Canaille / The Masses

The Machine Will Never Triumph, part thirteen

Multitudes.

The multitudes are like droppings of birds, like dung of sea-fowl that
    have flown away,
Oh they are grist for the mills of God, their bones ground down
to fertilise the roots of unknown men who are still to come
in fresh fields.¹

This chapter is directly related to the previous chapter and the next chapter: the preceding chapter dealt with modern humans in general, this chapter deals with mass man and mass formations, and the following chapter deals in more detail with modern man as such, namely the robot. A term that Lawrence was fond of calling the masses is the canaille, which is a colorful and pejorative word meaning the lowest mass members of society. The mass is always less than any individual. Most moderns have no lives of their own; attaining their limited fulfilment only through their function as part of the mass human hordes. There are, however, new men, sun-men, who may yet arise to liberate our world from the canaille. In this day and age, where even the staunchest individual is little more than a cog in a machine, a true individual is to be welcome, even if that individual is a vagrant or a bandit. Lawrence writes:

I feel quite anti-social, against this social whole as it exists. I wish one could be a pirate or a highwayman in these days. But my way of shooting them with noiseless bullets that explode in their souls, these social people of today, perhaps it is more satisfying. But I feel like an outlaw. All my work is a shot at their very innermost strength, these banded people of today. Let them cease to be. Let them make way for another, fewer, stronger, less cowardly people.²

As Lawrence makes clear, the war that is to be waged is not to be waged with the tools of the mass of men, namely bombs and guns and poison gases, but with words that cut one deeply in the soul. It is a common saying that the pen is mightier than the sword, but it is true. A sword can kill the body, but has no effect upon the soul, whereas words can awaken even the deadest individual. Technology doesn’t change the soul, as such, but it does place a veil over it, such that one sees with their third eye closed. The more technology there is, the more it places people into systems, and at the same time, the more people are part of the technological system, the more they group into mass formations. Thomas Merton described the phenomenon:

If technology really represented the rule of reason, there would be much less to regret about our present situation. Actually, technology represents the rule of quantity, not the rule of reason (quality=value=relation of means to authentic human ends). It is by means of technology that man the person, the subject of qualified and perfectible freedom, becomes quantified, that is, becomes part of a mass—mass man—whose only function is to enter anonymously into the process of production and consumption. He becomes on one side an implement, a “hand,” or better, a “biophysical link” between machines: on the other side he is a mouth, a digestive system, and an anus, something through which pass the products of his technological world, leaving a transient and meaningless sense of enjoyment. The effect of a totally emancipated technology is the regression of man to a climate of moral infancy, in total dependence not on “mother nature” (such a dependence would be partly tolerable and human) but on the pseudonature of technology, which has replaced nature by a closed system of mechanisms with no purpose but that of keeping themselves going.³

The breath of life

The breath of life and the sharp winds of change are the same thing.
But people who are fallen from the organic connection with the cosmos
feel the winds of change grind them down
and the breath of life never comes to nourish them.⁴

Life and change are natural, good, and necessary, and as Heraclitus stated, all is flux, but while the Heraclitean Fire nourishes those with a vital connection to the cosmos, it burns, burns alive, burns down those who lose touch with life and the cosmos. Most of us are only ever in touch with the cosmos as children, when we are full of wonder, but lately even children have the wonder torn out of them at the earliest ages. Now “we are born so woolly and swaddled up in mass ideas, that we hardly get a chance to move, to make a real move of our own. We just bleat foolishly out of a mass of woolly cloud, our mass-ideas, and we get no further.”⁵ When the mass of men accept a reductionistic, rational metaphysic, the ascendency of the Spirit—as opposed to the Soul—takes place, leaving us full of ideas, but without any real depth of feeling. As Ludwig Klages makes clear:

As Spirit penetrates deeper and deeper into the life-cell, it transforms both body and soul. The changes are expressed in the physiognomy of the body as well as in the ascent of technology. In the arena of the soul the effects of Spirit lead immediately to alterations in the emotional life, which find expression in the dwindling of poetic and artistic creativity. In the end, Spirit can only express itself through the medium of “ideas.”⁶

En masse.

