In his book, The Temper of Our Time, Eric Hoffer, in Chapter 5, which
runs from Page 93 through Page 117, present a chapter entitled The
Return Of Nature. I write out the whole chapter and then comment on
it where important to do so.
Here it is: Hoffer (H after this): “The Return Of Nature
All through life I had a feeling of revulsion when told how nature
aid us and guides us, how like a stern mother she nudges and pushes
man to fulfill her wise design. As a migratory worker from the age of
eighteen I knew nature as ill-disposed and inhospitable. If I
stretched on the ground to rest, nature pushed its hard knuckles into
my sides, and sent bugs, burs, and foxtails to make me get up and be
gone. As a place miner I had to run the gauntlet of buckbrush,
manzanita, and poison oak when I left the road to find my way to a
creek. Direct contact with nature almost always meant scratches,
bites, torn clothes, and grime that ate its way into every pore of
the body. To make life bearable I had to interpose a protective layer
between myself and nature. On the paved road, even when miles from
anywhere, I felt at home. I had a sense of kinship with the winding,
endless road that cares not where it goes and what its load.”
My response: Hoffer the thinker built his unique views based on his
own genius, his original take on the world, grounded in his
prodigious reading and phenomenal memory But, he was not romantic nor
idealistic—he lived always in the real world, and his sense of
realism (his lived experience) and solid common sense come through in
the paragraph above.
Hoffer intuitively understood that humans, the rational animals, are
alien to inhospitable nature; we do not belong there, and never will.
We are aliens when strolling in the woods. There, our accurate sense
of strangeness makes us feeling lonely because, on some level, we
really belong nowhere, and on some level we detect it. We cannot ever
be in pure harmony with the natural world without first obliterating
our individual human consciousness. We have to murder the self
spiritually to become one with nature. For humans, low-level living
angels, when at their best, are part of and actively contributing
members of the race or kinds of sentient, smart creators, lesser by
far versions of the Pantheon of existent good deities, who created
the cosmos literally out of nothing, or out of eternally existent but
unorganized prime matter and energy just existing in its naked chaos,
who breathed into prime matter and energy a guiding, organizing
rational principle or logos to organize and create the natural world
operating in line with natural laws introduced by these sentient
deities.
As a side bar, I want to offer that humans feel alone and lonely
because they are—social companionship or immersing oneself in
nature are somewhat effective palliatives, but are not meaningful,
ultimately satisfying substitutes, for curing the only real, lasting
heartache undermining the self-esteem of each living human: we feel
lonely and alone because we are, often lonely in the crowd where we
hide, lying by living our groupist, collectivist lives. Only if we
individuate while communing with a good deity whom we serve, that is
the only cure for painful loneliness which corrodes the human heart
beyond recognition. This damage occurs where each person refuses to
maverize, and fails to acknowledge with directly by self-realizing
and serving a good deitiy.
Hoffer recognizes that humans are strange, unnatural creatures who
belong nowhere except with each other or with God, so humans need to
build their own society apart from nature, an artificial, unnatural
complex society where man feels most at home in.
Hoffer too implicitly suggests that nature is evil and that human
society, a human construction, when its people are moral and loving,
it is morally good or superior to nature, and he accepts this
Christian and Western point of view.
H: “Almost all the books I read spoke worshipfully of nature.
Nature was pure, innocent, serene, health-giving, bountiful, the
fountainhead of elevated thoughts and noble feelings. It seemed that
every writer was a ‘nature boy.’ I assumed that these people had
no share in the world’s work, and did not know nature at close
quarters.”
My response: There is no doubt that the tree huggers and
nature-lovers have an overly optimistic, rosy, idealistic
misconception of nature, which Hoffer and I do not metaphysically
have, but till I hug trees and love nature, all while realizing it is
beautiful, though often brutal, cruel and harsh. We should enjoy
nature as it is, not as we preconceive it to be.
H: “It also seemed to me that they had a grievance. For coupled
with their admiration of nature was a distaste for man and man’s
work. Man was a violator, a defiler and deformer.”
My response: Hoffer the genius cuts through the thicket with a sharp
machete: those that revere nature excessively, also loathe humans,
their endeavors and mere presence on earth, especially if they alter
the natural landscape. Anyone that hates humans and wants a natural
world with no human presence—these radicals hate humans, and wish
we were dead and indeed would kill us off if they had the
totalitarian means of committing genocide. There are no nastier
idealists than these haters of humanity.
H: “The truth about nature I found in the newspapers, in the almost
daily reports of floods, tornados, blizzards, hurricanes, typhoons,
hailstorms, sandstorms, earthquakes, avalanches, eruptions,
inundations, pests, plagues, and famines. Sometimes when reading
about nature’s terrible visitations and her massacre of the
innocents, it seemed to me that we are surrounded by devouring,
pitiless forces, that the earth was full of anger, the sky dark with
wrath, and that man had built the city as a refuge from the hostile,
nonhuman cosmos. I realized that the contest between man and nature
has been the central drama of the universe.”
My response: I like and agree wholeheartedly with Hoffer in what he
mentions in this paragraph. Yes, the endless vying between men and
nature is one of the central dramas of the universe.
I also think humans built cities as a refuge against a hostile,
inhuman cosmos, but also they built cities so that they would finally
find and enjoy a human-friendly refuge in the universe where they no
longer felt so meaningless and lonely. Humans only can find a home or
receive emotional comfort from their own kind and that mostly must
occurs in the city, away from nature, away from a home unnatural and
unwelcoming to humans that most unnatural, fantastic creature half
beast, half angel.
