The ‘Introduction’ to Part ii of Lewis’ Paleface seems to have been particularly important to McLuhan. Passages from it are set out in Paleface (Introduction to Part ii). In fact, the whole book raises matters which seems to have been massively suggestive for McLuhan’s project in various ways — that is, not only by agreement with them.¹

Here are passages from the remainder of Paleface which would have struck McLuhan. Page numbers throughout refer to the Internet Archive edition.

*

to prosecute my function of ‘impartial observer‘… (3)²

And it will of course be difficult to prove that the Paleface is better than his Black or Yellow brother, not only because it is not true, but also because it is so unpopular a notion. (3)

A ‘moral situation’ is devoted to showing the part played by the puritan morality in the present situation (…) the transformation of our society, consequent upon the technical triumphs of science, would have been conducted perhaps in a more rational atmosphere — not, as at present, thick with a medieval gloom of bloodshot righteousness. (4-5)

the mischief that lies in unbridled moral righteousness (5)

‘blond beasts’… (5)³

there is some chance that we may wipe each other completely out. (6)

The sheer sentimentalism of this revolutionary protestant moralist [T.H. Green]⁴ is nevertheless a very interesting medium through which to look at the objects of our present concern. (7-8)

[T.H.] Green would set positively no bounds at all. (9)

Passing “the point beyond which there seems no longer to be either good or evil” — To pass the barrier described (…) by Aristotle into a non-ethical region is not part of the asceticism of this particular kind of moralist, for his ‘willingness to endure even unto complete self-renunciation, even to the point of forsaking ail possibility of pleasure’, is envisaged by [T.H.] Green in the most cheerless manner, in a kind of paroxysm of middleclass nineteenth-century christian-duty, that is calculated to make the flesh creep far more thoroughly than could any self-imposed rigours of the gvmnosophist. (10)

The ‘good citizen’s’ lot, having to forgo more and more enjoyment, even ‘the pleasures of the soul’ (which it did not so much as occur to a Greek to sacrifice), is indeed a melancholy one, it seems, as the number of people in the world increases and as the newspapers or cinemas inform him, or put visibly before him, more and more creatures for whom he is ‘responsible’. This is surely the very madness of morality, for there is no compensating beauty such as you get in the great catholic mysteries; there is nothing but this cold and ever growing, dutiful, quantitative responsibility. (12)

According to [T.H.] Green’s expanding principle of ‘the common good’ there is no limit to such expansion, or to the corresponding depression and ascetic continence of the conscientious Christian. (12)

The mere principle, of course, that everyone, of whatever caste, creed or race, has a ‘suum’ is not sufficient to base our moral conduct upon, as we must first know what ‘suum’ is. (13)

But in [T.H.] Green’s view, ‘there is no necessary limit of numbers or space beyond which the spiritual principle of social relations becomes ineffective’. His expansiveness is really infinite, that is to say. (13)

This readiness of the fanatical moralist to ignore the claims of ‘any form of political society’ and to give up his life for the publicans and sinners, who are peculiarly adapted to ‘some society not seen as yet’ gives him an unquestionable advantage over the Greek. (13)

The ‘moral situation’ which in those quotations from [T.H.] Green I have, I hope, brought clearly before you, is the moral situation that underlies all the questions that are agitating us today. (…) It is ‘a moral situation’ that is the essential point: our world has become an almost purely ethical place.⁵ (15)

Side by side we have an ever increasing ethical pressure — more and more strenuous dreams of moral persuasiveness — and a darker and darker cloud of poison-gas always gathering upon the horizon, and larger and larger birds of prey — in the form of aeroplanes pregnant with colossal bombs hovering over us: also war-films and war-books multiply at a dumbfounding rate.  (15)

“desire to dogmatise about matters whereon the Greek and Roman held certainty to be at once unimportant and unattainable” [Samuel Butler] (16)

the passion for tolerance (…) is surely today a thing of which we cannot have enough, as we find ourselves hemmed in more and more by righteousness and intolerance  (16-17)

the brutal physical subjection of one race to another could not co-exist with such conditions as at present obtain throughout the world. And (…) the race-prejudice or traditional superstition of some absolute or mystical ‘superiority’ could not be maintained, either. (17)

my analysis of what underlies the literary and pictorial expression of the present time (19)

my zeal for a non-national consciousness (20)

dogmatical mechanical reversals have become the only way that the average Paleface is now able to express himself at all. (20)

the colour-blind fanatic who can only see one colour at a time (21)

self-death or suicide is not a step to which we should allow ourselves too tamely to be led (21-22)

We have a responsibility of an order unguessed at by [T.H.] Green. (22)

in the position of fellow-slaves (22)

May not, you ask yourself, as you watch him, this Master of the World find himself in the end, abject and leaderless, a herd whose pale skin is a standing reproach — an emblem of tyranny instead of an emblem of privilege — driven madly hither and thither in gigantic wars that have at length become completely meaningless? If this apocalyptic picture sounds to your ears sensational or far-fetched, I can only say that you forget very
quickly what was called at the time [only a decade ago in WW1] ‘Armageddon’. (26)