Today, society has sanctified
the sin against the Holy Ghost,
and all are encouraged into the sin
so that all may be lost together, en masse, the great word of our civilisation.⁷

The most vital part of the Christian Trinity is the Holy Ghost, which is synonymous with the Heraclitean Fire. That Fire is the fire of life, and the greatest sin against it is to give our allegiance to death-products such as machines. A God or a prophet may be worshipped en masse, but the experience of the Holy Ghost is wholly individual.

One of the clearest descriptions of mass man, and the structures that create him is provided by Oswald Spengler:

Unleash the people as reader-mass and it will storm through the streets and hurl itself upon the target indicated, terrifying and breaking windows; a hint to the press-staff and it will become quiet and go home. The Press today is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty.

The dictature of party leaders supports itself upon that of the Press. The competitors strive by means of money to detach readers—nay, peoples— en masse from the hostile allegiance and to bring them under their own mind-training. And all that they learn in this mind-training, is what it is considered that they should know—a higher will puts together the picture of their world for them. There is no need now, as there was for Baroque princes, to impose military-service liability on the subject—one whips their souls with articles, telegrams, and pictures until they clamour for weapons and force their leaders into a conflict to which they willed to be forced.

This is the end of Democracy. […] The thought, and consequently the action, of the mass are kept under iron pressure—for which reason, and for which reason only, men are permitted to be readers and voters—that is, in a dual slavery—while the parties become the obedient retinues of a few, and the shadow of coming Caesarism already touches them.⁸

The press is the propaganda arm of any modern democracy. Any modern man, believing himself free, chooses to watch the news, read the papers, and makes sure to stay up to date on current events, but this wastes his time and turns him into a slave. Whoever controls the media controls the masses. Having contrasting opinions in the media is simply a ruse to create the illusion that there are multiple possibilities, but the reality is that both sides presented are still within the system’s realm of possibilities. One would never see our views, which are presented here, portrayed positively in the media, since these ideas are far too dangerous to the system. If one truly wants to be free, but has trouble finding the way forward, Lawrence provides simple directives:

[O]ppose the mass wave, whichever way it is running, or it will swamp everything. If the mass wave is money, oppose money. If the mass wave is enervating emotionalism, oppose it. If the mass wave is arrogant fascism, oppose it. If it is destructive communism, oppose it. The mass is always wrong. Mankind only lives on the strength of its vigorous minority of opposition. The mass, as we see in Russia, is a vast degenerating influence, degenerating to depraved mysticism, or equally depraved mechanism. The mass, unopposed would certainly destroy mankind. It is for the minority to fight for existence of the sane, free, whole individual.⁹

As proof that Lawrence is not bringing a new doctrine, but is a messenger of eternal wisdom, we here refer you to Ludwig Klages who references Zhang Zhou, who, in turn, espouses much of what Lawrence espouses.

The English “Deists,” led by Sir Isaac Newton, that master of the mechanistic apocalypse, openly proclaimed that the world must have had a divine origin, since it so obviously possesses the character of a purposeful machine (recall that Kant was still impressed by the so-called physico-theological proof of the existence of God!).

We know of no better way to illustrate the appalling unnaturalness of our apostles of political and moralistic “progress,” who are so intoxicated by the pseudo-life of the machine, than to adduce two words of wisdom which were attributed to Zhang Zhou, and which encapsulate more than two millennia of Chinese philosophical culture: A conceited traveler sees a gardener in a trench drawing buckets of water with which he is irrigating his plot of vegetables; the traveler advises the gardener to invest in a machine that will do his work for him. The gardener laughs and says: “This I have heard from my teacher: the cunning have tools and show their cunning in business, and those who are cunning in business have cunning in their hearts, and those who have cunning in their hearts cannot remain pure and uncorrupted, and those who do not remain pure and uncorrupted are restless in Spirit, and those who are restless in Spirit are those in whom the Tao can find no dwelling-place. It’s not that I do not understand the tools of which you speak. It’s just that I would be ashamed to use them.” The other anecdote goes as follows: The Spirit of the clouds asks the whirlpool why everything upon the earth has ended up in such a disordered state. The whirlpool answers: “That the order of the world is shattered, that the conditions of life are thrown into confusion, that the will of heaven is without effect, that the animals of the field are driven away, that birds screech in the night, that mildew rots the trees and the plants, that destruction overwhelms everything that crawls upon the earth: all that is the fault of government.”¹⁰

And there is evidence that our modern way of life is even more corrupt and depraved. The early Chinese philosophers, the ancient Greeks, the Etruscans, and so on, all knew these same truths. Lawrence is simply putting these truths in a particularly vivid way that are intelligible to modern minds.

