It is, in fact, sufficient to enjoy something no longer to have the desire for it, whether it is a matter of fortune or life. A certain degree of health is therefore necessary to kill oneself, and people who kill themselves do not wish to do themselves harm; people drown themselves in summer, but hardly ever in winter. In politics, it is the same; a relative social wellbeing is indispensable to the organization of reforms and revolutions, summer suits them better than winter, and it is generally the rulers who clamor for the abolition of privileges of which the abuses that they wish to alleviate attract them all.
When the Leviathan began to grow, it therefore found immediate and unexpected support among thinkers and artists, among those who had previously pretended to represent individualist ideals. Specialization increased every day and voluntary servitude to social functions received joyous consent.
One may talk about neurasthenia and collective maladies of the will, but that had nothing to do with it. It was with the fullest consciousness in the world that the elite was the first to become disinterested in general ideas and the direction of affairs. Five hundred years after the proclamation of the rights of man came the proclamation of duties, which enslaved everyone’s individual authority to the conditions of the collective and which recognized the indisputable superiority of the scientific organism that governed the world.
Although they were self-conscious mortals only benefiting from a short life span, men no longer thought, as they once had, of pursuing the universality of human knowledge, of seeking individually to know everything about the world. Each individual remained, immutable, where hazard placed him, accomplishing his social function without protest, suffering or dying at his post, as soldiers had done in times past. Moreover, with the ever-increasing demands of specialization, it was very difficult, after a passage of several years, to change position. Differentiated from infancy by scientific education, ignorant of everything that did not concern his own employment, a man would have been nothing but a useless wreck if his situation had been altered.
Only the formidable Leviathan benefited from these specialized activities. A monstrous and unconscious Hydroid, it replaced with its material universality the intellectual universality that had once been the prerogative of the human being.
It was by muted movements and inexplicable communal ideas that the existence of the new being was initially revealed. When, little by little, all men came to understand that it was not for themselves and for their own wellbeing that they were working, but for some dark and mysterious Unknown, and when the distinction became ever-more-obvious between their own wellbeing and the social wellbeing in which they were collaborating, there were a few muffled individual rebellions, as a frightful despair took possession of humankind entire—but by that time, the scientific organism and specialization had already done their work.
Outside social functions and economic organization, life no longer seemed possible to these specialized men—and slowly, without any possible goal, they desperately pursued their obscure tasks, like miners in the depths of a pit, or like globules circulating automatically, nourishing themselves, defending themselves or succumbing inside the bloodstream. They were working for a being that they did not know at all, which they had never understood and which did not know them, just as a man is ignorant of the work of the flesh in which he lives.
XI. The Morality of the Leviathan
It was at the beginning of the 20th century that one might, if one had been paying sufficient attention, have been able to discern the first infantile wails of the Leviathan.
Unfortunately, in 1900 and the years that followed, people did not have a very clear vision of the era in which they lived and blithely persuaded themselves that they had reached the final phase of civilization.
When one considers the entire history of our planet at a single glance, one can hardly help smiling at such a pretension. All things considered, man was not much different in 1912, for example, than he had been at the origins of humankind; he would only have had to be abandoned by himself in a forest for a few weeks for him to recover, without great difficulty, the habits and manners of his ancestors; the war subsequently demonstrated this. He knew nothing of his destiny, he was absolutely incapable of exerting any authority over his life; he did not even know what that life might be; with regard to the soul, God and death he was still as grossly superstitious as primitive tribesmen. It must not be forgotten, of course, that he had nothing at his disposal then, by way of a body, but the habitual organism common to all animals; he allowed himself to be mysteriously led through life by his animal instinct, and his true nature immediately got the upper hand when he was exposed to any sort of physical danger.
Whatever the clothes, laws, titles or honors were in which they dressed themselves up, all men found themselves equal in confrontation with danger, before danger—and in such circumstances, these so-called civilized beings often showed themselves inferior to their own domestic animals. That did not prevent the men of the 20th century from considering with pride the distance they had traveled and gladly imagining that the evolution of living beings had terminated with man.
If people had been able, in that era, to detach themselves temporarily from that absurd human prejudice, they would not have been long delayed in discerning the imminent domination of Earth by the Leviathan. Evidently, at the beginning of the 20th century, people felt that something in the world was undergoing a transformation; they spoke freely of an era of transition. Some affirmed that ancient traditions were in complete decadence, which was true, others that the scientific world had modified ideas in many respects, which was also true; but they attributed to these changes a purely temporary significance, due to habitual variations in fashion.