H: “Man became what he is not with the aid, but in spite of,
nature. Humanization means breaking away from nature, getting out
from underneath the iron necessities which dominate nature. By the
same token, dehumanization means the reclamation of man by nature. It
means the return of nature.”
My response: A return of nature does dehumanize humans, but a
complete distancing of human lives from nature dehumanizes us too but
less so, so the happy, moderate medium is to be more distant from
than submersed into nature, but to do both at the same time in a
balanced way.
H: “It is significant that humanization had its start in the fact
that man was an unfinished, defective animal.”
My response: Nature or God or both made humans as unfinished,
defective animals, and thus we are born basically evil in that low
self-esteem or self-loathing comes naturally to us because
instinctively we humans intuit that we are freaks of nature, twisted,
unhappy, violent, lusting, unfinished, defective creatures: that God
or nature or both made such hapless, untoward, angry monsters and
them tossed us naked and hungry into nature where we never really
will fit in, it is no wonder we hurt ourselves and seek to smash and
destroy everyone and everything under the sun; we have a grievance
against God and nature for creating us as defective freaks, and when
we choose to be evil, we seek revenge upon all humanity, all manner
of living things, against Being itself.
Perhaps becoming an ethical adult, to a large degree, is learning to
forgive ourselves, each other, God and nature, for our existential
burden, our unhappiness and necessitated suffering; if we can learn
to love ourselves, to love others, to love and obey God, and to love,
make a living off of nature without seeking to submerge ourselves in
it, or allow it to overwhelm us and subdue us again, then we have a
chance to lead good, constructive lives and make a contribution to
the world, without allowing it to tear us up anymore, nor any longer
being dominated by our impulse to smash nature as a grinding vendetta
to be acted upon.
As a metaphysical moderate, I always regard the glass of human life
as both half full and half empty at the same time, depending how one
looks at the human condition. To be created or evolve as a rational
mammal, born into this world, each of us, as unfinished, defective
creatures is the human blessing and the human curse, both at the same
time, depending on one’s perspective. If one is a pessimist and
fatalist, one will feel sorry for oneself and doing nothing to uplift
oneself or to make one’s existential burden bearable, or even to
live morally as a net positive influence in the world. If one
maverizes, then one can appreciate that we mostly do not belong to or
in nature and yet do not fit wholly, easily away from nature; for, on
the other hand we are half-angel, but more than that, we are bit more
than half natural, and this bestial nature of ours renders us
repugnant to our supernatural ladies and lords, were they unforgiving
of our repulsiveness, which they are not at all.
As beasts, we are repulsed by the goodness, the unnaturalness and
supernaturalness of angels and good deities. We recoil from their
offer for us to join and be as alike them as we can be, finding
common ground with living angels and the good deities in whose image
and likeness we aspire to and to a large degree can emulate, as we
individuate and strengthen the better part of our natures. Humans are
unique in the universe, free, having free will, and are not
determined to be mere natural creatures, biological robots, their
opposite number, purely perfected, purely more angels, lovely to be
sure, but one-dimensional somehow. Human nature is much richer than
that, stimulating, terrible and horrifying to know and experience
when we allow the demonic in us to run wild and wreak havoc upon
ourselves and the world.
H: “Nature dealt niggardly with him from the beginning. It brought
him forth naked and helpless, without inborn skills, and without
specialized organs to serve him as weapons and tools. Unlike other
animals, man was not a born technician with an in-built tool kit.
Small wonder that for millennia man worshiped animals, nature’s
more favored children. Yet this misbegotten creature had made himself
lord of the globe. (Humans have the powers of reason and by thinking,
humans have gained mastery or the appearance of mastery over nature
and this planet—Ed Says.). He has evolved fabulous substitutes for
the instincts and the specialized organs that he lacked, and rather
than adjust himself to the world he has changed the world to fit
him.”
My response: Agains, as a metaphysical moderate, I urge caution and
balance here. Humans should be activistic enough to change the world
to some degree or a large degree to fit him, but, to a lesser and not
easy to calibrate or specify, humans must fatalistically, stoically
learn to adjust to the world as it is, and just endure what nature
delivers to them.
H: “This, surely, is the supreme miracle. If history is to have
meaning, it must be a history of humanization, of man’s torturous
ascent through the ages, of his ceaseless effort to break away from
the rest of creation and become an order apart.”
My response: History does have meaning and it is a history of people
becoming individualistic or human, a torturous ascent out of
nonindiviudated group-living, slowly edging towards individuated
individual living, only as living angels are human an order apart.
Hoffer is so wise, so articulate, so perceptive at reading the human
heart: human history will only have meaning if it is the written
record of human progress or humanizing themselves as actualized
individuators, being of nature, loving nature, and intimately
interacting with nature every day, all the while self-realizing as
mini-Creators of the cosmos, a modest personal version of the
Creators, the Light Couple, the Mother and Father, the lesser good
deities and the Good Spirits.
H: “Man became human by finishing himself. Yet his humanness is
never finished and final. Man is not only an unfinished animal; he is
an unfinished man.”
My response: Humans can only find meaning, become happy and fulfilled
by finishing themselves, becoming human. I agree that Hoffer is
implying my lifestyle suggestion for each agent to individuate and
develop his potential, and I agree that our humanness is never
finished and final, that we expire before we could reach
perfection—not doable even if we lived 1.000 years. Yes, humans are
not only unfinished animals but unfinished humans.
