BOOK REVIEW : The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde

When he wrote this essay, first published in 1891, Oscar Wilde was very optimistic about the ability of socialism to rid society of poverty, and advanced machinery to rid society of burdensome toil. Or was he? I don't know much about the context, but Wilde was a playful provocateur. Perhaps by taking the promises made by socialists and running with them, he was trying to expose the fallacies of their thinking and explore what really might be necessary for an improvement in society.

He claims that the chief advantage of Socialism would be rescuing us from having to be concerned about alleviating the hardships of others. Poverty might be ended without the need for charity, which is degrading to the recipient.

What he means by socialism is the abolition of private property. He is not simply talking about some extension of a state funded welfare system. Of course he is writing well before the horrors which attended so many experiments with communism in the twentieth century. So it is possible his optimism is genuine.

We think of socialism as the surrender of the individual to the collective. Irony is at the heart of Wilde's wit, and here the irony is that he takes the promised Utopia of Socialism and explains how it can only succeed if it leads to the full flowering of Individualism.

The reason to abolish private property is that its protection and maintenance distracts us from cultivating our Individuality. The more we are our property the less we are ourselves.

His vision of socialism is more like anarchism. All forms of authority will cease and along with them all forms of punishment.

He turns to the teachings of Jesus, which he presents also as a call to Individualism.

It is common for people to wrongly associate Jesus' teachings with Socialism. There is a huge difference between appealing to one's followers to voluntarily help the poor and advocating that the state should force them to do so. Wilde isn't saying that Jesus was a Socialist. He's merely saying that Jesus advocated Individualism and asserting the opinion that Socialism, if properly pursued, would lead to greater Individualism.

He adds that Individualism would end family life, but that this would make the love of a man and a woman more than it has been, the implication being that that which is enforced is less genuine. Again he appeals to Jesus' refusal to recognise the members of his own family.

In the latter part of the essay, Wilde turns to literary criticism to show how hard it is for Individualism to find acceptance in various written forms.

Wilde's take on things may tend to be unrealistic. He argues ending private property will end crime. But in the broad strokes of his thesis is much food for thought.

It makes sense that a peaceful, cooperative and loving society, if such a thing is possible, would have to be made up of those in whom Individuality has found an unhindered expression. We can see an apt analogy in nature. A thriving healthy group of plants or animals are those least impeded in following their instincts.

Is a society possible where everyone is free from impositions on their Individuality and yet cooperation allows for the practical solution of the problems facing the group?

I think so, but the process to get there will not be easy as the healthy loving impulses are often buried beneath much resentment.

The abolition of private property is impractical because it requires either the consent or the control of the masses. On the other hand, Wilde is right that Individualism is the answer. The way to achieve it is through a mixture of assertion and healing. Strength and soundness are needed to stand firm in the face of all that opposes it. This is where Wilde's pointing to Jesus is so relevant. We don't need screwed up people uninhibitedly living out their reckless disregard for the well-being of themselves or others. Of course, we might see that they are not Individuals, because they are more of a programmed expression of those who have damaged them than of their authentic self. 

But we need a path of healing and it may be that the words of Jesus, rather than those of Socialists, have the ability to provide it.

Anyway, there is much to recommend Wilde's vision :

"For what man has sought for is indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself. Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment."

BOOK REVIEW : The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

A beautiful young man named Dorian Gray becomes an obsession for two gentlemen - artist Basil Hallward and cynical socialite Sir Henry Wotton. To Hallward he is a muse, to Wotton an amusement and would-be protege. Hallward captures his beauty in a remarkable portrait. When Wotton tells him that youth is all that matters, Gray makes a wish that the portrait might age instead of him. He is astonished and frightened when he finds that the painting shows the signs of his loss of innocence, while his own face remains the same. Under the tutelage of the witty cynic Wotton, he comes to embrace a life which runs after beauty and pleasure with no regard for the welfare of others. He leaves a trail of broken individuals behind him, his ex-friends and ex-lovers, himself apparently untouched. But there is always a price to be paid.

Oscar Wilde’s only novel begins with a preface consisting of epigrams on the subjects of art, literature and criticism. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” he tells us. “Books are well written or badly written. That is all.” There is perhaps something paradoxical about this statement appearing in the preface to a book which conforms very much to the conventions of the morality tale, and in which a book plays a corrupting role in the life of the protagonist, at least in his own mind.

So what is the apparent moral? A warning against idolatry. To worship at an idol, we are told repeatedly in the Old Testament, is a certain way to lose our soul. 

The soul of any person or thing is that integrity which maintains its existence as a functioning whole. To place too much emphasis on any part or quality of the whole is to risk the loss of the integrity which gives it its meaning. Dorian Gray comes to give youth primary importance - to worship at its altar - and any worship requires sacrifice. The soul of life is its impermanence. An inanimate object may remain the same. To live is to change, to be affected by others and by our own actions.