‘Our Indian Possessions’ is not a phrase that even the stupidest Englishman would employ today: and whoever Indians have to deal with — and no doubt they have to deal with somebody — it is not with us. (26)

a particular consciousness being evolved by this mass of books and plays, that is the point. (41)

the Whites, on their side, are being given a certain consciousness (41)

a corresponding sense of inferiority. It is this that is unfortunate: the mere reversal of a superiority (41)

the middleclass ideal of the Paleface is not a very high one, in the first Instance: and then the conversion of ‘millions of Negroes into coffee-coloured Babbitts is not an exceedingly stimulating picture for the revolutionary mind, nor for the intelligent person of whatever political opinion. (43)

in a world given over to Advertisement we are only too familiar with the way in which words take the place of facts  (56)

The Paleface at present (…) has fallen so low intellectually, is socially so impotent, and his standards of work and amusement are so mechanical, that he cannot be taken as an ideal by any man (57)

The ‘cultural’ present that the Negro has made to White America, and through America to the whole White World, can be summed up in the word ‘jazz’. (65)

I should like everybody to be imbued with the spirit of internationalism, and to keep all their local customs. (68)

the relations of human beings, especially as that applies to the wholesale reform of those relations, at present in progress all over the world. (71)

not until we cease to call ourselves free shall we be able to recognize how unnecessarily servile we have become. The word ‘free’ is merely, as it were, a magical counter with which to enslave us, it is full of an electrical property that has been most maleficent where the European or American is concerned. (72-73)

It is not disputed by anybody that we have evolved a very mechanical type of life, as a result of the discovery of printing and its child, the Press — the Cinema. Radio and so forth, and the immense advances in the technique of Industry. There is much less differentiation now, that is, between the consciousness of the respective members of a geographical group, and between the various groups or peoples, than before machines made it possible for everyone to mould their mind upon the same cultural model (in the way that they all subject themselves to the emotional teaching of a series of films, for instance, all over the surface of the globe).  (74-75) [See 84]

The more fundamentally alike nations become, the more fiercely ‘nationalist’ is their temper: but also the more impersonal they grow (…), the more they talk of freedom, and of their ‘personality’. (74-75)

Indeed a ‘moral situation’ is essentially a revolutionary situation, in the most frivolous sense, when for a time the unreal and purely sentimental values, in a dissolving society, get the upper hand. (77)

those days when, to be the curse of the West, ‘morals’ were first invented (77)

As this society becomes, instead of an organic whole, a mass of minute individuals, under the guise of an Ethic there appears the Mystic of the Many (…) and the dogma of ‘what is due from everybody to everybody’ takes the place of the natural law of what is due to character, to creative genius, or to personal power, or even to their symbols. I do not need to point out how intense this mysticism of the Monad or ‘the Many’ has become, nor how it has resulted everywhere in wholesale aggression, aimed at anybody, either in the past or present, possessing those ‘great’ qualities (…) The daily belittlement of, or the personal attacks upon, in books or in the Press, the ‘great men’ of our literary Pantheon is one of the obvious signs of this sansculottist temper. It is almost as though the duty of the truly moral man was (…) to destroy what he regards as ‘great’ (…) and a sentimental value for what is little or ineffective, or merely distant, or incomprehensible, must be eagerly professed. (77-78)

The idea ‘person’ I associate essentially with the idea of ‘organization’. (78)

All that is ‘due’ from one creature to another is, as I should describe it, in reality due to God, whose ‘things’ we are — only the fictions as it were of that Person. It would be best for me to recall here (since the existence of a spiritual power or God, or any reference even to that power, is involved for most people with the sickliness of some debased ethical code) the unsentimental nature of this obligation I am supposing to exist. And this character of compulsion, this intellectual character, applies as much to what is ‘due’ to God, as to what is ‘due’ elsewhere: and what is exacted from us elsewhere is an expression merely of a more absolute dependence. (79)

Political independence is the gift of a society, whereas independence of character, or the being a person, is a gift of nature, to put it shortly. That gift is held for our natural life, irrespective of function. A person can only be ‘free’ in the degree in which he is a ‘person’: and if the most potentially effective and the wisest members of a given society are obscured or rendered ineffective, then it can only mean that that society is about to perish, as an organism, for it cannot survive in a condition in which what is most vital in it is obscured or not permitted to function. (79-80)

What can I possibly mean by saying that the best individuals of the European race are outlaws? I mean of course that we are now in the position of local tribal chiefs brought within a wider system, which has gathered and closed in around us: and that the law or tradition of our races which it is our function to interpret, is being superseded by another and more universal norm, and that a new tradition is being born. (Of this more universal norm there are as yet no accredited interpreters […] I am perhaps the nearest approach to a priest of the new order.) (81)

The reason we are outlaws then is that there is no law to which we can appeal, upon which we can rely, or that it is worth our while any longer to interpret, even if we could. (81-82)

We, the natural leaders in the World we live in, are now private citizens in the fullest sense, and that World is, as far as the administration of its traditional law of life is concerned, leaderless. Under these circumstances, its soul in a generation or so will be extinct, as a separate unit it will cease to exist. It will have merged in a wider system. (82)

