The Aristos

it may be it is not, I think you will agree, a fascist one.

This edition contains new material, but it is shorter (though not meant to be attempted at one sitting) than its predecessor and, I sincerely hope, much clearer. One other criticism of the first edition I fully deserved. There was an irritating swarm of new-coined words. These I have almost completely abolished.

1968

I should like to take advantage of this New American Library edition to say that I have, since this book was first written, become increasingly interested in its relevance to the American experience. There are two main reasons for this. The United States is the key society in our world – ‘key’ both in the narrow sense of its being the guinea pig among human societies and in a broader one: the country where the struggle between individual freedom and social equality is being conducted (largely because of an innate national honesty) at its most naked and revealing. The second reason is an ever-deepening affection and respect for better qualities of the American ethos combined, alas, with an ever-deepening distress at its less happy effects.

I hope shortly to finish what will constitute a kind of appendix to The Aristos: a sympathetic critique, in the light of some of the ideas here, of the country that has for so long held so many of us Europeans in its complex spell.

1970

INTRODUCTION

1 The book you are about to begin is written in the form of notes. This is not laziness on my part, but an attempt to suppress all rhetoric, all persuasion through style. Many of the notes are dogmatic expressions of opinion; and here, similarly, my intention is not to bludgeon into belief, but to banish all possibility of persuasion by artificial means. I do not want my ideas to be liked merely because they are likeably presented; I want them to be liked in themselves.

2 This is not a dialogue, but only one side of a dialogue. I state; you, if you wish, refute.

3 Some of what I say suffers from the usual defect of speculation and generalization; there is no proof. What proof there is lies in your agreement; what disproof, in your disagreement. Many modern philosophers would claim that unverifiable statements are scientifically meaningless; but I cannot agree that philosophy is, or will ever be, only a science.*[2]

4 I am a poet first; and then a scientist. That is a biographical fact, not a recommendation.

5 I believe in the essential sanity of man, and what follows is a memorial to that belief.

1 THE UNIVERSAL SITUATION

1 Where are we? What is this situation? Has it a master?

2 Matter in time appears to us, with our vested interest in survival, to be governed by two opposing principles: Law, or the organizing principle, and Chaos, or the disintegrating one. These two, the one to us sorting and erecting, the other to us demolishing and causing havoc, are in eternal conflict. This conflict is existence.

3 All that exists has, by existing and by not being the only thing that exists, individuality.

4 The known universe is uniform in its constituents and its laws. All in it, or each individual thing, has a birth and a death in time. This birth and this death are the insignia of individuality.

5 The forms of matter are finite, but matter is infinite. Form is a death sentence, matter is eternal life.

6 Individuality is necessary for both the sensation of pain and the feeling of pleasure. Pains and pleasures both serve the one end of the whole: survival of matter. All pains and pleasures are partly what they are because they are not shared; and because, being functions of an individual, they end.

7 Law and Chaos, the two processes that dominate existence, are equally indifferent to the individual. To Chaos, Law destroys; to Law, Chaos. They equally create, dictate to and destroy the individual.

8 In the whole, nothing is unjust. It may, to this or that individual, be unfortunate.

9 There can be no power or god in the whole that is concerned for any one thing, though there may be a power concerned for the whole.

10 The whole has no favourites.

THE WRECK AND THE RAFT

11 Humanity on its raft. The raft on the endless ocean. From his present dissatisfaction man reasons that there was some catastrophic wreck in the past, before which he was happy; some golden age, some Garden of Eden. He also reasons that somewhere ahead lies a promised land, a land without conflict. Meanwhile, he is miserably en passage; this myth lies deeper than religious faith.

12 Seven men inhabit the raft. The pessimist, for whom the good things of life are no more than lures to prolong suffering; the egocentric, whose motto is Carpe diem – enjoy today – and who does his best to get the most comfortable part of the raft for himself; the optimist, always scanning the horizon for the promised land; the observer, who finds it enough to write the logbook of the voyage and to note down the behaviour of the sea, the raft and his fellow-victims; the altruist, who finds his reason for being in the need to deny himself and to help others; the stoic, who believes in nothing but his own refusal to jump overboard and end it all; and finally the child, the one born, as some with perfect pitch, with perfect ignorance – the pitifully ubiquitous child, who believes that all will be explained in the end, the nightmare fade and the green shore rise.

13 But there was no wreck; there will be no promised land. If there ever were an ideal promised land, a Canaan, it would be uninhabitable to humans.

14 Man is a seeker of the agent. We seek an agent for this being in a blind wind, this being on a raft; the mysterious power, the causator, the god, the face behind the mysterious mask of being and not being. Some make an active god of their own better natures; a benevolent father, a gentle mother, a wise brother, a charming sister. Some make an active god from attributes: such desirable human attributes as mercy, concern and justice. Some make an active god of their own worse natures; a god who is sadistically cruel or profoundly absurd; a god who absconds; a black exploiter of the defenceless individual; the venomous tyrant of Genesis 3:16- 17.

15 Between these tribes, the firm believers in an active good god and the firm believers in an active bad one, the great majority shift and surge, a milling herd caught between Pangloss and Job. They pay lip service to an empty image; or believe in nothing. In this century they have drifted towards Job. If there is an active good god he has, since 1914, paid very poor wages.*

16 Yet as man sees through one reason for living, another wells from the mysterious spring. It must be so, because he continues to exist. This inexplicable buoyancy irritates him. He exists, but he is abused.

17 Man is an everlack, an infinite withoutness, afloat on an apparently endless ocean of apparently endless indifference to individual things. Obscurely he sees catastrophes happening to other rafts, rafts that are too distant for him to determine whether they have other humans aboard, but too numerous and too identical for him to presume that they have not.

18 He lives in a survived yet always uncertainly surviving world. All that is has survived where it might not have survived. Every world is and will always be a Noah’s ark.

19 The old myth that his raft, his world, is especially favoured and protected now seems ridiculous. He has seen and understood the message from the distant supernovae; he knows the sun is growing larger and hotter and that his world will one day be a white-hot ball in a sea of flames; and he knows that the hydrogen bomb of the sun