THE SUPERFLUOUS ONES

    

    AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

"The whole of life is a predicament, complex and prolonged; and the whole of mind is a cry, prolonged and variously modified, which that predicament wrings from the psyche."                                         
                                                                                    —George Santayana

It had never been my intention to write the history of the Wolf murder, for that sort of work has never appealed to me.  Despite the fact that I knew both the victims and the suspect involved in the celebrated case, I resisted every effort on the part of my friends and my wife to persuade me to write a book about it.  Recently, however, several inducements have at last softened my reluctance to undertake the work, the most important of which has been my acquisition of Alex Nielsen’s journals.  After I became familiar with these journals, I soon realized that the story of the Wolf murder contained even broader implications about the society we live in than I had previously thought.  And since I, too, played a not insignificant part in the whole drama, who better to tell the story than myself?  With Alex’s journals at hand to lead the way, I knew at last that the whole truth could be told.  And if I wasn't willing to make the effort tell it, who would?

So many stories written these days, whether true or not, are irrelevant, shallow, stupid, and hardly worth the effort required to tell them.  Most of our practicing novelists and many of our historians and biographers seem more interested in prostituting their crafts to the fashions and foibles of the moment, none of which are of any significance to the great issues of life.  The literature of the present age is most decidedly a literature in a very minor key.  It consists almost solely of inconsequential wisps and strands of trivialities, artfully knitted together into patterns as meaningless as non-representational painting.  Form should follow content, but with our modern-day technique-mongers trained by proliferating writing workshops and inflicted on the world by publishers desperate for tax writeoffs, content has been swallowed up by form and no longer exists.  In no age has so many brilliantly written, exquisitely crafted, but substantively hollow books graced the catalogs of publishers; nor has any age appeared rivaling ours in its ignorance of the essential vacuity of its own utterly worthless literature.

Intellectual provincialism of claustrophobic proportions appears to be the rule of the day throughout most of what passes for contemporary culture.  Since most intellectuals are more interested in puffing up their gratuitous reputations or in avenging personal resentments than in anything else, many of them are not even aware that there is more to life than meeting “the right” people or acquiring tenure at a university.  As a result of this sort of obtuseness—a peculiar species of blindness so typical of the spirit of our age—our entire civilization finds itself on the verge of committing cultural and spiritual suicide.  And yet so miserable is our predicament, so immense is our lack of self-knowledge, that hardly anyone realizes that anything is at stake!  Oh, to be sure, from certain quarters one hears, now and again, various dim admonishments urging us to mend our ways.  But more often than not such warnings are merely the embittered cerebrations of some disappointed ideologue flashing like so much distant and noiseless lightening over the troubled waters of our culture.  Such flashings serve no other purpose than to distract our attention from the deluge at hand.  Imagine a race of sleepwalkers who cannot even conceive that there exists such a state as wakefulness but who nevertheless go about their business walking along the crests of steep ridges with dangerous abysses at either side and you will have an idea of our current predicament.  

Several weeks ago, while visiting a bookstore in a nearby city, I happened to run into one of these sleepwalkers.  She was an attractive, twenty-something young woman—bright, enthusiastic, ingratiating, but incurably myopic and as shallow as a surface.  She had recently published her first novel and had been sent out by her publisher to promote the book.  When I ran across her, she was trying to peddle her wares at a card table which had been set up for her in the middle of the book-store near the self-help and business sections.  (I do not believe she understood the hint, but that is of little consequence.)  I could see at a glance that the day had gone poorly for her.  A large stack of books still remained, not only on the table itself, but on the floor around the table.  I wondered at the folly which had sent this girl out into the cultural wilderness with so immense a burden.  Feeling sorry for her, I sat down at her table and drew her into a discussion about contemporary literature.

From the start, it was obvious that she had never been exposed to views like mine.  They puzzled, disturbed, and annoyed her.  On a number of occasions she was so baffled and offended by my remarks that it was all she could do to remain civil.  But her desperation to sell a book kept her in line.  She could not afford to antagonize a potential customer.  

