The Problem of Pretense and Chronocentrism, Part II

"[T]he public, the populace, the citizenry,

must be provided with the correct

feelings! Sentiments...are insisted upon

in all public utterances."

In Chapter 15, Terry convinces Alim to leave Herland or Troas. He also determines to get himself chucked out by breaking taboos:

As Alim states, 

Terry was convinced that he needed to break more taboos, force the leaders to deal with him as a malefactor or transgressor.

In retrospect, the plan was unbelievably risky. Any culture—no matter how polite and so-called civilized on the surface—can descend into anarchy and witch trials.

Not that I knew that then. To a coddled teen, Troas appeared entirely predictable. Boring. To Terry, it appeared merely restrictive. Both of us were tempting fate, Terry especially. He was hoping for exile. He could have gotten worse.

And as Terry states,

Bureaucracies are the same the world over. The leaders were discussing us—or, maybe, just me. Jeff wanted to stay in Troas. Van would stay or go to be near Ellador. In the meantime, there was no indication the leaders would encourage or allow or permit (whatever terms dictators use to convince themselves of their compassion) such a dangerous, unworthy, harmful course of action as Ellador or Alim leaving.

The tension here is between the reality of the utopia and what it pretends about itself.

Chronocentrism, Part II

 The ego-centered belief that we suffer more than our ancestors is irritating.

The ego-centered belief that we have progressed far beyond our ancestors is more understandable. It is still incredibly self-centered. 

Progress does exist. Medicine. Education. "Givens" regarding rights. The early years of the Common Era produced fresh ideas about the individual and God, ideas which filtered across many cultures and greatly improved conditions for individuals everywhere. As Rodney Stark points out, the Dark Ages are only dark because of how little we know. In general, life got better when the Common Era hit.

The arrogance comes into play not so much with the material goods and opportunities that we've gained. Those should entail a humble response: I'm so glad to be alive now! The arrogance comes into play when people in the past are treated with smug contempt. 

The smug contempt sounds something like this: 

"Those primitive ancestors of ours didn't know any better when it comes to science and religion and social order. We do. We are moving forward, beyond their silly thoughts and clearly shallow thinking based on our advanced theories and our talent for maintaining those advanced theories! We don't even have to refute those idiots of the past. We just have to roll our eyes over them like high schoolers at the prom. Har har har. Let us contemplate our magnificence!" 

Herland rests on the above thinking--to an extent. Gilman's perspective is rooted in nineteenth-century Progressivism. The mindset--we have progressed beyond our backwards ancestors--shows up in Victorianism even before Darwin. (Evolution as progression wasn't his precise argument, but what people thought he was saying fit well with the ethos of the time.) It continued until two World Wars turned it into a nonsense. It is now back in a slightly different guise. 

The problem is not that the world isn't materially better (despite all the bad stuff) than it was thirty to fifty to a hundred years ago. The problem is the adoption of a label or attitude: "Because I'm not as backwards as they, I'm automatically better and don't have to consider anything other than congratulating my vacuum-sealed existence and echoing what my group/clique/mob says." 

This we're-so-much-more-thoughtful-and-cultured-and-insightful insistence shows up in every area of life (not just social media, though it flourishes there). A few years ago, I encountered an article by a woman proclaiming how far she has risen above the backwards theological assumptions of her church: In this day and age, sin and guilt are such déclassé concepts! So tacky! I'm beyond all that!

Okay, was my thought. What do you have to offer?

What she had to offer were ponderings from her naval; big thoughts about the nature of the universe based on..."MYSELF" (I'm not kidding).

Not exactly Thomas Aquinas.

Gilman goes down the road of the aforementioned me-myself-and-I writer. In fairness, Gilman argues that just as the current generation of Herland's citizens is building on the ancestresses' achievements, so shall the next generation build on the current leaders' achievements. She acknowledges that their ideas (Gilman's ideas) might prove to be lacking--which is good, cause they were.

And she argues against infant damnation, which is a positive.

The problem, as my Celis character points out, is that Gilman doesn't argue against infant damnation using logic, faith, or, simply, a better idea--as plenty of people did, including Joseph Smith. She argues against it by having Ellador break down in tears (again, I'm not kidding). In His in Herland, Alim and Celis have this exchange: 

I [Alim] never paid much attention to Ellador and Van’s philosophical discussions. I shrugged. 

