Unexpected Humanism

 I was pointing out to a friend that I had been reading less absurdist nihilistic literature than usual the past few months. The desire to read it had somehow left me. It didn't match my mood. But then I spent a few weeks in Florida visiting family, and slightly increased my alcohol intake (namely, in the form of a margarita one night and a beer two nights later). And suddenly, the desire to read absurdist, nihilistic literature flooded back into me. 

This leads me to wonder how much of the "anxiety," angst, ennui, and Weltschmerz reported by twentieth century authors was in fact due, not to any fixture of the modern condition, but to the then-higher daily average consumption of alcohol. It was all those afternoon cocktails, perhaps—rather than the death of God—that did it. And now, perhaps, the average amount of existentialism will slowly leach out of the population, as public awareness grows of the deleterious effects of alcohol. 

But while I was still under the spell this past week of the depressive effects of alcohol, as I say, I felt the need to turn to nihilistic literature as the only appropriate complement to my mood. I therefore read Samuel Beckett's Watt and Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles. 

The two novels went well together, as well as with the week's news. It felt appropriate to read Houellebecq's portrayal of a suicidal and despairing end-of-the-millennium France—populated by National Front-supporting "idiots"—in the same week that the country looks poised to bring a post-fascist party to power in an act of gratuitous self-destruction characteristic of our current political malaise. The U.S. is obviously close to doing something similar next November.

Plus, the novel pairs logically with Beckett. It reads as the sort of thing you would get if you somehow crossed Philip Roth with Beckett. It has all the risqué exhilarating elements of the former, plus the philosophical absurdism and caustic humor of the latter. I suspect it was the former elements, more than the latter, that made the novel an international bestseller–but who am I to judge? I can't say that I disliked the naughty anatomical parts of the novel less than the satirical scientific-philosophical parts. 

Plus, the libidinous aspect of the novel actually ties in thematically with its underlying philosophical concerns, forming a kind of double helix. The novel follows two half-brothers—one of whom is all libido, the other of whom is all intellect (the body vs. the mind, the id vs. the superego, the Dionysian vs. the Apollonian, blah blah blah). Both men, however, in their different ways, reach the same conclusion: man is a disgusting animal—rendered that way primarily by his urge to reproduce. 

The novel's ethical position is therefore closely related to that of Schopenhauer. It regards the principle of life—the will to live and reproduce—as the fundamental source of evil in the world. The id-brother comes to this realization through his confrontation with the brutal struggle for narcissistic human ego-gratification and sexual selection. The superego-brother discovers the same through intellectually determining that sexual reproduction is the root of both mortality and human cruelty.

Even the stupid racism powering the French far-right, in the novel's telling, seems linked to the sexual urge. One character manages to get an erection from writing a racist pamphlet. His impulse to write it emerges, self-consciously, from his own sexual frustration. The emergence of sexuality in adolescence, in Houellebecq's telling, is what first makes boys cruel to one another—and it only festers from there, eventually issuing into political life. (And do we not often speak of Trump here as "pure id"?)

If life and sex are evil and lead ineluctably to cruelty and fascism, the solution—then—is to suppress both. The novel is therefore told from the perspective of a superior future race of beings that have managed to abolish distinctions of gender through genetic modification. They have attained the same universal androgynous character, and they reproduce only by asexual means. With the elimination of their sex drive has come the gradual reduction of human impulses toward greed, egotism, cruelty, and selfishness. 

For a period in my life—late college or early divinity school, as I recall it—I was briefly attracted to the Schopenhauerian position. It still seems to me a more honest way of assessing the true character of life than many. But I also quickly saw in it a logical flaw. After all, Schopenhauer condemned the will to life because it invited cruelty and selfishness. He endorsed altruism as a counterweight. But what is altruism if it is not the fostering of the will to life in others? Therein lies the contradiction.

What is it, exactly, that we object to about human cruelty, after all, unless it is suppressing the life of others? But if we object to that suppression, then the will to life cannot be all bad. If the will to live and reproduce were purely evil, after all, it would be a good thing to destroy it in others. But it is precisely this destruction that we regard as cruelty. It is precisely that which we cry out against with the voice of compassion. The will to life, then, seems to be the root of what is good in us, as well as what is evil. 

Even Houellebecq appears to acknowledge as much. When one of his characters confronts the spectacle of the endless brutality and cruelty in nature, he is forced to make an exception for the maternal instinct in animals—with seems to be the only taproot of "altruism" and "self-sacrifice" on display in the animal kingdom. 

Schopenhauer said something similar. The recognition of the will to live in others, and the desire to protect it—the master, for instance, who shoos away a loyal dog in the last moments before he falls victim to a firing squad—acts not because he can any longer save his own life-force. He acts out of compassion and a desire to protect the life of another. 

But surely the maternal instinct is rooted in the reproductive process. And surely the will to live and reproduce cannot be pure evil if it is the recognition of it in others—as Schopenhauer tells us—that prompts us to acts of mercy and compassion. A disgust with humanity and its urges, then, is always partly an affirmation of the same. We cannot hate man's cruelty to man if we do not simultaneously recognize the rights of man. 

And so, the apparent anti-human stance of the novel (as of Schopenhauer) leads inevitably to humanism. 

The novel itself makes this clear. Indeed, it ends, unexpectedly, with a great valedictory to humankind. 

Of course, the novel is able to condemn humankind "from the outside," by imagining a race of future perfect beings. This works great as a satirical conceit in a novel. But in reality, of course, there is no such higher race. There are no gods, angels, or alien beings to judge us. The sense in human beings of self-disgust with our own behavior—the feeling of hatred toward human cruelty and human brutality—only comes from our humanity. It is there because we judge ourselves—no one else is judging us. 

Our desire to be something other than cruel racist egotists is therefore as human as our wallowing in our basest urges. When Houellebecq condemns human beings for what they do to each other, then, and mocks the notions of "human dignity" in the face of so many human actions that violate it, he is simultaneously being a humanist. 

And he knows as much. That's why this is a novel. Its ideas are not meant to be taken entirely literally. And in its closing passage, the novel even confesses finally to its own inescapable humanism. 

Writing in the voice of the future asexual race that has replaced humankind, the novel concludes: "the ultimate ambition of this book is to salute the brave and unfortunate species which created us. This vile, unhappy race, barely different from apes, which nevertheless carried within it such noble aspirations. Tortured, contradictory, individualistic, quarrelsome and infinitely selfish, it was sometimes capable of extraordinary explosions of violence, but never quite abandoned its belief in love." (Wynne trans.)

Here, Houellebecq sounds as much like Feuerbach as he does like Schopenhauer. It is humanity that created the very ideals by which it judges itself. The remarkable thing is not that we often behave like brutal, self-interested animals (which we do, and which we are). What's remarkable is that we formulated an "aspiration" to be anything more than that. As the poet Stevie Smith once wrote, it is man's "virtue needs explaining,/Not his failing." This is the same humanism with which Houellebecq's novel concludes. 

The verse from Stevie Smith is worth quoting at greater length, for it encapsulates the theme and the ultimate unexpected affirmation of human dignity at the heart of Houellebecq's novel. Indeed, it so closely resembles the thrust and even wording of Houellebecq's closing valedictory to a departed humankind, that one almost wonders if he did not have the poem in mind. Smith writes: 

Man aspires

To good,

To Love

Sighs;

Beaten, corrupted, dying

In his own blood lying

Yet heaves up an eye above

Cries, Love, love.

It is his virtue needs explaining, 

Not his failing.