PARTISAN REVIEW
States at least. But he also believes that socialism should "presently
change its object" from that "of making everybody healthy and happy"
to that of "turning out better human beings." He advocates planned
economy plus planned eugenics. "The respect for human life in itself,"
he insists, "has in any case largely disappeared in the course of this last
war, and I doubt whether enough now survives to inspire the organizers
of socialism to try to keep everybody alive and see that everybody gets
an equal chance." Such being the case, we shouldn't delay too long the
institution of a "Board of Breeding."
"If
we can produce, from some
cousin of the jackal and the wolf, the dachshund and the Great Dane,
the Pekinese and the poodle, what should we not be able to do with
man?"
All this is quite remarkable. Above all, it is a howl of dejection
as lugubrious as can be heard today in this jungle-world of ours, a kind
of American answer to Silone's yearning for the inarticulate and the
dumb in
The Seed Beneath the Snow.
As a sign of the times, it cannot
be dismissed easily. Even the fact that Mr. Wilson apparently does not
realize that his is the old "snobbish" faith in Progress and Evolution,
with all meaning squeezed out of it, seems to me significant. Mr. Wilson
wants his nausea to be constructive. He does not want to shed either
the nausea or the assurance that the key to the whole damn business
must after all be of a technological nature. The result is more and more
nausea, the image of a technocratic Demiurge setting out to reshape the
Cosmos around an imperishable axis of disgust and boredom. Sartre
has said that "man is a useless passion" which
must
be upheld. To Mr.
Wilson, it appears, man is a useless busyness which, as a matter of sheer
fact, happens to persist; hence we had better be rational, and routinize
him
thoroughly and efficiently. As things now stand, the realization of
the author's ideal would seem to require no considerable leap in the
evolutionary process.
If
I have laid such heavy stress on Mr. Wilson's speculations, it is
because the kind of myth he is finally led to outline, however contra–
dictory, is revealing. Insofar as Mr. Wilson's utopia is not inconsistent
with a number of currently accepted premises, it is, I think, typical,
and certainly not unrelated to present American moods. There are many
people today who, like Edmund Wilson, feel that their fundamental
convictions and hopes have been profoundly shaken and, at the same
time, that they must stick to any notion which seems to guarantee that
those convictions are still intact, and that theirs is nothing but an emo–
tional state. Hence, such people keep up a sort of dejected optimism:
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