I was both amused and saddened by her plight.  I suspect that she did not entirely understand my views because she did not want to understand them: they were far too threatening to her preconceived notions.  Although she no doubt prided herself on her liberal open-mindedness, like most liberals, she was only open-minded north-northwest; when the wind blew southerly, her mind was as tight as a clam.  And paradoxically, it was the fact that she was so open-minded in some directions that caused her to be so close-minded in others: for by taking such pride in the gaping openness of her mind on one direction, she kept herself from realizing that her mind was stuffed to the gills with prejudices in the other.  

There was something touching and pathetic in all of this, as there is with any manifestation of mere faith.  All her intellectual life she had unquestioningly accepted certain cultural views which had always struck me as extremely dubious.  Taking for granted the health and vitality of contemporary literature, she never once considered the possibility that she might be living in a cultural dark ages.  Confusing prestige with excellence, she assumed that all the novels written by her creative writing teachers were masterful examples of the craft of fiction and that all she had to do to succeed as a writer was to imitate them.  Not once had it occurred to her that, if she needed models for her own writing, she really ought to be studying the classics.  She had no understanding of the value of great literature.  How could she?  She had read only a handful of books written before her time.  When I mentioned Stendhal and Dostoevsky, she did not know what on earth I was talking about.

The minute I began presenting my views to her, she had felt threatened.  Her first reaction had been to evade my comments by attempting to change the subject.  When she realized I had no intention of letting her off the hook so easily, she ventured several feeble objections expressed in a non-committal tone, which I refuted with an ease that astonished and frightened her.  She became irritated and peevish.  She was angry because I had called into question those very views which she believed all decent and respectable persons absolutely had to accept.  Yet because of her liberal commitment to open-mindedness and tolerating the views of others, she was ashamed to admit this to my face.  Deep in heart she knew it was wrong to allow her beliefs to be determined by what her friends thought.  But it distressed her to have to admit this to herself.  It is always distressing to have to admit that one is afraid to think for oneself.

This sort of conformity of thought is a well known phenomenon in our politically correct age.  To go against the prevailing ethos of the group violates one of the deepest sentiments in the nation's psyche—the sentiment of democracy.  The French aristocrat Tocqueville, democracy's greatest critic, warned of the inevitable result of the majority's tyranny of thought.  “Fetters and headsman were the course instrument which tyranny formerly employed,” Tocqueville wrote; “but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself, though it seemed to have nothing to learn.  Monarchs had, so to speak, materialized oppression: the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it entirely an affair of the mind.  Under the absolute sway of one man, the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it, and rose proudly superior.  Such is not the course adopted in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.  The master no longer says, ‘You shall think as I do, or you shall die'; but he says, 'You are free to think differently from me, and to retain your life and your property, and all you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people.  You may retain you civil rights, but they will be useless, for you will never be chosen by your fellow citizens, if you solicit their votes; and they will effect to scorn you, if you ask for their esteem.  You will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind.  Your fellow citizens will shun you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn.  Go in peace!  I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death.’’

All this is even more true today than it was in Tocqueville's time.  As a result of the fierce controversy between the Left and the Right in this country, we are inclined to think that, when it come to public debate, anything goes.  It is normally assumed that the tyrannies of puritanical thinking on the Right and political correct thinking on the Left are simply manifestations of political extremism, which is always tyrannical in nature.  As one moves towards the political Center, one is supposed to enter a realm of free thought and tolerance for divergent views.  This assumption, however, is sadly out of tune with the facts.  Even in the political Center, certain ideas are neither respected nor even tolerated.  Over above the political correctness of the Left there exists in all-inclusive political correctness which embraces nearly all political positions—Right, Left, or Center—in American life.  The man who unwisely violates this all-inclusive type of political correctness is liable to experience all the effects of democratic tyranny as described by Tocqueville.
These remarks are meant as a sort of preparation for what is to follow.  My purpose in writing this book was not merely to reaffirm what currently passes for right-thinking among the self-appointed cognoscenti.  On the contrary, my intention has been to portray and perhaps elucidate a certain condition prevalent in American society which, as yet, has not received much notice by our professional intellectuals.  That this “condition,” as I have chosen to describe it, is not to my taste, I will readily admit; however, this does not mean that my purpose in writing this book is to attempt to change anyone’s mind regarding this condition.  What people decide to think of it is their own business; their opinion, one way or the other, makes not the slightest difference to me.  All I wish to insist upon is that this condition does in fact exist.

