Misanthropy Read online

  Why should Rousseau have felt so intensely that people were just not sufficient as they were? He was torn between two historical cultures, both of which had their attractions but both of which, at the time, were also direly limited. He was born in 1712, in Geneva, a free city, a republic and a member of the Swiss confederacy with a long history of political autonomy.41 In principle, at least, all its citizens had equal rights. He lived there until he was fifteen, then in neighbouring Savoy until twenty-seven, the period constituting an idyll to which his works repeatedly testify – in Julie for example, Claire enthuses over Geneva (‘splendid’, her patrie, a place where ‘freedom’ has ‘taken refuge’, J, pp. 644–5) – and from which (according to the Confessions) he fell into an increasingly stark and bitter decline. Rousseau himself sufficiently recalled the idyll to keep on inscribing himself as ‘citoyen de Genève’ on the title pages of his books throughout his life.

  It was only in 1742 that he moved to Paris. There were, of course, good reasons for his doing so. To ‘a proud Republican’, France might seem unconscionably ‘servile’ (CO, p. 238), but Paris was increasingly the home of enlightened ideas and arts, and especially of the Enlightenment philosophes. Geneva was Calvinist, and had been since the sixteenth century, ‘a sombre fortress’ with an ‘austere, repressive ethos’.42 Its ‘enlightened Protestantism’ was not incompatible with ‘Calvinist misogyny’ and a moralism that stifled ‘artistic and sensuous delight’ (it even suppressed the performing arts).43 By contrast, Paris was intellectually worldly and broad-minded. Clever, gifted, ambitious, determined, Rousseau was bound to gravitate towards it. But as we saw in Chapter 1, in crucial respects, its culture was considerably more stagnant than Geneva’s, as Rousseau was bound to recognize.

  Nonetheless, in the 1740s, fashionable society was welcoming the philosophes into its bosom, particularly if they turned out to be witty and amusing. Rousseau was not a scintillating conversationalist but, for a while, even he was popular with the salons. They were prepared to overlook his rustic Swiss manners and the freedoms of his behaviour. Yet he felt continually humiliated by patronage. Where he was passionately attached to his ideas, those around him seemed suavely detached from their own. Worst of all, he found in Paris a beau monde that, however advanced its ideas were becoming, was still hobbled by manners, courtesies and cultivated formalities, what he called ‘precautions and reserves’.44 These, thought Rousseau, were appallingly destructive of natural sincerity and warmth. But he himself was gauche and untutored, and had none of the relevant social graces. In such a situation, his ‘free and republican spirit’ could only be a source of torment (CO, p. 294).

  If a hankering for Parisian cultivation would not let Rousseau rest easy in Switzerland, then it was the Calvinist element in him that emerged in Paris, its austere sense of principle, its uncompromising seriousness, its refusal to traffic with the world. In 1749, the tensions generated by this inner conflict led to a Damascene moment when, en route to visit Diderot in prison, he had a vision of civilization as a source of corruption, not progress. The rest of his career was the ‘inevitable outcome’ of that moment.45 When, not long afterwards, he published his Letter on French Music (1753), which claimed that the French were far too sophisticated to be great musicians, le tout Paris flew into a huge rage. So, in 1754, Rousseau briefly returned to Geneva, the only city on earth, it seemed, where it was still conceivable that ‘justice prevailed and virtue ruled’.46 Yet there were obvious holes in Geneva’s liberal, republican and democratic pretensions. The radical opposition were accusing the governing patriciate of despotism: though the patricians did not exploit the people economically, the latter had no real power. There was no religious toleration, and the dominant morality meant that Rousseau had to pretend that his mistress Thérèse was his nurse. Genevan society was committed to revealed religion, where Rousseau was increasingly turning to a natural one, a religion of the heart.

  Rousseau, then, was in large part a Calvinist in Paris and a liberal in Geneva. Neither place was going to work. Later in 1754, he went back to the French capital. He saw that he had to extricate himself from the coteries, and moved to the neighbouring countryside, but this was an awkward compromise. The hermit could not resist staying in touch with the city, and his friends (and enemies) bothered about what he was up to. He steadily fell out, not only with more and more of his old allies, but also with patrons, including those who had provided his cottage. He increasingly suspected the other philosophes of treachery, and they in turn increasingly hated him. In 1762, government censorship took on a new lease of vicious life, and singled him out. The Parlement in Paris denounced him, and issued a warrant for his arrest.