Dorian Gray is emotionally affected by life to some extent - he feels fear and self-pity - but something in the resilience of his flesh seems to keep the negative emotions from persisting.

There is a chapter in the middle of the novel which takes Dorian from the age of 20 to 38. It is a florid description of jewels and tapestries and unusual musical instruments - objects of fascination for him, to read about or to experience. This is the way that Wilde articulates his path of decadence. There will, later in the story, be hints at sexual excess, not to mention a visit to an opium den, but everything is left up to our imagination, which works well. Each of us can easily conjure our own personal image of depravity. But the fact that so much time is spent on descriptions of treasures seems significant to me. Someone could devote themselves to social pleasures - the pleasure of fellowship in song or dance, the sensual pleasure of skin on skin - either in a sexual or non-sexual context. Such pleasures might bring them closer to others and encourage them to be open also to their welfare. Or one might take pleasure in communing with nature. But the jewels and tapestries are like Dorian himself, beauties which exist outside of time - beauties cold in the face of human vulnerability.

The character of Henry Wotton is like the public face of Wilde himself taken to the extreme. He too was known for his cynical wit. It seems as if he recognised that his persona - and his philosophy of aestheticism, which championed beauty over all else - could be dangerous if taken too far. This gives the novel its brilliance. There is nothing like a great artist playing out through his imagination something which could symbolise his own possible downfall. As it is, extracts from Wotton’s dialogue are often presented as if they were things which Wilde said in own social life. Within the context of the novel we can see that he recognised the limitations of such cynicism. 

Nevertheless, Wotton’s siren call carries weight with Gray, and with the reader, because there is truth in it. Repression, in order to conform to society’s demands, robs us of our vitality. Virtue, as it is assessed by the current standards of society, can also become a idol which robs us of our soul. In Wilde’s satirical portrait of self-important philanthropists we get a glimpse of the emptiness of respectable society. And, after all, it was respectable society which would put Wilde in prison. The danger is always one of over-compensation. As the Taoists point out, the key is to walk the line of balance. 

In The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde said : “For each man kills the thing he loves…” That idea is here also in this earlier work. We see how romantic love can be more about attachment and projection than appreciation of the other person for who they really are. We are bound for disappointment, a disappointment which can be deadly. Genuine love is the spirit of openness to who the other person really is that does not close off if they prove to be something other. It requires openness to being changed in fundamental ways through the encounter. Yet Dorian Gray has prayed to be immune to change, therefore he is not capable of love.

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 15

His Psychosis

Presumably being well-nurtured would make it easier for values of cooperativeness to be imprinted on the blank slate of a child’s uncritical acceptance, because frustration would not have yet built up in such a way as to lead to rebelliousness against this programming.

But eventually life does provide frustrations to the growing individual. If Griffith tried to hang on to his “good innocent little boy” persona, then the source of frustration would be two-fold - that others didn’t behave according to these principles, and that his own frustrations, including anger at others for not behaving cooperatively, threatened to undermine his own ability to be cooperative himself.

These kinds of insecurities would require the adoption of a form of character armour, so the “good innocent little boy” became his increasingly rigid embattled perception of himself. It was how he would prove himself.

This persona needed to be maintained by self-nurturing - remaining close to nature, for instance. If it were really the genetic basis of the human individual, as he would come to believe, it would be far less fragile than that. You might block out your genetic orientation mentally, but it would be much stronger, and any time the mind lost its strength it would return to that orientation.

When our psyche becomes split - when we hang onto one aspect of ourselves in such a way that it requires us to repress all that is contrary to that aspect, e.g. cling to cooperativeness by repressing feelings of anger, those contrary feelings will only tend to build up more strongly in the subconscious.

So “good little innocent boy” Griffith gradually became more troubled by the aggressive and uncooperative behaviour of those around him, because their aggressiveness and lack of cooperation resonated with his own repressed aggressive feelings and resentment towards his cooperativeness-demanding character armour.

And the “good little innocent boy” isn’t sexual, so Griffith became increasingly troubled by other people’s sexual behaviour and felt the need to repress his own sexual feelings in order to hang onto that persona. Thus he came to view sex as essentially an “attack on innocence”, because other people’s sexual behaviour resonated with his repressed sexual desires which threatened to undermine his “good little innocent boy” persona.

Eventually, if he were to live in the world, and not hide himself away in a monastery somewhere, he had to seek some kind of reconciliation between the extreme idealism of his character armour and the contrary tendencies which he saw all around him and felt within him.

He built a theory, but it was a biased theory intended to normalise his position. He took his own position as the normal inborn condition of all humans and tried to work out why everyone else had diverged from that.

His battle to transcend selfish tendencies is evident throughout his theory. “Love-indoctrination” overcame the horribly competitive nature of other animals. What is “indoctrination” but learned alienation? In just such a way, the “good little innocent boy” persona Griffith has nurtured in himself alienates him from acknowledging the selfish impulses which lie beneath it.

