John Carey: The Intellectuals and the Masses

After making many notes, I thought I would add them on here. They are jsut points from the book that I found interesting and that give the overall theme of the book. The theme being that the rich intellectuals are trying to stop the poor masses gain any knowledge and better themselves. Seb rightly pointed out that the intellectuals were probably afraid of the masses bettering themselves and as a result tried and did stop this. They did this by making literature harder to read. This meant that the masses wouldn't be able to read it, get better jobs or earn more money. Here's the run down:

The different themes throughout the book:
The revolt of the masses,
Rewriting the masses,
The suburbs and the clerks,
Natural aristocrats.

-“The purpose of modernist writing, it suggests, was to exclude these newly educated (or semi-educated) readers and so to preserve the intellectual’s seclusion from the mass.”
-“Modernist literature and art can be seen as a hostile reaction to the un-precedently large reading public created by the C19th educational reforms.”
-Spanish philosopher, Jose Orteg Y Gasset – the revolt of the masses. Root of their worries was the population explosion from 1800 to 1914 from 180 to 460 million.
-3 Consequences to the explosion of population. 1. Overcrowding, doctors, cafes, beaches, waiting rooms etc. 2. Intrusion, the crowd takes possession of places that were designed for the best people. 3. The dictatorship of the masses.
-H.G.Wells said that the explosion of the new births was “the essential disaster to the C19th.”
-Nietzsche agrees with Ortega and says that many too many are born and Zarathustra declares, “they hang on to their branches much too long.”
-“The difference between the C19th mob and the C20th mass is literacy”. This was after they bought in the educational legislation which introduced universal elementary education.
-The mass is a metaphor for the unknowable and the invisible. It denies them individuality which we ascribe ourselves and the people we know.
-Tinned Salmon is repeatedly a feature in lower class cuisine.
-George Orwell says that tinned food destroyed the health of the British people.
-In Ortega's view, a mass man is that he is un-ambitious and common. The aim of all of his writings was to segregate the intellectuals from the masses and to acquire control over them with that that language gives. Pg 23
-Nietzsche's idea of mass is a large herd of animals.
-Virginia Wolf, Nietzsche, William Inge, T.S.Eliot all think that they should eliminate the humanity of the masses and degrade them in to weeds, a rabble, a shapeless jelly of human stuff, occasionally wobbling this way or that.
-Hitler refers to Jews as a bacterial disease.
-According to Le Bon, crowds are mentally inferior and intent on destruction. As soon as a man joins a crowd he automatically drops a few rungs on the ladder.
-Trotter thinks that there are many different sorts of herds/masses. Some are good like bees and others are bad like wolves. He thinks that the Germans are a bad mass and that they need a good thrashing.
-Kodak, invented by George Eastmen in New York in 1888 bought photography with the reach of every human being.
-Forster travelled from Japan to England to Italy to India and took note of the lower classes and found India the most colourful.
-Writers made the poorer side of the mass, cosmetically ugly. No teeth, begging, bulging etc
-Graham Greene did not feel sorry for the workers/unemployed as when the great Strike happened he sided opposite the workers and got a job beating them. He remarked on it being like rugger at school.
-George Orwell noticed the caste system when he was about 6. His parents did not allow him to play with the ‘common’ children. He does not blame his family for this as it is normal middle class snobbishness but the lower class ceased to be ‘a race of friendly and wonderful human beings’ and became enemies – ‘almost subhuman’ and ‘brutal’. Pg 40
-Indoctrination on young children of the caste system and who should and should not be friends with. Who are humans and who are not.
-Somerset Maugham says that it is not the lower class fault of their smelling sweat, they do not have bathrooms.
-Orwell renamed the masses the Proles and said that they live in dirt, among rats and bed bugs. Pg 43 They are also ignorant, stupid and gullible.
-The Frankfurt theorists, not Benjamin, shared the view that mass culture and the mass media, as developed under capitalism, had degraded civilization in the C20. They blamed radio, cinema, newspapers and cheap books for the ‘disappearance of the inner life’.
-They also believe that if the mass turned in to individuals and fought the bourgeoisie life would be better. However they won’t and O’Briens warns Winston: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”.
-There was an increase in people moving to suburban areas and commuting to the big cities as it was cheaper. People did however not like the eating up of the countryside around London and such places. Pg 46
-People did not like the rows and rows of housing. Nietzsche commented on it as a child taking them out of his toy box.
-Nice middle class homes surrounded by meadows now occupied terraced houses on every bit of green land.
-The masses caused irreparable damage with their cheap housing taking up the countryside. Another reason for upper classes to not like the poorer ones. Pg 49
-The speed of it too. A couple of decades and everything’s gone.
-This made writers head to other places to write. Pg 50 They did this to escape ugly Britain but tourist destinations were being made just as ugly.
-Greene thought that because of the cremation act the masses had turned even death in to a conveyor belt level. Pg 51
-Writers had different opinions on what suburbia was like. Pg 52
-Northcliffe Daily Mail aiming it at Clerks with the cycle column, tit bits and answers, pg 58
-George Bernard Shaw and Nietzsche strive for the overman, the ubermensch .