I am a man of the ‘transition,’ we none of us can help being that — I have no organic function in this society, naturally, since this society has been pretty thoroughly dismantled and put out of commission; though, of course, if you ask me that, I would prefer a society in which I was beneath a law, which I could illustrate and interpret. But I have no desire to walk into the Past. (83)

Our political disorganization (…) has come about through physical necessity, in the person of our revolutionary Science, all terrestrial societies being called upon to coalesce into a vaster unit — namely a world-society. (84) ⁶

The anti-Paleface campaign has all the appearance of attacks upon a disintegrating organism, by some other intact and triumphant organism: it has very much too human and personal a flavour. What it seems to imply is that the White World is ‘finished’, that it is a culture or political organism that is going to pieces under assaults from without and from within, quite on the traditional, historical Decline and Fall pattern. (84-85)

The outlaws like myself who are preparing the new Law and the new Norm have a very heavy responsibility. It is their business to detach themselves entirely from the specific interests of the human component or group from which they have come, whether Paleface, Negro, Indian or Jew. (…) And because a certain short-sighted cockiness in the Paleface makes him sometimes scorn my assistance and causes him to be blind to the novel dangers of his situation, I do not for that reason abandon my impartial ministrations. (86)

the metropolitan position of Rome caused the jus gentium to be developed  (86)

As Rome grew in importance, foreigners from all quarters of the world made their appearance; and the Praetor Peregrinus had forced upon him what was to some extent a constant exercise in comparative jurisprudence. It would be discovered no doubt after a time that, underlying the respective codes of even the most widely separated states (whose subjects the Praetor Peregrinus had before him) there was a sort of rough system common to all. It was upon this more universal system (as it sorted itself out in his daily practice) that the Praetor Peregrinus would base his judgments. In arriving at any decision involving a conflict between one code and another, he would naturally choose that law that experience had shown him to be of the more universal application. The main principles of the jus gentium were finally incorporated into the roman system. (87)

the significance of this juristic evolution, consequent upon the meeting and trafficking of nations. (87)

We are in a world in which we are all in some sense outlaws, at the moment, for our traditions have all been too sharply struck at and broken and no new tradition is yet born. Some such process as occurred in the administration of the Praetor Peregrinus is occurring today in every quarter of the globe —there is no country that is not in that sense metropolitan. Meantime, we are, technically, in an ‘inhuman’ situation. This is a very delicate position. It is necessary, I think, in consequence, to insist a little upon the essential (though imperfect) humanity of any ill-treated and threatened group — such, for instance, as the Palefaces—who so recently were the rulers of the world, and who are, as a result, looked at somewhat askance, in the new dispensation… (87-88)

No successful human society could be founded upon a notion of the ‘common good’ which attempted to weigh out to everybody an equal amount and kind of ‘good’. The ‘pleasures of the mind’, for instance (…), cannot be equally distributed unless you have a community composed of standard minds, turned out according to some super-mechanical method. (88)

For him [T.H. Green], as a typical nineteenth-century revolutionary moralist, until every man, woman and child (but especially every woman and child), in the entire world, had been accommodated (…) Green could know no peace. (89-90)

As for the indefinite expansion of the idea of the ‘good,’ or of the ‘human’ without limit of time or place — so that any number of units may be embraced by a law that is unique — there again the emotional or sentimental expansiveness of the protestant moralist seems to me to be at fault, and to provide for us, in place of a well-built society, an emotional chaos.  (90)

The once proud, boastful, super-optimistic American of the United States has become just a White ‘man-in-the-street’ with a pronounced ‘inferiority complex’. (…) What I propose to consider is the first cause or causes of this transformation. (113)

The Americana of that writer [Mencken] is not calculated to inspire a very acute sense of self-respect in the american bosom: and certainly attacks by Mr. Mencken upon the traditional american conceit must have been a
powerful factor in bringing to the surface this gradual sensation of insecurity, the habit of self-criticism, the dissatisfaction, to which I am alluding. At the present moment this has grown, it would seem, into what is actually an ‘inferiority complex’.⁷ (113-114) 

The influence of Mr. Mencken, both in his own writings and through his disciple Mr. Sinclair Lewis, is of a popular, rather than an intellectual,
order (…) we are concerned here with the wider general discouragement and disillusion of the large book-reading mass of a prosperous modern democracy. (114)

They are White Hopes with a complex ; or White Hopes composed of many complexes. (115)

All this [‘superiority complex’] is of course the complement (…) of the ‘inferiority complex’. A mechanical reversal is in progress… (117)

By key-nation I mean that what the United States are today, [what] the other most ‘advanced’ countries we know, from experience, will become tomorrow. Karl Marx, in his day, told people to watch Industrial England, on the same principle. So what America really is is of as great importance outside its frontiers as within them. (119)

Radical the changes no doubt should be. But there are so many radical things that are the opposite, even, of what is meant, currently, in America by ‘radical.’ Even the choice of this epithet for one direction only of change, or revolution, reveals, surely, a very much narrowed view of life’s possibilities. (119)