H: “His human uniqueness is something he had to achieve and
preserve. Nature is always around us and within us, ready to reclaim
us and sweep away all that man has wrought and achieved.”
My response: Our fallen natures within us and fallen nature outside
of us will easily reclaim us if each new generations is not taught
Christian morals plus individuating. We have to learn anew each
generation born, and we can lose civilization in one generation or in
35 years short period.
H: “Man’s chief goal in life is still to become and stay human,
and defend his achievements against the encroachment of nature.
Nature is in almost complete possession of us when we are born. The
child has to be brought up and made human. And no sooner is this
accomplished than comes a crisis, from childhood to manhood, in which
nature reasserts itself. The humanness of the adolescent is a
precarious thing, He has to be reborn to manhood and be rehumanized.
Indeed, every drastic change from one way of life to another
constitutes a strain which may crack the uppermost layers of the
mind, and lay bare the less human layers. Hence a time of drastic
changes, even when the change is a leap forward, is a time of
barbarization. Each generation has to humanize itself.
The contest with nature has the refined trickery we have come to
associate with totalitarian wars. There are fifth columns,
subversions, and a constant probing for soft spots. Just as man uses
the forces of nature to subdue nature, so does nature use men to
dehumanize their fellow men; and it is in the city that nature’s
fifth column finds its most fertile ground.”
My response I rarely contradict Hoffer or disagree with him and I do
not do so here either but if the city apart from nature is where
humans have a chance of individuating and humanize themselves, then
how can Hoffer affirm that the city is nature’s fifth column, its
most fertile ground? Let us see how he works out this contradiction,
or how I have to do so.
H: “The birth of the city was a crucial step in man’s separation
from nature. The city cut man off not only from the nonhuman cosmos
but also from clans, tribes and other primitive modes of
organization. A self-governing city with populated by more or less
autonomous individuals has been the cradle of freedom, art,
literature, science, and technology.”
My response: Only in the city can autonomous individuals arrive and
escape, defeat and overcome the stultifying repression causes by
clans, tribes and other primitive modes of organization based in
group living, altruism, collectivism, nonindividuating and a lack of
ambition and curiosity.
H: “But the city that has been a citadel against the nature around
us cannot defend us against the nature within us, in our lusts and
fears, and in the subconscious cellars of our minds. It is in the
city that man’s lusts and fears have free play, and dehumanization
spreads like the plague. The lust for power in particular has shown
itself to be antihuman. We savor power not when we move mountains and
tell rivers whither to flow but when we can turn men into objects,
robots, puppets, automata, or veritable animals.”
My response: Hoffer most always knows what is true and expresses it
clearly, concisely, eloquently, which is why I read and comment on
everything he wrote—if I live long enough. The desire not to
rearrange nature ( the positive power of powerfulness) but to
rearrange, capture, control and remake people is power savored by
those whose are tyrants (the negative power of powerlessness).
H: “Power is the power to dehumanize, and it is in the city that
this lust finds human material to work on. It is easier to dehumanize
man in the mass than than any individual man. Thus the city has been
the breeding ground of all movements and developments that tend to
press men back into the matrix of nature from which he has risen.”
My response: This is tricky to unpack. In the city is where humans
are humanized and individualized and can progress. It is in nature
where they are dehumanized and collectivized and advancement fizzles.
Then Hoffer adds that it is in the city, at a later stage, where
people are dehumanized and collectivized once more. Can he write
consistently or make up his mind.? He really is not contradicting
himself. He is just laying out two horns of the human dilemma and
somehow extremism is human undoing for humans in the city, and that
the answer to the riddle or contradiction that one one hand humans
find earthly salvation, personal humanization and can grow as
individuals in the city when things there promote human goodness and
development, and then, on the other hand, when cities turn corrupt,
there people are at their worst, the most cruel, unjust, radicalized,
nonindivudating, stratified and altruistic; Cruel humans in the city
on average may be much more brutal than people living so close to
nature in tribal settings are. It is likely that he is instilling in
the reader a cautionary that nature is inside us as well as outside
us, so we do our best and greatest as individuals in the city, but
that we are the most destructive pack creatures once the city goes
from being a civilized center of human development into a vast ghetto
where life is cheap, crime and lawlessness are rife, and suffering is
the lot of millions of people. In short we are at our best and at our
worst most bestial in the city.
Yes, the city is where people are able to individualize and progress
and be humanized. But when the city reaches a certain size its
critical mass is the collective or the mob, and at that point, the
city become a dehumanizing environments, where collectivism and
stagnation result Perhaps people living in a string of connected
suburbs of no more than 10,000 pope is the way to get the best of
city living without its downsides.
H: “A fateful feature of the war with nature is its circularity.
Victory and defeat run into each other. Just when man seems to be
within reach of his ultimate goal he is likely to find himself caught
in a trap. Everywhere there are booby traps and pitfalls, and nature
strikes back from unexpected quarters. A most recent example of this
is the splitting of the atom. Man cracked nature’s strongbox only
to discover he had cracked Pandora’s box of ills and woes and evil
spirits, and let loose the poisonous mushroom cloud of total
annihilation.