But what precisely is this “condition” that I speak of?  I see it as a peculiar outgrowth of man’s sempirtnal hostility towards his own nature.  There have always existed a large number of men—usually manifesting intellectual pretensions—who have loathed human nature and wished to see it abolished.  During the medieval era, this abhorrence found its deepest expression in the doctrine of original sin, which posited a human nature that was unalterably flawed.  The expositors of this doctrine believed that only God could regenerate human nature; man was powerless to effect so mighty a change.  This pessimistic view of human nature, although it might have led certain fanatics into some of the more dismal exhibitions of asceticism prevalent during the middle ages, at least had one saving grace: it helped people learn to accept human nature as it is rather than waging futile battles against it in an effort to alter it.  This, however, would change with the onset of modernity.  Instead of accepting human nature as an unalterable fact of reality, modern man would try to abolish it.

Modernity’s desperate revolt against human nature is largely responsible for that peculiar condition which I seek to identify and explain.  In the ancient world, a brave attempt had been made to live in accordance with human nature.  Instead of waging a useless war against human nature, most civilized men in the ancient world accepted man’s nature as an unavoidable fact of reality.  Thus in that era of mankind it was understood that men are not created equal, and the some men must command while others obey.  Nor did anyone feel resentment because of the unalterable imperfection of man.  

Since the French revolution, this stoical acceptance of human nature has increasingly become a thing of the past.  Man’s conception of himself has more and more become dependent on ideas hatched from the brains of alienated and resentful intellectuals who think almost entirely in terms of abstract rhetorical constructions and who therefore know virtually nothing about reality.  Out of this rhetorical intellectualism arose a thoroughly corrupt and distorted image of man and his happiness.  According the cerebrations of modern intellectuals, man was hardly more than a faceless abstraction who could be “improved” by the abolishment of perverse institutions and outmoded conventions.  Yet these, too, were also faceless abstractions existing only in the heads of intellectuals.

The upshot of all this was a tremendous retreat from the natural order of things.  It was declared that all values had to be justified in terms of utility, which itself was justified on a purely sensory basis.  This brought about an immense perversion in man’s scale of vales.  Value-judgements were made on the crudest basis, often without any sense of the rich complexities of life.  Base passions more and more came to distort man’s conception of his place in the world.  Out of the envy of intellectuals arose the monstrous specter of egalitarianism, the most unnatural doctrine of them all.  The lust for equality swept everything before it, dragging all that is lofty and noble and sublime into the mire of plebeian small-mindedness and fault-finding.  But nature cannot be abolished by mere ideas.  Despite all the talk of equality and the “just” distribution of wealth and power, the underlying hunger for preeminence remained.  Men could talk about the desirability of equality, but they could never bring it about, because even the most fanatical egalitarians thirsted for preeminence, even if it was only preeminence in their devotion to equality.  What was worse, because men denied what was natural to them, they wound up turning nature into something ugly and perverted.  In past ages, the better sort of men strove for preeminence in loftiness of spirit; now they strive for preeminence in bank accounts or adulation from the mob or in the number of women ravished.  Out of all this has come the degradation of most of the higher ideals of previous ages.  Chivalry and honor, piety and godliness, all became the targets of slander and small-minded abuse.  People no longer believed in higher things.  The world became ugly beyond all description.  The lowest part of man’s nature took center stage, and everywhere life found itself reduced to the lowest common denominator.

What, then, is the condition of mankind in the present age?  One of immense degradation, involving the forfeiture of all that is lofty, noble, and great.  Man’s soul has succumbed to a sickness so loathsome that even God has turned away from His creation in disgust.  Man no longer has the strength to face himself.  To ease his suffering, he blinds himself with narcotics — which is to say, with recreation, consumerism, television, hedonism, economism, careerism, ideology, utopianism, resentment, and nihilism.  Meanwhile, everything spiritual in nature has become feeble or downright moribund.  Religion has been thoroughly vulgarized; literature merely recites the trivialities of the age in an absurdly self-conscious manner; music entirely lacks inspiration; science is without soul; art is either superficial or hideous and obscene; and philosophy has abandoned subtlety for sophistication and depth for mere cleverness.

