There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy
To some the internet is a virtual Gomorrah, a bazaar of propaganda, pornography, rage-bait and fraud, wherein one may find a few useful things like Google Maps. To me it is a blessing for the cause of truth, for philo-sophia, and that is no small thing.
Of course the swelling ranks of citizen journalists are competing for engagement numbers just like the bad old corporate media chased ratings. Moreover, the algorithms which build our news feeds give us what we want so that we will keep our eyes on the screen for as long as possible. They profile us in order to pitch us products, instigate tribal fisticuffs, replace difficult social problems with easy para-social relationships, etc.. Things that are good for business are not always good for people.
Yet the long form discussion is something legacy media has rarely managed. The great virtue of the long form podcast is that it is long. Joe Rogan who, at last check, has the most popular podcast in the world, frequently runs over two hours per interview. Why does this matter? Because it is nearly impossible to maintain a lie for several hours in front of thousands of people. If you are being less than honest, if you are trying to spin a sensational narrative, chances are good that during the course of an extended interview something will slip out, and some people will notice. Or it may be that you are simply deluded or dimwitted. People will pick up on that too.
There’s also a chance that what will fallout is revelatory. I cannot remember the episode, the subject, nor the guest, only that it was The Jordan Peterson Podcast and Jordan Peterson as clinical psychologist suggested that he and his guest describe themselves in fiction. That is, name a character in a work of literary fiction which would, at least in some respects, describe you (I gather that this is a fairly common exercise in literary and psychological circles, but it was new to me). This set my mind in motion. Could it be that after two hundred years of modern psychology the great authors are still the better diagnosticians? Could it be that modern psychology, in chasing the clout of the natural sciences by adopting its methods, may be blinding itself to the very object of its study? Recall Aristotle, in his Nichomachean Ethics, having to remind certain smarty-pants people of his own time that “[a]n educated person only demands precision in each field to the degree that the nature of the thing permits. Asking for scientific proofs from a political orator surely makes about as much sense as accepting a mathematical proof because it ‘sounds pretty plausible’.” [1] Might modern psychology actually be causing mental illness precisely because it closes us off to the non-material spirit world in order to pass as a science?
Well these are grand philosophical inquiries. I’m not going to lie to you that these were my really my first thoughts. Of course my first thought was: who would I be in a great work of literature?
Tom Lingard
In Joseph Conrad’s last published novel, The Rescue, we find ourselves aboard the three-hundred-and-fourteen-ton brig Lightning, which is laying becalmed just a few miles northwest of Carimata (Indonesia). We meet the mate, Shaw, who is the only other white man aboard ship besides Captain Lingard among a crew of Malays. The mate, we soon learn, is a man chronically dissatisfied with his position in life. Shaw, in the first act of his we observe, is berating the Malay helmsman for allowing the brig to get sternway on her: “Shift the helm back again. Don’t you feel the air from aft? You are like a dummy standing there.”
The commotion brings Captain Lingard up on deck:
“What’s the matter up there?” asked a deep voice from below. The red-faced man in a tone of surprise said: “Sir?” “I hear that rudder grinding hard up and hard down. What are you up to, Shaw? Any wind?”[2]
“What’s the matter up there?” asked a deep voice from below. The red-faced man in a tone of surprise said: “Sir?” “I hear that rudder grinding hard up and hard down. What are you up to, Shaw? Any wind?”The ship is like an extension of Lingard’s own body. The slightest twitch has his attention.
There’s an element of unreality throughout this story of adventure and intrigue, a dreamy quality evinced in the first paragraph:
The shallow sea that foams and murmurs on the shores of the thousand islands, big and little, which make up the Malay Archipelago has been for centuries the scene of adventurous undertakings. The vices and the virtues of four nations have been displayed in the conquest of that region that even to this day has not been robbed of all the mystery and romance of its past — and the race of men who had fought against the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch and the English, has not been changed by the unavoidable defeat. They have kept to this day their love of liberty, their fanatical devotion to their chiefs, their blind fidelity in friendship and hate — all their lawful and unlawful instincts.
In the movie version we would expect some breathtaking, panoramic footage of azure waters, white beaches, majestic palms trees swaying in warm breezes while the orchestra envelopes our auditory faculties with lush but portending harmonies (I hear the brass section popping up in the mix here and there).
But as for a prologue to psychoanalysis, I think most of us would reflexively think this as but peripheral aesthetics. Perhaps a preface to a con even, as how, for example, incense, candles, and soft lighting prepare the gull to hand over his money to a fortune teller. At the very least it seems amateurish. Or perhaps narcissistic to imagine our little selves operating on such a grand stage. Psychotherapy is properly carried out by people with university degrees in neat and clean offices.
I ask you to entertain with me the possibility that the sanitized examination room may be the wrong place for the wrong approach. Modern psychology works with syndromes, disorders, neuroses. It operates rather like an auto repair shop. Is your car making funny noises? We’ll take it apart and try to figure out what’s going on. Is your brain not signaling happiness, is it making you anxious or depressed? Let’s get down to the root causes and see if we can fix it. That may require pharmaceuticals.
I am not claiming that modern psychology does not solve real problems. I’m no expert on the subject, but I’m willing to assume competence with, say, alleviating the symptoms of schizophrenia. I’m simply wondering aloud if perhaps, in some cases, the techniques of modern psychology miss problem entirely and thereby make it worse. Though measurable aberrations in brain chemistry may be observed to accompany severe depression, the underlying cause may in fact be that the psyche is trying to connect with the spirit world, the transcendent, the divine (I shall endeavor to narrow down what I mean here in a bit) but has no way of doing so because it no longer has the language to grasp it with.
You may already think that I’m talking nonsense. Yet it is a fact that nearly every human society we know of had gods, spirits, transcending entities in which they believed themselves to be engaged with. Were they all mistaken about such things, or have we, in our craving for power over nature and the social status of those who possess such powers, unwittingly and increasingly tragically cut ourselves off from the spirit world?
For the religious, this problem is solved through a relationship with God, plain and simple. But religion has become problematic for many (myself included) as a direct result of advances in scientific knowledge. I have written in a previous essay that I believe the Genesis account is essentially true, that God created the world in the same manner as we create things like science–the bringing forth of a rational order from indeterminate chaos. But I am speaking metaphorically. I trust that scientists are competent, that the earth and its creatures did not appear within one calendar week, but rather happened over millions of years, to cite one example.
Great literature does not have this problem. It only requires our imaginations and some life experience. Yet I think it evident that what makes great literature great is the abstracting away from the ordinary to the transcendent–to the good, the true, and the beautiful. Consider the opening scene of The Rescue quoted above: the evoked imagery, the elevated language. This is clearly not an abstract to a scientific paper which is oriented toward analytical precision, the isolating of definable problems such that solution can be reached through the coordination of causes and effects. Rather the opening of the novel is the opening up of possibilities, a space wide enough for high adventure, romance, salvation or calamity. Not just in terms of what it describes explicitly – tropical seas, islands, or the history of this archipelago– but by the aesthetic of the language itself. The genius of all great authors, beyond being keen people watchers, is their exceptional ability to orchestrate cognitive clarity with linguistic aesthetics. That timeless truths are beautiful and good I think may be the kernel from which religious faith properly grows.
Conrad continues:
The adventurers who began that struggle have left no descendants … Misunderstood and traduced in life, the glory of his achievement has vindicated the purity of his motives. He belongs to history. But there were others — obscure adventurers who had not his advantages of birth, position, and intelligence; who had only his sympathy with the people of forests and sea he understood and loved so well. They can not be said to be forgotten since they have not been known at all. They were lost in the common crowd of seamen-traders of the Archipelago, and if they emerged from their obscurity it was only to be condemned as law-breakers. Their lives were thrown away for a cause that had no right to exist in the face of an irresistible and orderly progress — their thoughtless lives guided by a simple feeling.
So there were adventurers of this patch of ocean and islands who were aligned with the imperial interests of the great European powers, and as such they can claim to have a place in history. They served their part in the greater story of mankind. Captain Lingard is not one of them. He does some trading with his beloved brig (a two-masted sailing vessel with square sails on both masts), but the Lightning is as much a yacht as a merchant ship. She no longer serves the greater interests of empires and commerce. Tom Lingard does not belong to history. Thus the persistent unreality of the novel. Lingard lingers in the world, commanding a ship that is fast becoming obsolete. But Lingard loves his ship and appears to have little interest in getting with the program. The ineluctable and orderly progress in which the powered vessel replaces the sailing vessel will happen, but so will Lingard’s own death.
A Fateful Night
Night falls on the becalmed brig. Lingard is on deck bantering with Shaw when they notice that the sea is hissing. “Tide rip, Shaw” Lingard states matter-of-factly. But there’s something else. The Malay lookout addresses Lingard: “I hear oars, Tuan. I hear oars.” Lingard orders the slumbering crew awakened and at their stations. “It’s annoying to be caught like this” Lingard remarks with vexation. Lingard orders them to fire a flare, whose brief blaze illuminates a small boat with five men.
The men are from the schooner yacht Hermit. The five men have been wandering for four days now and are out of fresh water and supplies. The yacht has run aground amongst a maze of islands and shoals. They are stranded. A fellow named Carter does the talking, who we learn is the second officer in charge of the yacht. Lingard permits them to board the Lightning. Carter carries a letter from the owner of the yacht requesting help. Carter describes some features onshore where the Hermit went aground, and notices that it gives Lingard a start. “Do you know into what hornet’s nest your stupid people have blundered? How much d’ye think their lives are worth, just now? Not a brass farthing if the breeze fails me for another twenty-four hours. You may well open your eyes. It is so! And it may be too late now, while I am arguing with you here.” Carter stands there flummoxed and uncomprehending, but Lingard is tending to the ship now. The strange night wears on. Carter and his exhausted men slip off into more of a stupor than sleep. They wake to see the Lightning under sail again. It is morning and Lingard is expertly piloting his bring through a maze of reefs and shoals. They see the stranded yacht, leaning over, hard aground.
Just then our attention is diverted to a spot about two miles from the stranded yacht where a Malay couple is camped out on the beach. They are natives of Wajo. Hassim and Immada are their names, brother and sister, and they are worried that the long absence of Lingard and Lightning perhaps means that he is never to return. They are trusting friends of the captain, but they also know that he can sail away at any time.
Pata Hassim is the nephew of one of the most powerful chiefs in Wajo, and like Lingard, is a trader-seaman. In fact he was in the process of securing another rather risky freight when he first saw the Lightning sail into the harbor and drop anchor. He wondered at what the white man might be up to. Lingard was looking for a stream to replenish his fresh water supply. But as it so happened, when Lingard came ashore with a few of his men to fill up on water, a Malay decided to take a pot shot at him. The spear grazes Lingard’s neck. A brawl ensues. Turns out that Lingard and his men are fighting the enemies of Hassim and his band of seamen-traders, who then join in to help the white man.
And so the two men formally meet, and they meet like men–standing over the corpse of a vanquished enemy:
Lingard, striding up from one side, thrust out his open palm; Hassim responded at once to the frank gesture and they exchanged their first hand-clasp over the prostrate body, as if fate had already exacted the price of a death for the most ominous of her gifts — the gift of friendship that sometimes contains the whole good or evil of a life.
His newfound friendship convinces Lingard to go to Wajo where he might find new fortunes. Wajo, we are informed, is chronically unstable and closed to white traders–but Lingard now has an in by his new friend. This prospect excites Lingard. But first Lingard has to chart safe waterways for his bring to pass in and out of Wajo. This is tricky business. Being subject to squalls and thunderstorms, there is always the possibility of the brig dragging anchor, of a frightful struggle to find safe water in violent winds and reduced visibility (Much of this is based on Conrad’s own experience when, in August, 1887, he signed on as chief mate aboard the 300-ton steamship Vidar. Though Conrad disliked steamships, it was work and he was still recuperating from his previous voyage on the 1,000 ton barque Highland Forest when he was hit by a falling spar. The Vidar “steamed southeast through the Karimata Strait (between Sumatra and Borneo) to Banjarmasin on the south coast of Borneo, to the island of Laut to take on coal, across the Macassar Strait to Donggala on the west coast of Celebes, back to the east coast of Borneo to Tanjung Redeb on the Berau River and to Tanjung Selor in the north. The Vidar then returned to Singapore, stopping at the same ports on the way back.” [3] During this time Conrad met a legendary local schooner captain named William Lingard who had made a fortune by discovering a secret passage that enabled him to sail his schooner up the Berau River. William Lingard was the real-life inspiration for Tom Lingard in this novel).
One night the brig is hit by a thunderstorm and the crew are scrambling to get her under control. During the maelstrom a Malay swimmer suddenly climbs up the side of the brig and comes aboard saying that he seeks the white man. “Here” Lingard replies. He introduces himself as Jaffir, sent by Hassim. Jaffir holds up a great gold ring to Lingard and handing it to him relays the message from Hassim: “Depart and forget.”
The story is that the death of one of Hassim’s relatives meant that a rival party had formed to oppose the rightful successor. So Wajo has plunged into a civil war and Hassim and his men are now fugitives. Lingard offers the half-starved and desiccated man some rice and water while trying to figure on a strategy to salvage the situation. Lingard concludes that under the cover of this dark, stormy night, he could get a boat ashore and evacuate Hassim and what’s left of his army. Jaffir agrees to swim back ashore to relay the plan.
The rescue would become legend in Wajo. Locals will speak of
… how on a certain night “when there was such a thunderstorm as has been never heard of before or since” a ship, resembling the ships of white men, appeared off the coast, “as though she had sailed down from the clouds … It was such a night that we on the watch hardly dared look upon the sea. The heavy rain was beating down our eyelids. And when day came, the ship was nowhere to be seen, and in the stockade where the day before there were a hundred or more at our mercy, there was no one.”
Once aboard and safely out into deep water, Lingard returns the gold ring to Hassim, saying that should he ever need help, send a message with the ring and Lingard will not fail him. Lingard determines that they need to find a fellow named Belarab who may assist Hassim in taking Wajo back. He recalls from an old captain acquaintance of his, Captain Jorgenson, that there is an anchorage known as the Shore of Refuge where they may regroup in safety.
Headstrong
At one of the larger trading ports where Lingard frequently convenes with fellow European sea traders to spin yarns and sometimes discover new business leads, his fellows note that Lingard is spending a good deal more time at the Shore of Refuge. Captain Jorgenson – Captain H.C. Jorgensen of the barque Wild Rose –now apathetic and decrepit, is yet curious as to what Lingard is up to. The two men banter a little and then Jorgenson gets to the point: “I was once like you …” he begins. He tells of other captains he once knew, just like Lingard, all of whom came to grief in these parts.
“I was like you — once,” repeated Jorgenson. “Five and thirty years — never dropped anything. And what you can do is only child’s play to some jobs I have had on my hands — understand that — great man as you are, Captain Lingard of the Lightning… You should have seen the Wild Rose,” he added with a sudden break in his voice. Lingard leaned over the guard-rail of the pier. Jorgenson came closer. “I set fire to her with my own hands!” he said in a vibrating tone and very low, as if making a monstrous confession.
But for all that, Lingard convinces Jorgenson to help him. In the end the old captain only requests that his equally decrepit but loyal girlfriend shall be taken care of should he die. Lingard gives his word:
“Don’t you worry about that,” said Lingard, grasping Jorgenson’s hand. “She shall want for nothing. All I expect you to do is to look a little after Belarab’s morals when I am away. One more trip I must make, and then we shall be ready to go ahead. I’ve foreseen every single thing. Trust me!” In this way did the restless shade of Captain H. C. Jorgenson recross the water of oblivion to step back into the life of men.
Lingard then meets with Belarab, the local chief of the Shore of Refuge. In exchange for some guns and money, Belarab pledges to help Hassim retake Wajo.
Worlds Collide
Lingard throws himself into the project, earning money to purchase munitions as well as the Emma, a once majestic schooner now reduced to a hulk. Lingard has her towed into the Shore of Refuge and run aground. She will be used to store all his powder and weapons. She will also serve as a new residence for Jorgenson, whom Belarab still reveres though he is but a shadow of the man Belarab once knew.
And into his carefully planned recapture of Wajo, now two years in the making, comes the blundering schooner yacht Hermit.
We find Lingard onboard the grounded schooner speaking with her owner, Mr. Travers. Lingard instinctively hates the man. Some bloody snob knocking about the globe in a yacht, for Christ’s sake.
For his part, Mr. Travers does not trust Lingard, thinking him some sort of piratical opportunist. Mr. Travers stands firm his intention to wait for official assistance. “I won’t be intimidated into paying for his services” Mr. Travers mutters to himself.
Among the passengers onboard the yacht is a Spaniard by the name of D’Alcacer, who received the invitation to join the yacht in good part because Mr. Travers wished for his company, which D’Alcacer obliged:
D’Alcacer had accepted with the reckless indifference of a man to whom one method of flight from a relentless enemy is as good as another. Certainly the prospect of listening to long monologues on commerce, administration, and politics did not promise much alleviation to his sorrow; and he could not expect much else from Mr. Travers, whose life and thought, ignorant of human passion, were devoted to extracting the greatest possible amount of personal advantage from human institutions.
Mr. Travers is a businessman. Such men rarely play well on stage or in a novel. But in times of peace, the successful businessman commands from the heights of the social order. The masses regularly pay their respects to him when they pay for his products. Being capable of generating significant wealth, such a man will, in general, have his pick for a wife. Mrs. Travers, who we shall soon meet, is the only other female character in the novel besides Hassim’s sister Immada, yet she wields considerable power.