Dark Satanic Mills

The dark, satanic mills of Blake
how much darker and more satanic they are now!
But oh, the streams that stream white-faced, in and out
in and out when the hooter hoots, whitefaced, with a dreadful gush
of multitudinous ignominy,
what shall we think of these?
They are millions to my one!

They are millions to my one! But oh
what have they done to you, white-faced millions
mewed and mangled in the mills of man?
What have they done to you, what have they done to you,
what is this awful aspect of man?

Oh Jesus, didn’t you see, when you talked of service
this would be the result!
When you said: Retro me, Satanas!
this is what you gave him leave to do
behind your back!

And now, the iron has entered into the soul
and the machine has entangled the brain, and got it fast,
and steel has twisted the loins of man, electricity has exploded the heart
and out of the lips of people just strange mechanical noises in place of
    speech.

What is man, that thou art no longer mindful of him!
and the son of man, that thou pitiest him not?
Are these no longer men, these millions, millions?
What are they then?¹¹

And one may add, how much darker and more satanic they are today compared to Lawrence’s day. On the surface, the co-working spaces that millennials adore may not seem particularly dark, nor satanic, but ontologically speaking they are far darker and far more satanic, for they lack the light of Being, and are the epicenters for the ideas that are destroying our world. Billions of men and women, currently working, have the system’s iron fish hooks deeply embedded within. In the old days a person would trudge off to their work only out of necessity, whilst begrudging the elites that put them in such a humiliating position, but now myriad workers actually want to go to their jobs; they look at their work as if it was some kind of fulfilment, but it only fulfils the desires of the elites and the needs of the Machine.

The ancient ways would have been less likely to lead to our current state of affairs, but through the adoption of false forms of Christianity Europe signed its soul over to the Machine, even if the fruits of this evil pact were only realized centuries later. Service is only needed for the self and the Gods. Free men will naturally help others, but by creating a doctrine of service, no one truly serves, and those in need are abandoned. The only service today is service to satanic powers, service to the Machine. Perhaps, rather than telling Satan to get behind him, Jesus should have confronted him and fought him. But we are where we are, and the answer to Lawrence’s question “what are they then?” is for many people, something akin to machine robots. When the world gives itself up to systems, whether of capitalism, communism, or something else, life atrophies and technology becomes dominant. Capitalism, which relies on the invisible hand of the market, is particularly ruthless in its rape of the world and the individual. As Heidegger writes:

In place of all the world-content of things that was formerly perceived and used to grant freely of itself, the object-character of technological dominion spreads itself over the earth ever more quickly, ruthlessly, and completely. Not only does it establish all things as producible in the process of production; it also delivers the products of production by means of the market. In self-assertive production, the humanness of man and the thingness of things dissolve into the calculated market value of a market[.]¹²

In the market, man and machine can seem to become one; but since man can never live while even partly a machine, the human qualities fade and die while the mechanical qualities become more prevalent. All machines, no matter how seemingly benign are evil. As Spengler writes: “Ever and ever again, true belief has regarded the machine as of the Devil.”¹³ The problem of mechanisation and the Machine is not just a practical problem, but the great spiritual problem of our epoch. Lawrence describes how the Machine took hold:

[T]he masses were caught and enslaved to industrialism before ever they knew it, the good ones got hold of the goods, and our modern “civilisation” of money, machines and wage-slaves was inaugurated. The very pivot of it, let us never forget, being fear and hate, the most intimate fear and hate, fear and hate of one’s own instinctive, intuitive body, and fear and hate of every other man’s and every other woman’s warm, procreative body and imagination.¹⁴

The rationalist metaphysics of today have much in common with Platonism and certain forms of Semitic religion in that the mind and the ideal are idolized, while the body is rejected. The path forward is to reclaim the sanctity and purity of the body through a renewed Dionysian metaphysic. It is either life, body and soul, or egotism, mind, iron and machine. You can’t have both. This is the time to make the choice. If one chooses the latter, we will witness the end of the world, as in fact we are already experiencing it, which disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima, and forest fires and extreme weather events have prefigured. The modern world in the end times is a time of noise as Richard Aldington makes clear:

NOISE;
Iron hoofs, iron wheels, iron din
Of drays and trams and feet passing;
Iron
Beaten to a vast mad cacophony.

In vain the shrill far cry
Of swallows sweeping by;
In vain the silence and green
Of meadows Apriline;
In vain the clear white rain—

Soot; mud;
A nation maddened with labour;
Interminable collision of energies—
Iron beating upon iron;
Smoke whirling upwards,
Speechless, impotent.

In vain the shrill far cry
Of kittiwakes that fly
Where the sea waves leap green.
The meadows Apriline—

Noise, iron, smoke;
Iron, iron, iron.¹⁵

If we allow the noise to penetrate our souls, “if we deny our imagination, and have no imaginative life, we are poor worms who have never lived.”¹⁶ The only way out of wormhood is through the creative imagination, which can lead us to unseen realms where anything is possible. “What we care about is the release of the imagination. A real release of the imagination renews our strength and our vitality, makes us feel stronger and happier. Scholastic works don’t release the imagination: at the best, they satisfy the intellect, and leave the body an unleavened lump.”¹⁷

Fellow-men

A few are my fellow-men
a few, only a few:
the mass are not.

The mass are not my fellow-men
I repudiate them as such.
Let them serve.¹⁸

All men are precious in the eyes of the Gods, because they manifest certain unique divine qualities. But those born into the wretched state of our prevailing mechanized civilization, have lost their primordial God-like magnificence, and have been reduced by “education” and “acculturalization” to a far lesser state, undifferentiated consumer units in a mass of lesser creatures. As nothing but members of the masses they are nothing, they are canaille, they are like worms. Most of the mass of men today will never awaken. Perhaps their children will awaken, but these dead machine-men will remain stagnant lumps of dead flesh. Only a few can be great, only a few can become sun-men; men who can lead the masses out of their machine slavery. The masses may never be free, but at least they will serve a higher and more fulfilling purpose, and under the inspiration and guidance of the sun-men, the earth will be free of the tyranny of the Machine, and future generations of men may experience the pure joy of life in the same ways the ancients did. Let us banish the Machine from the face of the earth and make sure it never rises again. But, for now, in the war against the Machine, the masses will offer resistance, and view the sun-men as enemies; so the masses themselves will become enemies against their own emancipation who must be overcome to be restored to their freedom. For as Lawrence writes:

The mass of people, let them listen ever so hard to their own soul, with ever so much sincerity, hear nothing but the confused roaring of old ideas, old phrases, old injunctions, old habits, to convince themselves they are moving on. New automatic tricks. These satisfy for ten minutes, then they invent another trick.¹⁹

These “tricks” are destroying the world. All the vast edifices of modernity that are considered the pinnacles of civilization are simply masks that obscure the fact that the more we have, the less we are. We must stop having and start being. We must smash the system and become free again. Lawrence writes:

That we are contained within the vast nullity of humanity does not make us other than null. That we are a vast colony of wood-lice, fabricating elaborate social communities like the bees or the wasps or the ants, does not make us any less wood-lice curled up upon nothingness, immune in a vast and multiple negation. It only shows us that the most perfect social systems are probably the most complete nullities, that all relentless organisation is in the end pure negation. Who wants to be like an ant? An ant is a little scavenger, a perfect social system of scavengers.²⁰

Love thy neighbour—

I love my neighbour
but
are these things my neighbours?
these two-legged things that walk and talk
and eat and cachinnate, and even seem to smile,
seem to smile, ye gods!

Am I told that these things are my neighbours?

