Was D. H. Lawrence a Primitive Communist?

Top: Quetzalcoatl by Hunt Emerson in Dawn of the Unread (Issue 7)

Bottom: Communist red flag with classic hammer and sickle design

 

 

I.

The concept of primitive communism is often credited to Marx and Engels and advances the idea that hunter-gatherer societies were traditionally based on egalitarian social relations and the common ownership of resources, distributed in accordance with individual needs. 

 

It seems that Marx and Engels took the notion from the pioneering anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan - best known for his work on kinship and social structure amongst the native peoples of North America (particularly the Haudenosaunee) - although it might be argued that the idea of primitive communism can also be traced back to Rousseau and his celebration of the noble savage.    

 

Wherever they picked up the idea, it obviously excited the imagination of Marx and Engels and they developed it broadly, applying it, for example, not only to wild hunter-gatherer societies and indigenous peoples, but to barbarian societies formed by the ancient Germanic tribes beyond the borders of the Roman Empire.

 

Marxist scholars and theorists - perhaps embarrassed by the romanticism of all this - attempted to downplay the significance of primitive communism in the work of their idols [1]. 

 

However, the madmen of the Khmer Rouge, looking to build on the revolutionary fantasies of Marx and Mao, really ran with the idea. Indeed, the party's General Secretary was so impressed with the self-sufficient manner in which the mountain tribes of Cambodia lived that he relocated the urban population to the countryside and forced it to work on collective farms. This resulted in approximately a quarter of Cambodia's population dying from malnutrition and disease, but at least he gave it a go.   

 

Still, never mind Pol Pot - what about D. H. Lawrence? Was he too someone seduced by the fantasy of primitive communism?

 

II. 

 

According to John Pateman, The Plumed Serpent can be read as an allegorical work that isn't so much concerned with ancient Aztec gods as promoting a political vision of a possible future Mexico based upon a model of primitive communism. 

 

For Like Marx, argues Pateman, Lawrence was interested in how human development might involve a radical return to pre-modern social relations. Thus, the hymns which Lawrence writes for his fictional neo-pagan religious movement should be heard as a revolutionary call to action, comparable to The Communist Manifesto (1848).

 

I have to say, I think there are problems with this reading of Lawrence's novel. And, push comes to shove, I'm with the German hotel manager who describes Ramón's Quetzalcoatl movement as another form of national socialism - not primitive communism [2].  

 

However, as I don't have advance access to the paper that Pateman is due to present to the D. H. Lawrence Society next month, I shall refrain from offering any criticisms here and now. Instead, let me just remind readers of my own readings of The Plumed Serpent, which can be found in several posts, including here, here, and here. 

 

In sum: The Plumed Serpent is - for me at least - Lawrence's rather frantic attempt to create what Deleuze and Guattari would call neo-territorialities based upon old fragments of code and the invention of new forms of jargon and myth [3]. 

 

Unfortunately, such neo-territorialities are, at best, artificial and archaic and, at worst, fascistic and malignant. As Kate's dead husband once told her: "Evil is lapsing back to old life-modes that have been surpassed in us." [4]  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] There was very little research into primitive communism among Marxist scholars and would-be revolutionaries beyond the 1844 study by Engels until the 20th century when some, like Rosa Luxemburg and the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, took up the idea and developed it. 

      Non-Marxist scholars of pre- and early-history did not take the term seriously, although it was occasionally examined if only then to be swiftly dismissed; for it soon became clear that Morgan's work was flawed (to say the least). 

      Today, there are still those who insist that we could learn much from (matriarchal) societies that practice economic cooperation and communal ownership, but they rarely (if ever) use the term primitive communism. For such thinkers, it is the dominant culture's bias against any alternative to capitalism (and the patriarchy) that is the problem - and if it hadn't been for Western colonialism and imperialism, we'd still find many peoples living happily and peacefully in a non-alienated manner.   

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 103. 