Celis said, “Van, bless him, tried to explain to Ellador about infant damnation. It’s a belief from the other world’s history. A belief that unbaptized children—children who are not inoculated against the sins of their ancestors—are doomed to hell.” 

“That’s unpleasant,” I said. 

“Of course it is. But it’s part of a bigger theology. Religions are complex. People are complex. Understand the idea, understand how people think. Then, you can challenge the religion or the philosophy directly. Yet Ellador ran off in hysterics to a Temple Mother.” 

Celis’s tone was fondly exasperated. 

“And of course, the Temple Mother told her, No, no, that sort of thing can’t be true. Only ignorant people ever believed it. Ellador’s no fool. She realized immediately that dismissing the idea wasn’t going to make it easier to grasp that big picture she’s always pursuing. She should have known better than to run to someone who wouldn’t talk to her as honestly as Van. But she did. That’s why mentors like Tyra put up with her. Because Ellador is appalled by the right—or, rather, wrong—things. She’s offended when appropriate. Appreciative when appropriate. She’s a ‘good’ girl.”

In other words, Herland's religion has nothing to offer in the place of Presbyterianism, not even anything as witty as Twain's quote. It offers a kind of generalized "we're better" self-label, a kind of "in" group culture filled with rules, cultural appropriateness, and "good thoughts." It's entirely substanceless, in part because it rests on the premise that it doesn't have to justify itself. The quality of being advanced is supposedly enough.

The end result of such smug self-satisfaction (I'm upset about the right things! I curse the right things! I hate the right people! I cry at the right times! I embrace the worthy people and ideas!) is a remarkable lack of critical thought. That is, the pretense or performance or presentation--Look at our wonderfulness!--is more important than thinking about...anything, really. 

My personal theory is that utopians are actually hunting for safety.  In truth, I'm not sure they are even aware that under all of the boasts of advanced thinking and edgy ideas, they are in fact...

Intensely reactionary, the kind of reactionary that belongs in countries run by dictators and religious oligarchs. It is less about holding the course (conservatism) or respecting the individual (classical liberalism) and more about retreating to something almost entirely imaginary based on an almost entirely constructed imaginary past.

Take the current so-called "revolution" on gender. The end result is not a broadening of gender or understanding of human self-perception and sexuality but, rather, "girls must like pink stuff and dolls" while "boys must like trucks and sports." In the meantime, schools that push pronouns on little kids create psychological havoc. Kids are fully capable of liking multiple things at once. Being forced to parse dinosaurs, sports, and unicorns is, to them, weird. 

They are right. It is weird.

My generation asked questions like, "Is it okay for men to cry?" and "Hey, what about women astronauts?!" Simplistic maybe, but we were headed in the right direction. Expand, not retract.

The categories being fed these kids are more reminiscent of Victorianism than anything in the last fifty years. 

Gilman does the same. To be honest, I've never fully understood her take here, since she suffered post-partum depression after the birth of her daughter and wasn't really an Earth Mother type. Yet Herland is entirely devoted to a gender imperative. The purpose of women is Motherhood, and yes, the "m" is capitalized in the book. 

Perhaps Gilman felt guilty about her own lack of motherliness. She may have embraced the idea of Utah polygamy whereby a woman could go to college while other women watched her kids. Or perhaps Gilman wanted to make her utopia palatable to her audience. Or perhaps she truly embraced the idea of improving future generations: bringing up children should be done right. (Her daughter and she had a strained relationship, which isn't made more understandable by recent scholars wanting the daughter to have had a different attitude towards her "great" parent than she actually did or cared to have or thought about.)

To Gilman's credit, she pairs Motherhood with Fatherhood. 

And Terry objects. 

Interestingly enough, although his objections in the book are portrayed as somewhat sexist, they resonate with a modern audience. When he proclaims, "What a man wants from women is more than all this Motherhood," he sounds like a feminist!

His objections to Fatherhood are equally strident. 

Terry is arguing for the individual. 

So many utopias falter on the need to tell citizens what roles they must adopt. Like dictatorships and American Ivory Towers, utopias really like the idea that people have been properly pigeonholed.  

In reality, revolutions are often far less "new" than they like to pretend. 

Chapter 15

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding