The Age of Defeat Read online

  Colin Wilson

  The Age of Defeat

  Copyright © 1959 by Colin Wilson

  ISBN: 978-0-993-32307-2

  The Colin Wilson Collection

  FacultyX Productions

  Contents

  Publisher’s Note

  Introduction by Thomas Bertonneau

  Introduction to the 2001 Paupers’ Press Edition

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction—The Vanishing Hero

  Part 1. The Evidence of Sociology

  Part 2. The Evidence of Literature

  Part 3. The Anatomy of Insignificance

  Part 4. The Fallacy of Insignificance

  Part 5. The Stature of Man

  A Postscript

  For Eve and Negley

  with affection

  Publisher’s Note

  The highest compliment Shakespeare’s Anthony could pay Brutus was: “This was a Man.”

  Colin Wilson

  The Age of Defeat

  We could not have chosen a better time to publish this book. The Age of Defeat is about the loss of the hero in Western culture and the implications of that loss for humanity—for us. When it was written in the middle of the 20th century, it was the idea of the hero that was endangered. Today it is Man, his identity and his masculinity, who is verging on extinction. The concept of Man is one of the most ambiguous and puzzling in our culture. It might be a good moment to remember what to be a Man used to imply.

  Today, the word Man just makes reference to a male, but in the past it comprised a list of virile attributes. The Latin word “Vir” meant Man and also hero because Man and hero have evolved together throughout history. Words with the same root, like vigour, virility and virtue were traits exclusively connected to Man. Virtue for example, comes from “virtus” and it was used to describe qualities attached to men, such as excellence, character, courage, worth and strength. It is these qualities that have got us from hiding in caves to walking the moon. Let us not forget that 99.9% of the creations we enjoy are the fruit of Man’s labour, effort, intelligence, sacrifice, ambition, courage, enthusiasm and tenacity. And yet we are suffering from the most serious crisis of masculinity in history, a crisis that in recent years has reached epidemic proportions.

  An epidemic is “a contagious disease that over a period of time infects a large number of people simultaneously and in the same area”. It is also “a misfortune that grows out of control.” The whole world is sick, including Man himself, because not even he seems to appreciate who he is or the magnitude of his achievements and, worse still, what he might yet accomplish. And if we do nothing, if we allow the epidemic to spread, and we permit radical feminists and feminized men—those who, according to Wilson suffer from “an acute form of the insignificance fallacy”—to spread their slander against Man, then Man could end up being a memory from the past. Man would have perished, not due to evolution, but to an ideological campaign to annihilate the virtues associated with him. We need to be very careful because when a country, culture, race or religious group points to “something or someone” as the enemy, when they demonize it, there are all too many reasons to destroy it. We already know many examples.

  Man is not perfect. He has committed unforgiveable atrocities, but he is responsible in his own right both for the good and the evil of this world. The problem today is that the good things are taken for granted; as if everything we posses wouldn’t have required anyone’s hard work. As if the infrastructures and the cleanliness we enjoy, indispensable advancements that set us free from a gruelling existence, or the development of technology and the astonishing medical advances that save us from the threat of constant danger or premature death, had not only created themselves but had nothing to do with his efforts. We forget that we are standing on the shoulders of giants!

  Nobody knows better than Man what it means to be a hero. It is in his nature. Like every legendary creature, Man has forged himself throughout history by facing fabulous challenges, full of dangers and setbacks, of betrayals and mortal wounds. The battle he is facing now is different, however. It is a psychological battle. And although it might seem less dangerous, it shouldn’t be taken lightly, because what is at stake here is the basis of his very being. The enemies Man has to face are not invaders from another country although in their cultural values and their religious orientation they differ strongly from him. They are in his own home, in his workplace, among his circle of friends and relations. The enemy is the whole world, and when I say “whole” I mean everybody, because the most bitter and hardest adversary is inside himself. To fight this war against masculinity he won’t need a spear and shield, but the kind of wisdom, insight and assurance only some books can provide. Victory will be convincing himself that to be a Man is an honour—a conquest, not a right.

