Nearing the past.

N. of the white arms found a copy of Wyndham Lewis’s The Art of Being Ruled at a used bookstore a few days after Christmas, a Black Sparrow Press edition, for the absurd price of three dollars, and bought it for me. The prose is of course uniformly excellent, the ideas difficult and unexpected, as with all of Lewis. I found the following passage particularly interesting, and not only because it introduces a chapter in which Lewis skewers Russell, who would go on to write, near the end of his long life, some of the worst short stories to ever insult the reading public.

...A simple belief in the “detachment” and “objectivity” of science, the anxiety of a disillusioned person to escape from his self and merge his personality in things—of the non-human, feelingless, and thoughtless—of such experiences and tendencies is this delusion composed. Its godlike advantages from the point of view of a hundred different classes of people are obvious.

A book that I have just read (Bolshevism and the West, by Bertrand Russell) suggests to me the best manner of educing this point in my argument. A detailed scrutiny of it will serve that end, I believe, very well.

I will preface my remarks on Mr. Russell’s contribution to this debate by a word or two as to the beliefs of his opponent. The book is an account of a debate organized in 1923, in America, to decide whether the soviet principle might be expected to meet with success if applied to western countries. Mr. Bertrand Russell was chosen to try it out from the english liberal standpoint. It was his task mildly to oppugn the militant americanism of a representative there of the bolshevik idea, Mr. Nearing. The debate resolved itself into an orthodox statement of the militant communist ideal on the part of Mr. Nearing; and a characteristic counter-statement of Mr. Russell’s attitude in these matters.

As regards Mr. Nearing’s beliefs, I find more to agree with in the soviet side of the argument than in Mr. Russell’s. I am not a partisan, but an independent observer of these events. I am not a communist; if anything, I favour some form of fascism rather than communism. Nevertheless, when two principles are opposed, and one of these is that of english liberalism, in most cases I should find myself on the other side, I expect. In my comment on this debate it is rather as another opponent of Mr. Russell, than as an ally of Mr. Nearing, or of bolshevism, or of communism, that I take my place.

Scott Nearing was born in 1883; he and his wife Helen late became famous for moving to rural Vermont in the 1930’s and livng the “good life” as commie/pacifist proto-beatnik back-to-the-landers. I met him. It was at some back-to-the-land conference in New England, possibly the one Mildred Loomis ran, but I think a different one. I remember that he was 90, although it was probably 1971 or 1972, so he was actually not quite that old. I have two memories of him: he claimed to catch mosquitos by hand without killing them so he could ask them not to bite him—a stupid story: not even pacifists or Buddhist sages actually behave in this manner, and if intended as humor the claim is self-aggrandizing—and he showed me how to cut a willow whistle with a jack-knife.

I was only a child. It might have been another who taught me to whittle that day. I can’t be sure.

Posted by Søren Renner on Saturday, December 31, 2005 at 01:28 PM in Political Philosophy
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Comments:

Posted by Guessedworker on January 01, 2006, 07:49 PM | #

I have never read Wyndham Lewis, so the following may be quite unfair. Anyhow ... the brief synopsis of TAOBR to which you link reminds me why I am a Conservative and not a devotee of some narrow philosophical school. As is so often the case with 20th century idealists, Wyndham Lewis appears to think his way close to the nature of Man. But everything remains externalised. There is no psychology. He arrives at the principle of mechanicity, for example, but assumes that it applies to some agency which willy-nilly enslaves Man’s will. I can understand how, after WW1’s industrialisation of killing, he might be led to such a conclusion. Nonetheless, it is crass ... and it’s back to front. What formative power resides in external agencies, be they capitalism or politics or philosophy, flows precisely from the mechanicity of ordinary consciousness.

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