One thinks of the fantastic spectacle of the nineteenth century when
the Industrial Revolution seemed to make man’s dream of total
victory over nature come true, and the prospect of a man-made world
blanketing the whole of the globe seemed within reach. The fateful
fact that man was not inventive enough to automate his second
creation, that his machines were half-machines lacking the gears and
filaments of thought and will, set in motion a process of mass
dehumanization that turned the machine age into a nightmare. Human
beings had to be used as a stopgap for inventiveness. Men, women, and
children were coupled with iron and steam. The machines were
consuming human beings as fast as coal. It was as if nature had
infiltrated the metal of the machines and subverted the manmade
world. Factories, mass armies, and mass movements would strip people
of their human uniqueness and transmute them into a homogeneous,
malleable mass.”
My response: It seems that though generally humanizing, the machine
age and the city could be used to dehumanize and tyrannize people
too. We cannot go back to the Stone Age, so what is the happy medium
that gives humans the advantage urban living and technology without
their downsides?
H: “Lenin, the leader of a mass movement, recognized that the ‘hard
school’ of the factory was readying people for a totalitarian
dictatorship. The mass armies trained people in obedience and mass
action. At the same time, Lenin’s revolution saw as its main task
the conversion of peasants into factory workers and soldiers. Thus
industrialists, generals, and revolutionaries worked hand in hand.
And not they alone. Carlyle’s glorification of brute force,
Gobineau’s race theories, Marx’s economic determinism and his
theory of class struggle. Darwin’s and Pavlov’s zoological
sociology, the dark forces of Wagner’s music, Nietzsche’s cult of
the superman, and Freud’s emphasis on the less human components of
the human soul were all part of a blind striving to reintegrate man
with nature.”
My response: All of these forces and influences working to
reintegrate man with nature, when the way up and out is to keep man,
a beast of nature, somewhat separate from nature so he could become
human and humanized., ultimately as egoistic individuals and
individuators.
H: “The deliberate dehumanization practiced by Stalin and Hitler
was an intensification and acceleration of something that had been
going on for decades. There was hardly an enormity committed in the
twentieth century that was not foreshadowed and even advocated by
some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
My response: This frightening pattern of new ideas concocted by
intellectuals—often bad ideas-- often becoming implemented,
nightmare social practices and public policies in the future is a
cautionary tale, reminding us to look before we leap, to do small
experiments with new ideas to flesh out the unintended consequences
of them upon society, before we ruin society by implementing them
pell mell.
H: “Even such clear-cut opposites as the fascination with science
and the romantic back-to-nature movements were actually pulling in
the same direction—helping to equate man with nature, and
cooperating in the dehumanization of man. They who leaped ahead and
they who plunged backward arrived simultaneously at the gates of the
twentieth-century annihilation camps.
One of the strangest features of man’s war with nature is its
undeclaredness. The men who are in the forefront of the battle are as
a rule unaware that they are fighting a war.”
My response: We must be self-aware that we are fighting a war against
nature, that we are to fight that war against nature, and not against
other humans, and nature itself does not want us to know consciously
it is our enemy because then one is better able to combat a
recognized enemy—whether nature hide’s its motivation of
anti-humanism by being nonverbal, or because Satan works to keep
humans ignorant so we are easy to defeat and control, remains
unclear.
H: “They are usually animated by a hunger for profit or for
spectacular action. I have not come across a clarion call to mankind
to abandon war between brothers and to mobilize all its energies in a
titanic struggle with the nonhuman universe. You can count on the
fingers of one hand unequivocal expressions of the eternal enmity
between man and nature. I can only think of Hardy” s ‘Man begins
where nature ends; nature and man can never be friends.’ Thoreau,
who sided with nature, recognized that ‘you cannot have a deep
sympathy between man and nature,’ and admitted, ‘I love nature
because she is not man but a retreat from him.’ Toward the end of
his life, Thomas Huxley realized that man’s ascent was different
from his descent. In his Romanes lecture, in 1893, he warned: ‘Let
us understand once for all that all the ethical progress of societies
depends not on animating the cosmic process, still less in running
away fro it, but in combatting it.’”
My response: The war between humans and nature is natural and eternal
for humans are unnatural, potential creators of nature and cosmos as
are the benevolent God who breathed life into us, and raw nature or
primordial chaos is devolved and entropy-oriented, not seeking to be
ordered, arranged and lawfully regulated.
We need not attack or abuse nature, but should make our living off of
it, while respecting it and not spoiling it or polluting it. This
sensible perspective allows humans to enjoy nature without
sentimentalizes a world that is hostile and foreign to us our needs
and our happiness.
H: “There is an echo of man’s first blows against nature in some
myths. The Babylonian God Marduk slayed the dragon Tiamath and
created arable land out of her carcass. Prometheus stole fire from
the gods and gave it to compensate for the meagerness of his physical
endowments. Yet, on the whole, the impression conveyed by mythologies
is of a close relationship between man and nature in which nature
always has the upper hand and must be supplicated and propitiated.
There is a Darwinian motif in the totemic assumption of a kinship
between man and other forms of life. The whole structure of magic is
founded on an identity between human nature and nature. Both the
scientist and the savage postulate the oneness of man and nature. The
difference between them is the savage tries to influence nature by
means which have proved their efficacy in influencing human nature
the way he deals with matter and other forms of life. The scientist
reads the equation human nature=nature from left to right, while the
savage reads it from right to left. Yet it is worth noting that
Darwin, too, read the equation from right to left when he read
cutthroat capitalist competition into the economy of nature.
In this as in other fields the uniqueness of the ancient Hebrews is
startlingly striking. They were the first ones to enunciate a
clear-cut separation between man and nature. Though monotheism was
born of tribal pride—the desire to be the one and only people of a
one and only God—it brought with it a downgrading of nature. The
one and only God created both nature and man yet made man in Hiss own
image and appointed him His viceroy on earth. Jehovah’s injunction
to man (Genesis, Chapter 1) is unequivocal: Be fruitful and multiply
and subdue the earth. Nature lost its divine attributes.”