  The Age of Defeat is a sound book, one that addresses us as adults and impels us to look at ourselves and identify without concessions what we have done wrong. But it is also a book that reminds us who we are, what we are capable of and where our power lies. It presents us with a new way of thinking and being in the world. Colin Wilson introduces his New Existentialism as the basis for the revolution in thought that we need to bring about; a revolt against insignificance and ordinariness. The New Existentialism is a practical and strong-willed philosophy that will renew the concept of Man as hero. It emphasises the extraordinary in us. Because to find his sense of purpose and to restore confidence in his own spirit, Man will need to believe in Man again, and include in his life words like heroism, greatness and power. What will emerge from this crisis will be a new Man who will embody heroic and full-blooded masculinity. This time the transformation will not take place through social, political or religious dogma, but via personal discipline and self-reliance.

  The world is turning into a playground. We need men who take their model in Man. Without them life is too effeminate, too soft, too shallow. We need heroes to brighten up our lives with their backbone and their honesty, with their protective strength and their lucid intelligence. Women cannot cope with the world by themselves. They need men too, even though some might not be aware of it. It is a fact that to raise men, men are needed and whether we like it or not, only men can be men, because only they are equipped by nature to fill the gap.

  Samantha Devin

  Samantha Devin is the publisher and co-founder of Aristeia Press. She is the author of the novels Bilis Negra, Arcadia and Heroica. As a playwright she has written MEN, The Great Pretender, Topophilia and The Silence.

  Introduction by Thomas Bertonneau

  Bucking the Whimper

  Colin Wilson’s Age of Defeat and the Rebuke of Nihilism

  Thomas F. Bertonneau

  I. “I envisage the new existentialism as a mystical revolt,” Colin Wilson writes in Part Five of The Age of Defeat (1962), “based upon recognition of the irrational urge that underlies man’s conscious reason.” Coming after The Outsider (1956) and Religion and the Rebel (1957), the first two installments of what Wilson’s readership would dub “The Outsider Cycle,” The Age of Defeat differentiates itself from its two non-fiction precursors by its narrower focus than theirs, its discipline in its presentation, and its author’s determination to bring to his prose a degree of elegance that the philosophical exuberance of the two earlier titles might have prevented. And yet, The Age is no less courageous a book than The Outsider or Religion and the Rebel. In its way, considering Wilson’s situation at the time, The Age exemplifies the heroic qualities that Wilson finds sorely lacking in the modern Western milieu in the middle of the last century, and concerning which he seeks a revival. The story of The Outsider possesses, among Wilsonians, the status of a myth. During the writing of it, Wilson, then in his mid-twenties, had
been spending nights in the clement season in a sleeping bag on Hampstead heath, to spare himself the expense of renting a room; writing in the British Museum during the day, undertaking odd jobs in the evening, and transporting himself on a bicycle. When The Outsider appeared, it whistled down a whirlwind of publicity, mainly positive at first. London journalism jumped at the chance to celebrate the young working-class genius, whose book-length philosophical and literary treatise had insinuated its way, almost incredibly, to the best-seller lists.

  An aggressive rejection of post-war liberal complacency entailing a critique of bureaucratic utilitarianism and the increasing pressure of social conformity, The Outsider touched a nerve. While reviews tended to enthusiasm for a time, a reaction soon occurred. The reaction’s probable cause lay in a species of resentment. It began to dawn on the reviewers, all of whom enjoyed the status of public intellectuals, and some of whom owned the pulpit privilege of academic office, that an upstart with no official credentials whatsoever had usurped their presumptive authority so that he was now the public intellectual of the moment—with his photograph on the cover of Life magazine, no less.