The two men will never get along. Lingard had tried to impress upon Mr. Travers that the present situation with the natives is rather fraught, and that he is working diligently to bring it to its rightful conclusion. Mr. Travers only scoffs. This infuriates Lingard. All his work and dedication taken as a con.
“I don’t see my way to utilize your services,” he said, with cold finality. Lingard, grasping his beard, looked down at him thoughtfully for a short time. “Perhaps it’s just as well,” he said, very slowly, “because I did not offer my services. I’ve offered to take you on board my brig for a few days, as your only chance of safety. And you asked me what were my motives. My motives! If you don’t see them they are not for you to know.”
Lingard’s pride is deeply wounded.
D’Alcacer whispered: “It is a quarrel, and the picturesque man is angry. He is hurt.” Mrs. Travers’ fan rested on her knees, and she sat still as if waiting to hear more.
While Lingard and Mr. Travers continue to argue, Mrs. Travers is looking on with interest–and delight. The “picturesque man” as D’Alcacer put it– alluding again to the unreality of Lingard and the life he leads, like some opera character mysteriously showing up in real life – is yet, as Mrs. Travers remarks more than once, more real than almost anyone she knows. And she is fascinated by the upwelling of genuine emotion she sees in her own husband, which, we are to understand, normally operates under many layers of cultural conventions, manners, and subterfuges.
The Lady
When the argument between Lingard and Mr. Travers seems to be headed for full-on altercation, D’Alcacer expresses his apprehension to Mrs. Travers who can’t get enough:
… she said with little bursts of merriment between every few words: “No, but this is — such — such a fresh experience for me to hear — to see something — genuine and human. Ah! ah! one would think they had waited all their lives for this opportunity — ah! ah! ah! All their lives — for this! ah! ah! ah!”
Thus in dramatic contrast are the company of the yacht–wealthy, civilized Europeans, the upper crust of Europe–on the one hand, and on the other a European outcast, Tom Lingard, who has long since run away to sea and is presently in deep business with Malay savages. Mr. Travers naturally assumes himself to be in the controlling position, not merely because he possesses more wealth, but because that wealth is issued and recognized by a mighty nation. Mr. Travers does not trade trinkets between East Asian backwaters. He does the business of global empires.
Lingard acknowledges this, though with a hastily added, grudging caveat:
“I AM an adventurer,” he burst out, “and if I hadn’t been an adventurer, I would have had to starve or work at home for such people as you. If I weren’t an adventurer, you would be most likely lying dead on this deck with your cut throat gaping at the sky.”
Thus admitting that back in Europe he would likely be nothing more than a common laborer, but hastily adding, in part no doubt to sooth his bruised ego, that in these parts Mr. Travers is lucky to still be alive thanks to him. Lingard wants Mr. Travers to know that his life is not one of opulence, soft cushions, afternoon teas, and the entertaining of fanciful philosophies.
So it is during height of acrimony between the two proud men that we are introduced to Mrs. Travers. For her first act in the novel, Mrs. Travers notices Immada.
Mrs. Travers fixed her eyes on Immada. Fairhaired and white she asserted herself before the girl of olive face and raven locks with the maturity of perfection, with the superiority of the flower over the leaf, of the phrase that contains a thought over the cry that can only express an emotion. Immense spaces and countless centuries stretched between them: and she looked at her as when one looks into one’s own heart with absorbed curiosity.
Conrad thus drawing our attention to the vast cultural distance between a beautiful, refined English lady and an attractive savage girl.
But Mrs. Travers’ real fascination is, of course, with Tom Lingard. She is drawn to him. This only further irritates her husband: “He underrated my intelligence; and what a violent scoundrel! The existence of such a man in the time we live in is a scandal.” Mr. Travers spits.
Edith Travers, we learn, is a disillusioned romantic:
As a young girl, often reproved for her romantic ideas, she had dreams where the sincerity of a great passion appeared like the ideal fulfilment and the only truth of life. Entering the world she discovered that ideal to be unattainable because the world is too prudent to be sincere. Then she hoped that she could find the truth of life an ambition which she understood as a lifelong devotion to some unselfish ideal. Mr. Travers’ name was on men’s lips; he seemed capable of enthusiasm and of devotion; he impressed her imagination by his impenetrability. She married him, found him enthusiastically devoted to the nursing of his own career, and had nothing to hope for now.
Mr. Travers, for his part,
was, however, perfectly satisfied with her beauty, her brilliance, and her useful connections. She was admired, she was envied; she was surrounded by splendour and adulation; the days went on rapid, brilliant, uniform, without a glimpse of sincerity or true passion, without a single true emotion — not even that of a great sorrow.
People accustomed to wealth often overlook the unceasing drudgery involved in its generation and maintenance. The businessman in the grey suit can be a monotonous bore, insensitive, unimaginative, and incurious to the larger questions of life, and that is in part because he seldom has time for such musings. An upper class English lady like Mrs. Travers, a woman of beauty and a perceptive mind, does have time for such things and finds her husband frustratingly self-centered, narrow, and disappointing.
We might dismiss Mrs. Travers as a spoiled rich girl who never matured past her childish idealism because she has never had to hustle, never had to deal with the meaner and seedier world of money-making. She’s a hothouse flower who thinks her unnaturally favorable environmental conditions are actually natural . Yet her intuitive fixation on “a great passion as an ideal fulfillment and the only truth in life” certainly suggests a wholesome feminine need for an emotional and spiritual connection to some kind of transcendent order which, if we accept Christianity for a moment, inclines her firstly to seek out a husband as the counterpart to her spiritual maturation. She is instructed to submit to her husband, not as the subject of a self-styled autocrat, but in so far as her husband submits to God, which is to say, in so far as he acts in accordance with the transcendent order as well. But Mr. Travers is a philistine unfit for the task, leaving Mrs. Travers bereft.
We are Edith Travers
The material conditions of the middle classes and up today are comparable to aristocrats of old, if not better. In the case of Americans, the peace following the second world war meant that all of the massive industrial wealth production, the major breakthroughs in medicine, the huge strides in public health and safety, could finally be enjoyed by the public. By the 1970’s a sizeable middle class emerged who owned homes, cars, boats, television sets, all sorts of household appliances, and though they still had to work hard, they could take a vacation once in a while too.
Beyond the material, Mrs. Travers suffers from a spiritual impoverishment of which she is aware but for which she lacks any credible, nourishing resources. This seems to be connected to her blessings in the worldly realm, her luxurious life, her privileged position in society. I believe that much of the West today suffers from this affliction. The newfound freedom from a life of unceasing drudgery, the many comforts and conveniences, entertainment on demand, and so forth, has not produced a proportionate amount of gratitude and contentment. Leisure time is rarely spent in contemplation but often filled up with distractions such as social media. Freedom from unceasing work has removed a palpable sense of purpose. Some even prefer to stay at the office and keep on working though their material needs are already exceeded. The endless advances in science and technology, which are transforming our environment and increasingly bringing it under human control, convince us of the truth of a scientistic ontology, i.e., that our world is reducible to material processes, and this undermines the authority and credibility of religion.
Thirdly, a sense of unreality has subtly advanced along with economic and technological progress. Even though we become acclimated to new gizmos and higher standards of material well being, our sense of place in the natural order of things grows ever more faint. Consider how little our lives resemble that of our ancestors. That we can drive a car for ten minutes on a paved road to reach a supermarket full of fresh food would be nothing short of a miracle to our great grandparents. Most of our ancestors had to produce their own food. In medieval Europe, for example, more than 80% of peoples were farmers; in present day America, that’s fewer that 2%. Hunting, fishing, and farming puts man in a direct relationship with the earth, the seasons, the animals. He is a perpetual student of nature, and not by choice. Contrast this with a middle-class American of today who buys his food at the supermarket with money earned from his desk job in an air-conditioned office. He may take the family to a nature park for vacation, but his relationship to the natural world, being one largely of choice, scarcely resembles that of his ancestors. Surely the increasing number of removes of modern man from the rhythms and impositions of nature also removes him psychologically from Creation and his sense of purpose within it.
Now, going back at least as far as Aristotle, most philosophers have agreed that since rationality is man’s unique gift, human flourishing must center on the cultivation of reason. But as modern science and technology reveal nature to be mechanical, chains of causes and effects, there’s no room for free will, which leaves no room for good and bad, for virtue. God is nowhere to be found here. Yet still we must concede that–somehow–we are subjects who value things, that we can will actions. We think that this goes on somewhere in our heads, which house thoughts that are immaterial and undetermined. Which makes no sense if we are merely very complicated machines, so we must posit that our awareness and sense of willing things is an illusion.
Well, say whatever you want, but the fact is that no one really believes that they are determined, that their conscious awareness is just an epiphenomenon with no reality of its own. You will not convince anyone that their desires don’t actually exist. No, we are selves with appetites, and we look to science and technology to better satiate our appetites. But this only establishes that we are animals, and it is clear enough that we are also spiritual beings. Presently in America and throughout the West we are watching some really crazy trends emerge, such as a fetish for Islam, which is openly hostile to Western values. While some of this can be chalked up to youthful rebellion, and yet some more is simply resentment of the successful, rooting for the underdog, it seems clear to me that people are drawn to Islam because there they see true believers. Same goes for the recent rise of socialism. People want something that transcends, has some higher purpose, something more to life than ever increasing consumption of industrial outputs.
The philosophers of modernity were not blind to this problem. They knew that the problem is rooted in the European Enlightenment and the rise of modern science. Friedrich Nietzsche famously summed up the situation by declaring that God is dead. He most emphatically did not see this as a triumph of reason over superstition, but rather as cultural catastrophe. Nietzsche imagined the solution in an atheist aristocracy capable of re-valuing all values, a master race that would define the hierarchy of values and human types. But such strenuous attempts to manufacture a moral north star resulted in some very frightening political events in the twentieth century. A world war was fought and thank God the Americans won and pragmatism prevailed, but that also meant that the problem remained. We would just continue on believing that the human search for meaning could be solved through progress, a belief that the philosopher Eric Voegelin describes as Gnosticism:
Gnostic speculation overcame the uncertainty of faith by receding from transcendence and endowing man and his intra-mundane range of action with the meaning of eschatological fulfilment. In the measure in which this immanentization progressed experientially, civilizational activity became a mystical work of self-salvation. The spiritual strength of the soul which in Christianity was devoted to the sanctification of life could now be diverted into the more appealing, more tangible, and, above all, so much easier creation of the terrestrial paradise. Civilizational action became a divertissement, in the sense of Pascal, but a divertissement which demonically absorbed into itself the eternal destiny of man and substituted for the life of the spirit. [4]
Progress toward a terrestrial paradise, of ever-increasing standards of living, though in itself a perfectly laudable goal, cannot be any substitute for the life of the spirit. Our pursuit of Enlightenment rationality has hardly made us more rational. The twentieth century disproved beyond all reasonable doubt that a populace educated in science and handy with technology wouldn’t kill each other.
So does that mean we have to abandon reason and return to blind faith? I think the question is a false dichotomy. We have to go back to the drawing board here, so to speak, and try to puzzle out what is meant by “reason”.
The Life of Reason
We typically think of rationality in terms of coordinating means and ends. For example, going into the workforce directly after finishing high school brings in money right away compared to attending a university or advanced technical school, which only costs money and will likely put you in debt. However, an advanced degree opens up avenues to much higher paying jobs, and even with a debt load you are likely to have a higher net worth in ten years’ time should you choose the higher education route. Hence we would say that, economically speaking, to defer work in favor of higher education is the rational choice for the long run.
But does so many rational choices constitute a life of reason? Aristotle would certainly answer no, for a life of reason means that the sum of one’s choices must amount to some good. While the actions of a gambling addict, for example, may be locally rational–working a job to earn the money to place bets in hopes of winning big–his rational choices typically do not lead to the flourishing of his character, nor to the increase of his personal wealth, nor to the expansion of wisdom, but rather to a static behavioral loop as time drains his life away.
More philosophically, rationality is the ability to abstract from immediate experience. For example, in order to count out three apples in this basket, among which there are also oranges and plums, I first have to understand the essence of an apple, what makes it an apple, its “appleness”. True, an animal like a Black Bear which eats apples must also be capable of making this distinction as well, but only when it presents itself to the bear’s immediate experience. So far as I know, no animal is capable of imagining a generic apple, making a sketch of it, or counting apples as identical units. For no two apples are identical in real life–adding up five units of appleness goes on purely in the abstract. The point here is that the essence of an apple which I can count is not anything in the world of immediate sense experience, is not physical, does not have mass nor occupy space. The essence of an apple it not itself an apple.
Intertwined with the essence of many things is the goodness of it, the purpose it serves. We can learn how to identify leaves on a tree, and then to distinguish between a maple leaf and that of an oak tree. But bound up with the “what it is” of a leaf is its purpose, i.e., leaves on a tree convert sunlight to sugars, which is necessary for the tree to live and grow. So in seeing the essence of a leaf with our rational eye also involves seeing the good of it.
Hence rationality is necessary for understanding ethics, aims, the good in things. Only rational beings can have any idea of moral right and wrong, because only they can grasp goodness. Like appleness ( the essence of an apple), moral right and wrong does not exist in nature, is not given to us by our senses, is not directly observable.
Now, the greatest strength of modern science is the removal of the subject by insistence upon replicability–“the laws of physics will hold for anyone who cares to observe them”–and therewith providing a method of observation which if carried out by anyone who is not crazy will yield the same result. This yields “objective knowledge”, the creation of things that are outside of ourselves in the sense that they are invariant with our mood, marital status, sex, race, etc. So it is easy to forget that the objects of science are still a synthesis of thought and sense experience. The result of forgetting the role of the rational agent in what we know produces scientific materialism, an ontology which holds that the objects of the physical sciences, atoms, quarks, photons, etc., are the fundamental building blocks of reality, and that they are exhaustive of reality. This is to mistake a map of reality for reality itself.
Not only is there the problem that the material world cannot be cleaved from the world of thought, but there is also the misconception that objects of experience are ready made for us. Such is the empiricist view, that we merely need to look at the sky, see moons and stars, and then start attaching ideas to them like equal areas swept out in equal times. But this does not appear to be the case. Rather we begin as newborn babes, living in an undifferentiated ocean of awareness, living solely in the present, and over time learn to differentiate our experience. In time we learn to see the moon as a round rock that is actually circling the earth approximately 238,000 miles away. In time we can understand something like history, which doesn’t exist in the present but is a way of perceiving, for example, the statue of President Lincoln which is now before me, so as to grasp its essence which is more than just a sculpted chunk of marble (history is a good example of knowledge that is fact based, objective, but yet mostly exists as an abstract construction).
There is also the issue that the number of possible observable facts of the world is probably infinity. Consciousness we might say is the experience of potential, of potential differentiation yielding patterns, facts, laws of nature. But in order to begin pulling out facts and patterns and laws of nature we have to focus on something–and that focus, in turn, will determine to some degree what it is that we find. A helpful analogy here is the searchlight:
…all scientific descriptions of facts are highly selective, that they always depend upon theories. The situation can be best described by comparison with a searchlight … What the searchlight makes visible will depend upon its position, upon our way of directing it, and upon its intensity, colour, etc.; although it will, of course, also depend very largely upon the things illuminated by it. Similarly, a scientific description will depend, largely, upon our point of view, our interests, which are as a rule connected with the theory or hypothesis we wish to test; although it will also depend upon the facts described. [5]
If you are not convinced that human creativity is partly responsible for creating the reality we know–even the laws of physics– consider that Newton explained gravity as an innate force between masses whose strength was inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Einstein re-imagined gravity as the curvature of space-time caused by mass. By Einstein’s formulation, the moon is actually traveling in a straight line but space-time is curved by the mass of the earth, so we see it as moving in an ellipse. Both Newton and Einstein’s view will explain the same data set: the observed orbits of the moon and the planets. So the difference is not empirical, but theoretical–what has changed is the “what-it-is” of gravity, the essence of what the term signifies. Of course Einstein’s theories have replaced Newton’s because Einstein was including new information–the invariance of the speed of light from any frame of reference–that Newton had never considered. Scientific knowledge is also cumulative.
Further, Einstein’s reformulation started with special relativity, resulting from the invariance of the speed of light in any inertial reference frame (one that is not accelerating), as predicted by Maxwell’s equations governing electricity and magnetism. Now Maxwell’s equations relate to things in the world such as electric motors, lightning, a magnetic compass. Prior to Einstein, Newton assumed Gallilean Relativity, which says that laws of physical motion (F=ma) holds in all inertial reference frames. So the man in a train car moving at a steady 50 m.p.h tosses a ball vertically and catches it as it falls back. The ball’s track will be two lines, up and down, with the ball always accelerating downward by gravity. But the man standing by the tracks observing the ball will see it trace a parabola, yet still with the same acceleration to gravity, still following F=ma. In formulating Special Relativity, Einstein did not need any new facts of the world. He merely replaced the ball in his imagination with a photon, and asked what both the man in the train–now traveling near the speed of light–would observe compared to the man sitting still if both must observe light traveling at the same speed, as predicted by Maxwell’s Equations.
Again, the “discovery” was not anything in the world not yet observed, like a new species of bird, but of a new theoretical framework to unite two existing frameworks operating in two different spheres of science– motion of objects observed by different frames in one, and electricity and magnetism in the other. Of course this theoretical discovery of relativity would drive new experiments to test predictions of this new theory, e.g., that time slows down in an accelerating frame, which was confirmed by zipping muons around in an accelerator near the speed of light and observing that they take longer to decay than muons at rest. Which is just to confirm the searchlight analogy. Scientists do not merely wander about collecting facts about the universe, but rather they are driven by curiosity which leads to mysteries which they solve at least in part, though sometimes almost exclusively, through their own creativity, in putting forth novel theoretical constructions. Though such constructions must be anchored in relevant facts, the constructions themselves–just like “appleness”, or the good of photosynthesis–do not exist in nature but come into existence through an act of human creation.
