Understanding Americans - Some Key Texts

The cultured English mind, until recently, could be defined as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Bunyan, the Romantic Poets, the English Novel and the War Poets with Kipling, Sherlock Holmes and HG Wells added to taste. But Americans are not Englishman. Although there is a common linguistic culture and both cultures are being transformed radically by the internet-driven shift from word to image, there is a cultural continuity in liberal America that outsiders need to understand before they accept or contest it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

There are key texts that emerged from within American culture and took hold of the American imagination in a way that helped define this curious half-idealistic empire. Political texts such as the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address and general journalism and propaganda (which is the origin of the Federalist Papers) are taken as read. Similarly, we are speaking mostly of language although we include three films in our mini-canon.

Like all cultures, American culture is multi-faceted. Every generation produces its unique masterpieces and its defining forms but what we are interested in are the pivotal points where an entire culture shifts direction rather than sanctify some text which liberates or changes just a component of it. In that context, I suggest that there are three key phases in the formation of the American liberal mind which must be seen in the context both of official ideology (the political texts) and an equally important 'intellectual silence' from the conservative Right, seen as anti-intellectual by liberals but also representative of a small town and conservative culture of doing and believing.

The First Phase: The 1850s - Setting the Texts for the Cultural War Against The South

The surge of creative writing in this period (we must not forget the genre-creating work earlier of Poe) may now be seen as a concentrated revolt against puritan authority that was inherited from, but out of time with, English mores of 150 years previously - not in the direction of European materialism (Marx) and existentialism (Kierkegaard) but towards transcendentalism.

This is the point at which the Northern (but not the Southern) culture of the United States moves from being a dialectical variant of European culture into something new and distinctive. It is the point at which American idealism and commitment to absolute moral values turns from aspirational political theory into cultural reality.We may take the major texts, read in schools later, as these five:

• Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter (1850): Questions are raised about communitarian authority.
• Herman Melville - Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851): The intensity of questions of good and evil.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe - Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852): Sentimentalism in the cause of the good.
• Henry David Thoreau - Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854): American individualism bonds with the land and with the ideal.
• Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass (1855): The poetic lauding of American earthiness

This immense flourishing of literature on the US East Coast in scarcely half a decade represented an America that was still an offshoot of British culture but that now asserted a distinctive urban liberal and democratic mentality that, in parts, and mostly unintended, helped to fuel the moral fervour behind a bloody war of conquest that was to be touted as a war of liberation after the fact.

This culture was later to invert itself somewhat into philosophical pragmatism as a result of horror at that war (as ably outlined by Louis Menand in 'The Metaphysical Club') and react against populist enthusiasm for moral absolutes but both the belief in force as agent of moral right and a measured antinomian belief in justice and rights over the forms of law has been a persistent value that drives American political action at home and overseas even today.

The Second Phase - From The Late Nineteenth Century to The Mid-Twentieth Century - Understanding & Reforming The Imperium

The first phase was a concentrated burst of generational energy based on an idealistic response to imposed authority from above. It ended in a brutal war that was pursued, albeit not always idealistically in practice, increasingly for 'moral' ends as it moved forward.

Henry James

The next phase is a coming to terms with the expansionary but increasingly anomic ever-expanding federal state that emerged from the crisis. It consisted of two  parts - a mainstream concern with American exceptionalism and how to make it moral, increasingly through a progressive discourse, and an attempt in relation to the South to include a still-alien culture in the whole.

Again, the critiques of capitalism in America are wholly unlike that in Europe. In Europe, there is a war against capitalism as a fundamental socially organising concept from both the Catholic or Fascist Right and the Socialist Left but, in the US, progressives are not arguing against capitalism but against 'bad' capitalism, against monopolies and for smallholders and the 'little man'. The attitude is more one of observation for reform than rage for revolution.

The texts to be read in schools today tell us that, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the US is not all that it could be in the eyes of thinking liberal men.

It is flawed but it is exceptional and it could be better by returning to its original intentions, the intentions, in a strange piece of patriarchal conservatism, of the Founding Fathers or the free-born settler. This is a liberalism that might be considered very conservative and nostalgic in Europe:

• Henry James - Works (1871-1911): Anglo-American subtleties and differences
• Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Fin (1884): A nostalgia for freedom
• Frank Norris - The Octopus (1901): The progressive critique of big business
• Sinclair Lewis - Main Street (1921): The dead weight of small town America
• F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925): The corruption under the glitter
• Norman Mailer - The Naked & The Dead (1948): Americans at war