My response: I wonder if the Hebrews being adversarial towards nature
was a critical aspect and logical entailment of their being God’s
chosen people, while others pagan peoples of antiquity were
worshiping nature as divine, and were submissive to nature, and thus
hated the Hebrews with extra ardor because they were from God and the
pagan peoples submitting to and worshiping nature are
devil-worshipers and followers of Satan. The anti-Semites ancient and
modern are just seeking to kill of their worst enemies, the chosen
children of God, chosen though as flawed and fallen as any other
people.
H: “Sun, stars, sky, earth, mountains, rivers, plants and animals
were no longer the seat of mysterious powers and the arbiters of
man’s fate. Though man had to wrestle with the earth for his bread,
he was the masterful male ADAM, and the earth, ADAMA, a female to be
beaten into submission. The writers of the Old Testament picked as a
father of the race not Esau, a man of nature, whose garments, like
those of Thoreau’s ideal man, smelled of grassy fields and flowery
meadows, but his twin brother Jacob, who was all too human in his
anxieties and cunning scheming, and who preferred the inside of a
tent to the great outdoors, and the smell of lentil soup to the smell
of trees and fields.
It is true that the downgrading of nature did not prompt the Hebrews
to become mighty tamers of nature. Still, their endurance as a weak
minority through centuries of persecution constitutes a great
defiance of nature, putting to naught of the law of survival of the
strong which rules the rest of life. Moreover, the mighty Jehovah did
play a role in the rise of scientific and technological civilization
of the modern Occident. It is hard for us to realize how
god-conscious were the scientists and technologists active at the
birth of the modern Occident. Jehovah was to them the supreme
mathematician and technician who had created the world and set it
going. To unravel the mysteries of nature was to decipher God's text
and to rethink His thoughts. When Kepler formulated the laws of
planetary motion he boasted that God had to wait 6,000 years for his
first reader. These early scientists and technicians felt close to
God; they stood in awe of Him yet felts as if they were of His
school, and whether they knew it or not, aspired to be like Him.
Perhaps one of the reasons that other civilizations, with all their
ingenuity and skill, did not develop a machine age, is that they had
no God who was an all-powerful engineer whom they could imitate and
vie with.”
My response: I do not mind if scientists, humanists and humans in
general imitate God the creator and engineer, but it is ill-advised
to vie with God, for it won’t end well for us. In that instance
that would be the bad kind of pride which God would punish, and
secondly, we cannot be God the Father and God the Mother or Jesus at
their won game.
If we agree to love, admire and serve these deities, then we can
individuate as engineers, inventors, poets, creators with God
enthusiastic approval, assistance and enthusiastic instruction, as
long as we do not try to overthrow God. God is a Powerful Warrior and
is not Nonviolent. When God wrath is incurred it is terrible to
behold and I advise that no human bait and disrespect God, lest he or
she be on the receiving end of divine wrath, not a smart place to be,
ending up burning in hell afterwards. It is not moral or workable to
scheme against those so loving, powerful and near eternal or eternal
good deities. It is the wrong hill for humans to die on.
H: “The next great assault upon nature took place in the Neolithic
Age when there was as yet no writing; thus it remained unrecorded and
unsung. Yet it is legitimate to wonder whether the presence of
scribes would have mattered one way or another—whether the ‘men
of words’ would have been aware of the import of that which was
happening before their eyes, let alone moved enough to declaim and
sing. For when the second great assault came in the nineteenth
century the ‘men of words’ were not in the fight, and, indeed, a
great many of them sided with nature against man. It was precisely at
the moment when the Industrial Revolution forged the weapons for
total victory over nature that scientists, poets, philosophers, and
historians, seized with a mysterious impulse, began to proclaim with
one voice the littleness of man and his powerlessness to shape his
fate. Man, declared Huxley, in 1860, ‘strives in vain to break
through the ties which hold him to matter and the lower forms of
life.’ Instead of being in the vanguard of the Promethean struggle
we find the most gifted members of the species on the sidelines
jeering at the clamorous multitude that set out to tame and straddle
God’s creation.”
My response: This is fascinating speculation by Hoffer, that he was
unsure that the assault of nature by humans in the Neolithic Age may
not have had intellectual support, and that many intellectuals sided
with nature against the masses which freed humans from nature’s
iron grip during the Industrial Revolution. Humans cannot become
human, humanized and individuated unless they dominate nature rather
than be dominated by nature. When the masses do the liberating, they
liberate themselves from being ruled by nature and by elites,
including educated elites.
H: “The intellectuals entered the nineteenth century flushed with
the conviction that they were the new makers of history. Had not
their words set in motion the earthshaking events of the French
Revolution? Coleridge boasted that the most important changes in the
world had their origin not in the cabinets of statesmen or the
insights of businessmen but ‘in the closets and lonely walks of
theorists.’”
My response: I do mind that intellectuals have made history, but I do
not like the outcomes: bloody revolution, world wars, weapons of mass
destruction, totalitarian states oppressing billions of humans,
violent purges, human rights abuses and mass movements.
If each one of the masses become as theorist, an intellectual
aristocrat of the highest caliber and originality, then introducing
new ideas, often revolutionary, will be received with careful
scrutiny and even enthusiasm occasionally, from the attentive and
judging individuated supercitizens.