With regard to the specific concerns of morality, however, it would have been easy to understand that this transformation went far beyond the simple ethical discussions of previous eras. It was easily observable that individual Christian morality had been abolished, that the violent attempt to rescue the moral individual attempted by Kant had undermined itself; but people were content to say that the era was immoral—or rather amoral—and no one troubled to enquire where that indispensable morality, which had guided the world since its origins, had gone. A few minutes of attention would, however, have sufficed to reveal to the men of the time that the morality in question had, if I might put it thus, been unceremoniously devoured by the new Being, the Leviathan.
No one bothers to inquire what the antecedents were of the cells that compose the human body. Whether they have appropriated their water, their phosphorus or their nitrogen from the right or the left, whether they have been taken ready-formed, in the aftermath of a catastrophe, from another organism, as if by an animal’s claws, is of no importance if, at the present moment, they are rendering the services expected of them. The same was true for the cellular humans composing the Leviathan. It was of scant importance, in the 20th century, to be acquainted with a man’s antecedents, to know whether his anterior life had been free of any suspicion. It was of even less importance to be acquainted with his family, since one only had to deal with him, and every individual, at the present moment, had equal value in terms of the services that he could render to the social body.
This point of view even extended to the most illicit cases. The summary execution of a man who had compromised the safety of the social body was easily comprehensible; but the old judiciary theories by which a man was still punished, five, ten or 20 years afterwards for a crime that no longer interested anyone were no longer explicable. All the old theories of expiation, heredity, traditionalism or family were on the point of disappearing; one thing alone was relevant: success at the particular moment, effort judiciously accomplished in the social moment in which it was fitting to attempt to succeed. That alone was important to the Leviathan, and its consent was necessary for individual effort to be attempted with success.
By contrast, all the isolated individuals, all the thinkers, all those who wanted
to act outside social opportunities, were looked upon with very jaundiced eyes, and it was felt that they were intervening inappropriately and in a dangerous fashion in a time that was not made for them.
Alongside an indulgence, which profoundly disturbed traditional humanists, for immoral actions that only stained the conscience, that era also demonstrated, on the other hand, a veritably excessive rigor in treating immoral actions affecting the collectivity—and this seeming illogicality misled the researches of all the psychologists.
If a man had committed all the indelicacies in his private life, if he were defective in a thousand ways, if he were morally rotten in the most odious fashion, that could not hinder his success on the day that he intervened opportunely in some communal action. If, on the other hand, a man had lived the irreproachable life of a thinker, with austere and pure morals, he found himself discredited forever, crushed within a few minutes in the formidable organism of the Leviathan, if he intervened at the wrong moment in a social action. This was, in fact, the way that it had always been in the human body when it was a matter of cells. It is, I repeat, curious to observe that no moralist of the 20th century was able to explain, by analogy, the strange disturbances that were then occurring in public morality. The enterprise, however, would not have been without its dangers.
About 1923, for example, a writer who took it into his head to denounce the stupidity, ignorance and incapacity of the masses was excluded from all the newspapers, whatever their opinion might be. Indignation would have been general if that same writer had affirmed that evolutions and wars, those apparent rehabilitations of popular initiative, were always decided outside the masses, to whom it was sufficient to throw, as the price of their services, the brief animal joys of a tragic mid-Lent or a few bloody scraps of offal.12 Let us finally add that he would not even have been understood if he had demonstrated that, under the sovereignty of the Leviathan, the role of the masses had become even more amorphous. In industry, as in war, the human being was no longer anything but the obscure servant of machines and materiality, but—even more incredibly—a formidable egalitarian Revolution had been able to turn the world upside down after the War, sweeping away the old capital and replacing intelligence with manual labor, not only without the collaboration of any popular movement but without the masses even being aware of it. This is true to the extent that when this Revolution, the greatest of any century, was accomplished, there were still people awaiting it, dreading it or wishing for it. It was still not understood, in fact, that the reign of man was over and that nothing would any longer be known than the anonymous mass composing the Leviathan.
For that mass all the basest demagogical flatteries were brought to bear, for to denounce the mass would have been, by the same token, to unveil the imbecility of the Leviathan.
It was forbidden, on the other hand, to be interested in personalities, to claim that, among the people like everywhere else, there were prodigious differences of intelligence and aptitude between individuals. Any impulse of charity, pity or fraternity for an isolated individual was severely reprimanded as subversive. One had to admire the totality of mass composed of homogeneous individuals—which is to say, the Leviathan, formed of identical cells differentiated not be nature but by social destination, like the “civilians” who are taught to march when they arrive in a regiment.
XII. The Murder of Style
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Leviathan, still young and not yet fully formed, had powerful moral enemies to vanquish, of which the greatest, without any doubt, was style.
Style is as old as humankind. It was to style that the development of the human mind was owed, on that alone that the individualism was still based that permitted heterogeneous individuals to escape social unification within the unique body of the Leviathan. In order to combat it, a muted campaign of denigration was launched. There was an attempt to persuade all literate people that style, properly understood, was nothing but a brilliant assembly of words, a game of showmanship without veritable reality, which was ill-accommodated to the documentary precision of triumphant science.
