Catastrophe Practice (21 page)

One reason why Nietzsche has made people anxious even when he has not been made out to say the opposite of what he did say (his work was for a time taken up by power-politicians) is that any suggestion that one type of man might be thought different or possibly more suited to evolution than another seems to imply the existence of an elite — and of all the taboo words of the second half of the twentieth century this (perhaps
with reason) is one of the most abhorred. ‘Elite' has come, historically, to suggest some inborn superiority of class, of race, of intelligence, of aesthetic sensibility: a conjunction between those who have these qualities and those who have power. But in Nietzsche's use of the idea (he did not use the word) there was nothing of this: in fact there was much, precisely, of its opposite. Nietzsche's implication was that there was some special form of activity open to almost anyone who chose; but this was a solitary, not a group, activity; and that on the whole people who liked power did not choose this form of activity simply because their own form of group carry-on seemed more attractive. It was the ‘privileged' in the conventional sense, obsessed with power, who found it difficult to stand back from the ensnaring mechanisms of power and see themselves: but it was this standing-back that was the mark of a true elite: so that the members of a true elite were almost necessarily non-privileged. Nietzsche saw as his enemies those who were entrenched in the established worlds of politics and of society and of academic distinction: these were the non-elite. Nietzsche's ‘higher' type of man might be bold, intelligent, imaginative; but even in these qualities he would be out of line with powerful society: his one undeniable ‘superiority' would be his freedom from other people's slavery-to-power. In this respect other men might envy him and try to do him down, but of this they would be almost unconscious: consciously, they would be able to ignore the standpoint from which he was different. So such a man would find himself working alone, almost in secret: and this was right, because what he knew would be difficult to put into words. Nietzsche saw the raw material of experience going round and round as it were in eternally recurring patterns (there being a finite amount of material energy and possibly an infinity of time for the energy to ring changes) this vision being as if of a treadmill; a hell. But some people, with the part of themselves that saw this, could choose to get out — even if they had to watch other parts of themselves on the treadmill. But what on earth could be said by these people when they saw other people's so powerful preference to stay wholly in? About this, it was true,
there seemed to be something of a taboo.

There is enough evidence nowadays, goodness knows, that it is the conventionally powerful people who seem slavish — those politicians, pundits, leaders of the fashionable world who in their uniformity of livery and adherence to strict routines and in their inability to behave as they might like on the spur of any moment not only look like servants and behave like servants but (don't be taken in by this!) actually are public servants — those bewigged and bewildered figures caught sleepless on the steps of aeroplanes; their bags under their eyes like suitcases; always ready to jump to the call of a microphone or a bell; on the trot from dawn to long after dusk; hardly any time to see their loved ones; their engagement books filled for months and even years; and always liable, like soldiers emerging from a wood, to be taken hostage or shot — such vulnerabilities extending to their children and children's children. These are the people who are honoured socially now; who have power; who choose to live like this — this is the point — no one makes them. And the people who choose to try to be able to do as they like, to look for what it is that they like, who discover diat this often involves them in difficult (but pleasurable?) rejections of that to which they have been accustomed — these are people held with little social honour in the modern world; who perhaps on some level are envied, but not always enough to stop them making themselves and others happy. For the ability to be in relationship with oneself is the ability to be happy — in this sense to have an area in common with others who are happy — but still, to be often solitary, which is a hard happiness and takes courage. And it is a common misery that is the bond, the reassurance, the comfort, the security, of people who are no more than the parts of themselves in the treadmill that is social. This craving to be a powerful albeit complaining slave to a conventional system — to be as it were a dominant domestic — is due to a fear of freedom: it is within the fellowship of common complaint that resentment, the desire not to let anyone be one up, can be effective: no one, if all are trapped, need feel inferior. Such a fear of a happy relationship within oneself seems to be
what a person is born into: a baby is dependent and perhaps confused about what is of other people and what is of itself: and so perhaps a person finds it easier to try to continue to project his own inadequacies and responsibilities on to others rather than to try to grow up, which is the taking of responsibilities within oneself What has hitherto been objectionable about ‘elites' has just been the assumption that such people should have power. But if the word is taken away from the concept of power — if it is recognised that now it is powerful people who seem slavish and who choose to be slavish and the only true concept of an elite would be that of people who are in this sense specifically non-privileged — then, what would be the harm? For everyone — both the non-privileged and the privileged — pays at least lip service to the idea of the overriding value of freedom: and what could be objectionable about an elite which most people who have the choice could not bear to be part of?