These remarkable maverizers want and will insist upon peaceful,
constant, steady, constructive, socially beneficial change without
violent revolution that destructively missile-launches its bombs of
chaos and commotion against the existing regimes with all of its
traditions, lore, and grand narratives. Change without violent
upheaval overthrowing a just, peaceful free government is the optimal
goal. This is how we end violent terrorist revolutionary
intellectuals making history as vicious dreamers and ideologues: the
goal is for the smart masses to transform intellectuals into mere
thinkers and talkers to be taken under advisement, never obeyed, and
usually kept out of citadels of power, thus reducing them to being
toothless, paper tigers, as they introduce their new ideas to
society, without mass movements, war and revolution being introduced
as corollaries.
H: “Heine was more blatant: ‘Mark this ye proud men of action; ye
are nothing but the unconscious instruments of the men of thought
who, often in humblest seclusion, have appointed you to your
inevitable tasks.’ Few of the educated knew in first decades of the
nineteenth century that they had an Industrial Revolution on their
hands. Everywhere the intellectuals were strutting, posturing, and
declaiming, each fancying himself a man of destiny. Then one morning
they woke up to discover the power had fallen into the hands of
their middle-class relatives, their lowbrow brothers, uncles,
in-laws, who not only had taken possession of everything they could
lay their hands on, but aspired to impose their values and tastes
upon the whole society.”
My response: The values and tastes of the American middle class and
blue collar society—adding in republican liberty, capitalism,
constitutionalism, Christianity, egoist morality, and individuating
individualism—become the cultural core of great and noble American
Way, a fit system to live in and under, economic and political
arrangement fit for all the world to adopt, elitists of all kinds
being kept out of power.
H: “The revulsion from a middle-class society that came to dominate
the nineteenth century alienated the intellectuals from the machine
age. Writers, poets, artists, philosophers, and scholars poured their
scorn on the money-grubbing, mean-spirited, sweating, pushing,
hard-working philistines who dared vie with God.”
My response: When the industrialists, farmers, miners and philistines
began to get materials and resources from nature, that was not vying
with God, the creator of nature and everything else; rather, humans
began to reinvent nature and make an artificial world outside of and
beyond and yet always intertwined with nature, and that was not vying
with God, but following God’s orders to build heaven on earth, for
heaven wherever it is, is not a direct duplicate of some lovely
mountain dell in the Alps in Switzerland.
H: “The steam engine,’ cried Baudelaire, ‘is the negation of
God.’ Flaubert described his joy at the sight of weeds overrunning
abandoned buildings, ‘this embrace of nature coming swiftly to bury
the work of men the moment that his hand is no longer there to defend
it.’ One also wonders how much the refusal to countenance history
made by a despised middle class contributed to the tendency of the
learned during the nineteenth century to downgrade man as a maker of
history.”
My response: Because the intellectuals hated the common people when
they made history in the 19th century, this constantly
gaslighting and undercutting their merited sense of sense worth and
potential, has kept people down, back, submissive and still obeying,
listening too and meekly accept the narrative which elites feed to
them, much to the detriment of human advancement to this very day.
H: “The cold war between the intellectuals and the middle class
that started more than a century ago has been gathering force in the
twentieth century, and the intellectuals seem to be coming out on
top. In many parts of the world the intellectual is just now at the
center of the stage as ruler, legislator, policeman, military leader,
and large-scale industrialist. One of the greatest surprises of the
twentieth century was sprung by the educated when they came to power.
Ghandi once said that what worried him most was ‘the hardness of
heart of the educated,’ and it staggers the mind that education
rather than educating the heart makes it more savage.”
My response: That intellectuals likely are the most corruptible and
the cruelest of all human types was not predicted by anyone before
Hoffer the wise. My hunch is that their aristocratic lust for power
of powerlessness as rulers of the masses, their ideological purity,
their utter selflessness to their holy cause, their perfectionistic
idealism, their altruistic ethics, their love of being enslaved and
enslaving the masses and their pure, groupism—all of these general
character traits shared by intellectuals in power likely fill them
with a pure, absolute self-loathing, an utter loss of self-esteem,
that what is eliminated is their consciences, then there are no
limits to their cruelty, their nihilism, their hardness of
heartedness—not many veteran demons could be more evil. Now, to
allow these people to bring about a totalitarian society, watch out!
H: “We have discovered that nature prefers to lodge its fifth
column in the minds and hearts of the educated. We have yet to
assimilate the fact that it took ‘a nation of philosophers’ to
produce Hitler and Nazism, and that in Stalin’s Russia professors,
writers, artists, and scientists were a pampered and petted
aristocracy. These privileged intellectuals did not let out a peep
against one of the most brutal tyrannies the world has seen. The
Stalin cult was the work of intellectuals.* (*Stalin also liquidated
intellectuals. The fact that when intellectuals hang together and
attain power they often end up by hanging each other underlines the
unconditioned savagery of ‘the bloody-minded professors.’)
It’s remarkable how worshipful of the machine intellectuals can
become when the economy of the country is in their keeping, and how
naturally they take to treating human beings as a cheap, all-purpose
raw material. They have processed human flesh into steel mills, dams,
powerhouses, etc., and it was all done in the name of a noble ideal.
It needs an effort to realize that the twentieth century is the
century of the idealist. No other century has seen so vast an
expulsion of practical people from the seats of power and their
replacement by idealists. In no other century has there been so
powerful an attempt to realize ideals, dreams, and visions. The
unprecedented dehumanization our century has seen was conceived and
engineered by idealists.