  Rousseau had kept in close touch with developments in Geneva since 1754, and thought of returning. But the Genevans had burnt Emile and The Social Contract, which seemed inauspicious. He ended up in the nearby principality of Neuchâtel, but there again his domestic arrangements and his views got him into trouble. The locals jeered at him in the street, and pelted his house with stones. He continued to pay attention to what was going on in Geneva, citizenship of which was still ‘fundamental to his self-image’.47 But the authorities upbraided and banned him, and the Swiss Party of Liberty used and betrayed him. In the end, he found the Genevans even more ‘disposed to hatred’ than the Parisians (CO, p. 588) and came to think of Switzerland as a ‘homicidal land’ (CO, p. 774). The rejection by Geneva was decisive. From Switzerland he fled to England, in which he had no interest, and where he collapsed into the paranoid delusions – he was constantly spied on; there were plots against him everywhere – that had been imminent for some time. In the words of his long-suffering sponsor David Hume, Rousseau had become a ‘real and complete madman’48

  Rousseau is obviously a different case to Hobbes and Schopenhauer, but in his case even more than theirs, misanthropy breaks up on the scattered reefs of history. He judged his own thought to be ‘too audacious for the century and the country in which I was writing’, and he was right (CO, p. 492). The growth of his vast influence, still evident today, began only after his death. Paris and Geneva would be quite different cities after 1789 and the French revolution, not least in becoming cities that idolized Rousseau. In neither city in the 1790s could Rousseau’s specific brand of misanthropy have exactly survived. Or, to put matters in a different historical context: one could hardly claim that the Rousseauian values of spontaneity, sincerity and openness are disregarded in our society as they were in Rousseau’s Paris. The formality of the social life that Rousseau came to so loathe has largely disappeared from our culture of mates, Twitter, jeans and open-necked shirts, and so equally has the joyless and priggish chilliness of his Geneva. We are in some degree Rousseau’s products, and he himself would not have been able to say about us what he says about the world he knew. This does not diminish the power of his philosophy, indeed it testifies to it. But it does raise questions of his misanthropy. It is understandable that Rousseau should have found the two cultures to which he was closest unbearable to live in. But like Hobbes and Schopenhauer, he also converted a historical moment or a social and historical predicament into a generically human one.

  4

  THE IRISH MISANTHROPIC TRADITION

  The first three chapters of this book have not set out to pour scorn on misanthropists. But neither, in the end, have they been able to take the misanthropic insistences we have encountered quite as seriously as misanthropists would presumably like them to be taken. This is because, as we have abundantly seen, the occasions of misanthropy repeatedly turn out to be determined by circumstance. Misanthropy seems unable to persuade us of the full reach of its generalizing claims. The first chapter showed that the great early modern outbreak of European misanthropy occurred in a society whose political features were eminently well suited to encouraging a contempt for human being. The third chapter took this case further, suggesting that the three eminent, misanthropically inclined philosophers it dealt with might have been less gloomy about h
uman proclivities had their own lives taken other courses, or their historical situations been less rebarbative, disquieting or depressing. Given the particularities of their experience, can their larger convictions hold good? In between, Chapter 2 asked whether a truly convinced misanthropist must not ultimately suffer from a condition of organic disgust, a pathological revulsion from human flesh, a paralysis or perversion of the affections, a drastic failure to respond to human beauty and warmth – in other words, a kind of disease. This raises a question more psychological than historical, but which nonetheless hardly shores up the misanthropic vision. It might seem at this point as if the book has already made a sufficient case against misanthropy, and can only repeat its basic argument.

  But there are certain points at which the anti-misanthropic case can at least be called in question, and the next three chapters will seek discreetly to do so. This chapter is rooted in one such doubt. Certainly, all grandiose judgements on humanity are finally relative. But are they necessarily vitiated by that? Does the judge have to feel quashed by it? Are all such judgements equally relevant (or irrelevant) to all historical and social worlds? To put matters differently: if we are looking at evidence for and against the general terms of the misanthropic vision, what weight can we give, for example, to Jane Austen’s elegant, seductively written romantic comedies of genteel life in Regency England, set alongside, say, Arthur Koestler’s clear-eyed, rigorous, infinitely bleak evocation – in Darkness at Noon – of the Moscow show trials in 1937–8, of a Russia increasingly caught up in wholesale atrocity? Koestler’s is a world gone ‘rotten to the marrow’,1 for his Rubashov does not suppose that to admit the monstrosity of Stalin’s Russia is also ipso facto to hold a brief for the Western way of life. After all, notwithstanding its supposed humanism and liberal democracy, the West has done nothing to aid the miserable victims. Austen shows herself to be at least aware of what is at stake in my question when, in Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland finally dismisses dark and troubling versions of the human world, even if these have come to her from no more profound a source than the Gothic novel:

  Charming as were all Mrs Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the South of France, might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities. But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist.2

  It seems unlikely that Catherine’s fragile and limited moral apparatus could withstand any account of ‘human nature’ more shocking than the one in Gothic novels like Mrs Radcliffe’s. She has a hard enough time with that one. Under the delicate irony, however, Austen’s point is also that the truth may be altogether too horrible to bear much contemplation anyway, and civilized people are best off ignoring it. If you are fortunate enough to be a member of one of the world’s more comfortable parishes, inhabit it as contentedly as you can. To think further is to risk destabilization and even derangement, to no good end.