Such a picture may seem a bit of a dream, and perhaps it is, if it is imagined that such differentiations between privileged and non-privileged can be seen simply in terms of differing individuals in the outside world. But such patterning is in the mind; and such differentiation takes place, is played with, more (this is the point) within an individual — between parts of him — than outside. In practice most people have one foot at least trapped as it were within the treadmills of routine and power — they have to to stay alive — and most people retain some spark within them by the light of which, at moments at least, they can glimpse a part of themselves that might be able to stand back — until, perhaps, they are too old. Certainly someone trying to hold himself on the side of a non-privileged elite should have no illusions about his involvement with trying to keep in balance differing parts of himself: to feel himself simple would be to fail. He must be handling both aloofness and the social cunning to remain aloof; holding on, not too tightly, to something fluttering, like a bird. As soon as success was grasped it would have to be freed; the mark of success would be something continually changing to stay the same. It would be like a child; to be fostered, to grow; but to
live its own life: to be both held, and not held, at once. To learn to love oneself would be like tending a seed, a pearl (as has been said): a matter of skill however much also of luck the ability to take advantage of luck (and indeed of non-luck): a making the best, and something profitable, of whatever it is that comes one's way: but what comes is usually averaged, and so one has a choice. There is something akin here to processes in psychoanalysis — the painstaking looking after, by making use of whatever turns up, projections; so that they can perhaps become healthy by being taken back; using a language which, by being listened to, can be seen to refer both to its own form and the things it refers to; by these means to undergo a search, a discrimination, an enablement to deal with the riddles that let trapped children out of cages. There is also something here akin to processes of writing plays or novels — that business that begins as the plaything of its creator and then takes off, disappears, comes back when it is ailing: takes off again (if it is any good) goes round and round somewhat dementedly and only when you are not looking, but have persevered, it is there! Ah, these plays! on the grid and riddle like happy children! But there is necessarily something secret in all this: people talking about having to be able to choose what they want — how embarrassing! If what they want is life, then this is something that they have to search for, quietly, themselves, and to discover. If they do not — then what one can say is that what they want can indeed be given them on a platter.

It may be of course that dominant domestics, with their inability to have much sense of their own identity except by hurling resentment at others, will sooner or later blow up the world: and then what will it avail the non-privileged elite that they will have, with such tip-toeing difficulty, learned to understand complex patterns and to carry their own resentments? They may have come to accept, even, that in the course of evolution all individual organisms have to die: that it is only by throwing cards in and shuffling them and re-dealing them as it were that a continuing strain, a genetic shape, may stay alive. But there is no evolutionary sense in everything dying. A game that can be played with oneself in the middle of the night
(those hours when grown-up gentleness needs a little infantile sustenance) is to try to imagine a circumstance in which a natural or man-made holocaust would destroy preponderantly those whom it might be of evolutionary advantage to destroy — the power-hungry, say (in the game, at least, one has one's own choice of enemies — perhaps those who might carry such infant dreams over into morning) — and would leave alive those whom it might be of evolutionary advantage to preserve — those self-questioners, say, who would in the morning laugh at their dreams. Some Noah's Atoll when the ice-cap comes down from the pole? Some fire to test immortality, like that of Empedocles on Etna? But such games, though exercising the imagination, seem to have no practical relevance: and the qualities of imagination, as Jacques Monod has been quoted as saying earlier, seem to possess no obvious genetic advantage. He also said ‘modern molecular genetics offer us
no means whatsoever
for acting on the ancestral heritage so as to improve it with new features'. But none of this need cause dismay. If there is to be a relevant change — if the human species, that is, is to be able to adapt itself enough in order to survive — it is still in the mind that it seems likely that such a change should occur; mind being the latest product of evolution. It is possible, of course, that all minds may be destroyed: but until, and unless, they are, theirs is the ground on which seeds might grow — seeds that are random, of course, but the ground being able to be tended so that certain seeds rather than others might be encouraged to grow — in the hope (there is no other) that if this is done what in time might die would be just that which wants to die (the seeds are so myriad!); and what would live would be just that which does not want to push and pull at its roots and so kill itself but does its work and tills the ground and trusts that forces of life will do the rest for it.