Again, to repeat what I said earlier, I am not trying to convince anyone that all this is bad.  Obviously, I have no particular fondness for it; but if other people like things this way, I have no problem with that.  And certainly I am not saying that man’s condition at present is all bad.  Any form of society, however corrupt, has its peculiar advantages, and I would be the last person to deny the advantages of the present social order.  Only I would like all the apologists of egalitarianism and utilitarianism and liberalism and all the other dubious creeds of modernity to once and a while acknowledge the immense price which have been paid for the boons of their social order.  In order to bring about their preciously hedonistic nanny-state, the progressivists of our time have had to subvert all that is lofty in spirit, noble in gesture, divine in contemplation, and honorable in action.  Giants once walked the Earth, hand-in-hand with God; since then, the Earth has been over-run by horders of resentful pygmies, wallowing hand-in-hand with Mammon.  It is, to my mind, truly horrible to contemplate.

The meaning of this horror, as reflected in the lives of real individuals, is the central theme of my narrative—the raison d'être of the entire work.  It was Alex Nielsen’s journals which revealed to me the extent to which the Wolf murder and most of the events relating to it illustrate my deepest convictions about the plight of man in contemporary society.  There exists something deeply dehumanizing within American society; and no where is this dehumanization more widespread than in the nation’s universities, where human beings are systematically exploited, brainwashed, robbed of their dignity as individuals, and used as mere fodder to fuel the ego-aggrandizing buffoonery of the most cowardly and despicable sort of men.  

Prima facie, you would expect the University to be the one place where ideas would be taken most seriously and where respect for man’s spiritual and intellectual needs would be greatest.  After all, the university is ostensibly dedicated to “higher” learning—to the best that has been thought and said in the world.  And yet many universities would prefer to teach the worst that has been said and thought.  The humanities are especially corrupt.  Literature courses have increasingly been taken hostage by hordes of fanatical deconstructionists and their multiculturalist fellow-travellers; philosophy remains in the grip of sterile pedants spinning webs of undecipherable symbolic equations lacking in any sort of earthly or divine significance; and history has become “social” history — or “history from the bottom up,” as one practioner of the obscenity described it to me.  

In the meantime, what has been lost in all this degradation and mendacity is any sense or vision of man’s deeper potentialities.  In its place has emerged a vision of man as an extremely complicated stimulus-response machine whose highest desideratum in life is to feel good.  Everything is to be sacrificed to this hedonistic desidaratum, including  the dignity of man.  Man’s entire spiritual existence is to be reduced to mere sensation.  He is once more to be transformed into a beast — though a gentle and kindly beast at that.  A touchy-feely beast, if you would — the dream of academic leftists everywhere!

Everything I am writing of here, including the vulgarity of our culture, the ignobility of modernity, the tyranny of group-think, can only be understood by the mind if it can first be felt by the heart.  Unless you can feel it as an outrage against all higher values, everything I have imparted here will leave the reader cold.  Now the greatest tragedy of our era is not so much abysmal spiritual condition of man — although, to be sure, that is depressing enough; — no, what is really tragic is the fact that most individuals these days are not even capable of realizing the extent of their spiritual destitution — that they have become, in effect, anesthetized to it, so that they cannot feel the pain of their own emptiness.  

This insentience, no doubt, has its merciful side.  A man so blind that he is not even aware of his own blindness probably suffers less than the blind man who realizes what he lacks.  Yet we may wonder if ignorance of one’s spiritual destitution can be justified by such an analogy.  Even if it is true that a blind man suffers less as long as he remains ignorant of his blindness, this does not mean that it is always better to be ignorant of one’s deficiencies.  Perhaps if our blind man realized that he lacked something of extreme importance, then maybe his longing to see would encourage him to seek every means possible to overcome his defect.  After all, not all forms of blindness are incurable.  But in order to be cured, one must first know that one is sick.  Before a man can determine to make himself a better person, he must first acknowledge the necessity for self-improvement.  The self-satisfied man, the complacent man, the man of self-esteem who believes all is well with his soul — why, is he not the blindest man of them all?  Of course he is.  And what makes his blindness incurable is because he is insensible of it.