  For Walter Benjamin, by contrast, it was axiomatic that the condition of truth is wholesale destitution. The historical victors, those assured of their place in the sun, will always tell the human story in their own interest or to their own advantage, not least by brightening it up. But its value on their lips is nil. This is equally the case when, seized by conscience or shame, they reverse perspectives and try to tell the tale of the other side. Indeed, anyone who can seek to tell that tale at all already belongs among the victors. The wretched of the earth, the victims of history, the terminally defeated, those that history has left utterly bereft of status or power, even the power to tell their story, have priority in matters of truth, the truth at stake being that of definitive misery and loss. All else is mere glozing. Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn compile their great encyclopaedias of depravity by heeding the millions of spectres that haunted the Soviet Gulag, watching them, listening to their narratives. They are scathing about the overlords, for whose ‘scientific’ truths and historical narratives they have vast contempt.

  It would seem, then, as though, from a Benjaminian point of view, there might be a certain case to be made for misanthropy, after all, the case of the historical loser, who begins in truth. If so, one fertile source of inspiration is colonial misanthropy. Take for instance the country with the longest colonial history of all, Ireland, not least because it can also lay claim to a rich and diverse tradition of misanthropic writing (though no doubt others can, too; the Irish is the one I know best). The trouble with the passage from Northanger Abbey is not so much its lightness of tone as that, burlesque as its intentions are, it ignores reasons for consternation that were closer to home than Italy, Switzerland or the south of France (though, interestingly, it does faintly concede that they may be present in the ‘western extremities’ of the British Isles). Austen was writing Northanger Abbey in 1798. In Ireland, this was also the year of the rebellion of the United Irishmen, which the British army was busily putting down, massacring defenceless prisoners, burning its victims alive and generally convicting itself of the most extraordinary ferocity. If Wicklow farmer Joseph Holt is to be believed, when they found young Irishwomen ‘wearing green stuff petticoats’, some English militiamen would cut off their haunches and thighs.3

  From the eighteenth century to Irish independence in 1922, the colonial British regime carried out various forms of experiment in Ireland unthinkable in Britain itself. They also tried out new inventions there. In 1798, they introduced new forms of torture: for example, pitchcapping. Pitchcapping involved pouring boiling tar into a conical cap, which was then placed on the captured rebel’s shaved head. His brains seethed. When the cap was torn off, so was his scalp. Half-hanging, too: half-hanging meant exactly that. In an early version of waterboarding, the victim was repeatedly half-hung, each time believing he was going to die. Catherine Moreland on the one hand, pitchcapping and half-hanging on the other: Regency England was by no means the only society to want to draw a veil over the consequences of its political, military and economic dirty work elsewhere. Governments ceaselessly operate on the principle that ‘Catherine Morland must not know’. Solzhenitsyn is at pains to stress that the Gulag Archipelago was a vast, shadowy world within a world that knew little or nothing about it. So, too, Ireland was England’s squalid backyard, its hidden abattoir. The misanthropist might seem to have at least some reason to suppose that this kind of concealment – and the wilful ignorance that often accompanies it – is typical, and that the underside, the Benjaminian truth, is likely to be bleak indeed.

  *

  The Ireland of 1798, in fact, was ‘fruitful in horrors’ to an extent quite beyond Mrs Radcliffe’s compass. But then, it had been so for many centuries. The English, or rather Cambro-Normans, Welsh Normans, first invaded in 1169, at the request of a beleaguered Irish king. They were in fact of maverick baronial stock: their predecessors had hurtled down to Wales as quickly as they could, partly to get as far away as possible from the jurisdiction of William the Conqueror. Henry II, however, was not about to let erstwhile vassals establish themselves as a rival power on a neighbouring island, and himself made the trip in 1171 (with fleet and army). Having asserted his authority, he left. (English monarchs never stayed long in Ireland). The Norman barons were free to go hunting for territory, which they promptly did, though the territory in question was duly incorporated into the royal Lordship under Henry’s sway.

  The Normans were a Viking people, and not noted for their kindly treatment of those they i
nvaded. Yet, strangely, their occupation of Ireland lost momentum, then weakened and came to a halt. The Lordship shrank to the coastal area between Dublin and Dundalk, known as the Pale. Perhaps because of what had been their own rootless tradition, the Normans turned out to be surprisingly open to assimilation. They became ‘Hibernicized’. Norman robber barons settled down alongside autonomous Irish princes, fought with but also built alliances with them. They intermarried with the Irish, adopted their language, customs and mode of dress. They wore their hair long, like the Irish. In the well-known phrase, they became more Irish than the Irish. This was so far the case that, in 1366, the English introduced the Statutes of Kilkenny, thirty-five acts that sought to counter what they took to be a process of degeneration. Since, however, the English monarchy had no resources for carrying out any practical programme, the Statutes changed little.