-Adam and eve mentioned briefly on pg 67
-Nietzsche says that men are not equal. The mistaken belief that they are is to blame for the degeneracy of Europe. The truly noble man is egotistic. He despises pity, which is unhealthy and us valued only by slaves. The warrior is the type of the finest man. Pg 72
-Pg 80 If society wants to be civilized it must establish conditions favourable to the preservation of the gifted few.
-Pg 82 Iany theory of natural aristocracy must attribute the aristocrats superiority either to intrinsic qualities, (secret knowledge, better artistic taste, superior vitality, etc) or to some kind of supernatural selection.
-He saves his maximum invective for last – and unleashes it on Wyndham Lewis, whose views he argues are not dissimilar to those of Adolf Hitler. And just in case we misunderstand, he points out that this is not simply crude anti-semitism and a hatred for jazz music and Negroes, but that Hitler, like the other intellectuals of modernism, believed in an intellectual hierarchy, in great art which was produced by special individuals endowed with quasi-religious insights (rather like God, in fact) and that none of this was accessible to the masses. The implication however was that it was accessible to the people making these judgments – such as Clive Bell up on his cold white peaks.

I hope that proves useful to anyone wanting a simple explanation of John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses.

Sigmund Freud, Enough Said.

Sigmund Freud was a lovely Austrian fellow that is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind. In this blog I hope to make this a little more clear and explain his theories as best as I can.

He was nominated for a Nobel prize three times, one for literature and twice for medicine; however he never actually won one. He was seen as a sexual renegade which meant that society did not like his ideas and theories. His theories on sex made them out to be animals and not the noble creatures they like to think of themselves of.

Freud saw sex as a central motivational factor to our own actions. For example phallic symbols are all around us: fruit, buildings, stationary and glasses all can represent the male genitalia. Freud believes that these are all made by the subconscious to look like the penis.

Penis Envy. This is what women have towards there fathers. Girls believe that they do not have penis because they have been castrated for being naughty. Thus making them love and adore their fathers for having a penis and not loving their mothers as much because they have been naughty and have been castrated.

Oedipal Complex. This is when boys want to have sex with their mother. They want to kill their father and make love to their mother. However they realise that their fathers are a lot stronger and that if they try to kill them and loose they will be castrated and not have a penis anymore.

Freud thought of 'self love' as a race, was a barrier to science in three ways:
1. It has stopped us accepting that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.
2. Darwin's theory of evolution.
3. The conscious brain was not in charge.
This was the key the Freud, the unconscious, this has been his legacy. We were becoming more clever and understanding more things but Freud said that the mind is divided in to three main parts which are conflict. These three main parts were:
1. The ID - the unconscious. This part is active from birth, it is the animal part, the instincts and operates on the pleasure principle. The animal part, that just wants to have fun and loves symbols as it can not talk. It acts like a child and just wants to do whatever is going to pleasure he body.
2.Ego - the self, the conscious, the person, what we are aware of at present. Reality principle, how to satisfy pleasures of origin of consciousness.
3. Superego - internalised rules of parents or society. It is the policeman in your head, always trying to keep the ID under control. When you sleep the superego sleeps and so the ID is let loose to think and d what it wants, thus your dreams.

