Life and Habit

 Samuel Butler was a crankish intellectual who devoted his life to erecting an anti-intellectual, anti-crank ideal. 

In book after book, he argued that the type of person one really ought to be is a "gentleman" of the old school—one who does not hold any belief too literally or firmly or uncharitably; who does not think about or examine anything in his life too consciously; one for whom, as he puts it in The Way of All Flesh, the great questions of life "have already passed into the unconscious stage"—where they belong. 

And Butler wrote a long series of tomes chasing down intellectual hares, riding crankish hobbyhorses, and exploring contrarian pedantic theories, in order to convince us of the beauty and nobility of this unselfconscious, unreflective, anti-intellectual type. 

No one was more aware of the irony of the situation than Butler himself—that consummate ironist. "Above all things, let no unwary reader do me the injustice of believing in me," he writes in Life and Habit—"In that I write at all I am among the damned." 

The burden of Butler's great novel The Way of All Flesh—possibly the best book ever written—is to prove that one should never believe in anything too much—that all the ills of life descend from an excess of literal-mindedness and the pursuit of crank theories "in the shape of a system which should go on all fours under all circumstances"—instead of practicing what Butler termed a "charitable inconsistency" in all one's viewpoints. 

Butler plainly needed to repeat this to himself as an affirmation precisely because he was so prone to hobbyhorses and system-building and literal-minded crankery otherwise. 

Life and Habit, for instance—which I had the pleasure of reading this past week—is Butler's crankish critique of the Darwinian theory of evolution. 

Now, in fairness to Butler, it must be said that breaking with Darwin was not quite such a crankish position in 1878 as it would appear to us now. At that point in intellectual history, after all—there were still quite a number of prominent holes in the Darwinian system. 

For one thing, the concept of natural selection had not yet been wedded to Mendelian genetics (the great "synthesis" of the two would not occur until the twentieth century). As such, Darwin in his time could not yet really explain why variation happens in the first place—he could only explain how natural selection might operate upon a certain amount of random variation that had already occurred, as it were, "spontaneously" (i.e., inexplicably) in the wild. 

As Butler epitomizes the point: "'Natural selection' cannot create the smallest variation [....]  'Natural selection' operates on what it finds, and not on what it has made."

Likewise, people in Darwin's era thought the Earth was likely much younger than we now understand it to be—and as such, people raised plausible doubts about how the planet's term of existence could have furnished enough time for such a slow and random process as natural selection to shape the complex forms we see around us today. 

Finally, scholars in Darwin's time were working with a faulty concept of heredity, which seemed to contradict the theory of natural selection. Prior to the rediscovery of the Mendelian concept of dominant and recessive traits, most biologists assumed that offspring tended to inherit an equal-parts blend of the characteristics of their parents. It therefore struck many reviewers of Darwin's work as absurd to think that a random variation in a creature could introduce enough of an evolutionary advantage that it would be passed on to future generations—because they assumed its effect would quickly be lost or muted through intermixing with other traits. 

Butler quotes these arguments from St. George Mivart and other contemporary critics of Darwin; but please note that Butler did not do so in order to advance a religious or "creationist" apologetic. To the contrary, Butler was one of the greatest satirists of English Evangelicalism of his age—as well as a thoroughly-convinced apostle of evolution. He just happened to think that evolution proceeds by a different mechanism than natural selection. Or rather, he thought that natural selection operates as a culling device to distinguish advantageous traits from among the variations that are first introduced by another process operating in tandem: namely, the will and intention of creatures. 

The results of competition would be, as it were, the decisions of an arbiter settling the question whether such and such variation was really to the animal’s advantage or not—a matter on which the animal will, on the whole, have formed a pretty fair judgement for itself, Butler summarizes. 

Of course, the standard objection to the idea that animals have will and intention is that they don't tell us about them. It is therefore hard for us to imagine them consciously "thinking" about the variations they are trying to introduce in their physical form. But—Butler asks—why should this be any difficulty? Do we not ourselves as humans do those things best—understand those things best—will those things best—which we do unconsciously (breathe, swallow, stand upright, etc.?)

Why, then, should we have ever confused real knowledge with consciousness, Butler asks? Is not self-consciousness actually the end of knowledge, rather than the beginning? Do we not become conscious of our activity at the very moment when we realize we are not quite sure we are doing it right? Whereas, when we are wholly confident in our ability, we do not even consciously process what or how we are doing it? 

Here—we see—Butler has found a way to work in his obsession with the anti-intellectual "gentleman" ideal. Nature, it would seem, is Tory (at least in Butler's somewhat tongue-in-cheek telling). It is a product of unreflective habit and custom and tradition and prejudice. It knows when to let well enough alone. It does not try to construct "systems that should go on all fours." It does not try to be literal-minded or write books or undertake intellectual projects or ameliorative reforms. To the contrary, when it really knows what it is doing—it does not think at all. 