Societies ruled by intellectuals tend to approach menageries: the
fences and walls which usually enclose them are there not to keep
anything out but to keep the animals from running away. The return of
nature in these societies manifests itself not only in the attitude
of the rulers toward the people, but in the attitude of the ruled
toward the government.”
My response: Hoffer is drawing our attention to what he as identified
as a pattern, an immoral pattern: A society favored, created and
ruled by idealists/true believers/intellectuals is a society, a
totalitarian monstrosity of maximalized suffering for the people, a
society that is as close as it can be to inverting humane societies
in a world of nature among humans ruled by the law of the jungle.
When humans are treated like animals, they are completely
dehumanized, but that was the unconscious desire of the idealists all
along.
H: “In a Communist country, for instance, people tend to view the
government as a force of nature, and the misfortunes that overtake
them as natural calamities. You do not protest or conspire against a
natural catastrophe, nor do you feel humiliated when struck down by a
natural force.. You do not feel humiliated when the ocean spits on
you, or the wind forces you to your knees. To outsiders, too, there
is something terrifyingly unhuman about these societies. Every child
is aware of Russia’s and China’s unhuman strength, while it needs
an exceptional acuteness, a sixth sense almost, to have anything like
a realistic grasp of America’s capabilities.”
My response: Here again I speculate, my hunch being that wisdom is
rare, and likely individuators have it in spades, so they would be
able to detect and approve immediately of wondrous American
capabilities and its finest culture.
H: “Why should power corrupt the intellectual more than it does
other types of humanity?”
My response: My hunch is that intellectuals are irredeemably elitist,
the purest and most groupist of all human types, so there the power
of powerlessness, the negative power of hatred and hating, is the
most virulent, deadly, hard-hearted, merciless, ruthless and violent.
They will do anything to be rulers, and will do anything to keep
their power, narratives, rank and money, once they latch onto it.
H: “One of the reasons is to be found in the assumption that
education readies a person for the task of reforming and reshaping
humanity—that it equips him to act as an engineer of souls and a
manufacturer of desirable human attributes. Hence when the power
gives him the freedom to act, the intellectual will be inclined to
deal with humanity as with material that can be molded and processed.
He will arrange things so that he will not be thwarted by
unpredictability and intractability of human nature. The antihumanity
of the intellectual in power is not a function of his inhumanity. An
elite of intellectuals are more vowed to the service of mankind than
any other elite. But a savior who wants to turn men into angels will
be as much of a hater of human nature as a monster who want to turn
them into slaves and animals. Man must be dehumanized, must be turned
into an object, before he can be processed into something wholly
different from what he is. It is a paradox that the idealistic
reformer has a mechanical, lifeless conception of man’s being. He
sees man as something that can be taken apart and put together, and
the renovation of the individual and of society as a process of
manufacturing. Robert Owen used a manufacturer’s vocabulary to
describe his intended reforms not mainly because he was a
manufacturer but because he was a reformer. He spoke of his new
social order as ‘the new machinery’ which ‘will facilitate the
larger production of happiness.’
Another source of the intellectual’s corruption by power is that no
matter how powerful he becomes he continues to utilize the devices
of the weak. It is curious that even at the height of their power
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others tended to speak and act as if they
were the leaders of ‘a company of poor men,’ of an oppressed
tribe or a persecuted minority. Absolute faith and monolithic unity
that enable the weak to survive are unequaled instruments of coercion
in the hands of the powerful.
Finally, intellectuals in power are chronically afraid, and herein
lies one more cause of their corruption by power. For the
intellectual cannot admit to himself what it is that he is afraid of.
When we are aware of the cause of our fear we can be afraid of only
one thing, but when we cannot face the truth, fear becomes general.
An elite of intellectuals is afraid chiefly of its own people and
cannot admit it, hence the fear of the whole world; and when power is
mated with great fear it become virulent.
As we have seen, the war with nature proceeds both around us and
within us, yet we have no precise knowledge how the happenings of one
front affect the other. Up to now, an increased command over nature
around us did not automatically increase our humanness. On the
contrary, in many parts of the world the taming of nature by rapid
industrialization gave rise to a greater or lesser degree of social
barbarization. Some thoughtful persons have questioned the wisdom of
seeking further command over nature until means have been devised to
prevent the misuse of the enormous power we already have in our
hands. Nevertheless, the overcoming of nature, so crucial in the
ascent of man, can be a most effective agency of humanization in the
decades ahead—if for no other reason than it may divert aggressive
impulses and wild energies for social strife. We are told a decade
from now 60 percent of the people in this country will be eighteen
and under. The Negro population is already more than half juvenile,
and the same is true of the population of Latin America, Asia, and
Africa. The presence of a global population of juveniles spells
trouble for everybody. No country is a good country for its
juveniles, and even in normal times every society is in the grip of a
crisis when a new generation passes from boyhood to manhood. The
enemy is within the gates. The trouble with the juvenile is not that
he is not yet a man but he is no longer a child. He has lost the
child’s capacity for wonder and for total absorption in whatever it
does, and its hunger to master skills. The juvenile’s
self-consciousness robs him of genuineness, while his penchant for
self-dramatization prompts him to extremist poses and gestures. In
his restless groping for an identity, he will join any mass movement
and plunge into any form of spectacular action. His humanness is a
precarious thing, easily sloughed off. Both the Bolsheviks and the
Fascists made use of juveniles to do the dirty work of killing.”