      It's interesting to recall that Kate, the middle-aged Irishwoman at the centre of the novel, refuses to accept this estimation of Ramón and his followers; for her, they were real men who wanted something more than modern pettiness: "She would believe in them. Anything, anything rather than this sterility of nothingness which was the world, and into which her life was drifting", writes Lawrence. But this, surely, is one of the great dangers of nihilism (and helps explain the attraction of fascism); one searches desperately for something or someone to cling on to. Even the most dangerous political invalids and the most fanatic of religious lunatics can suddenly seem attractive and find their ideas taken seriously - something that Nietzsche explicitly warns of.   

 

[3] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 257.

      Of course, it wasn't just Lawrence who oscillated from one pole of delirium to another and it's not just fascist society that works in this way. For as Deleuze and Guattari go on to point out, liberal capitalist societies - born of "decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine" - are also "caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritoriaizing unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold." [260]

      In other words: "They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neo-archaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia [...] They are continually behind or ahead of themselves." [260]

      Having said that, sometimes  an unexpected force of radical change can erupt "even in the midst of the worst archaisms" [277], whilst, on the other hand, a revolutionary line of flight can quickly lead into a black hole of some kind. Thus, we can never say in advance with absolute certainty where a literary experiment or political revolution might take us.    

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, p. 137.

      In a sense, this was also Lawrence's conclusion: you can't go back or cluster at the drum. See 'Indians and an Englishman', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 119-120. 

 

 

Musical bonus: Killing Joke, 'Primitive', from the debut studio album Killing Joke (E. G. Records, 1980): click here for the remastered version (2005).    

  

Why You Should Never Wish Happy New Year to a Nietzschean

 

 

I. 

 

I don't know the origin of the zen fascist insistence on wishing everyone a happy new year, but I suspect it's rooted in the 18th-century, which is why in 1794 the Archange de la Terreur - Louis de Saint-Just - was able to proclaim: Le bonheur est une idée neuve en Europe ... [1]

 

Such a new idea of happiness - one concerned with individual fulfilment in the here and now and realised in material form, rather than a deferred condition of soul which awaits the blessed in heaven - had already become an inalienable right of citizens in the United States.

 

Whether Jefferson was inspired by the English empiricist John Locke - or by the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau - is debatable. But, either way, the pursuit of happiness was declared a self-evidently good thing that all Americans should uphold and practice [2].        

 

It might also be noted that 1776 was the year that Jeremy Bentham famously wrote that ensuring the greatest happiness of the greatest number was the mark of a truly moral and just society [3].   

 

 

II. 

 

So what's the problem?

 

Well, the problem for those who take Nietzsche seriously, is that this positing of happiness in its modern form as the ultimate aim of human existence makes one contemptible. 

 

That is to say, one becomes the kind of person who only seeks their own pleasure and safety, avoiding all danger, difficulty, or struggle; one becomes one of those letzter Menschen that Zarathustra speaks of [4].    

 

Nietzsche wants his readers to see that suffering and, yes, even unhappiness, play an important role in life and culture; that greatness is, in fact, more often than not born of pain and sorrow. This is why his philosophy is a form of tragic pessimism.

 

And this is why it's kind of insulting to wish a Nietzschean happy new year ... [5] [6] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Louis de Saint-Just made this remark in a speech to the National Convention entitled Sur le mode d'exécution du décret contre les ennemis de la Révolution (3 March 3, 1794) - only four months before he went to the guillotine, aged 26, along with his friend and fellow revolutionary Robespierre.  

[2] The famous line written by Thomas Jefferson in the 1776 Declaration of Independence reads: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

 

[3] This phrase - often wrongly attributed to J. S. Mill - can be found in the Preface to Bentham's A Fragment on Government (1776). 

[4] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Zarathustra's Prologue', 5.

 

[5] Similarly, one should refrain from wishing happy new year to a devotee of Larry David; or, at any rate, be aware that there's a cut off after which it's no longer appropriate to do so. See episode 1 of season 10 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, entitled 'Happy New Year' (dir. Jeff Schaffer): click here.

 

[6] Having said that, see the post published on 1 Jan 2016 entitled 'Sanctus Januarius' for a Nietzschean new year's message: click here. 

Reflections on The Transparency Society by Byung-Chul Han (Part 3: From The Society of Information to The Society of Control)

ITMA: Byung-Chul Han

 

 

IV.