If we are not quite convinced, Butler takes us through the stages of human development—and admittedly, he makes some rather strikingly confirmatory observations on the basis of our common experience. When we are born—he points out—do we not start out already knowing the things that some of our most distant pre-human vertebrate ancestors knew how to do—namely, to breathe and swallow? Do we not learn the relatively recent primate innovations at a later stage (standing upright and walking)? Do we not learn the most recent specifically human acquisitions at a later stage still (speaking, e.g.)? 

The impression one obtains from this view—according to Butler (and we almost believe him)—is that we are remembering the knowledge we knew best from our earlier evolutionary history. And of course, we do not consciously realize we are "remembering" something. We do not form a memory-image in our brains of specific instances in our past lives when, "in whatever shape of mollusc or of ape," to borrow the poet John Davidson's phrase, we may have gone about our pre-human business. But, as Butler points out, is this not how memory often works? When we remember or know something most well—isn't that exactly the sort of thing we are least conscious of remembering? 

When one ties one's shoelaces—one doesn't think back to or picture to oneself all the times previously in which one did so. One shows one remembers how to do it by doing it. And—Butler points out—if we did find ourselves racking our brains for some specific recollections of previous times we tied our shoes—that would show that we were starting to forget how to do it; rather than that we remembered how it's done. 

But now wait a minute. At some point, each of us as a gamete splits off from our parents. So, even if we could "remember" what happened in our evolutionary predecessors' lives in this unconscious way (and Butler's view is that we can do so because all of life is really just one part of the same "compound" organism)—then presumably the guidance we receive from the unconscious "memories" which were bestowed upon us by our parents would cease—after about the age at which our parents conceived us. 

But—Butler asks—is this not more or less precisely what happens? Do we not generally cease developing at about the age of reproduction? Is that not when our growth stabilizes—and then the long process of decay sets in? Butler suggests that all of aging, in short, is due simply to our no longer having any unconscious "memories" from our pre-individual existence to guide us—once we have reached the age in turn that our parents were when they gave us life. 

"When we say that we are getting old," then—Butler concludes, "we should say rather that we are getting new or young, and are suffering from inexperience[.]"

I have often felt that my thirties have been a confused decade, compared to my twenties. Now I know the reason. At some point—about the age of thirty-two—I passed the age that my parents had been at the time of my conception. 

I did not mark the occasion at the time—but now I realize it was a great watershed in my life. That was the moment when I no longer had any preconscious inherited "memories" to guide me. It was at that moment that—for the first time—I was truly on my own; I had to proceed by my own feeble conscious efforts, instead of being able to rest upon the vast resource of inherited tradition. 

In my teens and twenties, I knew my business—as Butler would put it. But now, as a thirty-five-year-old, I am suffering greatly from inexperience. 

No wonder I too am a crank and an intellectualizer and a maker of systems and a chaser of hobbyhorses and a writer of blogs. I have been trying to drag up everything to the level of consciousness because it's now the only tool at my disposal. I am forced to resort to thought because I have run out of unconscious memories. No wonder I have long since ceased to be a "gentleman"—

—if indeed I ever was one. Which is highly unlikely—the more I think about it, the more I realize that I have perhaps always suffered from literal-mindedness. 

I once wrote a novel based on my own teenage experiences, for instance. The main character wrestles throughout the book with the question of how other people seem to be born knowing unconsciously how to pursue beauty and success and normality in life—whereas she has to figure out everything in a plodding and literal-minded manner. How did they know you could be popular and good-looking and academically talented at once? Who taught them that? (I was plainly wrestling with the same imponderables Gottfried Benn describes, in his poem "People Met.")

But now—all these years later—we finally know the solution to the mystery. Who taught them that? Why, their evolutionary inheritance taught them that; the unconscious memory of innumerable protozoa before them taught them that. 

I am obviously not that sort of person. I, like Butler, am "among the damned," as he put it. I, like him, could only ever arrive at an anti-intellectual ideal by intellectually constructing it; I could only ever have come up with the idea of dispensing with systems by first building a system against systems; by having gone through and exhausted all possible systems and then coming up with a system that explained why systems are a bad idea. 

I will never be able to understand the people who just knew all of this without being told; the people for whom all these things "have already passed into the unconscious stage," as Butler put it. 

But perhaps the world needs people to figure things out consciously, graspingly, by painful ordeal of thought—before it can pass into unconsciousness in future generations. This is the only justification Butler offers for people such as us—the only hope for "the damned." In a line that seems to anticipate Brecht—Butler writes: "with the pioneers [...] the grace is not for them, but for those who come after." 

We are making the stumbling forward gestures of thought so that you all—those born later—will not have to; we are being cranks and chasing intellectual hares so that one day, no humans will have to. 

I, the unloving, say that life should be lovely, as Vachel Lindsay once wrote. Let that be our excuse before Heaven. We are not capable of understanding beauty, which is rooted in unconsciousness. It is not for the literal-minded and the cranks to make beauty. But we can believe in beauty in the abstract. And we can even provide some of the raw material—the lumber of thought, complete with splinters and cracks—out of which others might one day make what is beautiful.