During the crisis period in which he lived, it was no longer possible to be like one of those Victorians who ambled through the colonial world without anything permeating their Britishness. Having spent time in several worlds without establishing roots in any, Paul could not construct an ingenuously “American” identity. His familiarity with Chinese culture, the respect he felt for his Japanese adversaries, the ease with which he learned languages and adapted to different customs all made for an extremely elastic personality.
As an adult, the primordial struggle at the core of his personality was between sincere Christianity and a firm commitment to power, a “dual bond” that would become more pronounced when confronted with the events of the Kennedy era.
The experience of growing up and working with people “of color” taught Linebarger to respect the “other” to the point of taking up its cause as his own. This did not merely immunize him against prejudice; it made him more sensitive to the racial discrimination that was poisoning American society.
The problem of race runs through the entire course of American history. It is the dark side of the melting pot: the massacre of the Indians, the slavery and segregation of blacks, the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy, the scorn for the “yellow” enemy in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. More recently, the reactive racism of black Muslims and the paranoid xenophobia exacerbated by 9/11 are merely fresh acts in an ongoing secular drama. For his part, Linebarger happened to be alive when social conflict was becoming more acute.
While an economic conception of history views racism as a superficial phenomenon, from an anthropological perspective it is the root of the problem. While every group is ethnocentric to a certain degree, the desire for domination must be buttressed by an ideology of superiority, one of the forms of which is racism.
From the time he was a teenager, Linebarger had worked toward consolidating the influence of the United States in Asia through supporting the progressivism of Sun Yat-sen, confronting Japanese imperialism, and limiting Chinese intervention in Malaysia and Korea.
Yet he also possessed the sensibility of a poet, and ever since his conversion, practiced a form of Christianity that involved far more than merely adhering to ritual. “His God was not the god of business and politics but that of souls, of the spirit of history and the fate of all living creatures,” Burns states.14 Linebarger believed in a God linked to the redemption of the entire cosmos. Not the watchmaker God of the Deists or the possible divinity of agnostic humanism but an actuating and providential Love.
His family had its religious roots in the Methodist tradition of the Low Church. His paternal grandfather was Reverend Isaac Linebarger, and his father had even considered becoming a minister.
Still, in Shanghai Paul had attended an Episcopal, or in other words Anglo-Catholic, school. The High Church was the branch most akin to the Church of Rome, ultimately returning to it in 2009, during the papacy of Benedict XVI.
In the 1954-55 Who’s Who, Linebarger was still listed as a Methodist, and at the time of his second marriage declared himself to be an agnostic. However, in 1955, impressed by the fortitude with which Genevieve’s mother faced her own death, he felt drawn to religion again. As a result, Paul and Genevieve decided to join the Episcopal Church as a compromise between her Catholicism and his Protestant roots. They became associated with the Saint John the Baptist Anglican church in Canberra, attending religious services there regularly.
At home, Paul grew into the habit of saying grace before meals. In 1960, sick in Mexico and convinced he going to die, it occurred to him to ask for the protection of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as he was “in her dominion.”
Paul’s attitude was rather conservative. He paid no attention to contemporary religious movements, especially the more secularizing ones. His belonging to the Anglican Church suited his personality extremely well, since, as he said, “he didn’t have to go along and hear some damn fool clergyman lecturing on politics or something which he knew nothing about.”15 His affiliation with the Church did prevent him from holding unorthodox beliefs about salvation and life after death, however, which according to McIntyre had more in common with the Religious Society of Friends.
Conservative attitudes often entail the belief in destiny and natural inequality. Linebarger, however, had an optimistic view of humankind.
Having come of age among Chinese and Japanese people who placed dignity above life and justified suicide in the name of honor, Linebarger rejected this attitude, believing that the sanctity of life is more respectable than anything else.
In the seminar where Burns met him, Linebarger held that it was better to seduce the enemy (“to persuade him to participate in group activities”) than to be forced to kill him. His audience consisted for the most part of Protestants from a strong Kantian tradition, men schooled in the conviction that moral integrity was the only value worthy of sacrificing one’s life for.
Linebarger sparked a debate when he asked his students what was more important, life or honor. In response, a former German officer related how, after escaping from a prison camp, he had insisted on killing the guard, convinced that the soldier would prefer sacrificing his life to losing his honor as result of being ridiculed or bribed.
Linebarger, in turn, talked of his experience in the recovery of combatants that had been prisoners of the Chinese during the Korean War and subjected to brainwashing. He argued that the more valuable soldier was the one that felt the least guilty, even if he had succumbed to the psychological pressures of the enemy. As long as there was “good food, freedom and acknowledgement”, reclaiming him was not a difficult task.
He was also familiar with the treatment these soldiers received at the hands of American psychiatrists upon repatriation, something he referred to un-euphemistically as “re-washing”. The technique, known as “reprogramming”, was later used to reclaim victims of drug addiction and manipulative cults, often with the sole result of creating a new species of zombie.