Once it has been decided to transform anything or anybody, from its or his present state into some other condition, it is important to know (especially if you are the person who is to be transformed […]) just which of an infinite number of possibilities is to be that ‘new’. It is usually a lack of imagination that makes people so blindly, uncritically, susceptible to the ‘new’. (…) It is because they cannot imagine anything new themselves that they are forced to accept the ‘new’ officially provided for them. (119-120)

Take, for example, the novelties of fashion. Each fresh novelty is accepted with a sort of fatalism as the only possible novelty, as an inevitable creation, as though it had dropped from the sky, instead of, as is the case, been invented by a fat little man somewhere in Paris. (…) But whatever happens at all is accepted by the majority as the only thing that could possibly have happened. In short, (…) the ‘new’ has happened; not that some other person a little shrewder and more active than themselves has done it to them. And all the other things that might quite well have ‘happened’ (if somebody else had been there at the controlling centre) are not so much as dreamed of. (120)

In a thick fog of the actual the generality of people dwell, deeply unconscious of all the multitudes of possible things, of possible ‘changes’ and ‘novelties’, that do not issue from that fog into the spotlight of actuality. (120)

‘Change’ is much less than is generally believed a single-gauge track. It is not a single-gauge track at all. It is a multitudinous field of tracks and lines, only one of which is used. That single line — the one that is used, the one that ‘happens’ — we call ‘the new.’ As we proceed along it we call that ‘progress’. (122)

All philosophy of history today — and Spengler is a most perfect example of that — assumes an absolute arrest somewhere or other. There is, on any analogy, advance or ‘progress’ between the amoeba and Socrates. (…) But now there is nothing but [arrest]… (122)

Yet what people call ‘Progress’ today is generally not an advance (…) that is the centre of the confusion.  (123)

The men of imagination of this period of ‘change’ and violent ‘progress’ are under no obligation to keep their eyes fixed on the one track and direction that what is called ‘modern ’ and ‘progress’ is taking. The fatalism of that fixed stare, of that ‘what is, is’, is perhaps natural enough, but, in its turn, can only claim to be one attitude. And, as to ‘progress’ or ‘change,’ there are millions of extremely different forms available. You should, for that one [form or track or direction] out of the many, of your [conscious or unconscious] personal choice⁸, [actually] wish: and you should steadily oppose what you do not [actually] wish. As for the many individuals of imagination and with certain powers, they have to learn once more to wish, or will, quite simply. (123) 

They have to learn once more to wish, or will, quite simply. That is the first step. This all Europeans have for fifty years been taught not to do, until today to will is very difficult for them: they have had such a thorough grounding in impotence. (123)

those who shut their eyes and open their mouths and swallow the
hastily-manufactured ‘new’… (123)

White Civilization, especially in America, built itself up with great rapidity into a towering babylonian monument to Science; but the old freedom and sense of power shared by every White Man in the early days naturally was crushed, or over-powered, at least, by the great technical achievements of the same instruments that had secured him his new empire.  (126)

Americans at the time of Edgar Allan Poe, or those of the period of The Virginians, certainly experienced no ‘inferiority complex’ where their european cousins were concerned. (137-138)

And here is a paradox (the paradox involved in the subject-matter of
this essay) : for in most cases [the American] would rather (…) live in Europe: he probably at no former time would have been so ready as today to say good-bye to America; and yet he has ceased to believe in Europe or in Europeans, or to have any illusions about them. (138)

The American Baby. It is a widely-held notion in Europe that the
American is a kind of baby-man : that the American is not adult, that he remains all his life a child. (…) Mr. Sherwood Anderson says, ‘Most american men never pass the age of seventeen.’ This would equally well describe most men everywhere: but when the typical educated European thinks of the inhabitant of the United States he thinks of something childish, super-young, undeveloped, excitable and helpless. (139)

America is a baby, the baby of Europe and (…) a peculiarly infantile one, making on all-fours for the womb of its origin. (140)

I know (…) that the whole of America is not a gigantic baby, tied to the apron strings of some ‘cosmic ‘ Mama, nevertheless it really does seem that the american mind is today more infantile than it was in the days of Edgar Allan Poe, for instance. (140)

If we take this patch, or this tendency, and if we isolate it, and so form an entire Baby, and proceed to call that ‘America’ (…), then who was responsible for that particular child ? For, as it did not exist a century ago, it must have made its appearance in the interim.  (141)

Walt Whitman was, I feel sure, the father of the American Baby (…) Walt showed all those enthusiastic expansive habits that we associate with the Baby, he rolled about naked in the Atlantic surf, uttering ‘ barbaric yawps’, as he called them, in an ecstasy of primitive exhibitionism. He was prone to ‘cosmic’ raptures. A freudian analyst specializing in inversion or perversion would have said, observing his behaviour over a suitable period, that he was certainly the victim of a psychical ‘fixation’, which incessantly referred him back to the periods of earliest childhood. He was a great big heavy old youngster, of a perfect freudian type, with the worst kind of ‘enthusiasm’ in the greek sense of that word. He was also, it should be remembered, the epic ancestor of the now celebrated american ‘fairy’ [Peter Pan!]. (141) 