The Southern Response

The 'Southern Response' is not so much a response by the South, which is a cultural back-water, but about the South. A choice is made in the early twentieth century not to integrate the black people who live there and in the Northern cities but to mythologise the culture romantically as a lost cause, a cavalier planter culture beaten (as they should have been even in Marxist theory) by kinder bourgeois roundheads. In doing so, the South is pickled in aspic in order to be integrated into Yankeedom while remaining segregated at home:

• Film - The Birth of A Nation (1915)
• William Faulkner - Works (1926-1962): The mythologising of the Deep South
• Film - Gone With The Wind (1939)

It is no accident that the process is book-ended by two major block-busting films. The first rewrites the civil war as a war of resistance on the lines of other doomed tales of resistance much loved by Anglo-Saxons - from Hereward the Wake onwards - and the second shows the romantic but wrong culture of the feudal South as ultimately ill-fitted to the modern world: 'frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!'

Distracted first by war and reconstruction, the nation-creating liberal texts of this middle phase displace resentments in the defeated South and divert a troubled national liberal culture, confused by its own victories at times, into hand-maiden to a State that could ambiguously be an agent for or against the people.

The Third Phase - The Sixties - The Creation of the New Liberal Mind: Fear, Anger & Guilt

The final phase is the one most of us are familiar with. Like the 1850s, it represents a point of concentrated energy that shifts the ground within the culture, creating the Democrat Party of today and the resentments of small-town conservatism that fuel Republican revolts. The texts below cover the three key psychological developments that rule liberal thinking today - environmentalism, feminism and a passion for indigenous movements as somehow more pure than urban man. These are three centres of contemporary radical thinking in politics and the media.

Notice that the works of sexual and 'negro' liberation - though important to those communities - are not on the list because these were primarily matters of direct action and not texts, though the texts were many. And we have two women on the list for the first time - third phase liberalism is increasingly driven by women and women's values to the extent that the crisis of support emerging today lies in the alienation of working class men who could be taken for granted in the first two phases as supportive of their bourgeois betters' aspirations for rights and reform.

Rachel Carson

And there is one film on the list that has almost been forgotten now but, at the time, brought the message of Dee Brown about forgotten history into exceptionally gory focus for a mass population:

• Rachel Carson - Silent Spring (1962): An environmentalist ur-text
• Betty Friedan - The Feminist Mystique (1963): Hardline quasi-Marxist introduction to feminism
• Paul Ehrlich - The Population Bomb (1968): Existential panic over scarce resources
• Dee Brown - Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (1970): Guilt at the genocide of the indigenes
• Film - Soldier Blue (1970)

The sixties are rightly regarded as a cultural watershed. These types of text and film helped to create a new liberal ideology of rights (especially for women and then for a range of other identity groups based on gender and orientation), imperial guilt and existential fear that drove the babyboomer political project and the opposing conservative communitarian reaction to contest each other right up until the age of the internet.

For those who have not spent time in the American school system (as I have) and are puzzled by the American liberal response to the world, a world which such liberals persist in not trying to understand in its complexity, these three phases may help comprehension of what they are dealing with.

The first phase gives us a genuinely liberal moral absolutism and sentimentality that the world is not what it should be and can be put right by individual endeavour and sentimental good will.

The second long phase shows a determined commitment to mythologising history in order to make things right, a progressive optimism that struggle will return the world to what it should have been if there had been no 'fall' and periodic, latterly apocalyptic, despair at the world as it is.

The last phase focuses on the moral wrongs that are to be found everywhere - in the world as a whole and not just the american world - and that our environment, equality and protection of the vulnerable are 'causes' where, perhaps, facts are not the issue but the will to change things ... which brings us back to the impetus behind the transcendentalism of the 1850s.

And the rest, as they say, is history ...

A Simple, Brutal Manifesto for the End Times

Manifestos are a curious literary tool, directed at the politics of art and the art of politics. They are usually over-simplistic, posturing and, from individuals, narcissistic and yet the brute assertion of values is sometimes a good corrective to the simple acceptance of given ideas.

Four years ago, I tried the experiment of putting my core values into a 'Manifesto', an assertive claim for attention and then watched the reaction. The support was instant though that says something about my friends - it seems I had a potential social movement! The tool seemed to work!

But it was also educative. Manifestos - whether surrealist or socialist - rarely come out of one mind alone. They emerge from a dialogue that amends and adds and removes ... while always retaining the core impulse (in my case, broadly libertarian and 'socialist' without the bad bits).

I have tried similar experiments with more specifically political intentions and noted that purity of intent soon comes up against brute political realities. Try suggesting that land be held in common amongst the English, even cautiously - my advice, forget it!.