My response: Juveniles without identity and individuality are almost
without conscience, so they can be weaponized to do the dirty work of
killing as nudged on by their mass movement or their revolutionary
government.
H: “My feeling is that the humanization of billions of adolescents
would be greatly facilitated by a concerted undertaking to master and
domesticate the whole of the globe. One would like to see mankind
spend the balance of the century in a total effort to clean up and
groom the surface of the globe—wipe out the jungles, turn deserts
and swamps into arable land, terrace barren mountains, regulate
rivers, eradicate all pests, control the weather, and make the whole
land a fit habitation for man. The globe should be our home and not
nature’s home, and we are no longer nature’s guests.”
My response: Hoffer wants us to humanize the globe, but we would wipe
out half of the fauna and flora in doing so, so that is a complete
non-starter. Without being so radically humanizing nature, we can be
its natural ways and beauty and still clean the world up.
H: “A hundred years ago Alfred Russel Wallace envisioned the time
‘When man’s selection shall have supplanted natural selection;
when the ocean would be the only domain in which that power can be
exerted which for countless cycles of ages ruled supreme over all the
earth.’ So, too, did the prophet Isaiah envision the total
domestication at the end of time when the wolf and the lamb, the
leopard and the kid, the lion and the calf, the bear and the cow
shall lie down together, and a little child shall lead them.
There is a phase of the war with nature which is little noticed but
has always impressed me. To me there is an aura of grandeur about the
dull routine of maintenance. I see it as a defiance of the teeth of
time. It is easier to build than maintain.”
My response: Hoffer’s recommendation that there is an aura of
grandeur about the dull routine of maintenance as perhaps the most
human and humanizing human effort to fight back against nature or
entropy: to build a grand edifice or castle is temporary
cosmos-building, but the lasting, more mature, and moderate or
ethical cosmos-building or cosmos-maintaining is undertaken and
accomplished by maintaining what we have arranged and constructed.
H: “Even a lethargic or debilitated population can be galvanized
for awhile to achieve something impressive, but the energy which goes
into maintaining things in good repair day in, day out is the energy
of true vigor. When at the end of the last war several Western
European countries lay in ruins, one could probably have predicted
which of them would recover first by looking at their records of
maintenance. So, too, in present-day Africa where some thirty new
countries have come into existence, one might guess which of them is
likely to be here fifty years from now by looking for the rudiments
of maintenance.
From talking with the foreign-born longshoremen and ships’ crews I
gained the impression that the capacity for maintenance is a
peculiarity of Western Europe, the Scandinavian countries, the
Anglo-Saxon world, and Japan. The reports of travelers confirm this
impression. Lord Kinross, while traveling in Turkey, was struck that
though the Turks made excellent mechanics they had no talent for
maintenance; ‘indeed, until lately no word for maintenance existed
in the Turkish language.’ Mr. Andr’e Siegfried sees the process
of maintenance as ‘something which belongs essentially to the
Westerner’ and thinks ‘it is here that we must look for his
distinct characteristic.’
It is strange that in Asia, where civilization had its birth, the
separation from nature and the ability to hold it at bay should be
much less pronounced than in the younger civilization of the
Occident.”
My response: I agree that Hoffer is right that Westerners are better
able to separate themselves from nature and hold it at bay than are
Easterners, and that this superior, Western aptitude is what
humanizes humans and civilizes them. My guess is that Westerners
generally are more individualistic, egoistic, rational, mechanical
and engineers of an artificial human world than are Easterners (the
difference is not based in ability and talent, but in right and wrong
values).
H: “In Asia, Africa and Latin America the man-made world seems
precariously stretched over the writhing body of nature. At the edge
of every cultivated field, and around every human habitation, nature
lies in wait ready to move in and repossess what man has wrested from
its grasp. You see trees cracking walls, heaving blocks of stone from
their sockets, and reclaiming once mighty cities. In Australia nature
reclaimed the dog from its human domesticator and almost reclaimed
man himself. One has the feeling that the true awakening and
modernization of a backward country is hardly conceivable without the
evolvement of the capacity for maintenance.
There is a story about Georges Clemenceau that when he traveled
around the world in 1921 he came to New Delhi and was taken to see
the huge Baker-Lutyen office buildings which were just then
completed. He stood gazing at the buildings for a long time without
uttering a word. Finally, the British officer who was with him asked
what he thought of them. ‘I was thinking,’ said Clemenceau, ‘what
ruins these will make.’ As so often with Clemenceau, his chance
remark threw a searching light on the human situation. Standing at
the heart of Asia, Clemenceau felt himself primarily an Occidental
and saw the British Empire as Occidental rather than British. He also
knew the days of the Occident in Asia were numbered, and that, once
the Occident withdrew its hand, the dragon of Asia would move in and
sink its yellowed teeth of time into all that the Occident had built
and wrought, and gnaw away till naught was left but a skeleton of
ruins.”
My response: Notice the archetypal alignments established by Hoffer
in the above paragraph: The Asian dragon symbolizes nature and chaos,
and the Western love of and duty to perform maintenance upon what one
has constructed is a symbol of moderation, order and
cosmos-maintained and cared-for not just built and then allowed to
decline into ruination from consistent neglect and indifference.
Hoffer implicitly ties together maintaining the world that humans
have wrought with maintenance is somehow the law of moral and
metaphysical moderation being preached and practiced, and that that
Western penchant for maintenance is what egoists and individualists
do and it is a civilized, liberating, humanizing project.
ANDREW
CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty
