 |
| Herbert Marcuse |
ONE of the greatest pleasures in reading, and in particular
of instinctively ‘going with the flow’ in your choice of reading matter, is
when you find yourself making unexpected connections between different authors
or disciplines.
I had a strong sense of this when reading the 1964 classic One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced
Industrial Society by Herbert Marcuse.
I wish I’d found this book many years ago, when my
strongly-felt hatred for consumer society was unsubstantiated by any kind of
coherent analysis – but I’ve got there in the end!
Anyway, one of the thinkers of whom I was reminded was René
Guénon, a traditionalist metaphysician who, at first glance, would appear to
have little in common with a man described as ‘The Father of the New Left’.
Marcuse’s criticism of consumer society, of capitalism, goes
deep into the very mindset that makes its existence possible.
He writes: “The principles of modern science were a priori structured in such a way that
they could serve as conceptual instruments for a universe of self-propelling,
productive control; theoretical operationalism came to correspond to practical
operationalism…
"Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only
through technology but as technology,
and the latter provides the great legitimation of the expanding political
power, which absorbs all spheres of culture. In this universe, technology also
provides the great rationalization of the unfreedom of man and demonstrates the
‘technical’ impossibility of being autonomous, of determining one’s own life.”
 |
| René Guénon |
Guénon also condemns science for having moved away from a
quest to make sense of life as a whole into the practical realm of devising
ways to manufacture objects (and thus money, power and control).
He writes in The Crisis of the Modern World (1927): “What the
modern world has striven after with all its strength, even when it has claimed
in its own way to pursue science, is really nothing other than the development
of industry and machinery; and in thus seeking to dominate matter and bend it to
their service, men have only succeeded, as we said at the beginning of this
book, in becoming its slaves.”
The second specific connection I made (in general Marcuse’s
ideas fit in very nicely with a lot of what I think) was more to do with
timing. I happened to dip into a few chapters of Sufi author Idries Shah’s The
Magic Monastery (1972), including an entertaining satire called The Oatland Story –
and found it very much mirrors Marcuse’s theories.
Marcuse, in his book, describes “a pattern of one-dimensional
thought and behaviour on which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by
their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and acion are
either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe. They are redefined by the
rationality of the given system and of its quantitative extension.”
Later he adds: “This language speaks in constructions which
impose upon the recipient the slanted and abridged meaning, the blocked
development of content, the acceptance of that which is offered in the form in
which it is offered.”
And this is very much the theme of Shah’s satire, which
revolves around a fictional country which entirely bases itself on oats and
derived products.
He writes: “Oatism became a valued and self-perpetuating
system, because its results were proved by its assumptions and its assumptions
were proved by its results.”
Satirising the repressive use of language in our society,
referred to by Marcuse, Shah explains that “oatistic capacity was not limited
to defending the porridge or tirelessly researching into its values and uses.
The philosophy could challenge all comers with an unanswerable dialectic: ‘If any of these crazy ideas outside oatism were capable of
being useful in life, they could be explained in Oatlandese, the richest, most
sublime medium of communication devised by man’.”
 |
| Idries Shah |
No comments:
Post a Comment