The Information Society

It could be argued that philosophy begins and ends in Plato's Cave. At any rate, that's where we find ourselves once again in chapter 7 of The Transparency Society [a] ...

 

Upon inspection, Byung-Chul Han decides Plato's cave is constructed as a kind of shadow theatre, in which even the objects casting shadows are not real things as such, but merely "theatrical figures and props" [37]. Real things and their shadows exist only outside of the cave, in the world of natural light (i.e., the medium of truth).

 

Interestingly, Han suggests:

 

"Plato's allegory does not represent different modes of cognition, as his interpreters commonly claim; rather, it represents different ways of living, that is, narrative and cognitive modes of existence. [...] In the allegory of the cave, the theatre as a world of narration stands opposed to the world of insight." [38]

 

You might think that Han would, as a philosopher, opt for the latter; but he seems to favour sitting by an artificial fire enjoying scenic illusions and spinning tales of his own. "The light of truth", he says, "denarrativizes the world" [38] and annihilates the play of appearances. And that's why the society of transparency - like Plato's Republic - "is a society without poets, without seduction or metamorphosis" [39].    

 

Han - as a Heideggerian - has a soft-spot for poets: "After all, it is the poet who produces scenic illusions , forms of appearance, and ritual and ceremonial signs; he sets artifacts and antifacts against hyperreal, naked evidence." [39] 

 

Having said that, Han is not entirely pro-darkness and anti-light - and he doesn't think these things separately: "Light and darkness are coeval. Light and shadow belong together. [...] The light of reason and the darkness of the irrational [...] bring each other forth." [39] 

 

And for Han, the transparency society (in contrast to Plato's world), "lacks divine light inhabited by metaphysical tension" [39]. He continues:

"The society of transparency is see-through [...] It is not illuminated by light that streams from a transcendent source. [...] The medium of transparency is not light, but rather lightless radiation; instead of illuminating, it suffuses everything and makes it see-through. In contrast to light, it is penetrating and intrusive. Moreover, its effect is homogenizing and leveling, whereas metaphysical light generates hierarchies and distinctions; thereby it creates order and points of orientation." [39]

The society of transparency may not wish to create order in the sense that Han thinks it here - but it certainly likes to generate (and accumulate) masses of information and innumerable images [b]. Why? Because, says Han, it wishes to disguise its own emptiness.

 

Unfortunately, all the information and imagery in the world doesn't prevent the growing void at the heart of our world ... 

 

The Society of Unveiling

 

"In a certain sense, the eighteenth century was not entirely unlike the present. It already knew the pathos of unveiling and transparency." [42] 

 

For it was, after all, the century of Rousseau, author of Les Confessions and one of the central figures within the Age of Enlightenment. Rousseau it is, who calls upon all men to unveil themselves, in the sincere belief that truth loves to go naked [c]. 

 

Thus whilst the eighteenth century was still a theatrum mundi - full of scenes, masks, and figures - "Rousseau's demand for transparency announces a paradigm shift" [43]. He explicitly "sets his discourse of the heart and truth against the play of masks and roles" [43] and "vehemently criticizes the plan to erect a theatre in Geneva" [43], on the grounds that it will be a "site of disguise, appearance, and seduction lacking all transparency" [43-44].

 

If, as a Nietzschean, I already had problems with Rousseau, Byung-Chul Han convinces me to despise him still further: 

 

"In Rousseau, one can observe how the morality of total transparency necessarily switches to tyranny. The heroic project of transparency - wanting to tear down veils, bring everything to light, and drive away darkness - leads to violence. The prohibition against the theatre and mimesis, which Plato had already legislated for his ideal city, impresses totalitarian traits on Rousseau's transparent society." [44]

 

In sum: "Rousseau's society of transparency turns out to be a society of total control and surveillance." [44] It differs from our world only in that digital transparency "is not cardiographic but pornographic" [44] and its goal "is not moral purification of the heart, but maximal profit" [44].

The Society of Control

 

The digital panopticon of the 21st-century is fundamentally different to the model designed by the English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham in the 18th-century. For whereas the latter offers perspectival surveillance from a central point, the former offers aperspectival illumination of everyone from everywhere (by anyone). 