I am in no way attempting here any estimate of the value of the writings I use as evidence. I take the good and bad writer (as I see it) indifferently.  (143)

Against this Dark Demon I oppose everywhere (for the sake of argument and ‘purely and simply to amuse myself’) a White Demon or daimon; the spirit of the White Race against the spirit of the Dark Race (…) With its White Demon I believe the White Race can be saved (instead of perishing on its way to the Melting-pot), if this demon can only be properly utilized. He is a marvellous force, who has manifested himself on many occasions, and often given us evidence of his magical power. If we do not entirely throw him over, he can yet be our saviour: he was the ‘daimon’ of Socrates , this White Demon we have inherited: he has vivid and spectacular history that it would be unwise for his antagonists to allow themselves to forget. (…) But there is no reason at all why we should not be on excellent if ‘distant’ terms with the ‘Dark One,’
even as in Byron’s Vision of Judgment we find that, when they met,
“His Darkness and his Brightness
Exchanged a greeting of extreme politeness.”
There is no reason why we should not be exceedingly polite to all that is ‘dark’. (147-148)

the discipline of my criticism (147)

The passion for ‘the primitive’ among the civilized, or (the same thing) the appetite for the ‘dark’ and exotic among the Whites (149)

What difficulties the author of Arabia Deserta encountered in his attempt to make-believe to himself that he was in the heart of an inaccessible, fanatical, and perilous land — a sort of ‘Darkest Africa’ (150)

our Earth has narrowed and is everywhere accessible and open to inspection. (…) the position of Romance is not what it was before the turbine engine, wireless, etc. ⁹ (150)

What was it that caused all these Northern dreamers to dream things so physically, or politically, disastrous to us, their descendants? Was it that instinct of the aristocrat to throw himself down to return into the untaught and dispossessed mass beneath him, dramatized in Strindberg’s Mademoiselle Julie? Whatever the answer is, these Playboys of the Western World of the last century, from Byron and Shelley, those typical romantic revolutionary aristocrats (…) have ruined us with their dreams. (151-152)

we should have been dictators of the Meltingpot, free to jump in or not as we like — not at least liable to be pushed in, like a small boy into his first swimming-bath. (152)

Mr. Lawrence writes: “The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way of consciousness. Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian.” He then continues: “‘The two ways, the two streams are never to be united. They are not even to be reconciled. There is no bridge, no canal of connection. The sooner we realize, and accept, this, the better” (Mornings in Mexico). (…) “The consciousness of one blanch of humanity is the annihilation of the consciousness of another branch”, again he says. How entirely true!  (153)

Mr. Lawrence’s explanation is that he has ‘a little ghost inside him’, which ‘sees both ways’. (154)

“It is the eternal paradox of human consciousness. To pretend that all is one stream is to cause chaos and nullity. To pretend to express one stream in terms of another, so as to identify the two, is false and sentimental. The only thing you can do is to have a little ghost inside you which sees both ways, or even many ways. But a man cannot belong to both wavs, or to many ways. One man can belong to one great way of consciousness only. He may even change from one way to another. He cannot go both ways at once. Can’t be done.” (Mornings in Mexico) All this appears to me exceedingly sound. (154)

The little two-way-looking ghost is the solution, of course (155)

Perhaps the truth is not quite on the side of either of these disputants, but somewhere else and not to be answered by such a simple statement. (155)

Dr. [Louis] Berman [in The Religion of Behaviourism] gives an account of the phases of the extreme mechanical doctrine of Behaviour (of which the principal exponent is Professor Watson), which he calls a ‘religion.’ But he cites Bergson as the author of all that is anti-Behaviour, of all that is Gestalt, of all that is admirable, according to him, in the contemporary world. (…) For the significant opposition in the contemporary world is not between Bergson on the one side, and Behaviour on the other. They are much nearer together than they would each have us believe. For if Behaviour comes out of Evolution, does not also Creative Evolution and Bergson come out of Evolution? The real opposition is very different from that. (158)

now ‘our men and women of ideas’ turn out to be ‘morons’! (160)

Some mind more ‘cunning’ than the White has enveloped them and infected them with a ‘consciousness’ not their own. And if we look round for the possessor of this more ‘cunning’ mind than the White mind, able to destroy it with its alien ‘consciousness’ (as Mr. D.H. Lawrence would call it), then we need not go to a hostile race, we can find it in the mind of Science (165-166)

the very intense puritanic backgrounds provided for it by its american setting. (167)

the infiltration of philosophic ideas (168)

Behaviourism alone would not have produced (…) anything like it. All the influences that, however paradoxically at first sight, fit into Behaviourism,
must also be counted into the whole effect  (168-169)

the manner in which I am approaching what Mr. Lawrence has to say (169)

Is it necessary for this different ‘consciousness’ between which and ours ‘there is no bridge, no canal of connection,’ this soul, to be incarnated (…) Or can this be merely a disincarnate idea? (170)

The romantic side in Mr Lawrence, his love of the sensationally concrete, would always dispose him to seek this situation in the psychological clash of
races, as others can only see it in classes. He sees it as a race situation and also quite conventionally as a (…) wholly melodramatic race situation. (…) It is a fight to the death. One or the other dies. (170)

