Superman and Dehumanity Part III — On Morlocks
Continued from Previous
What is Dehumanism?
Dehumanism is a term I have coined to describe that soft-edged cloud of modern thinking beloved of the Progressive elite. There is no rigorous definition of dehumanism for the same reason there is no Magisterium for the Wicca, and no Supreme Ruling Council of Anarchists. We are talking about a loose and incoherent alliance of incoherent thinkers. The central principle of Dehumanism is that it lacks principle. It is a disjointed admixture of Machiavelli, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Nihilism.
Its Machiavellian view of morals says that the ends justify the means, and says that noblest ends, such as world Utopia, justify the basest means, such as genocide; Its Darwinian view of history says that races and bloodlines are locked in remorseless and eternal war to extinction, that men should be bred like a dogs, and the weak and unwanted be exterminated; Its Marxist view of economics is that the free market is a Darwinian war between economic classes which must regard each other as implacable foes; Its Freudian view of ethics says that to repress the natural and selfish impulses in a child leads to neurosis, therefore ethics is unnatural, whereas pride and lust and greed and ire and perversion are not only natural, but healthy. Its Nietzschean theology says that God is dead and therefore Power is God. Its Nihilist philosophy says that nothing means anything, therefore no philosophy has meaning and no reasoning is reasonable.
Let me hasten to add that no one person holds all these beliefs, or to the same degree. The beliefs contradict each other and contain lunatic paradoxes, so of course no one can embrace all Dehumanist ideals simultaneously or with equal fervor.
Some wax and wane. The theme of Eugenics, for example, was quietly dropped from the Dehumanist diapason after Hitler betrayed Stalin. Eugenics is no longer welcome in polite society unless disguised as a concern about overpopulation.
Eugenics is not gone forever, of course. The notion is built into the world view of Progressivism, which sees reality as an endless war of race against race, selfish gene against selfish gene. The National Socialists celebrated this alleged reality and sought the totalitarian power to throw the victory of the Darwianian war to the Teutonic race; whereas the Fabian Socialists abhor this alleged reality, and seek the totalitarian power to impose a cease-fire on the Darwianian war.
The Christian idea of a brotherhood of man, or the Enlightenment idea of limits to government, is alien to Progressive thinking and abominated by them. They think colorblindness permits un-umpired competition between the Teutonics and their dusky inferiors; the duskies cannot win; and not to win means to be oppressed; hence, by the twisted logic of Progressivism, a non-racist government or a non-totalitarian government unable to umpire the competition between races leads inevitably to Teutonic triumph and ergo is racist. The only way to stop pro-White racism is by anti-White racism. This requires Whites to act against their own personal self-interest or Darwinian clan interest. Such interests, oddly enough, by the Nietzschean and Machiavellian theology and ethics, is the only source of life’s moral code. It is merely a matter of time before another variation Progressivism arises with some new formulation of Eugenics in its van. The selfish gene demands no less.
The average Progressive or National Socialist or Leftist or New Ager or Lover of Imbecility does not buy fully into these beliefs simply because no one could: these beliefs are deadly, and only the dead could practice them consistently.
The average Progressive or Leftist or New Ager or Imbecilophiliac does not except in small ways support them: he is like a man who burns his leaves and his trash in his backyard, and empties his spittoon off the dock, while the smokestack factories of Academia fill the air with gassy smog, and the overflowing sewer of Hollywood pours liquid sludge by gallons unnumbered into the flood.
He is himself neither truly a Nihilist nor a Marxist; his contribution to the general moral and mental pollution of the age is minimal, but real, and every little bit hurts. He is someone happy to call M. Night Shyamalan a racist for not hiring blue-eyed Eskimos to play the roles of hydrokinetic tribesmen from a make-believe world.
But such is the poisonous moral atmosphere of the modern age. I call it Dehumanism because ours is the first era in history which holds, as its basic postulate of moral reasoning, that there is no moral code, merely arbitrary or useful social myths, and no such thing as reasoning.
It is possible to raise a child to be a sociopath. A sociopath is a being without a conscience. He is able to avoid punishment, but he acknowledges no authority competent to impose duties on his behavior. Even the authority of reason is dismissed as suspect and partial. It is possible to raise a generation of sociopaths merely by raising a critical number of sociopaths among them.
Possible? It is not even difficult. All one need do is teach no young how to reason nor how to reflect on their consciences. It is no more difficult than raising a generation of illiterates: merely teach no young how to read.
At that point, without recourse to reason and without recourse to conscience, and being unable to perceive or even to imagine abiding by any moral standard, mankind will be reduced to being merely an ape that talks. It will indeed be a rational creature, able to calculate a sum or repair a motor, but it will not be human. It will be a creature that can be tamed, like a dog, not to injure its master’s kin, but also trained, like a dog, to kill its master’s prey, but the ability to reflect upon the moral meaning of its trained behaviors will be lost. It will be human in name only, if it deserves that name. A fitter name for the race replacing Man is Morlock.
Such forms the backdrop of assumptions, the starting point, of what any story teller or film maker expects his audience to accept unasked and unsupported.
How can one create a satisfactory drama against such a backdrop, with such intellectual furniture as the props?
What kind of tales can Morlocks tell?
If a Morlock is a creature unable to make or even imagine moral judgments, he only avoids injuring others to avoid punishment. He cannot imagine any other evil aside from injury, and he cannot but resent the lash of the master who inflicts the punishment. Only a totalitarian system of rewards and punishments can check his impulses. Conditioned to equate “goodness” with reward, and therefore the only good he can imagine is reward, usually physical pleasure, such as wine, women, and song, but sometimes psychological pleasure, such as praise, rank and dignities. The Morlock must be a hedonist.
The primary daydream of the Morlock is to achieve the reward for good behavior without the tedium of good behavior: his daydream is to break the whip of the master. His stories are stories of rebellion, retribution and retaliation.
Any authority figure in Morlockian stories is to be shown as a pretender, a poseur, a traitor to his right to rule, a hypocrite or tyrant. No antagonist other than an authority figure fits the mould for a Morlock story.
Morlocks, lacking conscience, daydream of being freed of control, but not in order to live the productive lives of free men. What they seek is pleasure. What they seek is thrills. The nature of pleasure is that it palls. Pleasure is not joy, it is merely stimulus. Stimulus weakens on repetition. Morlocks thrive on defiance. It does not matter what they defy nor why.
Morlocks also lack reason, a sense of proportion, and a sense of common sense. Seeking stimulus, and resenting any attempts at control, they seek indecency. And then when Hugh Hefner and Lenny Bruce becomes mainstream, and mild indecency is the norm, the only way to find an equal psychological reward is to become grossly indecent, to praise Che and Mao and Castro, and to call all the victims of 9/11 little Eichmanns who deserved to die. Once abortion is legal and commonplace the only way to defy the commonplace (and find the stimulus of pleasure that comes from defiance) is to become Peter Singer, and call in tones of whining self-righteousness for the death of children up to the age of two.
The Morlockian rebellion against reason never ends, because the point is to promote ever more illogical and unrealistic offenses against the conscience. It is addictive: ever larger doses of grotesque ugliness, outrageous perversity, malign brutality, and inhuman cruelty are needed to produce the same rush of smug self-esteem. The note of sadism, sheer brutal bloodthirsty love of pain for the sake of pain, is never very far from the high and lofty symphonic daydreams of the utopians
Let me pause to interpose the description of a movie made and distributed and viewed by modern Americans. Hundreds of people and tens of thousands of dollars cooperated to make this. They volunteered.
Not for the squeamish.
Two men are shackled to saws, with their mutual girlfriend hanging in between them over a larger blade. They decide to spare their own lives by sacrificing the unfaithful woman, who is graphically sawn in two. As the blade cuts through her, she screams (and screams and screams) as her blood spatters the men and her intestines slide to the ground.
Another elaborately grotesque trap involves four people, one of whom is superglued to the seat of a car that will soon fall from a jack, accelerate and kill his three friends. If he can rip his back from the seat and reach a lever to stop the car, he’s told he can save them. He cannot, of course, and his flesh is torn apart in his attempt. One of the tires falls on a woman’s face, shredding it and the rest of her body as the car speeds off. A man’s jaw and arms are attached to the car by hooks—and ripped from his body when the vehicle speeds into the fourth man, who is shackled to a wall. Blood and body parts fly. When asked how many victims there are at the crime scene, a cop says, “Enough pieces to make four.”
A woman’s eyes and mouth are savagely gouged by spikes when Bobby cannot save her from a trap. He must pull a fishhook from another woman’s stomach, ripping her throat in the process—evident by the mound of flesh he heaves out of her mouth. Bobby must pull two of his teeth in order to find a lock’s combination. He twists pliers in anguish, ripping his mouth, causing blood to pour from the wounds. We hear his jaw crunch. In order to reach and save his wife, Bobby pierces his pectoral muscles with large hooks and miserably hoists himself up with chains. Eventually, his chest rips apart and he falls to the floor in a pool of blood.
People are also shot and graphically burned to death. A man’s eyelids are shown sewn shut.
This is the seventh movie in this franchise, which has countless imitators and has spawned its own subgenre, called torture porn.
I solemnly assure you that even the Imperial box, front row center, at a Roman gladiatorial game did not show wounds and torment so vividly and closely. As I said above, the point is not to drive our civilization down to the point of paganism, nor to the point of barbarism. Barbarians are still human. The point is to drive civilization lower, to the subhuman.
What is it about subhumanity that hinders drama? We are now in a position to draw two threads of the argument together.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