All I can say is Nay! nay! nay! nay! nay!²¹

Nay! These machine people are nothings, they are nullities personified. Only a free man can be a true neighbor deserving of love. A mass man, part of the mechanized hordes of humanity is never deserving of love. In the so-called primitive eras, and in less developed, remote regions, today, neighbors are like family, and locking the door is viewed as a strange and unnecessary thing to do, but the more modern and civilized a person gets, the more he or she hates others and fears others. Lawrence makes this clear as follows:

I think, if we came to analyse to the last what men feel about one another today, we should find that every man feels every other man as a menace. It is a curious thing, but the more mental and ideal men are, the more they seem to feel the bodily presence of any other man a menace, a menace, as it were, to their very being. Every man that comes near me threatens my very existence: nay, more, my very being.

This is the ugly fact which underlies our civilisation. […] While “kindness” is the glib order of the day—everybody must be “kind”—underneath this “kindness” we find a coldness of heart, a lack of heart, a callousness, that is very dreary. Every man is a menace to every other man.

Men only know one another in menace. Individualism has triumphed. If I am a sheer individual, then every other being, every other man especially, is over against me as a menace to me. This is the peculiarity of our society today. We are all extremely sweet and “nice” to one another, because we merely fear one another.

The sense of isolation, followed by the sense of menace and of fear, is bound to arise as the feeling of oneness and community with our fellow-man declines, and the feeling of individualism and personality, which is existence in isolation, increases.²²

The last great wave against the Machine came between 1910 and 1950, with Lawrence, Jeffers, Spengler, and Heidegger proclaiming that this evil must be fought and destroyed, but the last time there was a great movement against the Machine was during the Romantic period. Ludwig Klages wrote:

The Romantics constituted the ultimate wave, because the very core of terrestrial life died when they died. Surely man has never experienced, nor has he ever suffered more rapturously, the convulsions of being than did the Romantics. Their horizon flamed in the fiery gloaming of farewell, a last, irrevocable severing of the ties.

Only a select few perceived this event. Fewer still understood its implications. Even Nietzsche confused that melancholy and overpowering radiance with the first flush of a new dawn.

I have indulged in such descriptions merely so that the reader might be able to see the reason why we refer to these last, great bearers of the radiance of earth as the dithyrambic bards of destruction. They were surrounded by ghouls and vampires, and their creative work was never really consummated.

The whole earth reeks as never before with the blood of the slaughtered, and the apelike masses now strut about with the precious spoils that they have plundered from the ravaged temple of life!²³

The enervated masses that are now ravishing the world are virtually robotic, and we will proceed to discuss them next, beginning with Lawrence’s starkly poetic rendering of men as virtually robots.

Bibliography

Aldington, Richard. The Complete Poems of Richard Aldington. London: Allan Wingate, 1948.

Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.

Klages, Ludwig. Cosmogonic Reflections. Translated by Joseph D. Pryce. London: Arktos, 2015.

Lawrence, D. H. “A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.” In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, edited by Michael Squires. London: Penguin Books, 2009.

———. Apocalypse. Edited by Mara Kalnins. London: Penguin Books, 1995.

———. Late Essays and Articles. Edited by James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

———. Quetzalcoatl. Edited by Lois L. Martz. New York: New Directions, 1998.

———. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Edited by Michael Herbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

———. The Poems. Edited by Christopher Pollnitz. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

———. The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Edited by James T. Boulton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Merton, Thomas. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. New York: Image, 2014.

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. Vol. II. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927.

———. The Decline of the West. Edited by Arthur Helps and Helmut Werner. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.

1. D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 529.

2. D. H. Lawrence, The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 120–21.

3. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Image, 2014), 71.

4. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:530.

5. D. H. Lawrence, Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 99.

6. Ludwig Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, trans. Joseph D. Pryce (London: Arktos, 2015), 126.

7. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:535.

8. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, ed. Arthur Helps and Helmut Werner, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 395–96.

9. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:669.

10. Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, 58–59.

11. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:543–44.

12. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 112.

13. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, vol. II (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 502.

14. Lawrence, Late Essays and Articles, 193.

15. Richard Aldington, The Complete Poems of Richard Aldington (London: Allan Wingate, 1948), 62.

16. Lawrence, Late Essays and Articles, 193.

17. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, ed. Mara Kalnins (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 47.

18. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:550.

19. D. H. Lawrence, Quetzalcoatl, ed. Lois L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1998), 110.

20. D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 46.

21. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:555.

22. D. H. Lawrence, “A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’,” in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 331–32.

23. Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, 124.