The takeaway here is not only that scientific knowledge arises by this tango between observation and theoretical construction, but is dependent on the interests of the scientist. The scientist’s interests direct the searchlight in our analogy, often a mere gut feeling that perhaps over there might be something worth investigating. Which means that values precede facts: there is always an implicit value structure which is directing the searchlight, and which in turn determines the facts we see, which in turn inspire or provoke new hypotheses, especially when facts are found that conflict with theoretical predictions. I thus dismiss scientific materialism which sees the psyche as some passive observer, like a living movie camera, which merely needs to look at the world carefully, apply reason, and eventually out will come a grand unified theory of nature. I believe the truth is, rather, that science begins with wonder or irritation in the soul of the scientist, who then forms a preliminary theory and sets about to check it by observation. The hypothesis already determines to a great degree the facts which will be considered. As facts emerge, either the hypothesis holds or has to be modified, or is scrapped. But the overall aim is to attain logical consistency in all descriptions of nature. That is the “tension” we feel by virtue of our rationality, to try to move toward the transcendent rational order.
Not just science but for human knowledge in general is this true. The facts on which fields of knowledge rely emerge through a unifying purpose, which in turn derives from an unknowable psychic gravity toward unity of thought. As another example, consider political history:
The objective historian deludes himself into thinking that he does not interpret the past but only describes it. There is, however, an illusion which lurks in the very word “objectivity.” Any statement about facts is an interpretation of facts. The very selection of data from an infinity of data is already an interpretation. Ultimately there is not a choice between objective and subjective history but only a choice between a noble, rich interpretation of the past and a base, impoverished interpretation of the past. [6]
So I hold that the noble and rich interpretation is what orients us and directs us toward the transcendent rational order. But the transcendent order is not anything that can be known as an object of sense experience, it does not exist in nature, it cannot be objective but rather emerges through the cultivation of a certain subjective disposition. This disposition is fundamentally an openness and awareness of the transcendent rational order, a keen sense of its pull, and the dedication to creative acts which produce objects here on earth that evoke the experience of that pull toward the eternal. Such created objects range from scientific theories which unite previously separate fields of scientific knowledge to great works of art that endure through the ages. At first approximation it is this disposition combined with an insistence on logical consistency that is what we mean by “the life of reason.”
Sorry, the Rational Order is Elitist
The book of Genesis says that God created the world and saw that it was good, and then created humans in his image. Meaning that humans have a modicum of God’s creative freedom by virtue of their rational souls. We have the freedom to create what is rich and noble or what is impoverished and base. Since what God created is good, if our purposes are in harmony with His architecture of goods, then we will create what is noble and rich and will have His blessing. We will create civilizations with flourishing individuals, men and women building their futures, chasing their dreams, beautifying their homes. But shake your fist at God, think you’re too sophisticated for religion, think people should be treated as animals, plied with bread and circuses and punished with the whips’ end, and you will soon be living in ruins.
Yet we are punting the question: how could we have any notion of harmony with God’s architecture, a transcendent hierarchy of value which let us refer to as the rational order? The rational order cannot be any object of science or propositional knowledge, as it transcends all such things, as we have said. Rather it seems to impress upon individuals through experiences such as inspiration, epiphany, the mad obsessions of genius, revelation, or intuition. Socrates spoke of his daimon as essentially an inner voice which occasionally spoke to him at critical moments in his life. When his daimon refused to speak after Socrates was condemned to death, he knew that he had to drink the hemlock even though he could arrange to escape Athens and his sentence.
If we learn to attune ourselves to these mysterious promptings, then our questioning will have a purpose reflecting the rational order–and the reality which is brought forth into our perceptions will reflect the rational order. If you are a Christian, then openness and awareness to the promptings from the beyond comes through the practice of faith. There are good reasons to believe that Christianity has gotten this right. To borrow an economics term, the “positive externalities” of Christianity are awesome. Just consider how well Christians are represented among the founders and builders of Western Civ–a civilization of individual liberty, justice for the common man, and wealth beyond the wildest dreams of any other civilization, past or present. Through the practice of the Christian faith men have created many rich and noble things.
The Christian God, following Plato’s transcendent world of Ideas, exists outside of space and time. The only connection humans have with God is through the practice of faith. The philosopher Eric Voegelin writes:
Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity. The feeling of security in a “world full of gods” is lost with the gods themselves; when the world is de-divinized, communication with the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith, in the sense of Heb. 11:1, as the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things unseen. Ontologically, the substance of things hoped for is nowhere to be found but in faith itself … The life of the soul in openness toward God, the waiting, the periods of aridity and dullness, guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance, forsakenness and hope against hope, the silent stirrings of love and grace, trembling on the verge of a certainty which if gained is loss—the very lightness of this fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust for massively possessive experience … The more people are drawn or pressured into the Christian orbit, the greater will be the number among them who do not have the spiritual stamina for the heroic adventure of the soul that is Christianity. [4] (p. 121-122)
The lack of spiritual stamina combined with the promise of relief from all of life’s struggles–beginning with securing food, clothing, and shelter–has naturally led humans to pursue progress here on earth (and adopt a belief structure which Voegelin calls Gnosticism) in the form of technological advances along with political systems congenial to innovation and wealth creation. The natural sciences are often driven by, and owe much of their clout to, the related technologies for which they provide theoretical understanding. The mathematical equations of the physical sciences facilitate the construction of machines; the less exact sciences like biology are still useful in providing reliable cause and effect relationships in living things, mechanical models such as how a virus re-programs a cell, which can be used to mitigate or cure the resulting illness. The value structure underlying technology is pretty obvious: the human desire to control the environment in order to make life easier, safer, more enjoyable.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger tells us that modern technology is no mere means to an end but is a way of revealing truth. The truth it tells is how nature can be set up to reveal itself as something calculable, predictable, and useful to human ends. The river can be dammed up, a turbine constructed, so as to produce a predictable amount of watts per hour. The universal laws of nature, such as F=ma, are maintained by the protocols of observation which remove all perspective–all values–except the one value of universal applicability of the law. So, for example, a balloon and a bowling ball will not fall to the ground at the same rate, but that’s because of the greater proportion of air resistance on the balloon. If you place them in a vacuum chamber you will observe both falling at 9.81 m/s/s, so the universal rule is maintained: all objects with mass will accelerate toward earth at the same rate.
Let us put this together. Technology is driven by the will to control our environment as its central value, and modern technology is also a way of revealing truth. Recall we have established that facts are preceded by values. Hence the central value bringing forth truths of nature as revealed by modern technology is the desire for power over nature, to prevent her from killing us and causing us discomfort, which she does on the regular out in the wild. As we’ve said, much of the clout of the natural sciences derives from their role in the furthering of technology.
Still, humans desire ultimate, universal truths, because they are also spiritual creatures.
Yet the natural sciences are in fact able to achieve universal laws of nature relating to actual things we observe here on earth. However, they achieve it by removing all perspective–removing the essence of being alive, of having perception at all. In this way the transcendent is brought down to earth. The classical and Christian idea of an ascent toward the eternal and transcendent is overrun by the psychological force of mathematical reasoning applied to the world of sense experience in a way that not merely reveals universals in nature, but plausibly of what nature actually is, it’s indisputable essence. If there is a god here it is the god of the philosophers, of the mathematicians who see beauty in the balance and intricacies of their formulae. Otherwise, and even for the mathematicians, their prodigious intellectual exertions do not speak at all of how to expand and ascend toward a higher plane of reality, as the transcendent abstractions with which they labor to better understand and extend are either the idle fascinations of the super intelligent, or they are merely useful insofar as they can sate our insatiable lust for power.
Again, Eric Voegelin:
The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed this mystery of the Western apocalypse when he announced that God was dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrifice God to civilization. The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world-immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life of the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline. [4] (p. 131)
However, we also know that artists, writers, and philosophers who have survived the vicissitudes of history, who yet remain in our common conscience as authoritative, are the rarest of human types who have yet produced universals which we understand or perhaps merely intuit. Their works or their claims are typically not checkable with common sense experience in any scientific way. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is a monumental work of art, but you could not run some sort of science experiment to prove that it is great because, e.g., it uses certain harmonic sequences found in all popular tunes. It cannot be checked against just anyone’s sense experience, as it is unlikely to have any great effect on someone whose soul has been distorted by addiction to narcotics, for example. One needs more refined sense to understand the greatness of the greats. I know that’s an awfully elitist thing to say, but I think it’s true.
Hence we are back to understanding that some universal truths are only knowable to the very few, in contradistinction to the claims of science which are, at least in theory, knowable by anyone. Moreover, these “elitist” truths involve the practice and exercising of reason, of cultivating sharpened perceptions, combined with courage, temperance, … –the classical virtues. Because the works of these extraordinary individuals result from the pursuit of some conception of excellence, of a pinnacle of human understanding and ability, whether it be in science or art, or–relating directly to the thesis of this essay–in literature, their works are the most valuable to humanity. They point to ultimate unities of thought, expressions of pure beauty, of what is absolutely good, because their authors perceived the pull toward the rational order and entered it into history in the form of their creations.
As I said earlier with regards to Christianity, I think the only empirical discriminator of great creative works that is anything close to reliable is time. The cream rises to the top … eventually. That’s as best us mere mortals can do. I do believe, however, that the great creative geniuses who shaped our world were keenly aware of a transcending reality which they had access to. They knew that they could see so far because they were in fact giants.
The progress of modernity as we commonly think of it, as advancing technology, liberal economics, individual liberty, is eminently practical and in high demand. It serves the people, is a champion of let us say the plebian part of the soul. The so-called Great Books, on the other hand, including great art and literature speak to, let us say, the aristocratic element of the soul, that part that seeks transcendent purpose, to perfect, to beautify itself. My thesis here is that both are essential to any healthy human society, only the former has the advantage that its value is immediately and tangibly recognizable to anyone. I assert that the present state of so-called mental health is case and point of the consequences of ignoring the latter by its uncertain status and suspicion of elitist pretensions. By which I mean that psychology wants to be a natural science, to be of this world and demonstrate that it’s doing its part in subduing unruly nature, and it is perhaps out of insecurity that it disavows any talk of the rational order, the transcendent, the eternal. But in so doing is unwittingly damaging the mental health of many.
Laura’s Story
Laura Delano’s story, as told in her book Unshrunk, I think serves as a nice case study for my argument that mental health cannot be dealt with solely as a science project.
Laura Delano was born into a well-to-do New England family, is related to President FDR, went to a private high school, and in 2001 was accepted early decision into Harvard. She’s athletic and reasonably good looking. Yet just before she went off to Deerfield Academy as a freshman, she recounts her first psychiatric incident:
Excruciating thoughts raced through my mind that night in bed as I tried to make sense of what had just happened: I must not have a real self. My whole life’s been fake. All those good grades and accomplishments and expectations I’ve been working for don’t mean anything. It’s all a performance—I’m just a fraud who’s been tricking everyone into thinking I’m Laura, and I’m so good at it that I’ve even tricked myself. [7]
She throws a tantrum and pleads with her parents to let her stay with her grandparents in Maine rather than go off to school.
I’d spent every year looking forward to August, when my mother would drive my sisters and me up there for the month and my father would join us on weekends after work. I spent my days scouring tide pools for crabs, building drip castles with Mom out of muddy sand, reading books on the porch as I listened to peepers in the bog at dusk. I popped bubbly seaweed between my fingers as I watched Dad fish for striped bass along the rocky coast. He’d let me stand in front of him to have a turn casting, wrapping his arms around my shoulders to help me reel in the line when I was too small to do it alone … [7](pp. 5-6)
When her request is denied, she becomes hysterical, prompting her parents to send her to a psychotherapist.
The visit to the psychiatrist does not solve her problems. Rather it would be the first step on her long journey through the psychiatric system, involving various methods of therapy and lots of psychiatric drugs. She does manage to attend Harvard University despite her mental issues, which she says:
… can be described as a willful lurch toward self-annihilation. I drank frequently because it felt like the only reliable way to forget that matriculating at an elite college hadn’t fixed me and now here I was, with no more promising landmarks ahead to bank on as the solution to my pain. I spent many nights walking the Cambridge streets aimlessly with a friend as we discussed postmodern philosophy and its presupposition that nothing is real, everything a social construct. On weekends, I sought out ephemeral happiness with each cocaine snort, just one more line, one more. [7](pp. 44-45)
She is not improving, so her father sends her to yet another psychiatrist, who recommends she spend time at McClean Hospital in Boston.
Which only meant more therapy and more drugs. She writes (in her diary):
“I’ve transformed into a machine.” This remark is particularly striking to me. At nineteen, I was so close to thinking critically about what was happening to me. I had a clear understanding that I wasn’t feeling. Wasn’t connected. Wasn’t present in myself. I’d morphed from a raw, suffering, lost young woman at boarding school into a detached, self-absorbed, empathyless machine. [7](p. 76)
She manages to pull things together enough to return to Harvard, though on a full regimen of meds and regular visits with the shrink. One of her psychiatrists, Dr. Bachman, prescribed her Provigil, which she would later learn is a form of speed (methamphetamine). The effect on her was dramatic, but short lived. She was also becoming aware that the years were passing and she was not one step closer to living as an independent adult. She depended on her father for an apartment and all the bills for her care. She had no prospects of finding a job, nor finding a husband. It was then that her father suggested she go on Outward Bound, something he had done as a youngster and which had changed his life (for the better).
Outward Bound was a challenge, but as for re-establishing herself in accordance with natural rhythms, inculcating the confidence the comes with basic survival skills, she was largely numb to it all: the entire three months was one of going through withdrawal from all the psych meds. As part of the challenge, she had vowed to quit all her meds, cold turkey. It nearly broke her, and brought her to conclusion that she could not live without meds. She also told her parents that she could not face going back to school. Instead, she checked in to the psychiatric ward at New York Presbyterian Hospital. She writes: “After about six months of spinning out without my medications, I was eager to comply with my new regimen: Lamictal, a mood stabilizer; Lexapro, an antidepressant; and Seroquel, the same antipsychotic I’d been put on just before meeting Dr. Bachman. I told myself I’d never again make such a grave mistake as to think I could manage without meds.”[7](p. 108)
So she was back out of the hospital with more meds, more psychiatric care, and no progress in life. Finally on the Thanksgiving family dinner in Maine, she decided it was time to end it all. “Despite all the money and time and energy that my parents had spent on me, all the help I had sought from the best doctors and medications and treatment programs and hospitals over all these years, the only change my family and I had seen had been progressive deterioration.” [7](p. 137) She left the home and walked to the rocky shore, downed a lethal dose of pills and passed out.
When my father set out to look for me, apparently, it was nearly dark. He walked with a flashlight through the fields, past the stone walls and cranberry bog, toward the birch trees, and to the sea. Something in him said, Go left, and he listened. He found me not with his eyes but with his ears: the tide was low, the waves were quiet, and my rasping breath was loud enough that when he heard its unusual sound, he walked toward it, flashlight out … I eventually learned that my mother was the driving force behind my rescue. As the sun closed in on the horizon, an alarm bell went off in her: I’d been gone for a while. At first, my father tried to reassure her that I was fine, but she persisted. He eventually put on his coat, grabbed a flashlight, and headed out. What’s always felt mystical to me is that my father knew where to go: of the many trajectories he could have taken that beamed out from that kitchen door—all the paths in the woods, the route toward the sandy beach to the south, right instead of left where the wooded path poured out to the sea—he was pulled to the very place where I lay dying in the dark. [7](p. 140-141)
She survived. Following intensive care, it was back on a regimen of psych meds and therapy. She writes:
In my admission notes to the substance abuse day program at McLean, my name is followed by a long list of diagnoses: alcohol dependence, cocaine abuse, bipolar I disorder (most recent episode mixed), eating disorder NOS, borderline personality disorder, and hypothyroidism. My medication intake form lists me on lithium XR, Lamictal, Lexapro, Abilify, Klonopin, and Antabuse … For the question “Is spirituality an important part of your life?” I checked “Not at all.” [7](p. 174)
Around this time she meets a recovering alcoholic named Eve. Eve is a regular attendee of Alcoholics Anonymous. She asks Laura if she would like to join her at the next meeting. Laura immediately balks. Eve gently persists and finally Laura agrees. At their first AA meeting, held in the basement of a church, a newcomer named Mary-Beth takes the stand, makes the obligatory admission of alcoholism, and tells her story. Laura is moved. Soon Eve and Laura regularly attend AA together. Laura finds herself enjoying the meetings. AA requires that its members submit to a higher power (“HP”). To this Laura remains atheistic. She names the ocean as her HP.
She stumbles on a book by Robert Whitaker: Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Whitaker puts for the bold thesis that modern psychiatry with its heavily reliance on psychiatric drugs are actually increasing the rates of mental illness. The cure is worse than the disease. This clicks with Laura. After all the meds, hospitalizations, therapy sessions, why hadn’t she improved? Thus Laura begins rebelling against the entire mental health system she had once placed her faith in.
She reaches out to Robert Whitaker, who agrees to meet her at a coffee shop. Whitaker encourages to write a series of blog posts on his website Mad in America, telling her story. Laura is hesitant to out herself as having been a mental patient. Her family agrees that it might damage her future. Whitaker disagrees, encouraging her to just tell her story, and tell it straight. She decides to trust Whitaker’s judgment.