  The backlash really crested with the appearance of Religion and the Rebel, a better book, in fact, than The Outsider, not least because its radical thesis went beyond the basic arguments of The Outsider, which had concerned itself largely with the question of alienation—or rather of the alienating character of the modern dispensation on a certain type of keen-sighted individual. In Religion and the Rebel, Wilson asserted what an incipient neo-Puritanism forbade anyone socially responsible to assert: Namely that the religious impulse and its attendant mystic vision qualifies itself ultimately as more necessary for the good of a society than the managerial provisions of the welfare state, as guided by the jejune precepts of socialism, rationalism, and humanism. As Wilson himself puts it in Religion and the Rebel, whereas “the Outsider’s problems point to the ‘visionary’ way,” the plight of the modern condition never confines itself exclusively to individual persons, but manifests itself as well in a pervasive cultural malaise; and therefore, “the avowed intention of this book is to say something about the need for a new religion in our time.” Wilson writes in Religion and the Rebel of “the need for a visionary and anti-humanistic attitude” to counteract the “unreality of life,” as men and women confront it in a disenchanted, consumerist world. “The world is too much with us,” Wilson might have written, much as William Wordsworth wrote in a famous sonnet at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, “the world” being precisely that spiritless economy of “getting and spending” in which men and women lay waste their powers. As Wilson sees it, most people no longer have knowledge of the powers of their full humanity. Modern people are content to live well below the potential level of their spiritual vitality and intellectual acuity.

  When the critics replied, having stored up their bile, they replied vehemently. Wilson has given an account of the journalistic campaign to obliterate him, which actually began before Victor Gollancz published Religion and the Rebel, in his autobiographical Dreaming to Some Purpose (2005). When the new book hit the shops the assessment of The Outsider had already gone into reversal. With the sequel on sale, the reversal exacerbated itself. “Although I still hoped that some miracle might persuade the critics that I had something worth saying,” Wilson writes, “that hope soon evaporated.” Wilson records some of the epithets used to condemn Religion and the Rebel, with “disappointing” being about the kindest and “rubbish bin” typifying the style. Wilson assumed a stoical attitude, moving with his wife from London to a remote habitation in Cornwall and squaring himself with the daunting practicalities involved in earning a living by writing books. He knew his own convictions: “I wanted to explain… why, in an age of pessimism, I was possessed by an absolutely absurd optimism”; and his explanation took root in his powerful intuition about the objectivity, and even the impersonality, of meaning. “When I go out on a spring morning, or listen to music, I am clearly conscious of a sense of meaning, which seems to me to be inherent in the universe itself, the product of some external intelligence, not just a ‘feeling.’” Wilson’s apperception of meaning directly contradicts the dogmatic pieties of the modern worldview, supposing that it could be called a worldview. Life is a biological, or a chemical, or even more reductively a material phenomenon; consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the material substrate; and happiness is simply the result of the scientific technique of balancing the bodily humors, to invoke a medievalism. Transcendence is a delusion whose glamorous appeal unbalances the humors, dragging the subject down into unhappiness. The optimum of happiness under the social contract requires the rigorous training, through education, of all individuals so that they might conform themselves, under the guidance of their teachers and managers, to the protocols of right thinking. For the sake of maintaining that optimum of collective happiness, the polity must sanction the individual who preaches on behalf of things transcendent.

