On the Manufacture of Good Little Boys (The D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post 2023)

Arthur Fleck as played by Joaquin Phoenix in Joker (2019) 

Click here for the relevant scene on YouTube.

 

In one of his late articles, D. H. Lawrence - who was born on this day in 1885 - complained of the manner in which modern men - himself included - have been enslaved by civilisation to the detriment of their own instinctive feelings and individuality:

 

"Little boys are trundled off to school at the age of five, and immediately the game begins, the game of enslaving the small chap." [a]

 

Mostly, Lawrence blames this on women; mothers and schoolma'ams and old maids, who know nothing about manhood and suspect that the latter is something "uncalled-for and unpleasant" [156]. 

 

On the very first day in class, young Johnny is told he must sit still "'like all the other good little boys'" [157], even though this is the last thing on earth that he wants to do: "At the bottom of his heart, he doesn't in the least want to be a good little boy ..." [157].       

 

The entire education system, says Lawrence is established to manufacture obedient little boys:

 

"School is a very elaborate railway-system where good little boys are taught to run upon good lines till they are shunted off into life, at the age of fourteen, sixteen or whatever it is. And by that age the running-on-lines habit is absolutely fixed. [...] And it is so easy, running on rails, he never realises that he is a slave to the rails he runs on. Good boy!" [157]  

 

"But to be a good little boy like all the other good little boys is to be at last a slave, or at least an automaton, running on wheels. It means that dear little Johnny is going to have all his own individual manhood nipped out of him, carefully plucked out, every time it shows a little peep." [157]

 

Some describe this as the civilising of the wild young boy. But Lawrence insists it's a "subtle, loving form of mutilation" [157] and bullying. And goodness ultimately just means conforming to a universal morality and being like everybody else without any feelings or ideas to call your own.

 

So what, then, is Lawrence suggesting here? 

 

He says that "nobody wants Johnny to be a bad little boy" [158]. But, having said that, I can't help suspecting that he would sympathise with someone like Arthur Fleck [b] who, after years and years, of being expected to sit and take endless bullshit from the po-faced finger-wagging moralists who have control over his life, finally snaps and starts to werewolf and go wild ... 

 

    

Notes

[a] D. H. Lawrence, 'Enslaved by Civilisation', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 156. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the text.

      What is remarkable about this short text is that it anticipates Freud's famous work of 1930 - Das Unbehagen in der Kultur - translated into English as Civilization and Its Discontents. 

      In this pessimistic work, Freud theorised the fundamental tension between civilisation and the individual; the latter desiring instinctive freedom, whilst the former requires conformity to the law and the repression of natural (often violent) instincts. 

      Unlike Lawrence, Freud thinks the non-satisfaction of man's most powerful instincts is not only necessary, but positively a good thing; that man is much better off tamed in the name of Love than allowed to give free expression to those primitive feelings and dangerous passions derived from and representative of the (so-called) death drive. The suffering and distress caused by this loss of instinctive freedom is ultimately a price worth paying as it secures the advance of civilisation. 

 

[b] Arthur Fleck is the aspiring stand-up comic and professional clown protagonist played by Joaquin Phoenix in the 2019 film Joker (dir. Todd Phillips). Fleck’s tale demonstrates what happens when negative thoughts and feelings are not tolerated. The individual, denied the opportunity to express suffering in a legitimate form, either self-harms or goes on a killing spree. In other words, psychic disturbances and psychotic behaviour can often be traced back to an excess of positivity.  

 

Guilt-Shame-Fear (Notes on the Spectrum of Cultures)

Henri Vidal: Caïn venant de tuer son frère Abel (1896)

Someone writes in response to a recent post on the subject of pride:

'I don't quite understand what your problem is. Would you prefer it if, rather than feeling proud of who and what they are, individuals who have historically been not only marginalised but victimised due to their sexual orientation or racial identity, went back to experiencing themselves in terms of guilt, shame and fear?' 

This is a reasonable question and I'm not going to pretend that any of these emotions - typically associated with negative self-evaluation - are particularly pleasant for anyone to experience.

But, having said that, it's interesting to note that cultural anthropologists have categorised three distinct types of social order founded upon the individual's sense of guilt, shame, and fear and shown how these feelings - rooted in our evolutionary history - can very successfully be refined and exploited. 

In a shame society, for example, keeping up appearances and retaining one's honour is all-important; the prospect of publicly losing face, or the threat of being made an outcast, is what maintains the smooth running of the system. This can be contrasted with a fear society, in which control is secured with overt physical force; an individual who steps out of line will not merely be shamed or ostracised, but violently punished for their actions.