She writes:
Healing, for me, has happened in the realm of the metaphysical: in the shifts of consciousness, in my awakening vitality—that fingertip-touching, I am actually, really here kind of vitality that can’t be measured in a lab or blood test or X-ray or through a subjective, number-scaled, clinician-led questionnaire about so-called mental health. In my experience, it’s had nothing to do with the disappearance of discomfort and everything to do with its embrace. It’s been about extricating myself from any industry or institution—be it psychiatric, mental health, holistic health, alternative health, wellness, or otherwise—that tells me I have a problem it has the solution for. As a teenager on a bewildering quest for purpose and belonging, I became an unwitting sleepwalker in a hazy daze of pharmaceutical enchantment. Healing, for me, has been waking myself up from the spell. [7](pp. 257-258)
Attending a conference where she was slated to speak about psychiatric drug withdrawl, she meets a man named Cooper. He had also gone through thirteen-year bout with the psychiatric industry, beginning with an ADD diagnosis when he was just a boy. Cooper has also concluded that none of it worked, at least not on him:
Two things are undeniably true about our society today: we’re growing ever more unwell in mind, body, and spirit, and the business of health is thriving. Industry has subjugated the natural world around us through commodification and profitization; what’s left for it to conquer is the space between our ears. It is now a radical act in our medicalized, professionalized world to look in the mirror for answers and to turn to your neighbor in times of difficulty and to open your door to them in return—or, if you don’t yet know the person who’s living life next to you, to bring a pot of homemade soup over and introduce yourself. For thousands of years, we wrote poems and plays and made music and comedy and art out of our suffering that we shared with one another in community; today we take it to a doctor and the pharmacy under the false premise that it can and must be obliterated.” [7](p. 284)
Mrs. Delano parts with her readers on a note of triumph. She and Cooper married and now have a son. Together they run a consulting group called Inner Compass Initiative, designed to help others navigate the mental health system, particularly with coming off of psychiatric drugs. They have found their calling, both professionally and personally, helping others and raising a family.
Discussion
Like Mrs. Travers from The Rescue, Laura Delano is firmly ensconced in a social milieu of wealth and privilege. While Mrs. Travers learns that “the world is too prudent to be sincere”, and resigns herself to it, Laura rebels. Laura scorns the curriculum that is being imposed in her as insincere. It becomes the obsession of her adolescent angst. Given the persistence and intensity of her symptoms, I don’t think we can dismiss it as a childish tantrum. I believe that her high intelligence (subconsciously) recognizes something amiss, namely, an impasse toward the life of the spirit, which her atheistic, materialistic social milieu has dismissed as beneath serious consideration. It is this loss of the immaterial transcendent which, somewhat ironically, results in a psychological sense of unreality. It is my belief that this was the root cause of her imposter syndrome and subsequent mental breakdowns.
To make matters worse, college introduces her to postmodern philosophy, a branch of philosophy which marshals high intelligence against itself. What I mean is that it directly and purposely undermines what should be the natural object of reason, the transcendent unity toward which all of our promptings, passions, obsessions direct the revealing of truth, goodness, and beauty. There is no truth according to the postmoderns, which means that there is no God. Without God, without a transcendent rational order, the so-called science of ethics can do no more than document who wins out in politics. That is, who determines what is morally right is who wins, be it in politics, economics, or war. Might makes right.
One might think immersion in nature would inspire openness toward the transcendent, given the beauty of nature combined with exposure to more primitive rhythms of life, to the kinds of hardships through which the Lord sometimes speaks to lost souls. This seems to have been the case with Laura’s father, who recalls Outward Bound as a transformative experience. Laura’s experience with Outward Bound, however, was largely that of withdrawal from psych meds. She did not have any of the sort of character-forming experiences that her father had with it. Surely in this case her brain chemistry had much to do with the null result, but I also think it points to a gender difference. The call to adventure–sailing an ocean, climbing a mountain, diving to the deepest depths, going to the moon–is generally heard by males, not females. I know that women nowadays do all of those things, but they didn’t until methods were developed which made it reasonably safe and predictable–and socially recognized as a sport, or a type of adventure. When Columbus set sail, ocean sailing was far from being a sport. Columbus did not even have a chart of where he was going, or any way of knowing what he would find. What I am saying is that women who adventure nowadays do so because it is another social event with rules for achievement, but males seek adventure as an invitation of chaos, to test their mettle against the abyss, where they may perhaps find hidden treasures. I am not saying that women do not benefit from something like Outward Bound, only that it is more salutary to males according to their nature.
Laura obviously hits bottom with her suicide attempt. Her account curiously suggests a kind of daimon at work, warning her mother that Laura had not left the house simply to take a walk, and then guiding her father to the very spot where Laura lay unconscious from an overdose. Yet she retains her atheistic defiance even after joining Alcoholics Anonymous. Though AA was originally a Christian program, they allow attendees to think of God in any way they like. Laura named the ocean as her higher power (HP), resisting the idea of the transcendent and immaterial.
AA insists on a higher power because they believe that recovery is ultimately a spiritual transformation, and they have the track record to back up this belief. Even though Laura resisted it, AA does seem to coincide with a turning point in her life, when she decides that it is time to start resisting psychiatric treatment.
Through her blog and attending conferences she eventually meets her husband, and they have a child. Through meaningful work and the challenges of raising a family, both of them appear happy and fulfilled for the first time in their adult lives. We all know that most men and women are driven by biological urges to couple and produce children. But people are also biologically driven to eat too many potato chips. Most societies have recognized that the coupling of man and woman to produce children has greater significance than a mere biological function, and thus have consecrated it with marriage. The marriage ceremony, vows, and symbolism connects the basic biological functions to the transcendent, to the rational order, wherein the union of the sexes in the flesh expands into the spiritual. This is why, in the Christian view, we are not at liberty to redefine marriage in any way we like, as Allie Beth Stuckey writes:
Earthly marriage is a representation of the great heavenly marriage of Jesus and his church, with both the bride and the groom designated with their own particular roles. That’s why the redefinition of marriage as anything other than a man and a woman matters so much. Two men or two women can’t represent Christ, the groom, and His Bride, the church: only a man and woman can do that. This definition has spiritual, eternal, and gospel significance. [8]
Not to get into Christian theology but only to underscore the point that harmony with the transcendent rational order, or with the teachings of Christ, is what produces sustained well-being here on earth, is what grounds societies and individuals, saves them from a sense of unreality–that life is merely what you make of it, that it has no purpose nor broader significance.
The psychiatric industry wants to reduce human suffering to a problem that can be conquered by technology. Which can only come about if the soul is ultimately just brain and body, there is no transcendent. Laura , despite her placing all of her faith in a scientistic, atheist worldview, only really began to heal with AA, who insisted that she recognize some sort of Higher Power. It was then that she made her largest leap forward – if not entirely healed herself – with marriage and family, which, whether she would think of it this way or not, certainly harmonizes her with the transcendent order.
Perhaps she would agree with me, in the end. Laura concludes: “For thousands of years, we wrote poems and plays and made music and comedy and art out of our suffering that we shared with one another in community; today we take it to a doctor and the pharmacy under the false premise that it can and must be obliterated.”
The Syren
So where were we?
Recall Mrs. Travers is fascinated by the altercation between “the picturesque man” Captain Tom Lingard and her husband. Though aristocratic society– in principle – is the perfection of human nature through rationality, it also constructs numerous layers of insulation from nature, from raw emotion, from basic living, and there’s a part of the soul that needs to experience its own history as a way of questioning the authenticity of its present state and the reasons behind all of the constraints placed on its public expression. Conrad writes that Mrs. Travers’ “heart was dilated with a momentary longing to know the naked truth of things; the naked truth of life and passion buried under the growth of centuries.”
The next meeting between Lingard and Mrs. Travers comes just after dark. Though the timing is overtly the natural consequence of the day’s events, it nonetheless hints at a lovers’ tryst.
Mrs. Travers is startled at the sudden appearance of Lingard under the counter of the yacht. He is standing up in the brig’s dinghy while coming alongside, looking as if he were standing on the water. Lingard opens the conversation by deriding the yacht’s company for their laxed security, making it known that his men had passed by the Hermit several times an no one onboard even noticed. “Where do your people think themselves, I wonder? In a dock at home? And you — ”
Having impressed upon her his superior understanding of the place and the situation, he renews his request that the company of the yacht move aboard Lightning for a few days, imploring Mrs. Travers to follow him instead of listening to her husband. Lingard is worried that the sudden appearance of the yacht will foil all of his carefully laid plans to help Hassim retake Wajo: ” ‘I believe he thinks yet I fetched you here for some reason. You can’t tell what crooked notion they will get into their thick heads. It’s enough to make one swear.’ He swore.” He then departs into the night and moments later Carter appears on deck to inform Mrs. Travers that the shore party, including her husband, is missing, possibly kidnapped.
Back in his cabin aboard Lightning, Lingard reads a letter he received from Jorgenson, detailing the current state of affairs in Wajo and the Shore or Refuge. Belarab is turning out to be rather feckless, and another fellow named Tengga, who is nominally allied with Lingard in the effort to re-take Wajo, nonetheless thinks that Lingard may have come to grief and will not return (referring to when the brig was becalmed at the beginning of the story, and thus delayed in her return to the Shore of Refuge). Then, menacingly, Tengga lets Jorgenson know that he has the superior force against Hassim, that he could take the Emma from Jorgenson and all of its stored powder and munitions, in which case he would be so powerful everyone would have to join with him. In addition, one of Belarab’s wives has it in her head that the yacht is full of silks and jewels and wants to loot it. So Lingard had correctly surmised that the appearance of the erring schooner yacht has destabilized the situation and is putting his plans in jeopardy.
While considering these matters the mate Shaw reports that there is much commotion over on the yacht. Lingard is hit with a sudden gust of elation that is a bit disproportionate to the situation.
He returned to the cabin, put away Jorgenson’s letter and pulled out the drawer of the table. It was full of cartridges. He took a musket down, loaded it, then took another and another. He hammered at the waddings with fierce joyousness. The ramrods rang and jumped. It seemed to him he was doing his share of some work in which that woman was playing her part faithfully. “She has done it,” he repeated, mentally. “She will sit in the cuddy. She will sleep in my berth. Well, I’m not ashamed of the brig. By heavens — no! I shall keep away: never come near them as I’ve promised. Now there’s nothing more to say. I’ve told her everything at once. There’s nothing more.”
Lingard is a bachelor and the thought of bringing an attractive female into his orbit, even without any romantic possibilities by virtue of her marriage, is subtly but strongly working into his blood like a powerful drug. He hears Shaw hailing someone from up on deck.
“One of my boats is back,” thought Lingard. “News about Daman perhaps. I don’t care if he kicks. I wish he would. I would soon show her I can fight as well as I can handle the brig. Two praus. Only two praus. I wouldn’t mind if there were twenty. I would sweep ‘em off the sea — I would blow ‘em out of the water — I would make the brig walk over them. ‘Now,’ I’d say to her, ‘you who are not afraid, look how it’s done!’”
Lingard thoughts are running wild, thinking of impressing a lady with his prowess. “He felt light. He had the sensation of being whirled high in the midst of an uproar and as powerless as a feather in a hurricane. He shuddered profoundly. His arms hung down, and he stood before the table staring like a man overcome by some fatal intelligence.”
The Syrens of greek mythology are not pure fiction, as women can beguile the strongest–and especially the strongest– of men simply with their femininity. I just have to note in passing the irony of feminists trying to talk women out of these natural powers so that they can compete with men in traditional male spaces (business, politics, sports, etc.). Feminists hate the Syrens because part of their power depends on their physical beauty, their youth and sex appeal, and not all women are beautiful. It makes one wonder if, besides envying the achievements of men, feminism is a form of intrasexual competition. Feminists try to “empower” beautiful women by disabling their feminine power and thereby making them less alluring to men, thereby increasing the odds for the uglies such as themselves of getting a decent man.
But to continue. Carter arrives at the brig requesting to speak with Lingard, and Shaw is back to his old tricks. ” ‘Don’t you fret yourself, young man,’ said Shaw in a superior manner; ‘he knows all about it.’ ” As if waving away a flunkey.
But Lingard is up on deck eager to receive the company of the yacht. ” ‘What can be his game?’ thought Carter, impressed by the powerful and wild aspect of that figure. ‘He’s changed somehow since I saw him first,’ he reflected. It struck him the change was serious, not exactly for the worse, perhaps — and yet… Lingard smiled at him from the poop. “
Soon the first small boat arrives alongside the brig carrying crew and passengers from the yacht. Lingard is also awaiting news of the two boats he dispatched to look for D’Alcacer and Mr. Travers, who have apparently been kidnapped. Lingard tries to be all business, but knowing that there is a lady waiting for him in his cabin has him off kilter. Approaching the door to his quarters he overhears several men from the yacht opining on what this strange Captain Lingard might be up to:
“Oh, he’s one of them skippers going about loose. The brig’s his own, I am thinking. He just goes about in her looking for what he may pick up honest or dishonest. My brother-in-law has served two commissions in these seas, and was telling me awful yarns about what’s going on in them God-forsaken parts. Likely he lied, though. Them man-of-war’s men are a holy terror for yarns. Bless you, what do I care who this skipper is? Let him do his best and don’t trouble your head. You won’t see him again in your life once we get clear.”
Lingard enters his cabin with a door slam:
The brig’s swing-lamp lighted the cabin with an extraordinary brilliance. Mrs. Travers had thrown back her hood. The radiant brightness of the little place enfolded her so close, clung to her with such force that it might have been part of her very essence. There were no shadows on her face; it was fiercely lighted, hermetically closed, of impenetrable fairness.
Mrs. Travers, though momentarily awestruck by the swashbuckling Lingard, quickly recovers : ” ‘You’ve given me your confidence. Now I want you to give me the life of these two men. The life of two men whom you do not know, whom to-morrow you will forget. It can be done. It must be done. You cannot refuse them to me.’ She waited.”
Hassim and Immada then enter the cabin. They confirm that Mr. Travers and D’Alcacer have been taken hostage by Daman.
Hassim, lounging with his back against the closed door, kept his eye on him watchfully and Immada’s dark and sorrowful eyes rested on the face of the white woman. Mrs. Travers felt as though she were engaged in a contest with them; in a struggle for the possession of that man’s strength and of that man’s devotion.
Immada, as the other female, recognizes the power that Mrs. Travers is wielding over Lingard: ” ‘Do not! Do not look at that woman!’ cried Immada. ‘O! Master — look away…’ Hassim threw one arm round the girl’s neck. Her voice sank. ‘O! Master — look at us.’ “
Lingard is essential to the restoration of Hassim as the rightful ruler of Wajo. He has heretofore shown remarkable focus and devotion to the cause, but Mrs. Travers is a sudden complicating force.
Every moment that fatal illusion clung closer to [Lingard’s] soul — like a garment of light — like an armour of fire. He was unwilling to face the facts. All his life — till that day — had been a wrestle with events in the daylight of this world, but now he could not bring his mind to the consideration of his position.
But Lingard does manage, with effort, to assess the situation clearly. He sees Daman’s game, the taking of the hostages to draw Lingard away from his brig, from his fortress:
They fear the brig because when I am on board her, the brig and I are one. An armed man — don’t you see? Without the brig I am disarmed, without me she can’t strike. So Daman thinks. He does not know everything but he is not far off the truth. He says to himself that if I man the boats to go after these whites into the lagoon then his Illanuns will get the yacht for sure — and perhaps the brig as well. If I stop here with my brig he holds the two white men and can talk as big as he pleases. Belarab believes in me no doubt, but Daman trusts no man on earth.
Lingard resolves to go alone in search of the hostages. He thinks if he can find Belarab he will be able to negotiate their safe return. This of course means leaving the brig as captain, and Lingard no longer trusts his mate Shaw. Intuitively he transfers his trust to Carter:
“Here! Take this,” said Lingard, who re-entered the cabin fumbling about his neck. Carter mechanically extended his hand. “What’s this for?” he asked, looking at a small brass key attached to a thin chain. “Powder magazine. Trap door under the table. The man who has this key commands the brig while I am away. The serang understands. You have her very life in your hand there.” Carter looked at the small key lying in his half-open palm. “I was just telling Mrs. Travers I didn’t trust you — not altogether…” “I know all about it,” interrupted Lingard, contemptuously. “You carry a blamed pistol in your pocket to blow my brains out — don’t you? What’s that to me? I am thinking of the brig. I think I know your sort. You will do.”
Lingard prepares to leave the ship, assuring Mrs. Travers that she will be safe and that he shall succeed in returning her husband and his friend.
It seemed to him that he was saying good-bye to all the world, that he was taking a last leave of his own self. Mrs. Travers did not say a word, but Immada threw herself between them and cried: “You are a cruel woman! You are driving him away from where his strength is. You put madness into his heart, O! Blind — without pity — without shame!…”
Lingard is undeterred, about to descend into the dinghy when Mrs. Travers asserts herself: “ ‘I am coming with you,’ declared Mrs. Travers suddenly in a tone of unalterable decision. “
So she would go with Lingard and that was that. Only Carter attempts to protest, but Lingard waves him away. Edith Travers now holds the reins on Captain Tom Lingard.