No thought was given to the contradictory fact that it was by the constant practice of the natural sciences that the Comte du Buffon had once been led—and quite naturally—to offer a eulogy to style when he was welcomed into the Académie. It was forgotten that its style, far from being an external manifestation, constituted, on the contrary, the very essence of a human mind, and that it represented, properly understood, the sole continuous principle created by man in contradiction to fragmentary natural law. Style was, in sum, the permanent opposed to the relativity of life, the only method that man had invented of triumphing over death and oblivion.
Style, in past centuries, had manifested itself in a hundred different ways. In the State, it was represented by constitutions and laws; in the family, by hereditary principles; in private life by morality; in public life by the voluntary contribution of each citizen to the State’s intellectual needs. In the fine arts, style was manifest in an even more precise fashion. By releasing immortal forms, tracing the definitive rules of architecture, synthesizing the traditions of mastery, style had permitted man to create, above and beyond natural contingencies, an imaginary world formed by all his works, immortal and solely capable of resisting, in the course of centuries, the slow modifications of evolution.
Little by little, in all social sectors and the most various actions of everyday life, superior men had acquired the habit of submitting their passions or momentary needs to the inflexible control of immutable rules; often—in the matter of honor, for example—they had preferred to die rather than debase or transgress them.
It was doubtless easy to object that these rules, always arbitrary and artificial, might turn out to be bad, but the objection cannot stand up to serious examination. If a rule of style, in morality as in architecture, happened to be erroneous, it was thus condemned in advance and was not viable. On the contrary, when it resisted collision with facts, maintaining itself over the centuries, one could be assured of its necessity, of its reason for existence in a superior world of ideas, even if that necessity did not appear evident on first inspection—which is why it is often said that an endeavor, even an infamous one, can have a certain beauty when it is pursued persistently, because its beauty proves, by its permanence, that it is not infamous above and beyond the prejudices of the moment.
The first endeavor of the Leviathan was, as can be imagined, to destroy at any price the style that was irredeemably opposed to its development—and the spirit of scientific analysis, born a long time previously, supported its efforts marvelously.
Already, since the French Revolution, social style had been extensively compromised, and the Empire had provided a sufficient indication of the marked tendency of social cells to group themselves into a homogeneous body. At the end of the 19th century, style in ideas was aggressively attacked by certain analysts who, following the example of Renan,13 attempted to break the straight line of our intellectual life, to separate it into many critical fragments, applied successively to the meager events of everyday thought. German influence, delivering muted combat to our Mediterranean creative enthusiasm in the 19th and 20th centuries, had not left our thinkers untroubled; experimental methods did the rest. Henceforth, in fact, there were immutable principles directing each individual; the synthesis of ideas was replaced by an everyday analysis, but an opportunist criticism; the tabula rasa of our convictions was transformed into a dissection-table on which the cadavers of ideas appeared in rapid succession, all equally subject to analysis.
In politics and diplomacy, these new procedures were likewise welcomed without difficulty, and it was not understood that this fashion of extracting all permanence from general external relationships, by submitting them to the critiques of the moment, destroyed all public security, and consigned individuals to fatalism, neurasthenia and disgust for any fecund and consequential effort.
A curious and final indication of
protest was what was called in that era “anti-Semitism.” For centuries as is well-known, the Jews had lived in a state of perpetual expectation; they had remained, from the material as well as from the moral point of view, simple nomads. For them, no definitive certainty, no future promise of the divinity, no permanent monument, no immortality on Earth or in Heaven, but the daily relativity of a wandering people. Quite naturally, when style was very nearly dead, the Jews did not fail to take the first place in all things, for their remarkable critical procedures happened to correspond exactly with the analytical procedures required by the Leviathan. They were accused, quite unjustly, of intrigue, for it was our world that had converted itself, in different ways, to their ideas, while they had only conserved their own.
Unconscious of all interior regulation, deprived of all style in their artistic productions as in their daily lives, the men of the 20th century no longer formed anything but an immense mass of differentiated cells, deprived of moral direction, which, quite naturally, agglomerated themselves gladly into the material body of the Leviathan. External social form replaced from then on the internal style of which it was nothing but a gross caricature. It was imagined that this gave them complete independence by delivering them from all ideals, but it only succeeded in serving the basest needs of material life.
This decline was particularly rapid for anything connected with Letters and the Fine Arts. For example, a scholar writing a history of religion undertook to describe the ceremonies of all the cults and the powers imagined by the priests, but the idea never occurred to him to investigate, outside material appearances, the possible interior needs of human thought, the creators of the various great currents of which individual cults were only gross materializations.
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