In a guilt society - which for those of us living within a Christian moral culture is the type of society with which we will be most familiar - the key is to construct a subject with a moral conscience; i.e., a subject capable of knowing the difference between good and evil and who accepts responsibility for their own actions, having been endowed with a free will. Judgement comes from within and the threat of punishment exists not only in this world and this life, but in the next world or afterlife.

It's possible - and may very well be desirable - to think of a future society that isn't located on this cultural spectrum of guilt-shame-fear. Indeed, having read Reich, Marcuse, and Deleuze, I'm well aware of such possibilities. However, these days I'm increasingly sympathetic to Freud's pessimistic view that there will always be a fundamental tension of some kind between the requirements of civilisation and the individual's wish for instinctive freedom.

In other words, it now seems to me doubtful that any society can function without some mechanism of repression and that neurosis, discontent and feelings we might prefer to do without are simply the price we pay for living alonside others; that culture is always synonymous with the internalisation of cruelty.


Notes 

Darwin regarded shame, for example, as a universal human trait that speaks of our common evolutionary history as a species, even if he carefully avoided upsetting his Victorian readership by discussing the radical implications of this (something that Nietzsche certainly didn't shy away from doing, declaring that not only were our precious feelings ultimately of animal origin, but so too were our moral values). See Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872): click here to read online.

The idea of distinct social orders founded upon guilt and shame was popularized by Ruth Benedict in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Houghton Mifflin, 1946), who studied Japan (as an example of the latter) in contrast with the USA (as an example of the former). 

For Freud's views on the self and society, see his classic work Civilization and Its Discontents (Penguin Books, 2002). 

Paint Your Wagon: Civilization and Its Discontents

Paint Your Wagon (1969) is a 22-carat, rip-roaring musical comedy set in a mining community - No Name City - during the period of the California Gold Rush (1848-1855). Directed by Joshua Logan, the film was adapted by Paddy Chayefsky from the 1951 stage show by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, and starred Lee Marvin as Ben Rumson, Clint Eastwood as Pardner and Jean Seberg as Elizabeth.

Despite its faults - and it's more ponderous and overblown than it is riotous if I'm being completely honest (which helps explain its failure at the box office) - it's a movie that I love very much.

And what makes me love it is the anarchic, amoral, hobo-punk spirit that the film romanticises and which is embodied in Marvin's character Ben Rumson; a spirit that Pardner - a farmer at heart, looking to settle on a little patch of land rather than a genuine prospector and pioneer always prepared to take a risk and move on - in collusion with Elizabeth - a woman who wants nothing more than the security of a log cabin that she can call home and a loyal, hard-working husband to provide for her - are determined to exorcise in the name of clean living and respectable society.      

This ongoing tension between civilization and its discontents is the essentially Freudian theme at the heart of the movie. As Ben Rumson points out, those who desire the taming of Man take every opportunity to coordinate the natural world and control freedom of movement:

"They civilize what's pretty by puttin' up a city / Where nothin' that's pretty can grow
They muddy up the winter and civilize it into / A place too uncivilized even for snow
The first thing you know ...
They civilize left, they civilize right / Till nothing is left, till nothing is right
They civilize freedom till no one is free / No one except, by coincidence me"

- 'The First Thing You Know' (lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner)

Writing in his seminal text - first published in German as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930) - Freud discusses how conflict arises whenever the individual's quest for naked liberty bangs up against the walls and institutions erected by a civilization that demands social conformity, even if it involves a violent repression of the instincts (the latter are always thought of negatively by Freud; as desires derived from and representative of the death drive which threaten the greater good of the community).

Thus, for Freud, as for Pardner and Elizabeth, the unrestricted happiness of men like Ben Rumson - drinking, gambling, fighting, whoring - cannot be allowed to continue; it has to be subject to a system of law and order and enforced with the threat of severe punishment. In other words, if you want to have all the benefits of living in society - education, healthcare, honest work, indoor plumbing, home-cooking etc. - then you just have to accept that certain forms of pleasure are no longer permissible.

And if you don't want these things and refuse to accept any restrictions on your freedom and happiness, then, well, you'll just have to paint your wagon and get out of town - not knowing where you're going, uncertain when you'll arrive, but careless of consequences and pleased simply to be on the way, following your dreams with a song in your heart ...


Click here to play Wand'rin Star, the number one UK single taken from the soundtrack of the film, sung in his own unique manner by Lee Marvin. 

See: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey, (The Hogarth Press / Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1969).