  Wilson’s “mystical revolt” characterizes itself by its “irrationality,” a word that modern prejudice easily misreads. By “irrationality,” Wilson implies, not some orgiastic descent into appetitive liberty, but rather the liberation of consciousness from the constraints of Utilitarianism and Logical Positivism, and of an impoverished reason as defined down by the advocates of those debilitating doctrines. While Wilson never based his thinking on Classical philosophy, a number of his central ideas resonate with those of the ancients. Thus to the extent that Wilson’s worldview approximated a Romantic or Neo-Romantic one, which it did, it shared many basic concepts with Platonism or Neo-Platonism. The mystic vision in particular is central to those. Plato, for example, acknowledges the usefulness of logic in its proper application. Plato’s dialectic makes use of logic, but Plato never restricts himself to logic. On the contrary, Plato’s philosophy begins in a vision of reality that, cutting through habit and prejudice, reveals a hitherto unremarked truth. In The Republic, Plato famously inserts his extended “true myth” of the Cave, the dwellers in which have inferred the structure of reality only from shadows cast on a wall, from the theater of which, due to their being chained on a bench, they cannot avert their gaze. That inference is erroneous, of course, but because each encourages the other in his conviction of it, the conviction acquires the status of truth-by-consensus. The gods miraculously free one prisoner from his shackles, permitting him to see the source of the shadows in wooden silhouettes paraded before the bright flames of a perpetual bonfire and to exercise his freedom by leaving the cave and experiencing the astonishment of the noonday sun. When, however, the freedman returns out of pity to reveal to his companions the truth of their wretched condition, they not only refuse to believe what strikes them as an insane story, but they threaten to kill him should he persist in it. Who then is irrational?

  Again in The Phaedrus and yet again in The Symposium, Plato critiques the limitations of what might be called mere metrical reason. Logic is a useful tool for assessing claims to knowledge, but logic has no power by itself to produce knowledge. There are types of knowledge: Some knowledge derives from experience, but some knowledge has no obvious experiential basis. The axioms or fundamental principles, upon which logic depends, cannot be derived from any more basic principle. The axioms are self-evident, having a status analogous to revelation. One is either aware of them—or not. In The Phaedrus, Plato extols the divine madness of the spiritually sensitive man, whose openness to the order of being confers on him the privilege to witness, not with his bodily but with his intellectual eye, the metaphysical pattern, the archetype-in-itself, that lies behind and gives comprehensible structure to physical reality. In The Symposium, Socrates recalls a lesson taught him in his youth by the seeress Diotima of Mantinea, who told him that people gravitate to this-worldly beauty because they see distantly reflected in it the Absolute or Perfect Beauty that no one could have encountered in the course of his earthly existence because neither absoluteness nor perfection occurs below
the moon. Socrates later breaks down his own metaphor logically, but only after describing the vision. How could a man detect imperfection, which everyone identifies intuitively, had he no knowledge of perfection beforehand? And if a man never saw perfection in life, must he not then have seen it elsewhere, perhaps prior to his incarnation? But the analysis is a concession. Like Wilson’s intuition of meaning, the vision of the Absolute or Perfect Beauty resists translation into propositional language. It can only achieve its representation in metaphors and other indirect constructions.

  The philosophical epiphanies of Socrates the teacher and Plato the student have undoubted ancestral origins in religious customs—in the Orphic and Eleusinian Mystery Cults, and in even more ancient, shamanistic practices widespread among archaic peoples. The epiphanic vision of the transcendent, living matrix is the archetype of every practical or earthly attempt to establish and conserve a lawful and social arrangement conducive to human happiness. Indeed, that a man, or even that certain men uniquely, could participate in the transcendent order of being and bring back news of it to the sublunary realm, as the freedman had brought back news of daylight to the prisoners in the cave, elevated the stature of man, in his generality, to a higher rank. Such knowledge belongs to the traditional wisdom of every great culture or civilization with the exception of the modern Western civilization, which, passing through the petulance of its so-called Enlightenment, declared that true knowledge consisted solely in what was immediately perceptible, inferable from perception, or instrumentally verifiable, as by experimental science. That limitation would ultimately exclude consciousness itself, a great and irresolvable mystery, just as much as it would exclude God, the gods, the Plotinian One, or the Platonic Absolute or Perfect Beauty. The phrase “irresolvable mystery,” not incidentally, is synonymous with something that cannot be wished away and therefore also with reality, the true test of which is its unwhimsical persistence. It follows that the Enlightenment’s restriction of what was admissible as knowledge extended itself, by its own definition, all the way to—reality. The break with Tradition styling itself as a grand clarification of reason repudiated reality.