Needless to say, the purpose of this book is not to give comfort to the spiritually vapid and the complacently blind.  I have no interest in making people feel good or uplifting their souls — or, even worse, increasing their self-esteem.  I am opposed to any sort of spiritual hedonism which insists that we should never offend for fear that we might hurt someone's all-too-tender feelings.  When things are in a bad way, the only proper state of mind is to feel bad about it.  That’s what bad feelings are for: to warn us that all is not well and that somebody better man the pumps before the ship goes down.

Although I seriously doubt that a mere book can change anything, I do feel it is important to at least say something about what’s really going on in this country.  Even if nothing can be done about it, at least the opportunity should be given to express our sorrow.  When a small animal is caught within the jaws of a carnivorous beast, it lets out a wail of tremendous pain and anguish.  A philosophical bystander might wonder what the purpose of so futile a noise could possibly be.  Does the animal really believe that his cry will save him from the jaws of the savage beast who very shortly will devour him, bones and all?  Hardly likely.  Even an animal as dumb as a rabbit knows that, once the treacherous fangs have ripped into his inner organs, he is done for.  And yet he cries out nonetheless — cries out, not to be rescued, or even to be heard, but because he has to cry out: something deep within him forces the cry from his fear-constricted throat.

This book is my cry of anguish, my cry of spiritual devourment at the expense of a voraciously vulgar and beastly society which detests nearly everything I value.  And although I know that few, if any, will care to listen to my shout of pain, shout I must.  Something is very wrong with our society.  Sinister forces have arisen which make it impossible for any genuinely eminent individual to occupy a place in the social order compatible with his inborn talents and capacities.  Indeed, in some instances, we have turned the aristocratic standard on its head.  All the honors of society go to man with ignoble hearts and shriveled souls and distorted vision, while the great-souled man is persecuted precisely because of his estimable qualities.  Can anyone imagine a greater perversion of values than this?

But perhaps you don’t believe what I am saying.  Perhaps you find it impossible that some men in our society are persecuted for their virtues, while others are rewarded for their vices.  Very well.  You are entitled to your opinion.  But I have one question to ask.  If, as you say, it is implausible to suppose that anyone in our society is ever persecuted because of his virtues, then how do you explain the fact that every eminent and noble and great-souled individual I have ever known — and I have had the good fortune to have known several such individuals — has been destroyed by a society which despised them merely because of the beauty and light and wisdom which they wished to shine upon their fellow human beings?  Why do so many people in positions of power in our society hat with a rabid passion any expression of genuine superiority?  Why do they wish to subvert the natural order of rank, putting the worst on top while the best languish in obscurity and silence?  When someone gives me satisfactory answers to these questions, I will say no more.

Before getting under way with my account of the Wolf murder (and all the injustices related to it), it is only right that I should reveal my principle sources.  My primary source consists of my own personal recollections of everything that happened during my final year in college.  I have also relied heavily on the aforementioned journals of Alex Nielsen, the main protagonist of the whole Wolf-murder drama, and also on the reminiscences of a police detective — who shall remain nameless — who played a major role in the palpably corrupt investigation of that murder.  My wife has also been of great assistance to me, as has Alex's former girlfriend, Melissa Brownell, and one of his former professors, Christine O’Donnel.  Despite the assistance of all these good people, I alone take full responsibility for everything written in this book, whether it be fact, fraud, or error.  My purpose has never been to indite anyone or tarnish anyone’s good reputation, but merely to give as truthful account of the events leading to and the consequences deriving from the murders of Professor Matthias Wolf and Richard Talley.  If anyone objects to my account of the matter, they are perfectly welcome to write their own account.  I have no objection to opposing views.  All I object to is hidden agendas.  My agenda, such as it is, I have no intention of concealing.  I expect the same courtesy from those who would criticize this book.


NEXT: Prologue.