Of course going down this path has made Griffith angry, egocentric and alienated, so when he looks into the mirror of the world he sees his own face staring back at him. And he rails against what he terms “pseudo-idealism” because his own idealism is “pseudo”, i.e a cultivated form of egotism. He also identifies now strongly with the right wing, because their embattled state, in a world in which their selfishness is causing great suffering and endangering the planet, resonates with his own.

In his first book Free : The End of the Human Condition, 1988, Griffith predicted, about its reception : “We will suspect it to be an expression of some form of disguised psychosis and will see its authority, its sense of conviction, as offensive arrogance.” Now we can see that that is what it was. The truth does carry its own authority, but that authority is intrinsic and does not need to be accompanied by big claims and promises.

The “Human Condition” Personified

Griffith says we set out seeking understanding of the human condition. In adolescence we resign ourselves to the fact that we are not going to achieve it. We adopt a false front and become angry, egocentric, selfish and alienated. Alienated in that we block out and angrily deny any truth which criticises us.

Griffith set off to find understanding of the human condition. He was unable to, because to do so he would have had to be able to confront the fact that the social phenomenon of idealism, which has no basis in our genes, was at the heart of the problem. He would have had to confront the fact that the idealism expressed by those he admired and the idealism he had been in the habit of expressing, was the source of all the manifestations of brutality and cruelty which troubled him. This is the central insight of any holistic systems view of the problem of good and evil, as Oscar Wilde acknowledged when he said : “It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.”

Trying to reconcile his “extreme idealism” with “reality” he came up with an evasive explanation for the human condition, one which tried to reconcile the two by providing an appeasing excuse for the “non-ideal”, a “defence for humanity”.

This theory became central to his character armour. In his state of increasing insecurity about his own worth it became his way to prove himself. He became increasingly aggressive and egotistical about the way that he tried to push it on the world. And became more and more alienated, placing more and more effort into collecting bits of quotes from famous thinkers to reinforce the blocks that prevented him from truthful thinking.

All of this is evident in his projections. It is humanity which suffers from a “psychosis”. It is humanity which is “evasive”. He thinks that simply thinking about how the conscious mind works would be enough to quickly lead us to think : “‘Well, if I’m so cleverly insightful why can’t I manage my life in a way that is not so mean and indifferent to others; indeed, why, if I am such a brilliantly intelligent person, am I such a destructively selfish, angry, egocentric, competitive and aggressive monster?’” But is it not possible that this is what his subconscious mind is saying about himself? “What if my theory is wrong? What if my behaviour in support of that false theory has, in truth, been destructively, selfishly, angrily, egocentrically, competitive, aggressive and monstrous behaviour”?

He says that our attitude to the truth is : “‘I don’t believe the criticism is deserved, and in any case it’s too unbearable to accept, so I will never tolerate any insinuation that I am a bad person.’” But hasn’t that been his embattled response to criticism of his work or behaviour?

Griffith is not a bad person. He lacks insight into his own madness. The road to his Hell has been paved with good intensions.

An holistic systems view of the universe sees that everything unfolds in the only way that it can. Thus any judgement of individuals as “good” or “evil” is inappropriate. Griffith has done something which had to be done. Just as Jesus is reputed to have taken the sins of the world onto himself, Griffith has absorbed all of the destructive poison of idealism into himself, so that, by his downfall, he can forever end humanity’s contamination by that poison. In William Blake’s philosophy Satan was the Accuser (the accuser of sin), i.e. idealism. So Griffith, in this metaphorical sense, is possessed by “Satan”. And his battle to have his ideas accepted is “Satan’s” last stand.

But, as I say, nobody is evil. Evil resides in destructive ideas which “possess” us. In time, Griffith’s “demons” will be cast out, both to his relief and the relief of us all.

We can see that the mythological figure Satan represents idealism, i.e. the accusation of sin. “He” is known as “the father of lies”, and it is because of idealism (that original distinction between “good” and “evil”) that we first began lying. When the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis says that we became ashamed of our nakedness and began wearing clothes, I think this a metaphorical way of saying that we became dishonest, we began telling lies as a way of trying to protect ourselves from the criticism which idealism brought with it. Nakedness is a powerful symbol for honesty. Dishonesty to protect ourselves from criticism was the first kind of character armour. And today, still, what keeps us in our various “closets” is the fear that aspects of our thinking, emotions or behaviour will be exposed to criticism. (Of course idealism would eventually cause us to become afraid of our erotic feelings and part of the process of repression that led to would be the literal wearing of clothes because idealism’s intolerance of our natural bodies and natural sexuality eventually made us ashamed of them.)

We can see in religions that they contain intertwining threads of the “Satanic” (the accusation of sin) and the “Godly” (love and forgiveness). This has been religions great flaw, the reason that it has failed to heal or liberate humanity. The disease has generally been a part of what was offered as a cure.

Read Part 16