Bentham's panopticon is very much a product of disciplinary society. But, as Han has argued throughout his book, this model has given way to the society of transparency and control. Thus we possess a distinct panoptic structure of our own; we call it social media and we all "actively collaborate in its construction and maintenance" [46], surrendering our privacy and making a pornographic spectacle of ourselves:

 

"The society of control achieves perfection when subjects bare themselves not through outer constraint but through self-generated need, that is, when the fear of having to abandon one's private and intimate sphere yields to the need to put oneself on display without shame." [46]

 

We might say that we are enslaved by our own will to exhibitionism and voyeurism. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, there are lots of techno-utopians ready to celebrate surveillance and advocate the move towards a completely transparent society - Han mentions the work of sci-fi author David Brin, for example [d]. Such totalitarian fantasists are as despicable as Rousseau. 

 

However, Han also worries me when he reads all this as a moral crisis:

 

"Strident calls for transparency point to the simple fact that the moral foundation of society has grown faulty, that moral values such as honesty and uprightness are losing their meaning more and more." [48] 

 

There are no simple facts, and it's shameful for a philosopher to speak of such. What Han offers is a simplistic reading of an increasingly complex world and the very last thing we need is to make a vain attempt to restore (or return to) our moral foundations (or get back to basics). 

 

And, let me add in closing, I prefer the idea of chance gatherings of individuals pursuing a shared interest or clustering around a favourite thing, to a community in the strong sense of the term. Such gatherings may lack spirit and prove incapable of mutual political action, but I don't want to belong to any kind of Gemeinschaft thank you very much and I would remind Han of something Heidegger once wrote:

 

"The much-invoked 'community' still does not guarantee 'truth'; the 'community' can very well go astray and abide in errancy even more and even more obstinately than the individual." [e]   

    

  

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society, trans. Erik Butler, (Stanford University Press, 2015). I remind readers that all page numbers given in the post are references to this work and that titles given in bold are Han's. 

 

[b] Although Han considers Heidegger's concept of Ge-stell (a way of revealing usually translated as enframing) in order to explain this technological proliferation of data and images, he argues that it is of limited use in describing the transparency society in that it only considers things in terms of power and domination and "does not encompass the forms of positioning that are characteristic of today" [40], such as exhibiting [Aus-Stellen] or putting-on-display [Zur-Schau-Stellen]. Ultimately, today's "multimediated mass of information [and simulacra] present things more as an accumulation [Ge-Menge] than as a 'framing'" [40].

 

[c] For many years, I believed that the line: "Craft must have clothes, but truth loves to go naked" was one of Rousseau's (and I'm pretty sure I was told this by Malcolm McLaren). But it seems that credit should actually be given to the British physician and author Thomas Fuller (1654-1734). See his work of 1732, Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs; Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings ...

[d] See David Brin's non-fictional work, The Transparent Society, (Perseus Books, 1998).  

[e] Martin Heidegger, 'Ponderings and Intimations III', 153, in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 127.

 

To read part one of this post, click here.

 

To read part two of this post, click here. 

 

 

Should We Tax the Rich, Eat the Rich, or Kill the Poor?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her 

Tax the Rich dress (Met Gala 2021)

 

 

I suppose the slogan tax the rich that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had emblazoned across the back of her off-the-shoulder white designer gown in large blood red letters at the Met Gala earlier this week is a more reasonable-sounding version of the radically-cannibalistic eat the rich, a phrase attributed to the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1] which remains popular within anti-capitalist circles concerned about class inequality and hungry for revolutionary change.        

 

However, more reasonable-sounding or not, tax the rich is an equally asinine remark, if only because the rich are already taxed; certainly on their income, if, arguably, at an insufficient level upon accumulated and inherited wealth, which is, I think, a separate (and more important) issue.  

 

As an American politician, AOC is obviously concerned primarily with what's happening in the United States. But, if I may, I'd like here to present a few facts and figures concerning the income tax paid by the richest members of society in the UK. My purpose isn't to praise or express my gratitude to those who earn obscene sums whilst others scrape by on a pittance, but merely - as AOC would say - to start a conversation on this issue ... 

