WILSON AMONG THE RUINS
seem to have urged upon him a number of questions-from the beast–
liness of modem man to the future of Western civilization-which are
of a markedly speculative character. I would even say that it is this
irrepressible undercurrent of speculative anxiety which (together with
his effort to control and even eliminate it for the sake of polished
communication) gives tension to Mr.Wilson's otherwise quite unruffled
reporting.
I have stated that one of the main components of these "sketches"
is the author's disgust with humanity. Although this theme does not take
as much space as the humorous polemic against the British, some elo–
quent pages are devoted to it. "Today it is perfectly plain," remarks Mr.
Wilson, "that human life is no longer an issue. No one pretends to give
a damn any more.... We can contemplate now with equanimity ...
a kind of warfare that crushes whole cities and that brings down agony
and death on thousands of women and children." "During the last
war ... there was ... a humanitarian reaction against the prac–
tice of war itself; but in this one the German methods have ended
by making everybody more callous and by interesting the practical
Americans in the technical side of the business, as if mechanized large–
scale homicide were a normal occupation."
This is, no doubt, the dominant mood of the
book.
Hitler and
mechanized warfare, together with the phenomena of Stalin and Stalin–
ism, have filled Mr. Wilson with a hopeless nausea. No person in his
right senses can, I suppose, escape such a feeling today. It is so per–
vasive, and so extreme, that it makes any attempted catharsis seem
futile and cowardly. Having been struck by it, the author seeks no
catharsis. He simply finds "relief and stimulus" in the contemplation of
the anthropoids. He thinks that nineteenth-century evolutionists were
still "snobbish" about the apes, insofar as they continued "to draw a
definite line between human and animal kind." It seems that the re–
searches of Mr. Robert M. Yerkes of the Yale Institute of Psychology
have definitely proved that apes are more like us than we thought.
It has even been suggested that "chimpanzees-which can be taught
to sew-might be trained to do the work of mechanics."
By realizing in our turn that we are more like apes than we sup–
posed ourselves to be, we might simplify our problems, which have been
hopelessly messed up by our pretenses about "reason," "civilization," and
so forth. As a result, if we are rational about it, we might have a chance
to start a new streamlined, and controlled, kind of evolution. Mr. Wilson
believes that democratic socialism is definitely possible,
in
the United
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