The couple silently disappear into the darkness, and the obtuse Shaw informs Carter of his opinion:
“Gone away — did you say? And carried off the lady with him?” discoursed Shaw very loud in the doorway. “Did he? Well, I am not surprised. What can you expect from a man like that, who leaves his ship in an open roadstead without — I won’t say orders — but without as much as a single word to his next in command? And at night at that! That just shows you the kind of man. Is this the way to treat a chief mate? I apprehend he was riled at the little al-ter-cation we had just before you came on board. I told him a truth or two — but — never mind.”
Shaw occasionally sounds out big words to have the listener know that his vocabulary exceeds his present station. He thinks Lingard’s sudden departure and the promoting of Carter is because he “told him a truth or two”. Such is Shaw’s sense of self-importance. Shaw has still not processed the new reality that Carter is in charge of the brig.
Lingard and Edith Travers arrive at the Emma at dawn and are greeted by Jorgenson. Mrs. Travers appears about to faint and Lingard puts his arm around her waist just in case, but gets a somewhat sharp rebuke, Mrs. Travers insists that she is stronger than Lingard imagines, that he best do away with any conceptions of her as a shrinking violet. Lingard tentatively accepts her claim. The revived corpse that is Jorgenson suddenly notices the new Tom Lingard:
Woman! That’s what I say. That’s just about the last touch — that you, Tom Lingard, red-eyed Tom, King Tom, and all those fine names, that you should leave your weapons twenty miles behind you, your men, your guns, your brig that is your strength, and come along here with your mouth full of fight, bare-handed and with a woman in tow. — Well — well!
The “Farce”
Mr. Travers and D’Alcacer have been returned to the Emma. One of the first things that Mr. Travers notices about his wife is that she has changed into new clothes:
“I had no clothes with me but what I stood in,” said Mrs. Travers. “I found my yachting costume too heavy. It was intolerable. I was soaked in dew when I arrived. So when these things were produced for my inspection…”
“By enchantment,” muttered Mr. Travers in a tone too heavy for sarcasm …
“A most appropriate costume for this farce,” he continued. “But do you mean to wear it in open daylight about the decks?” “Indeed I do,” said Mrs. Travers. “D’Alcacer has seen me already and he didn’t seem shocked.” “You should,” said Mr. Travers, “try to get yourself presented with some bangles for your ankles so that you may jingle as you walk.”
For Mr. Travers, the unreality of Lingard’s world is no reality at all. He refuses to lend his ear to any of Lingard’s “rascalities”. What of this hubbub with the natives, intrigues, civil strife? Absurd. Mounting frustrations cause Mr. Travers to lash out at his wife, though in a typically measured, English way:
“You have a scorn in you for the serious side of life, for the ideas and the ambitions of the social sphere to which you belong.” He stopped because his wife had clasped again her hands behind her head and was no longer looking at him. “It’s perfectly obvious,” he began again. “We have been living amongst most distinguished men and women and your attitude to them has been always so — so negative! You would never recognize the importance of achievements, of acquired positions. I don’t remember you ever admiring frankly any political or social success.”
Mr. Travers does not invite our sympathy. He is the unimaginative industrialist, the bean counter, the square against all romance and fun. Yet we owe him consideration. Mr. Travers’ charge of a refusal to recognize the importance of achievements and acquired positions (through achievement) is a shoe that would fit many of us today, in the way I have previously compared us wealthy Westerners to the fictional Mrs. Travers. To recap: we now have industrial scale agriculture to reliably feed us, sanitation and medicine to stave off deadly diseases, and automobiles, air conditioning, the internet, and on and on, thanks to the achievers of this world, the scientists, the industrialists, the innovators. And for all that we now have powerful political groups at work in the West, e.g. the Democratic Socialists of America, or Islamic groups, who take a decidedly negative view of all these Western wonders–though they still use them. In particular, they scorn the one demographic who brought the lion’s share of all of these wonders: European white males whose minds were formed by the cultural and intellectual legacy of Judea and Athens. Many of the anti-Western screeds originate in the universities, and nowadays the universities are dominated by women, both faculty and students. Our reflexive praise of females achieving in traditionally male spheres, and the swarming of females into these spaces [9] has produced socio-political movements of very much the kinds of characters whom Mr. Travers is sharply berating in his wife: the obtuse aristocratic female who, though intelligent, does not understand the vast array of supports which make her privileged existence possible.
The Captain’s Confidant
Mrs. Travers, we later learn, had accompanied Lingard to Belarab’s stockade to negotiate the release of her husband and D’Alcacer. Again Mrs. Travers easily persuaded him to include her:
It seemed to her that she could not let him go, and she didn’t know what to say till it occurred to her to make use of the power she knew she had over him. She would try it again. “I am coming with you,” she declared with decision. “You don’t suppose I could remain here in suspense for hours, perhaps.” He dropped her hand suddenly as if it had burnt him — “Oh, yes, of course,” he mumbled with an air of confusion.
Inside the stockade Lingard, Jorgenson, and Mrs. Travers seat themselves for the negotiations, which, to Mrs. Travers, are utterly cryptic.
She became aware suddenly of a soft murmur, and glancing at Lingard she saw him in an attitude of impassive attention. The momentous negotiations had begun, and it went on like this in low undertones with long pauses and in the immobility of all the attendants squatting on the ground, with the distant figure of Daman far off in the shade towering over all the assembly. But in him, too, Mrs. Travers could not detect the slightest movement while the slightly modulated murmurs went on enveloping her in a feeling of peace.
Then, very suddenly, which Mrs. Travers experiences as if waking from a dream, the negotiations are complete. Daman strides forth and shakes hands with Lingard: “Great is your power,” he said, in a pleasant voice. “The white men are going to be delivered to you.”
Daman continues:
“… you and I are men that have real power. Yet there is a truth that you and I can confess to each other. Men’s hearts grow quickly discontented. Listen. The leaders of men are carried forward in the hands of their followers; and common men’s minds are unsteady, their desires changeable, and their thoughts not to be trusted. You are a great chief they say. Do not forget that I am a chief, too, and a leader of armed men.” “I have heard of you, too,” said Lingard in a composed voice …
Mrs. Travers, her hand resting lightly on Lingard’s arm, had the sensation of acting in a gorgeously got up play on the brilliantly lighted stage of an exotic opera whose accompaniment was not music but the varied strains of the all-pervading silence.
For Mrs. Travers, Lingard’s world is one of high adventure, romance, and intrigue, because she does not nor ever will experience it as a man who is also fighting to stay alive and financially solvent.
Following the return of Mr. Travers and D’Alcacer, Lingard and Edith are standing by the rail of the Emma, and Mrs. Travers tells Lingard what she had felt earlier, like she was a character in some splendid opera while walking out of the stockade on his arm. Lingard then describes his experience of opera, back when he was a gold prospector:
“Some of us used to come down to Melbourne with our pockets full of money. I daresay it was poor enough to what you must have seen, but once I went to a show like that. It was a story acted to music. All the people went singing through it right to the very end.”
“How it must have jarred on your sense of reality,” said Mrs. Travers, still not looking at him. “You don’t remember the name of the opera?” “No. I never troubled my head about it. We — our lot never did.”
“But that story with music I am telling you of, Mrs. Travers, was not a tale for children. I assure you that of the few shows I have seen that one was the most real to me. More real than anything in life.” Mrs. Travers, remembering the fatal inanity of most opera librettos, was touched by these words as if there had been something pathetic in this readiness of response; heard a starved man talking of the delight of a crust of dry bread.
To the culturally well-nourished such as Mrs. Travers, Lingard’s experience of the opera may have contained an element of pathos, but then Lingard likely experienced the opera, second rate though it may have been, on a more visceral and profound level than Mrs. Travers could ever know. The sophisticate will smile at a rube like Captain Lingard who marvels at second rate art, but the posh environs of the former, which has been constant throughout his or her life, has correspondingly succored them from the rough and tumble, the raw pain which the world mercilessly inflicts on those with fewer layers of insulation. The emotional dung heap accumulated by those who have suffered can nourish the most beautiful flowers. Hardship of course produces many more thoughtless brutes than aficionados of high art, but the ones that it does produce are often the most profound.
Mrs. Travers then says to Lingard:
“Do you know the greatest difference there is between us? It is this: That I have been living since my childhood in front of a show and that I never have been taken in for a moment by its tinsel and its noise or by anything that went on on the stage. Do you understand what I mean, Captain Lingard?”
Edith Travers is perceptive enough to see decadence in high society, when refinement and culture have become pretense. The educational problem that aristocracies of old faced, and nowadays we the peoples of technologically advanced, wealthy Western societies face, is that we are so far removed from the basic human conditions from which the most profound wisdom was derived and expressed that we are in danger of losing touch with it.
This is why Jean-Jaques Rousseau allows his hypothetical prepubescent pupil Emile only one book: Robinson Crusoe . Rousseau wants the boy’s ideas to remain firmly connected to his experiences as a boy, not to get attached to opinion which leads to vanity and harmful inflammations of the imagination.
Jean-Jaques expresses to the reader the general sentiment that he hates all books–including, implicitly but especially, the book of books, the guide of belief and conduct, the Bible. Books act as intermediaries between men and things; they attach men to the opinions of others rather than forcing them to understand on their own or leaving them in ignorance. They excite the imagination, increasing thereby the desires, the hopes, and the fears beyond the realm of the necessary. [10]
Rousseau wants the boy to remain a civilized savage until the time comes to marry. It is through the sexual passion, cultivated into love for a woman, that Emile will enter society, for it is only at that stage that he will be capable of understanding the reason for social duties, which first and foremost are for the sake of his wife and children.
Otherwise we produce adults like the ones Dr. Gad Saad describes in his recent book Suicidal Empathy: those who know little else than opinions on things, and get attached to opinions which are dangerously detached from reality and common sense. Such as those who advocate releasing violent criminals out into the public out of empathy for the criminals who (very likely) endured horribly abusive childhoods. Their empathy is for the criminals, not the good people who may become their next victim. “The political scientist William Voegeli argues that so-called liberal compassion is nothing short of ‘pious preening,’ as instantiated by ’empathy crusaders.’ He is spot-on.” [11] Putting on the show of moral rectitude is tantamount to actually being moral. This is why Rousseau argued, seemingly paradoxically, that a youngster raised as the natural savage, focused almost entirely on himself, would develop a strong enough bond with his own nature and nature in general that when he entered society (e.g. the job market and the dating market) he would not so easily be carried away by opinions, fads, fashion. He would instinctively resist “pious preening”, knowing that it is immoral and false.
Anyway, during their tete a tete, Edith Travers notices that Lingard has a slip of paper in his hand. What could that be? From whom could that have come in a land of illiterate savages?
The letter is from Carter. The young officer is perhaps already too good at his job. The sort of man Lingard knows he can place complete trust in–thus he was wise in deposing Shaw for this man–but ironically in this case Carter has precipitated new troubles for Lingard. Carter explains that he had become concerned that neither Lingard nor the Lady had returned to the brig for several days and there were savages blocking the entrance to the harbor with their war praus. Carter weighed anchor and anchored the brig closer to the entrance and then opened fire on the praus and sank them. The pirates in the praus ran away (these are Daman’s men). Now with the danger gone, Carter will attempt to pull the yacht off of the shoal with the next high tide. He explains to Lingard that he is a seaman, that the safety of the ships are his first duty.
Lingard understands–fully– and Mrs. Travers understands that the compact Lingard had just so carefully negotiated with Daman, which included the release of the hostages, is now broken. Jaffir, Lingard’s trusted messenger, spells out Lingard’s necessary course of action–return the hostages to Daman to restore trust. Lingard has to break the news to Edith, but she surprises him in her willingness to follow his direction, her understanding of his situation:
…where was there another woman in the world who would have taken it like this? And he reflected that in truth and courage there is found wisdom. It seemed to him that till Mrs. Travers came to stand by his side he had never known what truth and courage and wisdom were. With his eyes on her face and having been told that in her eyes he appeared worthy of being both commanded and entreated, he felt an instant of complete content, a moment of, as it were, perfect emotional repose.
D’Alcacer accepts the news, that he must voluntarily return to captivity, and he is the one to break the news to Mr. Travers, who has spent most of the past few days laying supine on a makeshift bed looking like a sick animal. But he has not lost his wit, nor his disdain for Lingard:
“My wife has been stuffing your head with some more of her nonsense … My dear d’Alcacer, that craze has got such a hold of her that she would tell you any sort of tale. Social impostors, mediums, fortune-tellers, charlatans of all sorts do obtain a strange influence over women. You have seen that sort of thing yourself. I had a talk with her before dinner. The influence that bandit has got over her is incredible.”
The fact that Mr. Travers firmly maintains that the whole affair is some farcical charade means that he doesn’t care one way or another that he should stay aboard the Emma or return to the stockade. “ ‘Did you think I was going to make a fuss?’ asked Mr. Travers in a very low voice. ‘I assure you I would rather go than stay here. You didn’t think that? You have lost all sense of reality, of probability. I was just thinking this evening that I would rather be anywhere than here looking on at you. At your folly…’ ”
Which provokes a yelp from Mrs. Travers: “Martin!” she exclaims, causing even the moribund Jorgenson to momentarily arrest his habitual mumbling to himself.
After this sharp rebuke of his wife, Mr. Travers adds: “ ‘By the by,’ he said, checking himself, ‘I suppose the fellow understands thoroughly that we are wealthy. He could hardly doubt that.’ ” He then explains that he might be willing to make a significant payment to expedite the charade and would appreciate it if Edith would just snap out of her craze so that they can get on with their cruise.
Lady Luck
Hassim’s hope of ruling Wajo, his birthright, is fading. Daman and Tengga’s men are on the march. We see Hassim and his sister Immada cautiously moving about the Settlement on the Shore of Refuge, sensing that they may soon be reduced to fugitives. They are looking for their trusted messenger, Jaffir. They will pass the gold ring to him, the surest way to get it to Tom Lingard. They need Lingard’s help now. Lingard swore by the ring he would not fail them if it ever came to that.
Jaffir makes his way to the Emma where he finds the impassive Jorgenson. He explains his charge and that it is nearly impossible for him to approach the stockade, Belarab’s compound, from the beach without being captured himself. Jorgenson hardly cares, as he cares little for anything nowadays, but some lingering respect for Captain Lingard is sufficient to turn a few gears in his aged brain. After some thought Jorgenson says to Jaffir that the only person capable of getting inside Belarab’s compound is the white woman. In addition, says Jorgenson, Mrs. Travers should be the one to hand Lingard the ring. Jaffir is momentarily shocked by the proposal, but after some thought, concedes that it is their best option.
Getting Edith Travers to listen, much less agree, is another matter, as she has decided that she no longer wants anything to do with Jorgenson. But Jorgenson prevails in the end, telling it to her straight:
“I will tell you why,” said Jorgenson’s blank voice. “It’s because there is no one on board this hulk that can hope to get alive inside that stockade. This morning you told me yourself that you were ready to die — for Tom — or with Tom. Well, risk it then. You are the only one that has half a chance to get through — and Tom, maybe, is waiting.”
Jaffir and two paddlers transport the white woman ashore. Approaching the stockade Mrs. Travers is presented with an impenetrable wall of wood. She hears Lingard’s voice emanating from within, and moves forward with outstretched arms, nearly swooning and falling against the wall. Lingard is trying to tell her that she must lower herself to get through opening–he’s unable to get them to unlock the main gate.
She understood what she had to do. She put her head and shoulders through the opening, was at once seized under the arms by an eager grip and felt herself pulled through with an irresistible force and with such haste that her scarf was dragged off her head, its fringes having caught in the rough timber. The same eager grip lifted her up, stood her on her feet without her having to make any exertion toward that end. She became aware that Lingard was trying to say something, but she heard only a confused stammering expressive of wonder and delight in which she caught the words “You… you… “ deliriously repeated. He didn’t release his hold of her; his helpful and irresistible grip had changed into a close clasp, a crushing embrace, the violent taking possession by an embodied force that had broken loose and was not to be controlled any longer.
Once that Mrs. Travers had regained her composure, had freed herself from Lingard’s intoxicatingly powerful embrace, she proceeds to check on her husband, who is sulking and beset by fits of shivering. Meanwhile Lingard sits down on a long bench next to D’Alcacer, wondering aloud about what Mrs. Travers thinks of her husband, who appears a little deranged and a bit pathetic. D’Alcacer sharply corrects him on his appraisal. Even in his present semi-delirious state, Mr. and Mrs. Travers understand each other better than “anybody within a hundred miles from here”. Which includes you, Captain Lingard, in case you may be thinking that you have moved her soul in some special way.
“What do you know?”
“Men and women, Captain Lingard, which you…”
“I don’t know any woman.”
“You have spoken the strictest truth there,” said d’Alcacer, and for the first time Lingard turned his head slowly and looked at his neighbour on the bench.
D’Alcacer, having established his greater command of the subject matter, continues:
“She is a representative woman and yet one of those of whom there are but very few at any time in the world. Not that they are very rare but that there is but little room on top. They are the iridescent gleams on a hard and dark surface. For the world is hard, Captain Lingard, it is hard, both in what it will remember and in what it will forget. It is for such women that people toil on the ground and underground and artists of all sorts invoke their inspiration.”
“No, there are not many of them. And yet they are all. They decorate our life for us. They are the gracious figures on the drab wall which lies on this side of our common grave. They lead a sort of ritual dance, that most of us have agreed to take seriously. It is a very binding agreement with which sincerity and good faith and honour have nothing to do. Very binding. Woe to him or her who breaks it. Directly they leave the pageant they get lost.”