Freud believed that there were five stages of development and that if any of these stages were not completed successfully the person would never act correctly with that part of the stage.
1. Oral - mouth, premature weaning could lead to problems of eating too much or too little, smoking, sucking on pens etc
2. Anal - toilet training, if this stage isn't completed properly they may be compulsive, clean or stingy.
3. Phallic Phase - obsesses with penis of there lack of. Women need for domination and the Oedipus complex.
4.Latency - sexuality and sex isn't important.
5. Genitals- puberty, after this you are obsessed.

The battle between your Ego, Superego and ID can result in repression (censorship) and defense mechanisms. Such as:
- Sublimination - turning sexual energy in to something elsse, (art, sport.)
- Displacement - shameful thoughts, turn them in to something else/someone else.
- Projection - send feelings on to someone else.
- Rationalisation - more socially acceptable explanation.
- Regression - returning to earlier stage of development.

The key to psychoanalysis is that you are hiding something from yourself. Freud claimed that he had a way to deal directly with the unconscious, the ID. Freud believed that everyone was hiding something from themselves. His way to uncover the secret within the person was to get them to talk to him about everything and he would then find a direction with what you were talking about and uncover the secret from that. For example, if you were talking about an argument with your father, Freud may say that A. (if you are a girl) you had penis envy and you wanted your father to love you more, or B. (if you are a boy) that you want to have sex with your mother and that you wanted to kill your father but to not fail and let him castrate you. Freud also believed that dreams were the, 'royal road to the unconscious'.

He also said that the group (society) "wants to be dominated", and that there is a fear that no one is in charge now that "God is Dead." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Freud believed that civilization was there to control people and that groups gave up their sexual feelings to their leader and aggressive feelings are unleashed on the people outside the group.

Against Freud:
-Falsibility, proper scientific predictions could be proven wrong but Freud was so vague that it couldn't be tested. This was also the reason for him not winning the Nobel prize. There is also no proof that psychoanalysis actually works.

Notes on Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

I am going to try and make these notes as simple and as easy to understand as I possibly can. This way I hope to make Zarathustra understandable for me and you, my reader.

To begin with I shall give you as much information on Nietzsche as I can and try to make it simple in a bulleted list.

Nietzsche -

• Not a Christian, an atheist.
• He did not like Rome and didnt feel very creative whilst he was there. This may be because of his religion of an atheist and not a christian.
• He said that the late 19th Century in Europe was nihilistic. This meant that they no longer believed in God and that there was nothing to believe in at all. People didn't believe in themselves and this meant that no one believed in anything. Their lives became meaningless. He rightly foresaw that nihilism may lead to nationalism which would then cause wars. For example Hitler and the holocaust. Zarathustra says that everything must obey something. If one cant obey oneself they have to obey someone else. True freedom is only granted to those that can command themselves and obey onyl themselves; no one and nothing else.
• He calls the fundamental force that drives all of life is a 'will to power' although it may also be described as 'an instinct for freedom'.
• He was a lonely man and believed that nobody understood him or his writings. He believed that they would think his writings were ramblings to be ignored. This was mostly true as only very few people believed him to be the genius he was.
• This lead Nietzsche to make his best friend the preacher of his work, Zarathustra.
• The book is about Nietzsches most personal work, "it's about his experiences, friendships and ideals."
• He wrote the book in ten days bursts, which is why he repeats himself and it is quite long. If he had look over his work he may not have repeated himself so much.
• He believed that mankind should strive to create great men and nothing else.
• Nietzsche didn't make it clear if Zarathustra was the overman or not but if he was it wasn't until the fourth book that he became the overman.

Now you have some small facts about Nietzsche, I will explain some of the key points of the book and of Zarathustra.

"God Is Dead"

This is what Zarathustra said to a saint living alone in the forest. It means that God is dead and that although he was alive at some point and preaching he no longer is and people no longer are living their lives by him and his rules.

I hope that these notes have been able to help and that it has made the book seem a little easier to grasp.