Chris Wright - Notes of an Underground Humanist

Chris Wright

Preface to the First Edition I remember a time (seems like decades ago) when I still was sort of sanguine.

I wanted to write a book that would serve as a wake-up call to the world, a book that would lay bare the absurdities and hypocrisies of our civilization. Sort of in the manner of Nietzsche. Writing it was a delight. All the invective, the glib reflections on human stupidity and conformism, the epigrams on religion and politics and women. Periodically I wrote substantive analyses of society and psychology, delved into philosophy, history, and literature. On the surface the book was a sprawling mess, but in its essence it was to be a dialectically articulated artistic whole.

Basically I was striving for greatness. I wanted to catapult myself into history by resurrecting the spirit of Marx and Nietzsche. These pusillanimous times, I told myself, demanded nothing less. You see, for a whilewhen I was still very youngI was preoccupied with the thought of my genius. Or lack of it. I wasnt sure that life was worth living unless I could achieve genius.

Mediocrity was the morass I was constantly clawing out of. I had to have potential, I just had to. I did have potential, in factI was the next [ insert famous name here ]no, no, I wasnt , I was just a hack, a talentless impostorand yet, I was obviously so different from everyone!surely I had the potential to become a genius, at least in the public eye (for I knew even then on some level that the idea of genius or greatness is dishonest and empty)etc. I was neurotic, riddled with doubts and ambitions and self-contradictions, self conscious to the point of doubting my self-consciousness. I saw

myself as postmodernity personified, both in my personality and, to an extent, in my beliefs. To quote my former self: My life consists of intellectual levitation.

I have absorbed the trends of my culture and hover between conflicting worldviews. I recognize the truth in every philosophy from Marxism to psychoanalysis, from Hegelianism to poststructuralism; I recognize the value of every ethical position from Christian morality to nihilism; I have sympathies for every political ideal from Chomskys anarchism to Schumpeters democratic elitism. I cheer the march of science even as I fear it. I support globalization even as it horrifies me. I am a mess of contradictions. ....My faith in the power of reason is totally anachronistic, and even contradictory with myself.

I am the bastard child of a union between the Enlightenment and Existentialismthe Masculine and the Feminine. If I start analyzing myself, though, Ill never stop, so lets just say I had a deep need to be affirmed by myself and others, and I overcompensated for a lack of recognition by creating in my own mind a potential myth of myself. I knew I was overcompensating even as I did it, and I knew how ridiculous my self-absorption was, but, perversely, I interpreted this knowledge as confirming the truth of my delusions: if my self awareness was so keen as to see through itselfto diagnose itselfwell then, I must indeed be pretty special! I must have

some remarkable intuitive abilities! And so the very knowledge that I cherished self-delusions saved me from having to acknowledge their delusional character. I was deluded, but I wasnt. Anyway, even back then, at the age of 19, I recognized the absurdity, the contingency, of life. Nothing was real, everything was to be doubted (even the injunction to doubt everything), everything was paradoxical, life was wonder.

So I didnt take this stuff too seriouslyalthough, of course, on another level I did. But the point Im making is that despite all my torments I remained enough of an idealist to think I could have an impact on society by writing a book. Luckily I came to my senses. Books are not dead, not yet, but their history seems to have passed its zenith. There are more books now than ever before, but as their numbers increase their influence seems to decline. They become less relevant, less respected.

Less culturally central. Their place is taken by movies, computers, the internet, television, magazines, video games, which, unlike books, serve to atomize people and attenuate culture itself. American culture is defined more and more by the negation of culture, namely interpersonal fragmentation, immediate gratification, the fetishizing of technology, bureaucratic routinization, universal commodification. Broadly speaking, in short, social life is too atomistic, too materialistic for anything esoteric to really matter. You disagree? Look at the state of contemporary literature. S. S.

Naipaul, surely an authority on the subject, has said that the novel is dead, and Philip Roth thinks its dying. (T. S. Eliot even said it had ended with Flaubert and James.) Fiction can no longer be called very culturally relevant. The first thing to go

was the art of narration, of telling stories , in the manner of Balzac, Dickens, Hugo, and so on. Modernism and postmodernism abandoned it as hopelessly old-fashioned, since it seemed to presuppose that life is comprehensibleeven simple , linear that there is such a thing as truth and authentic selfhood.

There is something inauthentic for our time, wrote Lionel Trilling in 1969, about being held spellbound, momentarily forgetful of oneself, concerned with the fate of a person [namely, the main character of the narrative] who is not oneself but who also, by reason of the spell that is being cast, is oneself, his conduct and his destiny bearing upon the readers own. By what right, we are now inclined to ask, does the narrator exercise authority over that other person, let alone over the reader: by what right does he arrange the confusion between the two and presume to have counsel to give? In retrospect, the modern contempt for narrative necessarily prefigured a contempt for fiction, given that the essence of fiction throughout most of history has been narrative. Ergo: fiction itself has come to seem inauthentic and somehow frivolous to most people, though they may still read a novel now and then as a momentary diversion. Poetry is in the same position. Its everywhere, like fiction, but there is a macrocosmic sense of Who cares anymore? Or look at the state of theory. Philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics.

Far from being very original or ambitious, they often are not even readable anymore! Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 135. I cannot refrain from saying that this little book is remarkable. It is lucid, a pleasure to read, yet challengingthought provoking as few books are.

Philosophy has deteriorated into research, in the process becoming so technical and tedious that its a terrible bore to read. (I should know: I have a Masters in Philosophy.) In some ways I love academia, but I fear it has become an incestuous and largely irrelevant little community.

If from one perspective academia appears comical or superfluous, that isnt entirely the fault of academics: its because the life of the mind is less culturally valued now than it seems to have been long ago. In a moment of sadness once I wrote this: I cant imagine that the overripeness of our culture doesnt make every esoteric project otiose. I cant fathom the relevance anymore of art and intellectual matters. Philosophy, let us admit, is in its yellow leaf; this is uncontroversial, though painful for me, given that philosophy is, was, or would have been my vocation. Psychology and the social sciences dont fare much better, given the imperative of specialization as well as the publics apathy. Literature is passing away, losing its powers to engage societys imagination and tap the vein of rebellionor (at any rate) discontent.