After a while, the Manifesto becomes a metaphor for the management of the real, the mind seeks to assert power over matter, it is an instrument designed to inspire change in other minds but it must also be pragmatic about what those minds (or at least sufficiently receptive minds) will take.

So, to close, here is that 2010 Manifesto now changed to cover four years of further thought (surprisingly little change in fact) and the thoughts of those who commented at the time which I found I could share, my own Secret Committee. Vorwarts! Excelsior! Onward and Upward!


The 30,000 Year Manifesto  [1]

Do what you want is moral law enough but always mindful of the wants of others. Never complain when the brute force of the social decides to contain your desires to protect others. Kindness and compassion are not weaknesses but kneeling down to psychic vampires and bullies is death to the soul. If society is with you on this, be social. If it is not be proudly anti-social.
 
An end to the authority of organised religion and the State. Authority comes from oneself first, those one loves second, one's chosen tribe third and the universal last of all. If authority works for you by providing necessary order, accept it - but be prepared to overthrow it on the day the servant seeks to become master. 

Always choose your tribe - never let others impose your tribe from history.
 
An end to servility of all types, to the claims to superiority of all authorities, especially those based on a text of times past. All abstract ideas are servants. We are their masters.
 
An end to the slave morality that authority dictates to us out of habit and history where what is good is trampled under the feet of men who are bad. We may need managers and bureaucrats to manage our own complexity but they are not gods and must not get in the way of us becoming gods.

An end to prudery and shame of one's body and one's desires but also to sexual narcissism, the definition of all life by possession of the other. All sexualities are private negotiations of consent in which the social has little to say. You are not your sexuality or your ethnicity, they are mere attributes of you.

An end to the belief that all must be equal in intellect, beauty and talent but without falling into the trap of worshipping any of these mere attributes. None of them matter except as tools or pleasures, they just are. The accidental has its purpose. Let it be. Use it. The stupid, the ugly and the unskilled are precisely equal to the well endowed in their right to regard and respect as persons and their own potential. But the intelligent, the beautiful and the supremely skilled are still there - regardless.

An equality of direction for will and being. The vulnerable and different need the brute strength of the strong to protect them against the average, the cowardly,  the conformist and the mediocre. Above all, against the bureaucrat, the politician, the journalist and the intellectual, the abstractor of policies from ideas. 

The condition of the weakest is always evaded and the claimed advocates of the weakest have turned into an industry of liars. The greedy centre ground has been allowed to leach off both the best and the poorest for far too long ... oligarchical management of popular prejudice may be democracy but it is not what we could be. Beware the God of Fake Democracy.

An end to conscription, compulsion, regimentation, conformity, the worship of the conventional and the normal and to the theft of labour value. Beware the God of False Socialism, the bureaucratic control of the many by the few.

Treasure the children and the young against the claims of the dessicated, the wizened, the corrupted, the past ... eternal life is not the goal but a good life that hands over the property to the sons and daughters improved when it is time to do so. Then, the honour of a good death.

An end to the moulding and training of the young and, instead, a commitment to education through dialogue and struggle, errors, risk and honour. Get out of their way, expect them to try and depose you and glory in their lust for life.

Libera nos!

[1] The Manifesto postulated that we were a species caught between the animal (which we deny) and our potential (which we evade) and that the next stage of our evolution would not be a matter of machines and singularities or the fantasies of the New Age but a dogged business of genetic adaptation of our consciousness to material realities and to each other. And so the task was to create a frame of mind that would change ourselves but also direct our choice of mates and assist in the raising of our children to become strong and, so, to mate with the strong and create an intelligent, free, kind and creative species on a time-scale of 30,000 years. An imaginative tree-planting by a planter who knew that not all trees would survive but that the ones that did would be strong. It was a plantation designed to defeat, if only for a time, the very waste and cruelty of evolution ... and so any cruel intelligent designer that might be behind it. Naturally, I did not really believe it was possible but the act of pretending may still make it possible despite my belief. Such is the paradox of being human.

A Response to Tim Pendry’s Review of The Treadwell’s Papers, Vols. I & II

By Guest Contributor - Stephen Alexander

[Editorial Introduction - I am honoured by Stephen Alexander's agreement to provide a response to a somewhat old (2010) review of his Treadwell's Papers. Although there are places where he encourages a further response, I think it more honourable just to let his opinion stand and let the reader come to a view. It has been unedited by me but I have added a factual note for clarification. To permit a personal note, I rather liked this riposte - it scored some hits.] 

Firstly, I’d like to thank you Tim both for the review and for affording me an opportunity to make a few comments in response.