What has been discovered in the science of genetics is that although it is true that the occasion as it were for natural selection is given by chance — mutations in genes happen at random: mutated genes are then ‘tested' by environment so that most of them die and only very few prove to be more
suited than the usual ones in the line from which they sprang — although this is true and there can be no ordering of chance, yet still it is also true that there are so many possible or latent mutations in humans' genetic make-up that it is still possible for a person (persons) to do things to help, as it were, to bring certain mutations to the fore — by the provision of an environment — perhaps of an ‘environment' within personality — by which characteristics which have hitherto been recessive (because unsuitable for survival) might thus be made to seem of advantage — and so not die. The area in which humans might be able to affect themselves, that is, even genetically, is through the environment; and an environment not only, or even mainly, outside; but of heart, soul, mind. It is here that there might be some moving on from the old idea that a human genetically is helpless. There are patterns and styles of thinking that are themselves like genes — could even as it were be genetically selected — and it is over this area that a person has some slight ordering. By the cultivation of a ground for a new style of thinking one might find that seeds suited to it that have been blown there by chance have become established and have grown there because of effort. There are such seeds — how else could one have the idea of such a ground? So — Dig for Circuitry! for Recognition of Complexity! for the Entity worked by the Outside Ground. And beware of Resentment: Helplessness: the Tares of Anti-life. Something like cancer may perhaps be ineradicable: but there is nothing better to do or to try to get established than the encouragement of that which (though it is this that cannot much be talked about) wants, in place of that which simply wants to die, to stay alive.

There are signs, now, as if some part of the social body (some individuals in the social body? some part of the mind of each individual in the social body?) might want to die: as if to try to preserve this part might make the whole body die, as it were from some cancer. It is amongst the denizens of powerful and fashionable worlds that there is the malaise, the will to extinction, that is commonly talked about — the love of seeing and hearing things only violent and appalling; the reassurance from the perpetual round of preying upon others; the passion
for titillation, for dope, for the fruitlessness of pornography. But it is these people, nowadays, who are not likely to have children. Or perhaps their children, if they do, will not be likely to have children: children, within such attitudes, are a drag: parents may only render them more impotent. This, even in the mind, is appalling. But it is also here that there is hope. (Can this word be used, if something so appalling can hardly be talked about?) Such people may simply die; may withdraw themselves, modishly, from the area of selection. And it may be just the non-privileged, the unfashionable — who have some drive towards life, some effort towards orderliness, some containment — who might produce at least — children! In the mind at least; or in the flesh; as if they were genes in the body politic — the things which may survive. There does seem to be some force of selection at work here: but at the moment the confusion, the taboos, are such that although a force like this might be respected, it is scarcely encouraged. And although some form of self-destruction may seem inevitable, even justified, it indeed can scarcely be applauded. But what if it were possible to say in some form — to say with that part of one's mind that wants to live while addressing that part of one's mind (as well as that of others) that wants to die — All right, if you want to die, die! but know also that the saying of this is the best way possibly of stopping you. This is the point. This is the sort of thing a father might say to self-destructive children; who would know that it would be his way of stopping them; that a strict injunction would encourage them to be deathly; that his way of making them want to live, and thus of loving them, would be simply to remind them that they had the greatest gift of all for life — that of freedom. For this, still, is the word that can bridge a gulf between, be understood by both those who want to be fruitful and the deathly — it being a commonly acceptable highest moral imperative. One of the fallacies of old ways of thinking has been — if something is bad, stop it! — and it has been observed that this seldom satisfactorily works. But still, it is an attitude that is persisted in, because logical. But as Nietzsche knew, as Popper knows, as any scientist should know, as a proper parent knows with
children — it is by your mistakes that you learn: it is by being free to face what is ‘bad' that you can learn that it suits you to try to stick with what is good': that it is this sort of freedom — trial-and-error, circuitry — that is the only way of becoming something out of reach of the rules of slavery, So, it might be possible to say to people publicly — For goodness' sake, yes, destroy yourselves if you want to! — if this were said with love: this being the hope (the best hope) of preventing them. But this, certainly, needs a difficult sort of language. And some bright understanding. It would have to be seen — half seen — that one was talking about mind; but that this was of direct relevance (the most direct relevance) to the outside world; the outside world being available to patterns of mind; but not in the old bullying type of language; not even in the simple languages in which things are set out dead as on a platter; but in the circuits and secrets and lightning flashes that are the provinces and provenances of life.