 

Every year, HM Revenue and Customs publish an analysis of the income earned and tax paid by by UK citizens. In 2016/17, for example, £174 billion was raised in income tax [2]. Of that amount, nearly a third - £52.5 billion - came from the 381,000 highest earning individuals (i.e., those on salaries of more than £150,000 per annum). And that is more than all the income tax raised amongst the first 20 million lower earning individuals (£50 billion).            

 

As The Guardian's money editor, Patrick Collinson, notes, if you examine things in London, the truth of this matter is even more inconvenient to those who, for ideological reasons, like to believe that the highest earners don't pay their fair share:  

 

"The city has 4.2 million income tax payers, but just 87,000 individuals earning over £200,000 a year paid nearly half the £43.8bn income tax raised in the capital. It’s uncomfortable to say it, but if we lose all those absurdly paid investment bankers [...] the hit to the public purse will be painful, as they are clearly paying vast amounts to the Treasury. Those London bankers, lawyers and their ilk paid more income tax in 2016-17 than the entire sum raised from every income tax payer in Scotland and Wales combined." [3]

 

And so, simply shouting tax the rich - or eat the rich - is as politically suspect as the secret fantasy of killing the poor is amongst members of the super-rich who would sooner exterminate those in need than provide funds to help eradicate poverty ...  

 

 

The sun beams down on a brand new day / No more welfare tax to pay 

Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light / Jobless millions whisked away 

At last we have more room to play / All systems go to kill the poor tonight [4]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, President of the Paris Commune, is believed to have given a speech on 14 October 1793 (i.e., during the Reign of Terror), in which he quoted Rousseau as saying: Quand le peuple n'aura plus rien à manger, il mangera le riche.

 

[2] I am using figures given by Patrick Collinson writing in The Guardian (9 March 2019): click here.  Those who wish to find more recent figures should visit the government website concerned with income and tax: click here. 

 

[3] Patrick Collinson, ibid. 

[4] 'Kill the Poor', written by Jello Biafra and East Bay Ray, was the third single released by the Dead Kennedys (Cherry Red Records, 1980). Lyrics © Decay Music / Bmg Vm Music Ltd.

      Click here to play the re-recorded version on the band's first album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (Cherry Red Records / Alternative Tentacles, 1980). 

 

 

For a sister post to this one on AOC and radical chick, click here.

 

Let Them Eat Bananas

Image credit: Dan Murrell / New Statesman (20 May 2018)

I.

Let them eat cake is the standard (slightly inaccurate) English translation of the French phrase Qu'ils mangent de la brioche.

A phrase, according to Rousseau, spoken by a great princess upon learning that the peasants had no bread and thereby displaying either her callous contempt of the people, or her inability to comprehend the grinding, desperate reality of poverty.

Commonly attributed to Marie Antoinette, there's no record of her having said it. And so it could just as easily have come from the lips of some other overly-privileged royal cunt; Maria Theresa of Spain, for example, or, indeed, the retired Hollywood actress-cum-Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle ... 
 

II.

I don't know why the latter decided to pay an impromptu visit to the One25 charity in Bristol last Friday - an organisation that helps women who used to be called prostitutes, but who have now been rebranded as sex workers - nor, indeed, do I know why she would drag poor Prince Harry along with her.  

One assumes the royal couple went along to meet volunteers and demonstrate their support by helping to assemble parcels of food, warm clothing and condoms for the women on the streets; something which is not quite pandering, but is arguably enabling a lifestyle of vice and (unofficially) giving the royal seal of approval to such.    

And the fact that Meghan - entirely off her own bat - decided to inscribe the bananas that were being handed out with inspirational messages only lends weight to this argument. But it is also peculiarly offensive to tell vulnerable women leading dangerous, often desperate but otherwise depressingly ordinary lives, that they are strong and special. 

American schoolchildren might find such patronising bullshit empowering, but surely the whores of England aren't such snowflakes as to be taken in by this ...? Indeed, one might hope that the next time the lovely Meghan decides to slum it in a red light district they tell her exactly what she can do with her bananas.

Note: for those interested in seeing filmed footage of the Duchess personally signing pieces of fruit, click here. 

On the Romantic Conception of Childhood

Suffer little children and forbid them not - 

for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven

I.

If there's one child in modern philosophy and literature who should have been aborted, it's Jean-Jacques Rousseau's fictional offspring Émile (1762). For this immaculate conception fatally shapes the ideal of childhood not just in the Romantic and Victorian period, but well into the twentieth century.

Indeed, in some quarters, there is still an ideal insistence on the essential moral superiority of an individual child over the collective corruption of adulthood. To grow up - I was recently informed - is to fall into complacent mediocrity, accepting of your own limitations and all the evils of the world (i.e. to grow up, is to give up).

Those who believe this - whether they know it or not - are giving credence to the opening li(n)e of Rousseau's book which asserts that each and every child is perfect at the point of their divine creation - Rousseau rejects the notion of Original Sin - but quickly degenerates within a social system designed to erode their natural goodness.   

According to Voltaire, when not fantasising about the noble savage, Rousseau likes to imagine himself as part-educator, part wet nurse to an infantalised humanity. 


II.

Thanks, then, to Rousseau and his novelistic treatise Émile, from around the middle of the 18th century many cultivated and otherwise perfectly intelligent people began to view childhood in a more sentimental light; i.e., as an authentic state of innocence and freedom.

The traditional idea - that children were born sinful and therefore required moral instruction and setting on the path to righteousness with discipline and punishment - was thrown out with the bath water. Perhaps, it was argued, what children really needed was love and affection. And perhaps they should be encouraged to express themselves and develop their healthy instincts and natural creativity.

If Rousseau was right, then, it was hoped, his method of education would preserve the special attributes of childhood and this would result in well-adjusted adults and model citizens.     


III.

Rousseau's ideas rapidly crossed the Channel - Émile was first published in English in 1763 - and disseminated by Romantic poets, including Blake and Wordsworth, who fully bought into the idea of childhood as something blessed. After all, hadn't Jesus told his disciples that in order to enter God's Kingdom they too had to become as children [Matthew 18: 1-5].

This new idealised version of childhood became (and remained) an immensely powerful myth; in all kinds of literature and art, the innocence and purity - and, yes, even the supposed wisdom - of the pre-pubescent was promoted as something that adults should cherish and learn from. Children, it was now thought, were not only our future, they were our salvation too - And a little child shall lead them!

But, of course, these weren't actual children - snot-nosed brats who like to pull the wings off flies - they were, rather, imaginative representations. Even artworks that appeared realistic were underpinned by cultural understandings of childhood and reflected the values and desires of the artist; usually male, usually upper-middle class, and with little knowledge of children living outside the nursery and no direct experience of what day-to-day childcare involved - Nanny takes care of all that.

IV.

By the mid-19th century, the so-called Cult of Childhood arguably reached its nauseating and slightly pervy peak. Lewis Carroll, for example, wasn't simply content to celebrate the childhood of Alice Liddell and her sisters in his writing (and nude photography), but liked to confess his longing to return to a state of infancy himself. A poem entitled 'Solitude' closes with the following lines:

I’d give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life’s decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer-day.

Now, it's one thing to gaze upon the world with childlike wonder - and perhaps the struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play. But it's another thing for a man to actually want to be a child and give an obscene literal rendering to Christ's words. This, says Lawrence, is an extreme form of decadence; a sheer relaxation and letting go of all adult pride and responsibility. 


V.

When not dreaming of regression like Lewis Carroll, there were other men, with darker fantasies, conceiving of ways in which adolescence could be deferred and children kept in a state of eternal childhood. Thus it is that in some of the best-read and most-loved Victorian fantasies we discover a sinister tendency for child characters to die and thus, in this way, remain forever young.

So it is we arrive at a fatal conclusion: idealism ends in murder - for each man kills the thing he loves most. This is why child worship is a form of cruelty and abuse. Place a child on a pedestal, fetishise their virgin purity, and you'll soon find you've built a sacrificial altar ...

See: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom, (Basic Books, 1979).