Perhaps I may begin by providing a brief contextual history to the series of talks given at Treadwell’s in 2005 and 2006. Back then, Christina [1] was still making a concerted effort to appeal to a spectrum of people and not just occultists and those of an esoteric bent. Philosophers, poets and intellectual provocateurs from a wide range of backgrounds and with a broad range of interests were made welcome and whilst the shop always had the look of an enchanted grotto, it never felt like a magical ghetto
  
I had previously given a six-part series of papers at Treadwell’s in 2004, entitled ‘Visions of Excess’, which traced out a libidinally material tradition of philosophy running from Sade and Nietzsche to Bataille and Foucault. ‘Sex/Magic’ was, however, the first series written specifically for Treadwell’s and attempted, as you rightly say, to bridge the worlds of modern European philosophy and modern pagan witchcraft. I now recognise this project to be in vain: ultimately, philosophy (like science) only begins where all religious superstition and stupidity ends. However, at the time, I naively hoped that the interesting practice of witchcraft could be divorced from its untenable (and conservative) metaphysics and coupled to a more radical politics of desire.

It’s already apparent, I think, that by the time I came to give the ‘Thanatology’ series, just twelve months later, I had pretty much abandoned any hope of this and my own brand of literary-philosophical paganism (informed by D. H. Lawrence and Nietzsche) was being replaced with a more sceptical form of nihilism as my hostility towards those who sacrificed intellectual integrity on the altar of romantic religious fantasy intensified. Things reached a breaking point in 2008, when I gave my final six-part series of talks at the store entitled ‘Reflections beneath a Black Sun’. This not only effectively marked the end of my relationship with Treadwell’s, but also a decisive move away from my own youthful follies in the dangerous zone where politics meets paganism; i.e. half-a-dozen nails in the kind of thinking that can quickly become fascistic and lead to terror.
 
Having said this, I can now turn directly to your remarks and comment on one or two specific issues. Firstly, let me explain why D. H. Lawrence was so central to my thinking in The Treadwell’s Papers (and has remained an important reference and point of departure). For one thing, it needs to be understood that I am primarily a Lawrence scholar – and not a philosopher. So, for example, whilst my Ph. D. was on Nietzsche’s project of revaluation, it was nevertheless mediated via the poetry and prose of Lawrence.

Secondly, I still think that Lawrence forms the perfect point of interface not only between English literature and European philosophy (Deleuze describes him as one of the four great heirs to Spinoza – the other three being Nietzsche, Kafka and Artaud), but also between philosophically-informed literature and paganism. For Lawrence was a profoundly religious writer familiar with occult works by the likes of Mme. Blavatsky, James Pryce, and Frederick Carter.
  
Thirdly, my thinking at the time was that more of the Treadwell’s audience might be familiar with Lawrence’s work (or able to get hold of it from the library or in cheap Penguin editions) than they would be familiar with works by Heidegger or Deleuze (available only in more expensive academic editions). Indeed, Christina stocked many of Lawrence’s books at Treadwell’s, as she was herself a great Lawrence devotee.
 
Looking back, there was doubtless an overreliance on Lawrence and the reading I gave of him was far too generous and uncritical. Ironically, these days some members of the Lawrence Society regard me as a renegade or traitor.

As to your contention that ‘Sex/Magic’ was far superior to ‘Thanatology’, I’m not sure I’d agree with that, but, yes, maybe you’re right: this is just a matter of preference really. I certainly don’t think the latter series lacks the intellectual vigour or interest of the former, though it is rather different in tone and subject. That said, an argument could be made that all the papers presented at Treadwell’s are attempting to do the same thing; namely, deconstruct metaphysical dualism and the binaries it erects.

Thus, in ‘Sex/Magic’, I was trying to dissolve gender distinctions (as well as genre distinctions). In ‘Thanatology’, on the other hand, I was more interested in interrogating the categorical distinction made between life and death (arguing that the former is only a rare and unusual form of the latter). In the ‘Zoophilia’ series that followed in 2007 – the most successful series I think, certainly the one I enjoyed writing and presenting the most – the goal was to dissolve the distinction between human and animal.

This remains, it seems to me, a crucial project; but one which very few of the Treadwellsians dared to take seriously or carry forward. You say I was a bit cruel on them, but, actually, I was far too kind and generous and because I said things with a smile they mostly thought the work could be considered humourous (and that I was basically just a clown there to amuse them). When I did tighten and harden things up a bit all that happened was that people would shake their heads, wag their fingers, or leave and then email Christina demanding their money back. As one greatly offended early leaver told Christina: ‘The talks are neither about sex nor magic and the speaker is an idiot.’
 