Lingard turned his head sharply and discovered d’Alcacer looking at him with profound attention. “They get lost in a maze,” continued d’Alcacer, quietly. “They wander in it lamenting over themselves. I would shudder at that fate for anything I loved. Do you know, Captain Lingard, how people lost in a maze end?” he went on holding Lingard by a steadfast stare. “No?… I will tell you then. They end by hating their very selves, and they die in disillusion and despair.”
Bible scholars translate the original Hebrew for helpmate, who is Eve, as “equal in opposition”:
God created woman as a helpmate for Adam. The Hebrew word used is k’negdo, which when translated with nuance in English yields approximately his “equal in opposition”: Furthermore, if we dissect the word literally, k’negdo means “as opposed to him.” This implies that the woman helps her man in part by challenging him (to be better). Every man in a good marriage knows how true that is. As my longtime friend, former presidential speech writer Bruce Herschensohn, once put it to me, “In the beginning God created man and critic.” [12]
A man thus meets his match in a woman not only for her beauty (in his eye) and her genuine love for him, but also as a sparring partner. In a functional romantic coupling the woman frequently inflicts hurt on the man, but the hurt is strategic in the same way that a good sparring partner in boxing will hit at your vulnerabilities to better prepare you for the real fights.
A woman tests a man’s seriousness. She plays with him, taunts him. She wants to know how deep his emotional and spiritual roots go. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says: “woman must obey and find a depth for her surface. Surface is woman’s nature, a mobile, stormy film on shallow water. Man’s nature, however, is deep: his torrent roars in subterranean caves; woman senses his strength but can make no sense of it.” [13] The pageant women lead, as D’Alcacer puts it, is a foil to masculine virtues, the virtues of pursuing truth, having honor, serving God. Women are of course a source of great –if not the greatest–pleasure for men, but they are also a danger to men. Men have to learn to master them. In a recent podcast Jeremy Boreing said:
God tells Eve, “your desire will be for your husband, but he will rule over you.” The kind of desire being described there isn’t affection, but the desire a leopard feels for its prey. The same voice that said “let there be light” and light was, also declared as a fact of the universe that women would want to devour men, but men would rule over them anyway. [14]
Lingard is archetypally masculine. But as a bachelor he is still not fully formed as a man, which is becoming evident as we witness Lingard so easily fall under the spell of Edith Travers. Not merely by desire for her touch, for female companionship, but because he is not practiced in handling women.
A man tests himself against the hazards of the world – war, business ventures, the boxing ring – but he must also hazard his self-identity, his sense of worth and honor, by submitting it to a woman’s judgment. Her judgment is a test of his rectitude against her wiles, a contest a good woman hopes to lose (a bad woman, conversely, is looking for an animal who will carry her to hell, e.g., women who propose marriage to serial murderers on death row). There is no guarantee that a great man in the public arena can withstand the force of the feminine. The downfall of the great man by the femme fatale is a common literary theme.
The man who succeeds with both not only fully mature, but brings forth the most beautiful qualities that women have to offer, the very qualities that men will build, write, paint, preach … –build civilization for.
Feminists of course dispute all of this. They will say that any idea that women are inherently nihilistic without the imposition of masculine ordering (I.e., “the patriarchy”) is antiquated nonsense. Let us now consider this.
Feminism is Satanism
Because men must rule and take responsibility, are the orderers and builders of civilizations (historically this is true), women are therefore taken less seriously, like the court jester to a king.
Feminists hate this arrangement, and it was not lost on the earlier feminists who, because they were operating in a culture suffused in Christian teachings, saw that they were rebelling against God as did Satan, particularly as portrayed by Milton in Paradise Lost. The early (proto-)feminists not only acknowledged but celebrated their allegiance with Satan, including such luminaries as Percy Bysshe Shelley:
The doomed and evil Satan, the villain of Milton’s Paradise Lost, is for Shelley transformed into the ideal symbol of Romantic rebellion and freedom. Shelley viewed the diabolical passions as the opposite side of the typically masculine characteristics of order, reason, law, hierarchy, obedience, and authority. God, he believed, was the source of order and all that is male, while Satan, represented by the serpent, was the source of passion and creativity. Men and women, in his view, were not meant to be children of God, but rather opposing forces. “Woman and Satan are both part of nature,” Per Faxneld, author of Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Women in Nineteenth-Century Culture, explains, “while God and males are connected to a hierarchical, unjust civilization.” [15]
Similarly the famous feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton co-authored The Woman’s Bible, wherein she provided “a counter-myth where Eve is a heroine and Satan a charitable philosophical instructor of woman.” [15](p. 51) The wise serpent approaches Eve not because she’s an easier mark, but because she’s the more promising pupil.
It is not clear whether or not Adam knew that it was the forbidden fruit when Eve handed it to him, but at the very least Adam did not do his due diligence, for God had spoken to him directly about the fruit from the tree of knowing good and evil. I think it was probably a mixture of succumbing to the same temptation that Eve did, to curiosity toward something pleasing to the senses and forbidden, combined with the fact that Adam loved his woman and didn’t want to upset her by refusing. Forgetting one’s duties and good sense to please a woman is a well-known defect in the human male. And so the deed is done and God metes out the punishment, which for Eve–for women–means no more worldly power. You shall love your husband and he shall rule you. A woman’s place is in the domestic sphere.
Well the feminists have made impressive progress in their rebuke of God’s decree for womankind, that must be admitted. Legions of women now operate in previously male dominated spheres such as medicine, law, and education. The scale of the change has indeed been astonishing and has verified many feminist claims about women’s competence outside the home. Moreover, feminists have largely won the culture. There are anti-feminists and men’s rights activists who oppose them, but they are largely ignored.
For now. I doubt history will side with the feminists. Feminism is a rebellion against nature, in the very least, even if you do not accept the Christian worldview. Feminists have weaponized women’s natural proclivity to poke at men’s weaknesses not to strengthen men but to demoralize them, weaken them, ruin them so that women can take their places. They extol masculinity in human females, pitting them against males at doing masculine things, but endlessly inveigh against males merely acting in accordance with their nature (e.g. “toxic masculinity”).
Masculinity in females attenuates their attractiveness to men. This must certainly have something to do with the collapsing marriage rates and the rising ranks of single men in Western, feminized nations. [16][17]
Feminism suppresses the masculine drive for creating beyond merely mating. How many structures have men built, how many expeditions launched, symphonies composed, poems written, science progressed, athletic feats performed, for the attention and approval of women? Science may seem utterly unerotic, but then James W. Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, once said: “Almost everything I ever did, even as a scientist, was in the hope of meeting a pretty girl.”[18] But feminists insist that we must even the playing field everywhere. To what extent do you think the ugliness of modern art, the rise of work-shy young men [19], the lackluster performance of males in the education system and their refusal to improve, what Richard Reeves calls the “male malaise” [20], is the result of women refusing their natural femininity in order to duke it out with the men in the world of achievement, of money-making, of politics? What does the feminist woman have to entice a man outside of sex? Had Beatrice been a boss-girl would there be a Divine Comedy?
In a recent article titled The Great Feminization, author Helen Andrews summarizes a book by the same title which was authored by someone who goes by the name of J. Stone. The central thesis is that the full force of feminization of our society, of our institutions, which has been going strong since the 1960’s, is only now beginning to register. Why? Because feminization requires that a demographic threshold be passed for the institution to become feminized. Previous arguments about women’s role as, say, Supreme Court Justices, centered on the difference in psychological traits between the sexes. Feminist advocates would point to women’s greater empathy which would give them a much-needed feminine perspective on justice. Whereas the Anti-feminists might say that women are too emotional for rational, unbiased application of the law. Such psychological traits exist in averages, but we all know of women who are logical like a man, and men who are emotional like a women.
The clear and distinct difference comes, however, when we look at the group behaviors of males and females. All male groups will almost invariably be hierarchical and rules based. A healthy male hierarchy will be one based on competence, as opposed to one based on brute force. All-female groups will resemble an extended family. It will be more care oriented and risk adverse. It will try to ensure that the most vulnerable have their needs met. The so called ethic of care prevails here. This may sound like a much better arrangement than the male style of socialization, except that all-female groups tend be highly conformist, and in particular, are very punitive toward dissenters.
So feminization happens when there is a large enough female demographic in any given organization such that the organization takes on this distinctly female group dynamic. This is now happening in America and throughout the West as a result of affirmative action and the endless cheering for women going into traditional male institutions. For Andrews, feminization of the legal system is the most troubling:
A feminized legal system might resemble the Title IX courts for sexual assault on college campuses established in 2011 under President Obama. These proceedings were governed by written rules and so technically could be said to operate under the rule of law. But they lacked many of the safeguards that our legal system holds sacred, such as the right to confront your accuser, the right to know what crime you are accused of, and the fundamental concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties, not in how one party feels about an act in retrospect. These protections were abolished because the people who made these rules sympathized with the accusers, who were mostly women, and not with the accused, who were mostly men. [21]
Females decree that the most vulnerable need to be protected, and it is the job of the justice system to supply the protection. In the case of a sexual tryst gone wrong, women instinctively see their fellow woman as the vulnerable one, and so denying the man the right to confront the woman making the charge is a justified measure in keeping her safe. By any traditional sense of justice in which everyone is equal before the law, this is not justice at all.
Feminists such as Dahlia Lithwick, however, still see this as progress in the right direction:
Dahlia Lithwick opens her book Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America with a scene from the Supreme Court in 2016 during oral arguments over a Texas abortion law. The three female justices, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan, “ignored the formal time limits, talking exuberantly over their male colleagues.” Lithwick celebrated this as “an explosion of bottled-up judicial girl power” that “afforded America a glimpse of what genuine gender parity or near parity might have meant for future women in powerful American legal institutions.”
Lithwick lauds women for their irreverent attitude to the law’s formalities, which, after all, originated in an era of oppression and white supremacy. [21]
Recall Milton’s Satan: “Among the Spirits beneath, whom I seduced With other promises and other vaunts Than to submit, boasting I could subdue The Omnipotent. Ay me! they little know How dearly I abide that boast so vain” [Book 4]
Cancel culture is a direct result of feminization. Andrews cites the case of former Harvard president Larry Summers, who gently suggested that the reason for the less than 50% representation of women in the physical sciences may have to do with biologically based differences in aptitude and interest. Summers soon learned what happens when the womenfolk get offended. “When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT. Larry Summers had to resign as president of Harvard.
While there have been female faculty at universities dating back to the 19th century, they have always been in the minority. Nowadays, in many universities the females outnumber the males. And as a result the universities have transformed socially into the feminine mode, in which protecting the vulnerable from outside threats is prioritized. But this includes policing upsetting ideas, such as sex differences in mathematical aptitude. The original mission of the university was to provide researchers with an oasis for free inquiry, the search for truth wherever it leads, without having to fear the fate of Socrates. The universities, as with the legal system, cannot function as such if they are feminized.
I do agree with Andrew’s proposed solution to this problem, which is simply to end affirmative action and dispense with the erroneous idea that under-representation of females in a given field necessarily means sexist discrimination. “Feminization is not an organic result of women outcompeting men. It is an artificial result of social engineering, and if we take our thumb off the scale it will collapse within a generation.” Texaco, Goldman-Sachs, and Coca Cola have all paid out nine figure settlements to complainants alleging sex discrimination in their hiring. The result is corporations promoting women as a safety precaution. It is effectively illegal to employ too few women. Surely this needs to end.
And to top it all off, feminism, for all of its smashing successes, has not made women happier. In fact it appears to be making women less happy. The now famous study by Justin Wolfers and Betsy Stevenson published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2009 found that while women are succeeding by nearly all feminist metrics–education, career, representation in government, etc.–their reported subjective well-being has steadily declined since the 1970’s, both absolutely and relative to men. [22]
But that’s only to be expected if you accept the case I am making here. Subvert the rational order, try to turn women into men to sate your envy, sabotage the natural checks and balances of male versus female power, and it’s almost guaranteed that we are going to be the worse for it.
All is Lost
We are back onboard the Emma, and Jorgenson is approached by one of Tengga’s messengers who says that Tengga wants “to have long talk” with him. Jorgenson takes this as bad news. “This invitation meant that Lingard had made no move. Was Tom asleep or altogether mad?” Jorgenson thought.
The messenger claims that Hassim and Immada are now friendly with Tengga, but Jorgenson refuses to believe this. He tells the messenger to bring Hassim and Immada out to the Emma where they can confirm this to his face. Jaffir remarks acidly that Tengga would love to board the Emma with fifty war canoes. Jorgenson waves him away, telling the messenger that he would gladly receive Tengga if they bring Hassim and Immada.
As the envoy paddles away, Jorgenson turns to Jaffir and says, portentously: “Death amongst friends is but a festival.”
Meanwhile Lingard is getting briefed by Belarab on the present state of affairs. Belarab notices the change in Lingard. His fierceness is gone, replaced by a dreamy, unconcerned attitude. Reports are coming in of Daman’s fleet making for the Emma, and that the white man (Jorgenson) is not putting up a fight, he is not defending his floating fortress of munitions. But it is a foggy morning and no one can see anything clearly. Lingard dismisses the reports. D’Alcacer appears, and Lingard says to him:
“I don’t think there is anything going on. Listen how still everything is. The only way of bringing the matter to a test would be to persuade Belarab to let his men march out and make an attack on Tengga’s stronghold this moment. Then we would learn something. But I couldn’t persuade Belarab to march out into this fog. Indeed, an expedition like this might end badly. I myself don’t believe that all Tengga’s people are on the lagoon… Where is Mrs. Travers?” The question made d’Alcacer start by its abruptness which revealed the woman’s possession of that man’s mind.
As the morning fog lifted it became clear that a large raft of Tengga and Daman’s men were gathering around the Emma. Still shy of direct conflict, however, the Malays hang back. Belarab can see this and he says to his attendants: “The white man is being betrayed.” Still no fight from Jorgenson, no return fire from the Emma.
Jaffir sees Jorgenson place a cigar in his mouth and jump down the hatchway. Jaffir immediately jumps overboard.
He was still in the water when all the world was darkened round him as if the life of the sun had been blown out of it in a crash. A great wave came along and washed him on shore, while pieces of wood, iron, and the limbs of torn men were splashing round him in the water.
Jorgenson had ignited the powder magazine. Thanks to the smart work of the young Carter, both the brig and the schooner are anchored a safe distance away.
As far as Belarab is concerned, Lingard is now a nobody with no business here anymore.
Belarab turned away. His opinion had changed. He regarded Lingard no longer as a betrayed man but the effect was the same. He was no longer a man of any importance. What Belarab really wanted now was to see all the white people clear out of the lagoon as soon as possible.
And the white people cleared out. There was indeed nothing left here for Captain Tom Lingard. Hassim and Immada had been killed in the blast. All his great plans to install his friend and sworn ally as the rightful ruler of Wajo had quite literally gone up in smoke. Lingard’s failure to act, to assure Belarab and admonish Tengga from trying anything rash, had led directly to Jorgenson finding himself surrounded and deciding to blow it all up.
Just before parting with the company of the yacht, D’Alcacer asks Lingard how he thinks this great accident happened.
“What is an accident?” said Lingard with a great effort. “Where did you hear of such a thing? Accident! Don’t disturb me, Mr. d’Alcacer. I have just come back to life and it has closed on me colder and darker than the grave itself. Let me get used… I can’t bear the sound of a human voice yet.”
Jaffir survived the blast, but is mortally wounded.
“Can you hear me, O Jaffir?” asked Lingard. “I hear.” “I never had the ring. Who could bring it to me?” “We gave it to the white woman — may Jehannum be her lot!” “No! It shall be my lot,” said Lingard with despairing force, while Wasub raised both his hands in dismay. “For, listen, Jaffir, if she had given the ring to me it would have been to one that was dumb, deaf, and robbed of all courage.”
Lingard is aware of how drastically he has been reduced, echoing the fallen Othello (“That’s he that was Othello. Here I am.”) on several occasions. He asks Carter if he would still serve as mate aboard the Lightning. Carter replies: “I told you sir, I am your man, if you still want me.” To which Lingard replies: “The trouble is, Mr. Carter, that I am no longer the man to whom you spoke that night in Carimata.”
Goodbye to All That
Lingard wishes to meet with Edith one last time on the sandbank, early in the morning. D’Alcacer rows her ashore to the appointed place. She looks around at the desolate place, seeing no one. But shortly thereafter Lingard approaches. He has just finished with the burial ceremony for Jaffir.
Edith greets him defensively, as women often do when their emotions are running high: “Are you looking for a change in me? No. You won’t see it. Now I know that I couldn’t change even if I wanted to. I am made of clay that is too hard.”
“I am looking at you for the first time,” said Lingard. “I never could see you before. There were too many things, too many thoughts, too many people. No, I never saw you before. But now the world is dead.” He grasped her shoulders, approaching his face close to hers. She never flinched. “Yes, the world is dead,” she said. “Look your fill then. It won’t be for long.” He let her go as suddenly as though she had struck him.
Mrs. Travers still has the power to shock Lingard with the severity of her moods. But Lingard regains his composure and commands her to take his arm. She does so immediately. They walk the sands together and come up on a board standing up in the sand–Jaffir’s freshly dug grave.
“This is a grave,” said Lingard in a low voice, and still gazing at the heap of sand. “I had him taken out of the ship last night. Strange,” he went on in a musing tone, “how much a grave big enough for one man only can hold. His message was to forget everything.”
Edith Travers breaks.
“Don’t say a word,” said Lingard in an untroubled voice and never taking his eyes from her face. “I know already.”
“You can’t,” she cried. Her hand slipped off his shoulder. “Then why don’t you throw me into the sea?” she asked, passionately. “Am I to live on hating myself?”