My more abstract interests would naturally make me seek it rather in ideas than in races. (170)

But you must fix your eye on something less palpable — on systems of ideas, and a restless mass of theories. (172)

The White Man has unearthed and brought to light an enormous historical rubbish-heap: there is nothing he has not excavated and brought into his own ‘consciousness’ for examination. Some of the distant charms and remote systems have released into his ‘stream of consciousness’ things that are not healthy for it, perhaps?  (172)

“these drumming aboriginals” [Lawrence] (174)

It is as a servant of the great philosophy of the Unconscious — which began as ‘Will’ with Schopenhauer, became ‘The Philosophy of the Unconscious’ with Von Hartmann, launched all that ‘the Unconscious’ means in Psychoanalysis, and was ‘Intuition’ for Bergson, which is ‘Time’ for Spengler, and ‘Space-Time’ for Professor Alexander — that Mr. Lawrence is writing. (177)

When Spengler is trying to give us an idea of what he means by ‘Time’ for instance, he writes: “Time — that which we actually feel at the sound of the word, which is clearer in music than in language . . . has this organic essence, which Space has not.” (…) Spengler’s is in the same sense an ‘organic philosophy’ as Whitehead’s. The ‘philosophy of organic-mechanism’
is how Professor Whitehead describes his philosophy. These names and bare indications will suggest to you the theories that lie behind the romantic interpretations of Mr. Lawrence. (…) So, with him, we see the impulses of the evolutionist, organic philosophy reaching the glorification of the ‘consciousness in the abdomen’, a sort of visceral, abdominal, mind involved with the gonadal affective apparatus, and establishing in these ‘centric parts’ a new revolutionary capital, the rival and enemy of the head, with its hated intellect. (178)

‘But,’ says Mr. Lawrence, ‘the man coming home from the bear hunt is any man, all men, the bear is any bear, every bear, all bear. There is no
individual, isolated expedience. It is the hunting . . . demon of manhood which has won against the . . . demon of all bears. The experience is generic, non-individual.’ So we reach Mr. Lawrence’s communism, cast into
the anthropologic moulds first prepared by Sir Henry Maine. (179)

At first sight, I am afraid, many of the rapprochements that I make here may sound strained, since, I am sorry to say, if things do not lie obviously together and publish their conjunction explicitly and prominently, it is not considered quite respectable to suggest that they have any vital connection. (…) That one idea should have a hidden liaison or be in communication with another idea, without ever approaching it in public, or any one even mentioning them together — that is the sort of thing that is never admitted in polite society. (181)

So the majority of people are deeply unconscious of the affiliations of the various phenomena of our time, which on the surface look so very autonomous, and even hostile [to each another]; yet (…) they are often closely and organically related to one another. If you test this you will be surprised to find how many things do belong together, in fact, in our highly contentious and separatist time. Yet it is our business — especially, it appears, mine — to establish these essential liaisons and to lay bare the widely-flung system of cables connecting up this maze-like and destructive system in the midst of which we live (181-182)

destructive, that is of course (…) something essential that we should clutch and be careful not to lose (182)

‘There is no division between actor and audience. It is all one.’ 
‘There is no Onlooker. There is no Mind.’
‘There is no dominant idea. . . . The Indian is completely embedded in . . . his own drama. It is a drama that has no beginning and no end.’  (184, all from Mornings in Mexico)

It is cataclysmic evolution, a la Marx, rather than evolutionary evolution (188)

all we are concerned with (…) is the notions underneath (…) and not the literary expression. (191)

underlying ideas, or philosophy (191)

“He’s different. There’s no rope of evolution linking him to you, like a navel string. No! Between you and him there’s a cataclysm and another dimension. (…) You can’t link him up. Never will. It ’s the other dimension.” (192)

As between Dark and White, Indian and European, so between Man and Monkey, there is this absolute gulf for Mr. Lawrence, like the cleavage between mathematical dimensions. ‘The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way of consciousness. . . . There is no bridge, no canal of connection.’ (193)

It is all arranged to heighten, or deepen, the separation between… (193)

with, always, the rebellious hypnotic accompaniment of the revolutionary drum, the primitive tom-tom (194)

and always, that is the important thing, all the sympathy of the reader engaged on the side of the oppressed and superseded, the under-dog (194)

Mr. Bertrand Russell (…) obedient to his liberalist traditions, which he imports into his physics (194)

The reason why I direct an adverse analysis against this type of ‘revolutionary’ emotionality, is not, once more, because I believe that the White Man as he stands to-day is the last word in animal life, or in spiritual perfection, or that he is not often quite as ridiculous as Mr. Lawrence’s parrots would have him, and in any ease he is engaged in the road to the Melting-pot. (194)

I would rather have the least man that thinks, than the average man that
squats and drums and drums, with ‘sightless’, ‘soulless’ eyes: I would rather have an ounce of human ‘consciousness’ than a universe full of ‘abdominal’
afflatus and hot, unconscious, ‘soulless’, mystical throbbing. — These few remarks must suffice to indicate the orientation of my attitude in this part of
the debate. (196)

