On Self-Loathing (Despicable Me)
My parents were from a generation wherein it was the norm to project vicariously upon their children. In my case, each wanted their only son to pursue the vocation they themselves missed out upon, also a commonplace filial trope. For my mother, music was the dream. Her own parents, hailing from the late 19th century, forbid it and, at seventeen, steered her into secretary school. She did emerge much later to sing in a university chorus and study music, as well as teach ESL, but she had been destined for far more. Likewise, my father, who dreamed of becoming an architect. The only thing he shared with Hitler, mind you, he left home at the same age of seventeen and joined the RCN, fighting in the Battle of the Atlantic. But though I showed early promise in both music and architecture, and maintain to this day a love for the one and a fond interest in the latter, my own path took me far from anything either of my parents could ever have imagined. At first, with my mother passed, my father questioned academics, and then for the next two decades fostered an utter disdain for it, and secondarily, if not only by implication, myself within it. It was only in 2009, four years before he himself passed, that he began to see some merit in myself as a thinker, after reading my 2009b Becoming a Modest Society. That was my seventh book and I can now hardly recall its themes. But on his deathbed, he was engrossed in my 2013b, We Other Nazis, leaving it incomplete. I was and remain grateful for his change of heart, even though, perhaps ironically, perhaps equally fittingly, I have of late adopted his own attitude toward the academy and those within its faux ivory tusks.
Is this a way to repay him for his belated loyalty? Most of us, as children, wish to please our parents, make them proud of us, even to point of sycophancy. And though outright mimicry is only for the young child, it is nevertheless a sign of an enduring sensitivity to the idea that one’s parents must be on one’s side no matter what, and perhaps also vice-versa. But then there is a reactive aspect found in adolescence which is the more profound. Necessary for becoming who we are – that is, not one’s parents after all – youth is a time of tension and experimentation. Passion rules the day, and, if one is lucky enough, the night as well. Yet this incipient individuation is also a delay mechanism. A delay which can solidify itself into a decoy. For adulthood, the developmental precursor to mature being meant in the hermeneutic sense of the phrase, is the proving ground for my newly minted selfhood. Casually, we may to ourselves, ‘do I really have what it takes to do what I want to do with my life?’. This question, however informal, is both pregnant with maturity and perspective but also unanswerable as stated and also due to the timing of when it is asked. Only by living on, certainly for a number of decades, can any response be forthcoming. There are many late bloomers even at the highest of cultural levels. Tom Thomson in painting, Anton Bruckner in music, and even less conspicuous age relative, myself at around the same age as a writer. My first book was published only when I was 37 years old, back in 2003. Fifty-nine books later I still do not have a sure answer to that question of worthiness. But to the related query of worth, at least, I do.
Or I like to think so. For to be a philosopher in a time of polar unthought, as cold and as oppositional as the Weberian term implies, is at best a lonely job. There will be few readers, almost no recognition. And as we humans are sourced very much in the looking glass self as well as guided, even goaded on by the need for community, the lack thereof promotes a gnawing doubt, one that can easily slide into the despondent pool of self-loathing. True to say that the pilgrim walks on by himself and in our godless and finite world, also for himself. Indeed, the very idea of the pilgrimage has been altered at both beginning and end, since we fall into it without the sense of calling, divine or otherwise, and we also recognize that there is no terminus, no Santiago de Compostela but rather, for some, the effort of becoming part of the sainted compost of the history of ideas. Composing this, then composting it in yet another essay collection, might give some bland zest to the sense that it is force of habit alone which generates reflection and perhaps yet self-reflection. No matter, we tell ourselves, for ‘those who have ears shall hear’.
This Nietzschean poise, which worked well for his books but not at all as well for he himself, is something of a theatre. A cultured autism, a high-minded affect, a transcendental but still shamanic trickery, the critical essayist, falling as he does within the panorama of philosophical work but taking on a dangerous dilettantism even so, is ever at risk that his reasoned loathing of the social world should turn upon himself, no matter what one’s parents might have thought either way. The critic is himself problematic, the wavering target of Shaw’s sneering snarkery, for instance, for the mere critic is a mere eunuch of course. And even if, contra a related epigram, teaching is also ‘doing’ of a sort, in Shaw’s own time his was a much more apt remark than one hopes it is in ours. Even so, when I made the shift from teaching to writing, which I never thought I would, I began to see something through his narrow glance: I have been fortunate that I have also been able to do, and not merely critique.
