Nonchalantly, they say, “We’re all going to suffer and die, so why not have fun while we can? Why not laugh it up? Come on, let’s see that smile.” Their pessimism is the most horrible pessimism, and their laughter and smiles are the most horrible laughter and smiles. Only for those among the protected, only among the greatest of all pessimists, can the horrible provoke complacent smiles and unthinking laughter.

A procession of puppets boarding a cruise ship, the debaucheries of a vacation romp filling their skulls, is iconic of this world-shattering pessimism. By contrast, what an example of temperamental balance was the Cynic Antisthenes, who said,

“I would rather go mad than enjoy myself.” In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), the character Alvy Singer says to his girlfriend Annie, “I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.” This is one of the most quotably funny bits in Allen’s movie, which was originally titled “Anhedonia,” the psychopathology that places Alvy among the miserable. Clinically, anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure. The main reference to this disorder occurs when Alvy fecklessly, and hilariously, tries to get Annie to understand him by saying, “I can't enjoy anything unless everybody is. If one guy is starving someplace, that puts a crimp in my evening.” In real life, anhedonia is no joke: it is a symptom of the worst cases of depression and schizophrenia. In Annie Hall, it is illustrative of an artist sublimating the tragic into escapist entertainment. One guy or billions of guys in an earthly hell will not persuade many to think of life as MALIGNANTLY USELESS. That would not only put a crimp in one’s evening—it would damn us all to a philosophical anhedonia and a pathological hypersensitivity, stifling all pleasure we take in the futurity of our species, that deluge of bodies cascading out of nothing and back into the same.

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CONSUMING HORROR

BLEAKNESS I

To salve the pains of consciousness, some people send their heads to sunny places on the advice of a self-help evangelist. Not everyone can follow their lead, above all not those who sneer at the sun and everything upon which it shines. Their only respite is in the unpositive. The best thing for them, really the only thing, is a getaway into bleakness.

Turning away from the solicitations of hope and the turbulence they bring to the mind, sanctuary may be petitioned in desolate places—a pile of ruins in a barren locale or a rubble of words in a book wherein someone whispers in a dry voice, “I am here, too.” But dejected readers must be on their guard. The lure of phony retreats has taken in many a chump who treasures philosophical and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable to their existence. Too often they have settled into a book that begins as an oration on bleak experience but wraps up with the author stealing out the back door and making his way down a sunlit path, leaving dejected readers more exasperated than they were before entering what turned out to be only a façade of ruins, a trompe l’oeil of bleakness. A Confession (1879) by Leo Tolstoy is the archetype of such a book.

Having savored renown as the genius who wrote War and Peace (1865-69) and Anna Karenina (1875-77), not to mention his station as a wealthy landowner who indulged in sexual contact with his serfs, Tolstoy underwent a crisis of consciousness in which he became disenchanted with human life. Naturally, he began casting about for something to ease his discomfiture. After turning to science for answers to the eternal questions that had lately begun to eat at him, he came up with this: “In general, the relation of the experimental sciences to life’s questions may be expressed thus: Question: ‘Why do I live?’ Answer: ‘In infinite space, in infinite time, infinitely small particles change their forms in infinite complexity, and when you have understood the laws of those mutations of form you will understand why you live on the earth.’” Those inclined to query the various sciences today, or at any time in the future, will come upon the same answer. It is a malignantly useless answer to a malignantly useless question. But Tolstoy did not think the question malignantly useless, only the answer, so he kept on digging until he read Schopenhauer, who only aggravated the Russian’s crisis by answering, “Life is that which should not be—an evil; and the passage into Nothingness is the only good in life.”

Tolstoy was impressed with Schopenhauer as a thinker and tried to hold the plow steady as he cut his way through the philosopher’s daunting works.

At length, Tolstoy harvested four answers to his crisis. Three of them do not deserve mention. The one that is worth remarking on was his tentative conclusion that the ultimate response to being alive “consists in destroying life, when one has understood that it is an evil and an absurdity. A few exceptionally strong and consistent people act so. Having understood the stupidity of the joke that has been played on them, and having understood that it is better to be dead than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke, since there are means: a rope 75

round one's neck, water, a knife to stick into one's heart, or the trains on the railways [one of which Tolstoy arranged to be the vehicle for Anna Karenina’s exit]; and the number of those of our circle who act in this way becomes greater and greater, and for the most part they act so at the best time of their life, when the strength of their mind is in full bloom and few habits degrading to the mind have as yet been acquired.”11

Earlier in his life, Tolstoy had fought intrepidly in the Crimean War, and in War and Peace he used this experience for his rendition of Russian life during the reign of Napoleon. But the literary master evinced even greater fortitude in writing the words in the above quotation. Few men of such expansive wealth and accomplishment have had the mettle to express sentiments of this nature within earshot of their peers and the general public. Naturally, Tolstoy wrote these words only after he had moved to safer ground, which turned his “confession” into a self-help workbook for survivors, a trip guide with directions for skating around the pitfalls of consciousness as Zapffe would later outline in “The Last Messiah.”

By and by, Tolstoy hit upon a way of renouncing coherence and embracing religion, even though it was not religion of the common sort and led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. A true genius of conceptual prestidigitation, he had rationalized his way into irrationality. Spending time with his serfs helped him to bypass intelligibility, and Tolstoy more or less became a born-again peasant. Like them—more nicely, like his perception of them—he began living not by his brain but by his “gut.”

Then he started reasoning with his gut. For better or worse, his gut must have spared him the ordeal of becoming a suicide. Later, though, his head went to work again, and he was once more in crisis. It seemed that what Tolstoy required was not an answer to his philosophical spasms but a lobotomy. He remained preoccupied with life and death and meaning for the rest of his days, preaching the kind of twaddle that turned back the bleakness which once dogged him.

BLEAKNESS II

After being disappointed with Tolstoy’s Confession, connoisseurs of bleakness may become shrewd readers: if they are mistrustful of a book, leery that the promise of its inaugural pages will be broken by its conclusion, they turn first to the ending. Due to the quirks of the literary market or an author’s duplicity, many books whose flap-copy guarantees a “dark vision” finish up by lounging in a warm bath of affirmation, often doing a treacherous turnabout in the closing pages or paragraphs.12 Grim is a grabber, as every publisher knows. What else could be the reason for innumerable magazine articles with such titles as “Are We Doomed?” or “Is This the End of Everything?” (The answer is always “no,” sometimes resounding in its declamation but more often qualified, which is even worse.) The bleak-minded could still be in for further consternations, but these will be fewer once they have learned to begin a new and seductive book where it counts—at its conclusion. One of the finest curtain closers in fiction is that of Horace McCoy's novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? The protagonist of this story is a young woman named Gloria Beatty. Hoping to walk away with a sum of much-needed cash, Gloria becomes an entrant in a grueling dance marathon during the era of the Great Depression. A moral loser from the start of the book, she begins the dance with an insight 76

that is not habitually stressed in popular fiction. "It's peculiar to me," Gloria says to her future partner in the marathon, "that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying. Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant ways to end it? There must be a hell of a lot of people in the world like me—who want to die but haven’t got the guts." After the dance marathon has taken its toll on Gloria and the other contestants, her once happy-go-lucky partner goes over to her side, and, with more nobility than any high-powered scientist and more mercy than any god born of human imagination, helps her to end it all. This liberation is carried out in one of the far from pleasant ways people have been forced to use for so long—a bullet from a gun. The ending of McCoy’s novel is what the average mortal would call bleak.