When Linebarger confessed that he had been mixed up in these activities, his audience, including Burns, a socialist disciple of Tawney who had approached the seminar with distrust, was shocked. In an instant, however, it became clear that Linebarger had turned the question on its head simply by making it an ethical matter.
He argued that it was always preferable to persuade and indoctrinate a man rather than kill him –psychological warfare is always more humane than cannons and bombs. Linebarger believed that more than the fulfillment of duty it was necessary to appreciate the capacity of emotional response, in particular a sense of humor. He was convinced that “human fragility contains a large capacity for survival.”16
Paul valued emotions and customs more than strict rationalism. He was able channel this attitude, one that might have inclined him toward sentimentalism, into his deep love for animals. His house in Washington was filled with cats, and Paul claimed to share a special kind of understanding with them. Such characters as C’mell and Captain Wow are derived from these feline companions.
Mystics typically believe that all of creation (not only humans but animals and plants too) must be redeemed. This belief inspires the rigid respect for life observed by Jainists and informs Saint Francis’s and Saint Anthony’s preaching to birds and fish, to the sun and fire.
Something similar occurs in Norstrilia in what is an almost incidental scene. C’mell starts singing on the beach, drawing all living things to her: “The air, the ground, the sea were all becoming thick with life. Fish flashed out of the blue waves. Birds circled by the multitude around them. The beach was thick with little running birds. Dogs and running animals which he had never seen before stood restlessly around C’mell, hectares of them.”17
As we have seen, the origin of the underpeople is complex. It is nurtured by a love for animals and takes shape amidst the scandal of racial segregation. The shadow that Afro-Americ
ans cast on the fiction is what makes it believable.
Paul was a man that inspired deep friendships. Burns recalls with admiration that Eleanor, the black cleaning woman who worked for Linebarger in Washington, was considered part of the family. Perhaps this attitude can be better appreciated if we recall that Paul had southern roots and just as easily could have inherited contempt for persons “of color”.18
Eleanor, it seems, played a very important role in his life, and “Cordwainer Smith” addresses her directly in one of the few texts in which he talks about himself. The dedication to his key book, Space Lords, is a message for “Eleanor, Jackson, from Louisa, Virginia.”
Paul begins by recalling the circumstances of Eleanor’s death. The cleaning woman died suddenly, when Genevieve Linebarger was in the hospital and Linebarger lay “sick and trying to finish this book” in another room.
“You died there in my house,” he says, “you looked very sleepy when you were dead, like one of the little ‘colored’ dolls that they have in the department stores in America.”
It is the moment of truth: “You were a woman and I am a man. In seventeen years, we were thousands of times just the two of us in the house, and there was never an indecent gesture or an unchaste word from one of us to the other.”
Only when in the presence of her corpse does it occur to him to share with Eleanor Jackson the words he never dared to utter before: “I love you, Eleanor. Where are you going, my little brown girl?”
In the face of death, the great equalizer, social differences vanish: “You were a Negro, Eleanor, and I have been called white […] I honor and remember the seventeen years of your intelligence and kindness, while I was called master and you were called servant. I’ll see the real you again, Eleanor, in a friendly place in which we both believe:”
This is nothing less than a confession, albeit one prudently concealed behind a pseudonym.
I am not interested in ascertaining if there is any ambiguity in the relationship it reveals. As these conjectures do not aspire to being a biography, I leave the matter to the mavens of suspicion. I only wish to call attention to a religious experience that relativizes power, wealth and race precisely at the outset of a book that tells the story of the martyrdom of D’joan and the emancipation of the underpeople.
Needless to say, this is not the kind of acknowledgement of loyalty and services rendered that any humanitarian master might offer at the burial of a faithful servant. Nor is it the abstract discourse on fraternity of the stoic or secular humanist. Rather it is a dialogue of existences, a communication that is more cordial than intellectual which faith projects onto a plane perpendicular to daily life. Yet let us not forget that the same person who wrote these lines inspired by a sense of evangelical brotherhood was committed to a manipulative policy that implicitly treated other groups of people as “inferiors”.
Recall how in the fiction another Eleanor is rescued to serve as Rod MacBan’s workwoman. Her figure is blurry, relegated to a second or third tier, until MacBan declares shockingly that she is the only person he loves.19 Eleanor ends up taking Rod’s place, and her career culminates with the highest honor one could aspire to in her time: admittance into the Instrumentality.
From bad conscience to unhappy conscience
As we have seen, Linebarger’s life was marked by an apparent identity crisis that got resolved when he assumed the persona of “Cordwainer Smith”.
Added to the contradictions of childhood were those of public life: the circumstance of serving the Chinese government without being Chinese, or perhaps the feeling that he was using the Chinese to defend the interests of his own country.
At this stage, Paul identified with his curriculum vitae and the political position that he owed in large part to his father’s prestige. In Hegelian terms, we would say that he had a “bad identity,” that is, an abstract identity that had yet to be synthesized. It was barely an enclosed individuality, concealing unresolved tensions.