“You mustn’t!” he said with an accent of fear. “Haven’t you understood long ago that if you had given me that ring it would have been just the same?”
“Am I to believe this? No, no! You are too generous to a mere sham. You are the most magnanimous of men but you are throwing it away on me. Do you think it is remorse that I feel? No. If it is anything it is despair. But you must have known that — and yet you wanted to look at me again.”
Tom Lingard had diverted all the depth and breadth of his great and gallant soul for what could only amount to a dalliance with a married woman. He was a bachelor bereft of female intimacy and who simply lost control when the natural passion suddenly arose for an unattainable woman, to which he responded with the romantic devotion of a knight of Arthurian legend. He had true friends in Hassim and Immada. He had made them promises. Edith Travers feels remorse for having caused such a loss for this man the enormity of which he has only beginning to calculate. Soon she will return to her husband, to civilization, to her comfortable life.
It was not till after she had passed Jaffir’s grave that Mrs. Travers stole a backward glance and discovered that she was alone. Lingard had left her to herself. She saw him sitting near the mound of sand, his back bowed, his hands clasping his knees, as if he had obeyed the invincible call of his great visions haunting the grave of the faithful messenger. Shading her eyes with her hand Mrs. Travers watched the immobility of that man of infinite illusions. He never moved, he never raised his head. It was all over. He was done with her. She waited a little longer and then went slowly on her way.
Why Tom Lingard?
It was the first thought that came to mind when I considered the matter of describing myself in fiction. Of course there are some aspects of Tom Lingard which are larger than life, for he is a fictional character, and some which, though certainly fun to entertain, do not describe me in the least. Lingard is a natural leader of men while I am more of a hermit (I recall when I got promoted to manager at Arthur Andersen and never feeling more uncomfortable with a title in my life). But what first came to mind were the moments when I felt like I understood the man completely. Particularly vivid in my memory were the opening scenes of the Rescue, where we find Tom Lingard tacking his brig through a maze of reefs and shoals to reach the anchorage, done with a level of expertise that requires a deep love to attain:
When heading toward the inshore shoals the brig was never put round till the quick, loud cries of the leadsmen announced that there were no more than three feet of water under her keel; and when standing toward the steep inner edge of the long reef, where the lead was of no use, the helm would be put down only when the cutwater touched the faint line of the bordering foam. Lingard’s love for his brig was a man’s love, and was so great that it could never be appeased unless he called on her to put forth all her qualities and her power, to repay his exacting affection by a faithfulness tried to the very utmost limit of endurance. Every flutter of the sails flew down from aloft along the taut leeches, to enter his heart in a sense of acute delight; and the gentle murmur of water alongside, which, continuous and soft, showed that in all her windings his incomparable craft had never, even for an instant, ceased to carry her way, was to him more precious and inspiring than the soft whisper of tender words would have been to another man. It was in such moments that he lived intensely, in a flush of strong feeling that made him long to press his little vessel to his breast. She was his perfect world full of trustful joy.
Thus encapsulating why I insist on keeping my own 8-ton cutter engineless, despite all the inconvenience and occasional panics. Put a reliable diesel engine in a sailboat and it’s just another piece of technology, a means to an end, a means of marine transport. Gone is the intuitive conceiving of the sailing craft as a kind of wild creature, like a bird or a dolphin, perfectly formed and constituted to operate in its environment with an efficiency that is not entirely calculable and that contains an element of mystery. The march of machine technology is intended to purge such mystery for predictability, to unfold the future in calculable ways so that we can all plan better. Eminently more practical for sure, but it comes at the expense of losing a lot of natural beauty in the world and any sense of spirit beyond our own desire to bend the world to our will. Mind-blowing technologies just to feed the appetites of humans reduced to animals at first approximation. A dreary wasteland of a future that is, no matter how nifty all the gadgetry might be.
Lingard is a bachelor, and the Lightning is his surrogate wife. She is his world full of trustful joy likely in part by necessity, as a man who never found much trustful joy in other humans likely carries some, to borrow some present-day psychobabble, emotional baggage. For humans are designed to pair bond and to rear children.
Socrates said that Eros is the longing for eternity, and that producing children is the ground floor expression of Eros. It does seem, however, that without the ground floor, anything beyond it that humans create can never carry the same sense of grounding in reality. This is half the reason, by my reckoning, for the sense of unreality of the novel. Eros is clearly strong with Lingard, for he is a grand figure, but lacking a wife and children he lacks the earthly foundation of a man’s soul. There’s a lot of romance to the story, but it’s as far-flung as the remote islands and waterways where it is set. Lingard’s foil is Mr. Travers, the businessman, the married man, who never changes his assessment of Lingard as a huckster. He repeatedly scolds his wife for being so daft as to grant Lingard any serious attention.
Lingard refused his place in English society, which would have been that of a common laborer working for pennies, or whatever scraps the likes of Mr. Travers would toss his way ( ”if I hadn’t been an adventurer, I would have had to starve or work at home for such people as you”).
His refusal pushed him to the fringes, which is certainly more romantic but also precarious. We learn that he did well enough as a gold prospector to buy the brig, which he employs as a tramp to earn money. If Lingard only wanted money he would have stuck with prospecting or some such thing. The brig is partly an indulgence for sure, for though she carries cargo, such vessels are becoming obsolete as working vessels, hence she’s partly a yacht. The brig is Lingard’s love. She is romantic, she is beautiful, and she is his home.
But women worthy of marriage will choose Mr. Travers over Lingard, no matter how much they may fantasize about getting with a swashbuckling sea captain. Social status rules women. They insist on it, particularly when choosing their mates. They want security and provision, and high-status men, or men likely to achieve high status, are their best bets and so the ones they pursue. Men like Lingard will have to look to lower class women, bohemians, prostitutes.
I identify with Lingard as one who refused his station in life and remained a bachelor. I could not and would not take the bit in my mouth, at least not long enough for any sort of a career. Unlike Lingard, however, I was able to land two good paying jobs, first with Arthur Andersen in Chicago, and then later with Merrill Lynch Commodities in Houston. Yes, I was laid off from Merrill in 2008, but my plan was to work maybe two or three more years to save up more money. I never looked for another job in the financial world. I would make do with what I had.
Even to this day, the thought of living an ordinary life in the suburbs, with a wife and kids, going to see a show every now and then, is like contemplating life in prison. When Merrill kicked me out I was half crazy because I had already tasted the life of high seas adventure, having circumnavigated from 2001-2004, and there was no going back to normie life, if there ever was any chance of that in the first place. There are some species of wild animals that will mutilate themselves if placed in a cage, compulsively pace (which I used to do), exhibit constant nervous stress. I am that sort of animal.
I had a deep disdain for polite society because of all the nonsense (by my lights), and polite society is largely ruled by women, so I guess I never really liked women that much. I grew up in an academic environment (on a New England prep school campus), my father was a teacher, and while I had teachers and professors who were both brilliant and men of substance, many were unserious people who had merely cultivated their intellects for status and respect. What Allan Bloom reported from Cornell in the 1960’s does not surprise me in the least:
These American professors were utterly disarmed, as were many German professors, when the constituency that they took for granted, of which they honestly believed they were independent, deserted or turned against them. Students and colleagues wanted to radicalize and politicize the university. To fulminate against Bible Belt preachers was one thing. In the world that counted for these professors, this could only bring approval. But to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. They were not in general strong men, although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were—that they alone manned the walls protecting civilization. Their collapse was merely pitiful, although their feeble attempts at self-justification frequently turned vicious. [23]
It is little wonder then that postmodernism would become so popular in the academy, for it offered these men an excuse, best of all, an excuse that flattered their prideful intellects. For the postmodern professors thought that they could see for the first time what even the writers of the Great Books could not, that they were deluded in thinking that they described reality, they could discern moral truths, that they could discover eternal truths. Such things are social constructs: the true, the good and the beautiful are whatever the dominant political class of the time says it is. Also, many dominant political classes were comprised of sexist pigs which is why women’s contributions to history are so scandalously omitted. The professors of the 1960’s were not spineless poltroons, as paleolithic scolds like Allan Bloom insist, but rather they were in possession of deeper insights by which they, as a matter of principle, threw in with the most popular moralists of the time. How convenient.
I was not so blissfully ignorant of all of this well into my forties (that is, not so blissful but largely ignorant). Still I always had a slight suspicion that all of this bashing of the great men of the past had less to do with righting historical injustices against the underrepresented, the downtrodden and defeated, and more to do with a burgeoning race of weak men accustomed to comfort and plenty knowing that they are pretty pitiful when measured against their forefathers. The feminists, who are intensely jealous of men, were their natural allies in mocking and deriding the men of the past, their courage, their bravery. While I had accepted feminism as inevitable, I do recall wondering why it was that if women were all feminists said they were, how come all the great leaders, builders, innovators, explorers, and scientists are men?
I had to prove myself, partly as an act of defiance of what the culture was telling me I was as a young man. When I set off in 2001 on what would become a world voyage, I didn’t even have a 12-volt system in my engineless gaff cutter Ruth Avery. I would navigate half the world by sextant only, including the Torres Strait and down around South Africa. I wanted to re-create, so much as I was capable of, the experiences of my seafaring heroes like Joshua Slocum (an unemployed clipper ship captain who became the first man to solo-circumnavigate the globe). I wanted to see the world through the eyes of a seaman, not a modern-day tourist of the “if it’s Tuesday this must be Cancoon” variety. That I made it without mishap is, looking back on it now, somewhat miraculous.
Naturally I was proud of myself and I wrote a book manuscript describing my voyage with a lot of high-minded philosophy mixed in. It was never published, which is a very good thing, as I have plenty in my past to torment me already.
Nonetheless in the attempt to find a publisher I got a clearer sense of the situation, which is that I had committed a sin against the culture. The publishing industry is as feminized as academia. Of course feminists, after explaining how imbecilic and awful men are, were never going to allow a man following in the footsteps of James Cook and Joshua Slocum to see the light of day. It wasn’t just with publishers and agents either. I was getting it a home, starting with my parents who were both dedicated feminists. I was eventually cowed into silence. I had lost confidence in myself and I clammed up. I very much appreciate Jacob Savage’s recent article “The Lost Generation”, where he presents compelling evidence that in recent decades male writers, especially straight white ones, have been systematically discriminated against in academia, publishing, and the entertainment industry. [24] David Maywald, in his book The Relentless War on Masculinity, writes: “The publishing industry is notoriously dominated by privileged White women, which is the reason why this book is being self-published.” [25] I needed to know that I was not the only one thinking these things.
Anyway, this is all to say that I identify with Lingard as an outcast, and a slightly bitter one if we are being honest, who found in his ship his one and only world of trustful joy. Yet it is a sub-optimal solution, even for a fiercely independent man like Tom Lingard, to live without intimate female companionship. It made him vulnerable to the femme fatale who is Edith Travers. In Mrs. Travers’ defense, she did not deliberately lead Lingard to ruin, rather she fell into his orbit, unable to resist the adventure and the attention of such an exotic man. That she actually felt remorse for her role in Lingard’s fate places her on the top shelf of women, at least by today’s standards.
Which brings me to the second source of unreality in the novel, or perhaps the ultimate source of unreality, which is its implicit atheism. While romance is a great part of the allure of this tale and something we seek out in our own lives, as it is the experience of expansion into a greater realm of meaning, nonetheless it can rely on unhealthy amounts of denial. Romance is potent, and rightfully deserves its place in great literature, but in relation to what we now call mental health, is insufficient. I believe that, ultimately, great literature is insufficient without its final destination, the realm of faith.
Recall from earlier we said because we have rational souls we are able to see a world that transcends the world of immediate experience, the here and now, which enables us to entertain possible courses of action in the abstract and therewith make moral judgments. Our rational eye enables us to see the good in things, but the good is purely abstract, cannot be observed as an object in the world like a certain species of bird. While literature can give us the experience of the noble and good, as well as the depraved, I hold that any determinations of such things, as best as humans are capable of, is religion and that religion is not reducible to literature.
I am not a believing Christian, but I also believe that without faith both society and human souls will degenerate into chaos. I am suggesting a cause-and-effect relationship between the lack of coherence of aims and a sense of unreality which is a kind of despairing. I think this comes through in the novel, if unintended, by its author Joseph Conrad.
Though Conrad was given a Catholic funeral on August 7, 1924, he was never religious. His wife, Jessie George, whom he married in July, 1896, was nominally Catholic but an atheist. They were married at St. George Registry Office instead of a church. [3](p. 139) It is worth noting that Conrad endured numerous hardships, illnesses, and mental breakdowns throughout his life, yet he always resisted religion.
On March 26, 1889, Conrad resigned his command of the beautiful 345-ton sailing barque Otago, to take command as captain of a decrepit 15-ton freshwater steamboat, the Roi des Belges, which he would board on August, 1890 in Kinshasa, Africa. Thus would begin his journey into the Congo, which then was the private property of King Leopold II. Conrad needed work, was curious about Africa, and had believed a lot of high-minded propaganda about bringing the light of civilization to the Dark Continent. What he in fact saw he later describe as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration.” [3](p. 96)
There Conrad contracted malaria and dysentery and made his way back to London on February 1, 1891, where he began his long convalescence. Biographer Jeffrey Meyer writes:
The malarial fever Conrad contracted in the Congo permanently damaged his health. But the psychological effects went even deeper. The long months spent in hospitals and spas allowed him to meditate on his tragic experience and think about how he might transform it into literature. Conrad saw this experience as the turning-point of his intellectual development and once told Edward Garnett: before the Congo, “I was a perfect animal.” Afterward, his new insights into the nature of evil turned his innate pessimism into a tragic vision: “I see everything with such despondency—all in black” [3](p. 108)
He would of course turn it into his most famous work, Heart of Darkness. Literature is particularly well suited to impress upon us the horrors of human depravity, how inhuman cruelty, exploitation, and sadism can sometimes operate with perfect impunity under ideological and euphemistic pretenses. But despite producing literature–great literature–Conrad was never able to shake his despondency. He was famously short tempered, would throw tantrums in which he “chattered and screamed like a monkey”, then would calm himself by compulsively brushing his hair. He had a nervous disposition, he was guarded to the point of being inscrutable, and suffered from bouts of severe depression. His marriage to Jessie George did not alter his psychology, although he became deeply dependent on her. Though she was a plain woman and later obese, she was certainly supportive of him. In 1910 Conrad had a nervous breakdown but managed to recover.
Conrad’s father, Apollo, was a Polish patriot who resisted Russian oppression, who belonged to a secret society called the Trinity, for which he was arrested by the Russian police in October, 1861. In the end Apollo, along with his wife Eva and their young son, were exiled to the godforsaken town of Vologda, 250 miles northeast of Moscow. The winters were brutal, and on account of poor health the family was allowed to move to the slightly milder town of Chernikov, 80 miles north of Kiev. In April of 1865 Eva died of tuberculosis at the age of 32, when Conrad was seven years old. [3](p. 22) At that point Apollo had only his son, his Polish patriotism, and his Christian faith to sustain him though a life that could hardly be called a success.
Conrad rejected his father’s patriotism and his religion:
Though Apollo was deadly serious in engendering these noble sentiments in his son, Conrad later classified them among the “absurd illusions common to all exiles,” and deflated his father’s ideals by declaring: “A class that has been under the ban for years lives on its passions and on prejudices whose growth stifles not only its sagacity but its visions of reality.” [3](p. 17)
Conrad evidently saw religion as an emotional crutch which unfortunately went hand in hand with delusion if not destructive fanaticism, a view not uncommon to atheists. While I think this view is wrong, nonetheless I do sometimes find common cause with those who question the Bible. The extraordinary stories told in the Gospels require extraordinary evidence if they are to clear the bar as history, and we are not in possession of such evidence. Eric Voegelin says that the substance of Christianity lies purely in faith. I think that I could repurpose D’Alcacer’s words to describe my current view of the Christian faith: ”a sort of ritual dance that most of us have agreed to take seriously …Woe to him or her who breaks it. Directly they leave the pageant they get lost …They end by hating their very selves, and they die in disillusion and despair.”
Faith is binding, but not by force of argument. We can only observe that, in general, those who have followed the Christian faith have done the best in history. Not necessarily because God is speaking to them from on high, or because of some “prosperity gospel” incantations that miraculously bring them riches, but because they have cultivated virtue which brings them in consonance with God’s will.
Though a rational order penned by the Almighty is not anything that can be demonstrated, pointed to, or proved in any scientific way, it does appear to be a fact of the world that the absence of faith leads directly to a sense of unreality. Unbelievers can reasonably view the Christian faith as a kind of pageant, the Bible as mere literature, but as the West collectively dismisses Christianity as so many fanciful stories, we are left with trying to write our own stories, to find the meaning in our own lives. One needs only a cursory look at social media to come away skeptical. Doctored photos, AI generated videos, all trying to snatch the zeitgeist, present a narrative arc that is often pure fantasy, has no grounding in reality and some cases does not even pretend to do so. Or think of the college kids with their “personal pronouns”, a device to draw attention to their unique person in everyday conversation, fiat distinctions which issued by the self. No hard work, talent, perseverance required, but everyone else has to act as if it was. Hence the paradox we encountered earlier: the more we turn away from the unverifiable reality of the transcendent and toward science and facts, toward the tangible and measurable, the less things feel like reality.