It’s not a case of my wanting the people who come along to the talks to believe the things I tell them; it’s not even relevant to wonder whether I believe the stuff or not. I don’t believe in belief and sometimes I say things not because they are what I think, but so as not to have to think them any longer. Further – at all times – I insist on my right to be transpositional; that is to say, to move between ideas wilfully and whimsically, paradoxically and perversely. I don’t care about the spectre of logical consistency any more than I care about building consensus.

I’m not sure this betrays philosophical confusion, however, as you claim, or that it means I allow personal factors to dictate and determine what I say. I would be particularly disappointed if the latter were true, as I strive hard to eliminate all personal qualities and to effectively disappear within the text (to become-anonymous and clandestine).

Sorry you didn’t much like ‘Thanatology’. But, Tim, you’re a bit of a vitalist and full of a certain (I won’t say put on) joie de vivre so I don’t imagine topics such as suicide, deicide, and necrophilia will hold much appeal.

Too much Lawrence, you say, well, I’ve addressed (and conceded) this. Too assertive, you say, well, that’s an unusual criticism as often people complain I’m vague, ambiguous, and always slightly hesitant about saying anything (thus fond of using terms like ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’ to constantly qualify statements).

I don’t think the opening to ‘Thanatology’ – in which I simply presented the facts of life and death – was dark; or that we can (or should) move on from these facts. On the contrary, I very much think people should remind themselves of these on a daily basis and never seek any kind of false comfort in fantasies of a personal survival of death or immortality. Where, pray, have you moved on to? And do tell me where (and how) you imagine Nietzsche’s Übermensch comes into this. I mention the overman as the one who can teach Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence in the final paper of the series; how exactly do I misuse or misunderstand things? I also develop a practice of joy in the fourth essay, so things aren’t really quite so bleak or joyless as you suggest.

If Heidegger’s thought of Dasein as a being-towards-death [Sein-zum-Tode] is also too dark for your tastes it’s hardly my fault. But again, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could indicate why my reading of this is so poor. It’s obviously somewhat compromised by the limitations of both paper and audience, but I don’t think it is bad (in terms of being mistaken) even if a bit banal.
 
You’re right to find the Aztec stuff disconcerting; particularly Bataille’s and Lawrence’s ‘sulphurous-politico-theological’ speculations to do with human sacrifice and the need for cruelty etc. I don’t, in fact, advocate Nazi neo-paganism or even Nietzschean Dionysianism, but, yes, I probably could have and should have offered more of an objection to this kind of thinking. In fact, this comes in volume IV of Book II of The Treadwell’s Papers – ‘Reflections beneath a Black Sun’ – which I mentioned earlier.

I agree (and it was Lawrence’s position post-Plumed Serpent) that there has to be more than merely sensational blood lust and a desire to palpitate to murder, suicide, and rape, for these things result at last only in complete inertia and a reactionary form of nihilism. Still, in order to better counter these things we need to understand them. Further, it’s important I think to show the pagan-minded where their romantic celebration of irrationalism and primitivism and noble savagery etc might lead them. It irritates me when they tell me about the ancient Egyptians, or Native Americans, and don’t also talk about female genital mutilation or a whole range of other forms of religious cruelty and cultural violence.
   
Moving on ... I know that the actual dead do not actually resurrect. I was clearly talking about ‘symbolic’ death and resurrection in the final paper (virtual, but nonetheless real). Obviously, I’m performing a philosophical reading of novels and poems – but not sure I share your ever-so-slight (but always evident) contempt for literature as for other forms of intellectual labour. And I certainly don’t subscribe to the dualist notion of theory/praxis, as if thinking were not itself a form of action and a very important form at that!
  
A world that is more-true-to-itself, you say, as if there ever could be such a thing (and as if ever there were such a world it wouldn’t be a form of hell). It is in the closing paragraphs of your remarks, Tim, where you disappoint: it’s you (not me) who suddenly lurches into the most depressing idealism and becomes a defender of Truth – the true world, the truly transhuman, the truly Real, etc. You even start to talk about love! Don’t you see, after 2000 years of this, that love is simply hate on the recoil?

One might politely suggest you return to volume one, page one and start again ... 

Stephen Alexander (11 April 2014)
torpedotheark.blogspot.co.uk

Editorial Notes
[1] Christina Oakley-Harrington, owner of Treadwell's, now in Store Street, London. Treadwell's is the centre of a vibrant community of neo-pagans, magicians, esotericists, academics, collectors, artists and intellectuals, offering a certain equidistance between the practice of beliefs and the study of beliefs with respect to the core values of both. The lecture programme she organises is one of the treasures of London intellectual life.