The Distilled Essence Of The Conservative Impulse

The overwhelming majority of all peoples across the globe, spanning all times and eras, of all races and cultures, of all classes, and of all religious practices are nasty, stupid, brutish philistines mired and wallowing in their own ignorance with no possibility of ever being elevated, ennobled, or deproletarianized without sustained, coordinated, and intense cultural pressure: i.e. totalitarianism.

This is not an indictment or judgment. It's just a fact.

It's also the distilled essence of the conservative impulse.

'Peak Experiences' and The Robot

Maslow described another typical peak experience to me later, when I met him at his home in Waltham, Mass. A marine had been stationed in the Pacific and had not seen a woman for a couple of years. When he came back to the base camp, he saw a nurse, and it suddenly struck him with a kind of shock that women are different to men. The marine had told Maslow: ‘We take them for granted, as if they were another kind of man. But they’re quite different, with their soft curves and gentle natures . . .’ He was suddenly flooded with the peak experience. Observe that in most peak experiences (Maslow abbreviates it to P.E’s, and I shall follow him), the person becomes suddenly aware of something that he had known about previously, but been inclined to take for granted, to discount. And this matter had always been one of my own central preoccupations. My Religion and the Rebel (1957) had been largely a study in the experiences of mystics, and in its autobiographical preface, I had written about a boring office job: ‘As soon as I grew used to it, I began to work automatically. I fought hard against this process. I would spend the evening reading poetry, or writing, and would determine that, with sufficient mental effort, I could stop myself from growing bored and indifferent at work the next day. But the moment I stepped through the office door in the morning, the familiar smell and appearance would switch on the automatic pilot which controlled my actions . . .’ I was clearly aware that the problem was automatism. And in a paper I later wrote for a symposium of existential psychology, I elaborated this theory of the automatic pilot, speaking of it as ‘the robot. I wrote: ‘I am writing this on an electric typewriter. When I learned to type, I had to do it painfully and with much nervous wear and tear. But at a certain stage, a miracle occurred, and this complicated operation was ‘learned’ by a useful robot whom I conceal in my subconscious mind. Now I only have to think about what I want to say: my robot secretary does the typing. He is really very useful. He also drives the car for me, speaks French (not very well), and occasionally gives lectures in American universities. ‘He has one enormous disadvantage. If I discover a new symphony that moves me deeply, or a poem or a painting, this bloody robot promptly insists on getting in on the act. And when I listen to the symphony for the third time, he begins to anticipate every note. He begins to listen to it automatically, and I lose all the pleasure. He is most annoying when I am tired, because then he tends to take over most of my functions without even asking me. I have even caught him making love to my wife.

‘My dog doesn’t have this trouble. Admittedly, he can’t learn languages or how to type, but if I take him for a walk on the cliffs, he obviously experiences every time just as if it is the first. I can tell this by the ecstatic way he bounds about. Descartes was all wrong about animals. It isn’t the animals who are robots; it’s us.’

Heaven lies about us in our infancy, as Wordsworth pointed out, because the robot hasn’t yet taken over. So a child experiences delightful things as more delightful, and horrid things as more horrid. Time goes slower, and mechanical tasks drag, because there is no robot to take over. When I asked my daughter if she meant to be a writer when she grew up, she said with horror that she got fed up before she’d written half a page of school-work, and couldn’t even imagine the tedium of writing a whole book.

The robot is necessary. Without him, the wear and tear of everyday life would exhaust us within minutes. But he also acts as a filter that cuts out the freshness, the newness, of everyday life. If we are to remain psychologically healthy, we must have streams of ‘newness’ flowing into the mind—what J. B. Priestley calls ‘delight' or ‘magic’. In developing the robot, we have solved one enormous problem—and created another. But there is, after all, no reason why we should not solve that too: modify the robot until he admits the necessary amount of ‘newness’, while still taking over the menial tasks.

– Colin Wilson "New Pathways in Psychology"

Money as Manure

Thornton Wilder channeling Ezra Pound:

"Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow."

The Root of Empiricism is Rationalism

"Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. … Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

– Richard Lewontin

Approaching Middle Age

"The essence of a thing never appears at the outset but in the middle, in the course of development, when it's strength is assured."

- G. Deleuze "Cinema"

Radical Bourgeois

From a book review of Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago:

Mailer is stricken by their slovenly nerve. He sits in Chicago's bars, drinking too much and telling himself the reason he isn't joining in is because his role in this great social upheaval is to write about it; he can't missing deadline by getting injured or detained. "Besides," he writes, "a variety of militant choices would now be present for years. One simply could not make the dangerous choice every time; he would never do any other work." He goes on:

And then with another fear, conservative was this fear, he looked into his reluctance to lose the America he had had, that insane warmongering technology land with its smog, its superhighways, its experts, and its profound dishonesty. Yet, it had allowed him to write -- it had even not deprived him entirely of honors, certainly not of an income. He had lived well enough to have six children, a house on the water, a good apartment, good meals, good booze, he had even come to enjoy wine. A revolutionary with taste in wine has come already half the distance from Marx to Burke; he belonged in England, where one's radicalism might never be tested...

Inherent Value

"Just as we represent certain statements as true while recognizing that their truth is independent of our representation, so we sense that objects, people and events are not only appreciated as valuable by us but would still be valuable if no one appreciated them."

– Georg Simmel "The Philosophy of Money"