The great men of history are not great because of worldly success, but because they were, in some capacity, like Christ in making the Word flesh through their actions and productions which introduced tangible things into history reflecting the rational order, the will of God. They dropped ladders down from the heavens so that we mortals may climb up some, see something of what they see. They produced new modes and orders in politics, objects of artistic beauty, sciences of nature, literary characters, which to the degree in which they had the eternal in them have endured as maps for the known reality in which we operate here on earth. Faith orients us toward the eternal, which is also ineffable and unknowable, but without this orientation everything we know has no palpable sense of reality to it. Without faith we get value relativism, postmodernism, chaos. Directly we leave the pageant we get lost.
Coda
I do not deny that modern psychology, psychotherapy, and pharmacology has efficacy in certain cases of mental illness, that the brain can sometimes be treated as a computer running corrupted software. But it is also widely accepted that psychology is progressing toward scientific, and therefore more credible, solutions to life’s problems. Psychologist Sally Satal and philosophy professor Christina Hoff Sommers describe a now pervasive “therapism” in the culture:
This is not to say that psychology has not made impressive progress. We understand very well that the same half century that incubated an unwholesome therapism also saw remarkable developments in the knowledge of the brain and in new medications for severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. And we appreciate that the various talk therapies have real value for many patients. But this approach can be, and has been, taken too far. The popular assumption that emotional disclosure is always valuable, and that without professional help, most people are incapable of dealing with adversity, has slipped its clinical moorings and drifted into all corners of American life. [26]
I contend that modern psychology, as a quasi-natural science, cannot cure all that ails the soul because it denies our orientation toward the transcendent. Part of the essence of the human soul is its proclivity to explore what reason reveals, to see what is permanent, what transcends immediate experience. A flourishing soul expands itself beyond the here and now, beyond the material world and into the spirit world. Eric Voegelin describes the life of reason as openness toward Ground, where Ground approximates as the transcendent unity toward which our rational souls experience tension toward. The cultivation of reason is to mental health as an athlete’s regimen of diet and exercise is to bodily health: it achieves health as a matter of course while it aims to perfect it.
We’ve seen that values precede facts, that values are what determine the type of map of the world we draw. The value structure underlying modern science is the revealing of nature in determined chains of cause and effect, as mathematical models, which engages with the world of experience by an initial setup (the initial conditions of a physics experiment, e.g., the pendulum of x length is perturbed by some degree) such that human perspective is removed and the mathematics take over and determine the result (e.g. the pendulum swinging with a period of 8 seconds). Thus universal truths of nature are achieved here on earth, not merely in the world of abstractions, like mathematics. The psychological force of deductive reasoning combined with the fact that modern science connects with the world of sense experience is easily misunderstood as not merely revealing universals in nature, but what nature actually is, it’s indisputable essence. This is commonly known as scientific materialism, or scientism.
Modern technology is the implementation of modern science in order to manipulate and control nature to our advantage. It is an expression of the will to power. It endlessly advances through the production of tools and machines which make our lives safer, easier, more enjoyable. Thus its near universal appeal. Modern science combines with modern technology to reveal the essence of nature as lifeless, raw materials on hand to sate human appetites, to serve human purposes.
Nothing revealed by science and technology has any bearing on the cultivation of the soul. This is because, in the creation of objective knowledge, the perspective of the observing subject is removed. Hence all characteristics of the individual soul are removed to create an everyman perspective where all truth claims are checkable by common sense experience. The appeal of modern science and technology therefore derives not merely by its usefulness in raising our standard of living, but by its persuasiveness in revealing universals in the material world, thus bringing what was heretofore thought of as the transcendent and divine down to earth and accessible to everyone. Modern science and technology flatter the democratic man, provide theoretical justification for him to thumb his nose at the philosophers, priests, and artists with elitist pretensions. Plato correctly intuited that equality in everything would be a ruling passion in a democracy to the point where people would have to step aside to make way for ponies striding through the streets, tossing their heads in haughty airs.
Conversely, great works of art, literature, and philosophy offer only the possibility of universal knowledge to those willing to devote themselves to these pursuits, which may involve learning a musical instrument, or learning formal logic, or having the patience for profound literary works. We might say that modern science reveals what is knowable by the plebian part of the soul, from which it derives its universality in truth claims about the world, while the Great Books speak to the aristocratic element of the soul, which, while a great many possess such a faculty, very few will take the time to cultivate.
But even if only a small percentage of humans are able to achieve this, it is indispensable for any thriving. Otherwise, I argue, we will find ourselves in a culture whose peoples are chiefly concerned with power: the power of mathematics and deductive proofs for the theoreticians, the power of technology over nature, and the power of those who hold the reins on the first two over everyone else. When the transcendent is brought down to earth, when God is dead (at least in the minds of men), all that is left is worldly success. While leading technologists and scientists will often cultivate themselves outside of their expertise, having naturally curious intellects, and so the society they lead will not likely be so brutish as that of ancient warlords, but that is still a very real possibility whose reality revolves around power. In the 1930’s, Germany was one of the most scientifically literate civilizations on earth and had produced more Nobel laureates in science than any other country.[27] Martin Heidegger learned the hard way that the German will-to-power that was being harnessed by the Nazis was not going to advance any sort of high culture as imagined by his predecessor, Friedrich Nietzsche.
The point is that a culture whose thought leaders, when speaking within their professions, are only serious as facilitators of power, of power which undermines and overwhelms the minority who look for universal truth, goodness, and beauty at the apex of rational imagining, then that society has a shorter distance to tyranny than one which also has, let us say, an aristocratic element. The church, for example, is an institution dedicated to disseminating the voices from on high to the masses, and though hardly perfect it has sometimes managed to curb human evil, as in the case of the Catholic church reigning in the atrocious greed of the Conquistadors. [28]
While a tyranny founded on technology is certainly the scariest scenario, in our time there is perhaps the far more likely scenario as simply finding ourselves trapped in the hell of our own banality. Postmodernism explicitly asserts that all truth, beauty, and goodness is but an expression of cultural power, thus whoever gets control of the cultural sphere, of the money, is who gets their shows on television, who gets their art hung in the museums, whose books get published. That the erasure of the eschaton, or the rational order as I have named it, has produced so much mundane kitsch should not be surprising, although the fact that it is now curated by the most prestigious universities should be alarming. Consider Fat Studies, for example. Yes, this is an area of academic research just like particle physics. Fat Studies examine how systems of intersectional oppression are preventing you from keeping the weight off. Notice that postmodernism is still addressing the human need for meaning–to understand ourselves in a broader context–except, in keeping with a power ethic, does not present meaning derived from the struggle to overcome one’s personal problems, ignorance, lack of discernment in order to ascend toward the eternal, but in getting the rest of the world to affirm that you are actually healthy at 400 pounds. Activists are recruited for enforcement, e.g., to shadow ban the social media accounts of people who refuse the requisite affirmations. At least they are consistent in their belief that reality is determined by those who have the power.
Of course no matter what the Fat Activists say, people still want to be thin and beautiful because there is a reality outside of social convention. To this end, more nature conquering technology has been created with drugs like Ozempic. Now you can get thin by just popping a pill.
But it will not work, not in the long run, not by my lights. I am convinced that the only way for humans to flourish, to have purpose in life, to sense meaning despite all of life’s inconveniences is through faith. But as I’ve said, and I don’t think that I am alone here, I need a few more steps filled in before I can embrace the Christian faith (or any other faith).
I believe that one way we may fill in a few steps is through a restoration of our relationship to nature. Though I care a great deal about conserving remote areas because I am a cruising sailor who prefers a tranquil, tree-lined cove to drop anchor in over a coast crammed with condos and marinas, I also believe that untouched nature can draw the creative soul out of familiar ruts by its beauty and, depending on how close you venture, its ferocity. For if the entire planet becomes urbanized, then we see almost nothing in the physical world outside of ourselves that is not human artifice. Nothing left to see that was wrought by the hand of God, and nature is infinitely fascinating. Scientists like Stephen Meyer have calculated the (near) impossibility of the most basic bacteria cells resulting from chance combinations of molecules, even considering all the known matter (atoms) in the universe and the estimated time since the Big Bang, approximately 15 billion years. The myriad of creatures, the rains, the forests, the wild oceans evoke wonder and awe–which I would argue is the natural ignition system for a sensitive soul, which may open up new worlds, new sciences, new artistic expressions.
Failing that, our own souls are the only remaining natural resource. As I said at the outset, The Bible is problematic for many, myself included. This leaves us with literature. Surely art and music also play a role in this, but literature is more explicit, more directly psychological, and as such provides ladders that reach all the way down to common sense and common experience, where we can all get a foothold.
Psychology seeks to be a practical body of know-how, a technology, similar to bodily medicine, which knows how to set a broken leg, or cure a bacterial infection. Literature, or at least great literature, speaks directly of all manner of human disorders, passions, frailties, aspirations as instantiated in literary characters, and then lets them play out in a story. Great stories will involve archetypes, both in the characters and the narrative arc. Which is to say that great stories link the story of humans in the world with the transcendent rational order as we’ve spoken of it. Literature leads us to consider the possibility of absolute good and evil, that there is an unseen measure, a Logos, a God.
Of course the great books are not morality plays. The greatest writers merely give us the experience of peering into the transcendent, the perspective of the wisest humans.
Contrast a psychological understanding of Shakespeare’s semi-historical play about King Richard III versus a literary reading. In a psychoanalysis published in 2021 by Sibel Ayaz, “Psychoanalysis of The Central Character in Richard III By Shakespeare with regards to Freud’s Narcissism, And Machiavellianism” understands Shakespeare’s famous villain through the lens of narcissistic and Machiavellian personality disorder. I do not dispute the analysis, nor that psychotherapy and drugs may be of some use on people with these disorders, in mitigating the damage they do to themselves and everyone around them. OK, but now listen to Richard Gloucester addressing us in the opening scene:
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments,
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front,
And now—instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks …
The peace and plenty that is presently blessing England is one that Richard Gloucester cannot enjoy, as it presents few extreme and dangerous situations by which he can distinguish himself. It’s now more of a woman’s world, of gossip, intrigue, where the men who succeed are the ones who best strike the ladies’ fancies. Not being handsome nor charming he has no chance here, so he sets out on his bloody quest for power. He will make them respect him, bow to him. Nearing his certain demise, Richard Gloucester says: “ I am so far in blood that sin will pluck upon sin, tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye”[Act 4, Scene 2] Reminiscent of Milton’s Satan: “Whichever way I fly is hell, myself I am hell”.
The soaring language, the poetry, is important. One of the reasons we were forced to read Shakespeare in high school – or should be forced to read Shakespeare– is the exquisite expressiveness of the text itself, rich with metaphor, imagery, clever allusions. When you learn to think and speak with eloquence, if only when reciting the words of these great authors, it beautifies your person. Sure some people will line drop Shakespeare to be pretentious (vanishingly few of those these days), but that doesn’t subtract any from the ways Shakespeare will elevate your perceptions just as climbing a hill allows you to see further.
Shakespeare was not a religious writer. He only considered religion insofar as it influenced the thoughts and actions of men. Yet the grandeur of the language already implies greater significance beyond the explicit actions and words of the characters. In the opening soliloquy, Richard Gloucester is raging as Cain raged against God, convinced that God has cheated him, done him hard. For this he will have bloody revenge. Shakespeare is instantiating an archetype from the Old Testament. And once that he is well along his path of evil, Richard Gloucester certainly echoes Milton’s Satan, who knows that he is past redemption, that he has become embodied evil.
Hence without explicitly referencing Christianity, with its description of Satan, of the Fall of Man, of redemption through Christ, Shakespeare coaxes our minds into considering that there may be absolute good and evil, that there is an “unseen measure” of men, of virtue and vice. That our souls are not our sole property, that we are embedded in a spirit world as well as a physical one, and if we disobey the laws of the spirit world–disobey God–suffering will result surely as a stone tossed in the air will fall back to earth.
In the final scenes of the The Rescue, following the careless catastrophe of Jorgenson igniting the powder magazine in the Emma, Captain Lingard, like Joseph Conrad returning from the living nightmare he saw in the Congo, sees only despondency, all in black:
Once more Wasub raised his eyes to Lingard’s face. “Paradise is the lot of all True Believers,” he whispered, firm in his simple faith. The man who had been undone by a glimpse of Paradise exchanged a profound look with the old Malay. Then he got up. On his passage to the main hatchway the commander of the brig met no one on the decks, as if all mankind had given him up except the old man who preceded him and that other man dying in the deepening twilight, who was awaiting his coming.
The “glimpse at Paradise” came for Captain Lingard by Edith Travers. When the robust but sterile love the captain maintained for his brig, his perfect world full of trustful joy, found its principal object — an attractive human female – his love grew exponentially, intensified, burst the bridle of any reasonable proceeding. But with no possibility of marriage and family, of containing and directing the love passion within a religious covenant, the effect was of merely burning off fuel in a great conflagration. The fuel that produced a grand figure like Tom Lingard, a legend in Wajo for the famous rescue of Hassim and Immada and their compatriots on that dark and stormy night, the expert captain who could successfully navigate his brig among the maze of reefs and shoals which just ensnared a modern yacht–a fighter, a man of honor–was spent like the Emma’s powder magazine.
Lingard is not firm in his simple faith like his Malay compatriot, and there is nothing to comfort him now that his great project has come to nothing, now that almost every hope of success on earth is gone. Edith looks back to Lingard one more time to see the captain prostrate before Jaffir’s grave : ”She saw him sitting near the mound of sand, his back bowed, his hands clasping his knees, as if he had obeyed the invincible call of his great visions haunting the grave of the faithful messenger. ”
Lingard has only great visions but not faith, no anchor in the spirit would where he senses the unique story of his life that does not depend on worldly success or accidents. Paradise is the reward of True Believers, but Lingard is not one of them. He is bound to this earth, presently kneeling alone on a desolate sandbank. And the last words of his friend and faithful messenger, to whom he is paying his last respects, was just to forget about everything.
Steer North
Lingard still has the brig and has found himself an excellent mate in the young Carter. Carter even managed to get rid of Shaw for him, placing him as second mate aboard the yacht where “he can do no harm”, Carter reports to Lingard.
Both the brig and the yacht weigh anchor from the Shore of Refuge. Lingard sails ahead, leading the Hermit out to safe water through the maze of shoals which had ensnared her. Once out past the dangers, Lingard orders the brig hove-to, and Carter has the main yards backed such that the brig comes to a near stop, now slowly drifting to leeward.
Carter paces the deck while Lingard disappears below.
Following orders, Carter reports to Captain Lingard that they have now lost sight of the yacht. “The sound of a stifled groan reached the attentive Carter and a weary voice said, ‘All right, I am coming.’” Evening is coming on, the tropical seas are turning wine dark. There’s silence. Then Carter quietly asks Lingard if they should resume sailing to get a proper offing before nightfall. To this Lingard assents and gives the order. The main yards are swung around to join the fores in driving the Lightning ahead. Lingard asks Carter:
“How was the yacht heading when you lost sight of her?”
“South as near as possible,” answered Carter.
“Will you give me a course to steer for the night, sir?” Carter asks.
Lingard’s reply needs force to overcome internal struggle, which makes his lips tremble as he gives Carter the command, the last two words of the novel:
“Steer north”
References
[1] Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics (Penguin Classics) (pp. 2-3). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
[2] Conrad, Joseph; Book House. Joseph Conrad: The Complete Novels (The Greatest Writers of All Time Book 36) (p. 4477). Kindle Edition. All quotations in this piece are from the novel unless otherwise indicated.
[3] Meyers, Jeffrey. Joseph Conrad: A Biography (pp. 76-79). Lyons. Kindle Edition.
[4] Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Walgreen Foundation Lectures) (pp. 128-129). The University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
[5] Popper, Karl Raimund. The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton Classics) (p. 466). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
[6] Strauss, Leo; Cropsey, Joseph. History of Political Philosophy (p. 1181). The University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition
[7] Delano, Laura. Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (pp. 4-5). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[8] Stuckey, Allie Beth. Toxic Empathy (p. 83). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[9] Heather Mac Donald asks, is a more feminised society a bad thing?
[10] Bloom, Allan. Giants and Dwarfs (Simon and Schuster: New York, 1990), p. 182
[11] Saad, Gad. Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind (p. 19). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
[12] [Prager, Dennis. The Rational Bible: Genesis (p. 92). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.
[13] Friedrich Nietzsche; Original Thinkers Institute. The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more (pp. 82-83). Kindle Edition.
[14] The 50-Year Project That Trained Women to Hate Erika Kirk | Ep. 15 (starting at 32:12)
[15] Gress, Carrie. The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us (p. 27). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.
[16] No Wonder Men Are Opting Out | ZeroHedge
[17] 5 facts about single Americans for Valentine’s Day | Pew Research Center
[18] Moxon, Steve. The Woman Racket: The New Science Explaining How Sexes Relate at Work, at Play and in Society (p. 20). Andrews UK – Academic. Kindle Edition.
[19] Eberstadt, Nick . Men without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition (2022). Templeton Press. Kindle Edition.
[20] Reeves, Richard V.. Of Boys and Men (p. 14). Brookings Institution Press. Kindle Edition.
[21] The Great Feminization | Compact
[22] The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness – American Economic Association
[23] Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (p. 317). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
[24] The Lost Generation | Compact
[25] Maywald, David. The Relentless War on Masculinity: Does it Ever End? (p. 65). Celebrating Masculinity. Kindle Edition.
[26] Sommers, Christina Hoff; Satel, Sally. One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance (p. 9). St. Martin’s Press. Kindle Edition.
[27] Science and technology in Germany – Wikipedia
[28] The Rise and Fall of Western Civilisation- Professor James Hankins (20:00)