“The parrots whistle exactly like Rosalino, only a little more so” (Lawrence) (197)

the more abstract and fundamental (198)

But some form or other of it [dark laughter] (and it becomes, with people more sophisticated than Mr. Anderson, though otherwise much the same,
White laughter or imitation-‘dark’) is sure to abound and to multiply. (202)

he is a poor henpecked, beFreuded, bewildered White, with a brand-new ‘inferiority complex.’  (203)

worth reading (…) provided you know how to laugh whitely at the ‘dark’
ideas  (204)

There is an important feature of the teaching of Mr. Sherwood Anderson with which l am much in sympathy. (…) I refer to his eloquent opposition to the influences of industrial life — to the killing of life and natural beauty that that entails.  (212)

the great mailed fist of Big Business (…) that giant orthodoxy of
mercantile collectivism which is pulverizing the life of the contemporary world, in herding people in enormous mechanized masses.  (219)

true sources (220)

the broad stream of influences (to which he, in common with everybody else today, has been subjected) up to its fountain head, and finding himself at last in the company of early Generals of the Society of Jesus, or Grand Inquisitors, closeted with the chiefs of the Templars or passing into the shadow of the Star Chamber, or finding himself at length face to face with the learned priestly rulers of Eastern theocracies, such for instance as the priests of Sais… (220)

Muddle and blindness is bad, encountered in the spokesmen of our race: for if such men as Shaw, Russell, Lawrence and so on, here in England and Anderson amongst the best-known dozen in America are not our spiritual spokesmen, then who are?  (221)

We should all know where we were, then, the issues would be stark and plain (221)

It is quite easy for White Men, as well as Negroes, to become Mass men, “not to be distinguished from one another”. Intensive Industrialism is able to achieve that for you. (221)

I am proposing to you an entirely new system of feeling and thought, a new way of looking at the world in which, since the War, we have been called upon to live. (224)

let us put under the microscope (…) the scrutiny  (224)

He is a wild, rousseauesque thing, a fragment of wild Nature. (225)

Suppose we begin to (…) fall into that beastly condition, so abhorrent
to all emancipated, freedom-loving Children of Nature, to all Behaviourists, to all Bergsonians, Gestaltites and Emergent Evolutionists—that condition we call (…) ‘reflection’. How would that new state of mind affect our view…? (226)

The mortgage will never have to be paid!’ (227)

If we were acquainted with these backgrounds (227)

We should know (if we were acquainted with the backgrounds specified above) that the order of the White World was far from perfect, but that it was nevertheless a form of order that should not utterly be allowed to decay (228)

All these elementary, universal, homely truths, from which there is no escape for successful life, and which are the first conditions of organization or ‘mind’ as opposed to chaos or ‘sensation’ (228-229)

Then (…) Mr. Anderson’s eloquent appeals to our hearts and senses would begin to give place to something disagreeable and mathematical, almost like the meter of a taxi (229)

The reader must be induced somehow to contract the habit of reading between the lines. (…) Even if sometimes you are mistaken in your enthusiastic detective activity, that is better than always accepting blindly, as purposeless ‘entertainment’, what so often is saturated with some political philosophy or other (229)

the struggle (…) between the all-conquering Machine and himself. (…) To-day that is the problem more than ever. But it is never stated very clearly, because all the organization of publicity is in the hands of the owners of the Machine (236)

Meanwhile inside himself (there he never looks, though it is, of course, there that he should direct the most objective glance that he can muster), the ferment of the intellectualist disease goes on, and ‘complex’ after ‘complex’ is introduced, attacks some mortal centre of life and vitality, and a further portion of the (…) soul is disintegrated (239)

They would never do anything that might result in my Time-table being contradicted or disproved. They will not risk — never fear! — offending
Time! Not Time! (243)

Every Western government has now accepted all that the new conditions of gas and aerial warfare entail. No future belligerent will be able to make use of a propaganda campaign about ‘atrocities.’ as was the ease in the
last war: in advance every form of ‘atrocity’ is taken for granted. That is an entirely new situation in the civilized european world. It imposes  a formidable change of attitude upon any civilized government taking up arms today. The first thing on the declaration of war that all the air-squadrons
of those governments engaged would have to do would be to go and bomb and murder the sleeping citizens of the nation on whom war had been declared. The method of murder and poison, only upon a vast scale, which formerly was recognized as the peculiar province of Renaissance Italy and actually the monopoly of the Borgias, is imposed upon us by the development of our machinery of destruction. (244)

it is impossible for revolutionary [communist] method not to keep pace with its militarist opponent. So you get most communists committed to the same anti-humane train of thought as the militarist. And further it is essential for people engaged in preparing for such events to instill into the Public a philosophy which must be ‘ruthless,’ materialist and mechanical. And so a philosophy must ensue that is a contradiction of commonsense, and it will be quite unlike any other popular philosophy that has ever existed. For here with our rapidly-evolving machines of destruction at our sides we are in a different position to any former men. (245)

