On Olaf Stapledon's Moral Rationalism

Promotional image for the 2020 film adaptation of Olaf Stapledon's novel 

directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson and narrated by Tilda Swinton

Click here to view the trailer 

 

 

Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) [1] sets out the future history of mankind divided into eighteen distinct species of human being across a period of some 2000,000,000 years. The narrator of the work is supposed to be channelling a text dictated to him by one of the last men. 

 

If Stapledon's cyclical (whilst progressive) theory of history, complete with rising and falling civilisations, owes something to Spengler and the Hegelian dialectic, his theory of a universal supermind (i.e., a consciousness composed of many telepathically linked individuals) arguably has its origins in religious mysticism.

 

That's bad enough. But, in a sense, my main problem with this essay in myth creation, is that, ironically, it remains very much of its own time. Stapledon is clearly not all that interested in a posthuman future; his real concern is with the politics of the post-War world and the "earnest movement for peace and international unity" [xv] that he hopes will triumph. 

 

At its core, then, this work is less one of speculative fiction and more a piece of propaganda on behalf of universal moral rationalism. A form of communism, which helps explain its aggressive anti-Americanism. As more than one critic has pointed out, this is what makes the book - particularly in its opening chapters - seem "awkward and naive" [2].        

 

But, actually, the end of the work is just as ridiculous: the Last Men, we are told, have finally achieved "spiritual maturity and the philosophic mind" [xviii] - a sort of mix of Socrates and Jesus, whom the Last Men think highly of, as the very first page of chapter one makes clear:

 

"Socrates delighting in the truth for its own sake and not merely for practical ends, glorified unbiased thinking, honesty of mind and speech. Jesus, delighting in the actual human persons around him, and in the flavour of divinity which, for him, pervaded the world, stood for unselfish love of eighbours and of God. Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionte intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.

      Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was never really capable. For many centuries these twin stars enticed the more precociously human of human animals, in vain. And the failure to put these ideals in practice helped to engender in the race a cynical lassitude which was one cause of its decay." 

 

It's passages like this that, unfortunately, make it impossible for me to read this novel from start to finish - even though I've tried to do so numerous times - and which kind of make me happy to discover at the end of the work that the sun is about to explode!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, (Gollancz, 2004). All page references to this edition will be given directly in the text. 

[2] Gregory Benford, Foreword to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, ibid., p. ix. 

      As Benford reminds us, Stapledon was a Marxist with a strong dislike of capitalism - particularly American capitalism. Unfortunately, this causes him to give a reading of his own times and the near future that has proved to be completely mistaken. Thus Benford advises readers to skip the first four chapters. 

 

Reflections on The Strange Death of Europe: A Book For Thinking, Nothing Else

Bloomsbury (2017)

Douglas Murray's new book, The Strange Death of Europe, addresses very contemporary concerns to do with immigration, identity and Islam. But it's in some ways a rather old-fashioned read, as one might expect from a neoconservative who continues a long (peculiarly German) tradition of cultural pessimism - Oswald Spengler anyone? 

Far from being an incendiary text full of urgency and the visionary promise of a future beyond the ruins, it's a nostalgic, somewhat lugubrious work oscillating between world-weariness on the one hand and a sense of loss on the other; less angry call to arms, more solemn eulogy. But perhaps that's its strength and what distinguishes Murray's work from that of far-right nationalists; he's not demanding that Europe awake! but suggesting that Europeans take time to quietly reflect and, in so doing, rediscover not just old forms, but find new feelings.

Never going so far as to renounce entirely the need for action, Murray nevertheless understands the importance of engaging in what Nietzsche terms invisible activities and which Heidegger relates to a notion of transcendence (the human capacity to reshape and revalue the world via an essential form of contemplation).

In other words, The Strange Death of Europe is a book for thinking, nothing else.

Thus, whilst Murray discusses in detail the large-scale events unfolding all around us and clearly indicates the problems these events bring in their wake, he wisely refrains from offering any final solutions. Critics who pour scorn on the book for failing to provide such answers have missed the point.

Similarly, when they laugh at Murray's suggestion that the fate of Europe might depend on our attitude towards church buildings, they fail to grasp what he means is that our singularity as Europeans is made manifest in our art and architecture. And, of course, in our literature; one of the nicely surprising sections of Murray's book is his discussion of the novelist Michel Houellebecq.    

Having said this, there are aspects of Murray's book that disappoint. For example, whilst I broadly accept his political analysis of postmodern Europe, I don't find what Lyotard termed incredulity toward metanarratives paralysing in the way Murray suggests. Nor do I feel ravaged by decades of deconstruction and desperate to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Although an atheist, one gets the impression that Murray is moving towards the Heideggerean conclusion that, ultimately, only a god can save us. But if only he stopped thinking nihilism in such dramatic nineteenth-century terms and playing the crypto-theologian, Murray might recognise that our loss of faith and inability to act with absolute certainty paradoxically signifies our spiritual superiority to all fanatics and fundamentalists who daren't ever doubt or deviate from scripture.

For me, it's infinitely preferable to live in a secular society that delights in shallowness and gay insincerity, than in a theocratic society plumbing the depths of religious stupidity. In order to counter Islamism, we need to become more ironic and irreverent, not less. And a little bit more Greek; superficial out of profundity.