Such doings, however. I try to love my work, though I never go back and read my scholarly titles and only read my fiction with others; victims, perchance. But I do understand if someone were to attempt to read either, they might well imagine on the one hand, that the philosopher is unable to communicate his genius widely enough, and the fiction writer is at best, a sociopath. Does my fiction impinge upon my non-fiction? Is my fiction too realistic to bear because of the opposite influence? Or are both merely the by-product of what could have been? For truth be told, I have wasted so much time chasing girls and flirting with addiction that my output would likely be twice that extant today. And surely, one tells oneself, the author with 120 titles could not be so summarily ignored. I am but the author of my own premature literary grave, its stone bearing the longest epitaph in human history.
This evaluative sensibility is ancient, though hardly primordial, for human consciousness. In the West, it is Horus who first judges the relative weight of one’s acts versus that of the gifts of one’s soul. The much later Christian incarnation of this same idea has our ethical worth measured by how close we approach the moral ideals of the world system itself. It is interesting to note that though Christianity’s revolutionary ethics on the ground promote the gradual development of the individual as her own person along with the subjectivity that defines the personal, its evaluatory mode suggests the very opposite: that the highest human attainment is the same for all. By contrast, the Egyptian original was individuated in its afterlife, even though the concept of the person, and the ‘much-vaunted’ modernist subjectivity, to nod to Nietzsche once again, was absent in that society. But though we owe much to both belief systems, and from afar, they could be seen as glosses upon one another and not only in historical sequence, Christianity is itself unfairly blamed for the disdain not only of the body, but also for the mind and spirit alike. Our own latter-day evangelists are in the main, anti-intellectual at best, as well as shunning the fuller intimacies of the body, electric or even Electraic, if you will. Their spirits too await their collective freedom, perhaps to be had at the expense of the rest of us in some Armageddon made real. This is clearly not our species destiny in any noble sense, and we might well rise to fight against its inertia. And this, by the way, is a major theme of my fictional work, just in case the casual reader mistakes it for something else.
But however over-ripe is the evangelical obsession with Pauline anxiety, we ourselves are to blame for having adopted too readily the wider Western neurosis of self-loathing. Pre-dating Christianity by far, the Greeks were convinced that their own age was lesser, part of a devolution of culture, and not its Victorian opposite. Hope was, for them, a resident evil, the only thing that did not escape Pandora’s Box. Yes, one can get one’s hopes up and be disappointed. A hundred casual lines, oft repeated in popular song, attest to this lingering fear of hapless harm; ‘hopes are dashed’, ‘hope goes up in smoke’, and the like. And for the Egyptians, insofar as we can know of their perduringly murky doings – were they really reanimating ex-human drones inside their giant pyramidal Tesla batteries? – it seems one rather blindly walked forward onto the scales of Horus with only then finding out if one’s acts were of equal measure to one’s gifts.
I feel their pain. The Egyptian in me worries I have not measured up to my potential. But what is my potential? What is anyone’s? The Greek in me mourns the loss of youth, the ‘good old days’ leitmotif that was never true and that of course animates the false faith of the evangelical as well as that of the more benign nostalgia buffs of all stripes and hues. And the Christian in me steps forward with some trepidation, doubting the future itself and for itself, which in turn acts as a mechanism of self-sabotage both for the person and for the culture as a whole. But as a person, no matter how despairingly weighty this combination of dead historical hands might be, I have in modernity a different kind of agency. What should bear down upon me is not so much an archaic world system, but the lack of insight and experience which, over the life course thus far, has led me to make some impoverished choices. At the same time, this very knowing allows me to do differently. Let me then quote from volume one of Queen of Hearts, andhere’s to it:
The Unpolished edge of futurity will draw our collective blood.
If it must be spilled then let the one who holds the sword be a visionary,
and not a reactionary.
Let her raven eyes be the windows of our collective soul.
Let her joyous judgment be the compassion of our call to conscience.
Let her unknowing be but innocence and never ignorance.
Let her knowing become the working wisdom of light before heat.
G.V. Loewen is the author of 60 books in ethics, education, religion, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.