But people do not believe in the alleged motives for wars any more today, and they are uncertain as to the benefits of revolutions. Henceforth then all
of those forms of organized violence must be gone into to some extent against human reason; they are henceforth motiveless, and hence mad. That is why the fever and delirium is essential, in those masses who are to participate in them. Organized mechanized violence must be made to assume the inscrutable face of a ‘necessity’ — a necessity of Nature, not of man — man, indeed, must be carefully kept out of the picture. (246)

And here is the key to the form of a great deal of contemporary work in every field of activity. The backward step has to be represented as a forward step. (247)

Any idea should be regarded as ‘sentimental’ that is not taken to its ultimate conclusion. (248)

The hideous condition of our world is often attributed to ‘ dark ’ agencies, willing its overthrow. But there have always been such devils incarnate — it goes without saying that there are such evil agencies — ‘dark’ influences of every sort are certain at all moments to be at work. That alone would not account for the ‘unique’ position of universal danger and disorganization in which we find ourselves all round the globe. It is obviously to its mechanical instrument, not to the human will itself, that we must look. Without White Science and the terrible power of its engines, such evil people as always abound would be relatively harmless. (250)

Every age has been a Machine Age! (250)

reintroducing into our life an element which the most ancient art supremely possessed, but which has been absent in european art, and which existed nowhere in european life to any great extent, until the industrial age. (251)

Plastic or graphic art is, in fact,  (…) essentially a geometric thing, a thing of structure. But with european art the structure, the geometric basis of beauty, has always tended to be covered up, hidden away (and so lost very often) (251)

it could almost be said that the European had never understood the secrets of the pure eye at all. (252)

the reform and rejuvenation of our beliefs (252)

Extreme concreteness and extreme definition is for me a necessity. Hence I find myself naturally aligned today, to some extent, with the philosophers of the catholic revival. Against the mysticism of the mathematician I find myself with Bishop Berkeley (though, of course he is claimed by the enemies of the concrete, strangely enough): I am on the side of commonsense, as against abstraction, as was Berkeley, and as are today the thomist thinkers (though the militant neo-thomist would repudiate any association of their doctrine with that of the great Irish idealist): and my position, inasmuch as it causes me to oppose on all issues ‘the romantic’, comes under the heading ‘classical’. (253-254)

To solidify, to make concrete, to give definition to — that is my profession: to ‘despise the fluid’ (…) and ‘to postulate permanence’ (…); to crystallize that which (otherwise) flows away, to concentrate the diffuse, to turn to ice that which is liquid and mercurial — that certainly describes my occupation, and the tendency of all that I think. (254)

It is a new West, as it were, that we have to envisage: one that, we may hope, has learnt something from its recent gigantic reverses. For it is only by a fresh effort that the Western World can save itself: it can only become ‘the West’ at all, in fact, (…) by an act of further creation. (256)

Not only such people as Spengler, but also (but with better motives, and perhaps inevitably) the catholic thinkers and the best of the ‘patriots,’ insist on regarding the problem historically, in terms of a rigid arrest. ‘The West’ is for almost all of those a finished thing, either over whose decay they gloat, or whose corpse they frantically ‘defend’. It never seems to occur to them that the exceedingly novel conditions of life today demand an entirely new conception (256)

It is always from an exaggeration, however, on one side or the other, that the actual comes into existence. Everything real that has ever happened has come out of a dream  (258)

The poor little White is at the mercy of his dark ‘inferior’, his traditional sense of ‘superiority’ dwindling every day; but of course, since he is not in reality superior, he should not have a Black servant  (268)

Nine people out of ten live in the past: they are aware that ‘things have changed’, but they do not realize very clearly in what specific way (269)

This really tragic sloth, and unwillingness to admit anything unpleasant, of the Many, is our main difficulty in proposing a change of orientation for our satire, or indeed in proposing a realistic effort of any sort. The Present can only be revealed to people when it has become Yesterday. (269) 

Man is an animal that believes he is living in a different time to what in fact he is. So it is that a firm and concrete, totally unromantic, realization of the main features of the Present, gives the man possessing it enormous advantages over others. It is, as it were, the hypothetic ground of the lever of Archimedes, when he said of his lever, ‘Give me somewhere to rest it, and I will move the world.’¹⁰ (270)

the contradictory spectacle, which we can all observe, of our institutions, as they dehumanize themselves, clothing themselves more and more, and with a hideous pomposity, with the stuff of morals (…) the artificial character of this puritanic gloom, settling in a dense political smoke-screen about us, gushed from both official and unofficial reservoirs. (273)

It is natural that ‘the Congo’ should ‘flood the Acropolis’ (…) the crocodiles are on their way to Hellas. (273)

profound heart-searching groans (…) that is the correct (…) response (274)

On the one hand you have too absolute a segregation, on the other too absolute a freedom to mix. (278)

separatist or (…) fusionist passion — which in the near future may wreck
those societies as it is wrecking ours? (282) [see 278]

I am not so well qualified as many other people to draw up a practical scheme. But I shall be extremely happy to get in touch with any experts who arc so qualified, and to offer them what merely theoretic assistance lies in my power.¹¹  (286)