(no subject)

Teacher's convinced Burgess argues freedom is more important than happiness; I maintain A Clockwork Orange deliberately dodges this argument, perhaps because it doesn't know how to make it, perhaps because it's busy with another (integrity as a precondition of happiness). Teacher usefully hypothesizes an unwritten novel where instead of the "Ludovico technique"--the nightmarish Skinnerian eye stuff from the movie--society reforms the criminal via entirely successful brainwashing, changing his will, giving him new sources of happiness. Don't we still recoil? Yes but can we defend why? Totalitarian systems are hated because they make people unhappy. They're indifferent to all values but social values, and uncaringly byproduce confusion and pain while promoting these. But if one wasn't? Suppose a system knew us well enough and gave enough of a damn about us (if only because it saw our happiness as essential for its own perpetuation) to ensure our private happiness, while still corralling us down its own channels for its own purposes: something like the Grand Inquisitor or Brave New World situations. Maximum apparent happiness, minimal suffering. What's the case against?

Case 1 is that if people are sheep the system must somehow self-correct, and systems don't do that so well: see Kafka's Penal Colony.

But suppose this system somehow knew its business, run by wily Inquisitors or Alpha-plusses who genuinely gave a damn about the flock.

Case 2 is our alleged existential outcry. We're free and must stay free! I.e. freedom is a categorically greater good than happiness, perhaps so much greater that happiness without freedom simply doesn't count. Free, we choose ways to be and goals at the ends of those ways, goals that make us more free rather than merely more happy.

Freedom as force is as problematical as love as force, morality as force, evil as force etc. We don't fully understand the causes and consequences of some set of similarly-behaving phenomena, so we categorize them as intruders into the large set of things we have a hang of, as supernatural. But they of course aren't supernatural, they're groupings of incomplete information. Cutting them off from their source in the world gives up on them, programmatically neglects new information.

So if what we call freedom is just a shadowy corner of the pool, don't its waters interflow with our others? Can't it be subsumed under "happiness", defined as an experienced state worth retaining?

And if it can, is such a state somehow allergic to external definition in principle?

I don't see why. I think the tendency to see freedom as preconditional of true happiness is a recent development; people at large have had enough dealings with "unenlightened" tyrannies, the kind that couldn't care less if they're happy, to know they'd better hang onto all possible freedoms. Practically, as states and religions and ideologies grow large and mad, unfreedom means unhappiness.

I see some problems with this, and feel even more; among which: does this account for all of our profound unease at the idea of being brainwashed into Eden?

Maybe the key here is the break in continuity brainwashing implies. If happiness is just a trait like any other, there's no more reason to drum up more of it than there is to paint smiley faces on every tree and rock face you're acquainted with. It has to be a need, something toward which you will always quest when given scope. Brainwashing sounds like erasing the quest and putting something else where it was, not like completion. The quester is essentially annihilated. Unless we're advanced Buddhists we're going to tend to not want this for own selves. But for others? If we acknowledge any responsibility for them, is their happiness or present integrity (as a new integrity will be found, in this model) more important? Obviously they'll feel the same tummyache we do at the thought of self-loss, but suppose we don't have to let them know what will happen, as we have perfected a method of drugging and kidnapping subjects, then correcting them through manipulation of their dreams. Or does this make them like the rocks and trees? Perhaps sympathy requires wanting for the sympathized-with exactly what one wants for oneself. This might be the real source of anxiety: social responsibility demands maximizing happiness, but we don't bother to be socially responsible unless we sympathize, in which case there is something else in people we want to preserve that can conflict with that happiness, but only because we need them to be like us; a chain exposing an intolerable egoism inside altruism. Or perhaps we could tolerate this just fine, and the disturbance I'm feeling now is a biological defense mechanism, designed to shake the mind back into safe lies when it gets too close to recognizing the paltriness of what we live for, mere extension.

(no subject)

But of course Clockwork's argument is that you can't remake people. You can control them externally to some extent, you can drive them mad, kill them. But deep change is impossible because we don't understand ourselves well enough; and, were it found possible, it would be undesireable (compared to imprisonment, say) because it maims the human mystery in the subject, at a level comparable to the worst they could have done to the human mystery in their victims. "Every Harlot was a Virgin once/Nor shalt thou ever change Kate into Nan." Burgess makes an effort to see as Kates the rapists who made a wreck of his life. And perhaps he joins Blake in recognizing an innocence in evil itself. "The Son of Morn in weary Night's decline."

Obviously I'm having trouble rationalizing the humanist outlook lately but the alternatives seem to me to make far less sense. One of Wordsworth's best earlier poems, The Old Cumberland Beggar, can't quite find a basis for finding individual human life valuable as such either, but I think it means to. The beggar in question is to be kept out of the workhouse because he binds the community together by awakening sympathy and charitable urges. A bit like Wordsworth's Nature of later poems, he's an unwitting pedagogue. I think Wordsworth argues his social value so pressingly because he doesn't know how to argue his real belief, or anyway real wish: that there's value in and to itself for this infinitely reduced life. Or maybe he's being subtle and showing it, through the man's actions in the awesome opening and closing passages. And the sympathy business...maybe the point there is that the cottagers he passes are awakened out of mere social values and into human ones. Still, I think the poem at least wavers. Resolution and Independence, his famous masterpiece of a few years on, has Wordsworth finding--and conveying--an ultimate consolation in how much remains in the life of another barely subsisting ancient man. But what's left of the earlier man, presumably older still, is perhaps mere motion and sensation and "animal tranquility".

Our sense of what's good in us that isn't itself us, or at any rate that might be outlived by our bodies, seems like a kind of social value, to me; or at any rate seems similarly arbitrary, next to the deeper value, the question of the existence of a deeper value. Political reforms, joys of sport and art, sexual success are all just fuel for a preexisting flame. Or at any rate a "prior" flame, as many nowadays hold that social values light it, that narcissism (or what you will) is taught.

This one is falling through my fingers again. Kafka: "There are questions we could never get over if we were not delivered from them by the operation of nature."