His “bad conscience” at the time did not involve a conflict between reality and ideals. What he desired, like anyone else, was to be fully conscience of and responsible for his actions, yet the truth was that he was limited in this by factual determinations.
One of the contradictions was between discourse that promotes democratic fair play and the Machiavellianism inherent in intelligence activities. This ambiguity is most apparent in the Felix C. Forrest novels, especially in Carola.
Ria and Carola have been through wars and turbulent political processes, experiences that ultimately topple all of their ideals. In their lives, it could be said that the sum of their determinations threatened to obstruct the formation of a unified self.
The invincible spy Michael Dugan represents a dangerous backward movement. Dugan is nobody; he sees himself more as a weapon than a person, and his life is restricted to the fulfillment of duty. He expresses the temptation to suppress not only doubt but also contradiction itself.
The combination of these and other factors appear to have prompted Kirk Allen’s “escape”.
Faced with the crisis that ultimately has him knocking on the psychoanalyst’s door, Paul is left with two alternatives: he can opt for either totality or determination. That is, he can try “to be a totality”, fleeing from the real world, or resign himself to being “nothing more than determinations” and giving himself over to a conformist skepticism.20
At the moment when Paul chooses fantasy, his escape consumes him. He flees from the conflict between the real and the ideal world, takes refuge in an illusory place, and identifies with a fictional hero.
“Kirk’s” world does not represent the irruption of irrationality. It entails nothing fearsome or uncontrollable. Rather it appears to be the madness of a technocrat, a totally organized and coherent universe where everything has its place, Good and Reason coincide, Good always triumphs, and Kirk is on the side of righteousness.
Yet this escape is a form of alienation that exceeds the limits of realism and causes the fugitive from reality to advance deep into psychosis. When Lindner intervenes, “Kirk” has already constructed a fictional biography, a parallel life onto which perhaps he has transposed his contradictions in order to resolve them magically. Fantasizing a virtual world, in other words, was a way of avoiding contact with an unsettling reality and compensating for life’s frustrations.
“Kirk Allen’s” flight from the world seems to coincide with the writing of Psychological Warfare, in which we find passages bordering on the sarcastic. This is the “professional illness” of political analysts, compelled by their utilitarian Machiavellianism to suspend ethical judgment. Yet Linebarger remains beset by ambiguity. After coldly analyzing the military uses of prevarication, he concludes by arguing for “psychological disarmament” as an alternative to lying.
For someone who had taken refuge in a private, perfectly controlled world, it was much easier to view external reality as something alien and apart, even if the price was succumbing to cynicism.
Linebarger’s cultural history justified this by reminding him that deception and manipulation had always existed in war and politics. Carola believed in American efficiency and prosperity, and nothing was able to shake her faith. Michael Dugan killed and lied without scruples. And the creator of both did not appear to have any doubts about the power of propaganda techniques.
A good example21 of this cynical “bad conscience” is found in the passage in which Linebarger traces a parallel between religious wars and ideological ones. He is confident that military success and the consolidation of conquests depend on the indoctrination of the dominated and the loyalty awakened in them by their conquerors. The enemy should be treated as a heretic or a pagan in need of conversion. To illustrate this point, Linebarger mentions the tactics that Islam used against Christians and Hitler against democrats.
The Linebarger of 1948 beli
eved there were two alternatives. The first consisted in forcing the conquered to choose between conversion and death. This method is “costly and harsh”, because it entails surrounding oneself with apostates (potential traitors) and necessitates creating a counterintelligence apparatus to control them.
The second method is more reliable. It involves showing tolerance toward the persecuted faith while at the same time favoring converts, which allowed for winning over the elite. Linebarger believed that in the future, “Christians, or democrats, or progressives ―whatever free men can be called”― would be subjected to policies of this kind.
In these reflections Linebarger demonstrates both clarity of thought and cynicism. What he was describing is the formation of a native class of domestic elites, like the sepoys of the British Empire. This is precisely the method that the Americans would later employ unsuccessfully in Vietnam and Cambodia, before appealing to bloodier and even less successful techniques.
As we have seen, this was also the policy of the Instrumentality. When Linebarger-Smith created the underpeople, he evidently no longer believed in the efficiency of manipulation, since it proved to be dysfunctional within the system.
It was providential that Linebarger, already clinically approaching the edge of madness, fell in the hands of a psychiatrist that was antagonistic to drastic methods. Lindner relates how from the beginning he refused to recommend neurosurgical procedures or shock therapy. If he had, he would have run the risk of producing another example of “that new class of the vegetal kingdom that so many of my colleagues are creating,” he observed. Also, it goes without saying, there never would have been a Cordwainer Smith.
Convinced of the need to exhaust all the psychotherapeutic resources available, Lindner sensed the importance of what was at stake. His patient was an assembly of uncommon conditions: “Despite his psychosis, he had a brilliant mind, a personality with fundamentally good motivations and that, once freed from the shackles of his disorder, promised to be one of those valuable persons upon whom our civilization depends.”22
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