Update: The Razor's Edge · 10:52pm Aug 11th, 2014
Back in April I posted a review of W. Somerset Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge. I wrote,
Elliot’s “self-interested” social climbing makes him a much better friend than Larry’s selfish spiritual quest. The fact that Larry does not seek material goods or social approval does not clear him of the charge of being supremely selfish. His quest is only to meet his own needs; he shows no interest in teaching or helping others on that path. Larry’s “wisdom” is entirely negative. It consists only in rejecting things (money, friendship, respectability, love, home, religion, emotion), but not in accepting anything else in their place. Maugham says that Larry has found peace and contentment, as if that were a worthy ambition for a life. Yet Larry has no peace; he is driven to quest endlessly around the world, observing much but feeling little, while Isabel, Elliott, and the “fallen woman” Sophie live real lives with highs and lows of emotion.
So I was dismayed to go to Amazon and see the majority of reviews there were people impressed with Larry’s spiritual enlightenment. I don’t know whether Maugham knew what he wanted to say. It would certainly have been a worse book if it had been the straightforward praise of spirituality that it’s usually described as. It might have been a better book if Maugham had had some idea of what spirituality ought to be, rather than only what it ought not to be. As it is, I can only read it as a condemnation of spirituality.
Since then, I've read most of Maugham's autobiography, The Summing Up (1938). He wrote things that bear on this question:
- He said that he never made characters up; he wrote only about people he knew in real life.
- He said that he never felt any impulse to teach, or cared whether people understood the lessons he could teach.
- He described a "spiritual" man in the same circumstances and with the same personality as Larry:
After leaving Cambridge he was called to the bar, but he had a little money, enough to live on in those inexpensive days, and... he had made up his mind to devote himself to literature. ... For 20 years he amused himself with thinking what he would write when he really got down to it, and for another 20 with what he could have written if the fates had been kinder... He had neither imagination, nor passion... He was completely devoid of will-power. He was sentimental and vain. ... The spirituality of his expression suggested the tired scepticism of a philosopher who had plumbed the secrets of existence and discovered nothing but vanity. Having gradually wasted his small fortune, he preferred to live on the generosity of others rather than work... His self-complacency never deserted him. I do not think he ever had an inkling that he was an outrageous sham... He had charm, he was devoid of envy, and though too selfish to do anyone a good turn, he was incapable of unkindness.
So Maugham knew what he was doing. He cleverly wrote a book that could be both popular and deep. Most people would interpret it as being the kind of shallow statement about spirituality and finding yourself that is eternally popular, while others would perceive a different story.
If the only people who can understand a lesson have already learned it, what is the point of teaching it?
I've spent forty years' worth of leisure time in geekdom, and that describes every third person I've met.*
(Yes, I more than suspect I'm a multiple of three myself)
*[EDIT] Which probably explains those Amazon reviews.
2362188
It's called "preaching to the choir" and you should try it sometime. Simply delightful!
It is quite possible to be vain about not being vain, and to hoard your unselfishness like a miser would money. Virtues are not things in and of themselves and thinking they are that, rather than heuristics, leads to interesting and rather depressing failure modes.
You could probably make that into a rather good lesson on why consequentialism[1] is superior to traditional instructions on 'how to be good' which rely heavily on encouraging an abstract set of virtues. Hah. It even compresses down to a hokey bit of wisdom, if you think about it: "Ethics isn't about being, it's about doing."
[1] Or, rather, an incarnation in the form of something like preference utilitarianism.
2362204
I do not, sadly, know you enough to evaluate you in all of the terms of that unflattering profile, but I do know enough of you to know that to claim that you have neither passion nor imagination is madness. I suspect you aren't evenly divisible by three after all.
2362188
What else? To be admired as the incomprehensible guru. How does that poem go...
I suspect it is a feature of many sorts of mysticism that there is pretense of knowledge, pretense of teaching it, pretense of wanting to learn it, but in the end it's just a complex signaling game that traffics in, essentially, cargo cult knowledge.
2362253
Yeah, I'm hardly one to actually complain about such.
2362312
False profundity is quite salable, and has a surprisingly long shelf-life.
2362312
That's dense with wisdom.
I think 2362188 meant, Why write a book if only people who already agree with you can understand it?
2362431
I learned everything I needed to know from The Sphinx in Mystery Men:
2362440
This is, indeed, what I meant, though I suspect he understood.
2362467
That movie has so many great lines, and yet is somehow not a great film.
2362188
2362440
Can't tell if profound praise or sarcastic mockery...
Ah! Whoops.
I recently ran into a book that did the exact same thing[1] and I have to admit that is a pretty strange way to behave. My take is this: It is a subtle mockery of those very people, all the sweeter because it is designed to appeal to their prejudices while excoriating them. And if someone (a Bad Horse, say) sees through it, well, it's bound to be a kindred mind and is certain to appreciate the joke.
I'm not too big of a fan of the style[2]. It's mean-spirited and smacks of misanthropy and cynicism to me. Not my favorite things, those. But... *shrug* It can be amusing, if you've a suitably cruel sense of humor.
[1] And I can't tell you which one because telling you wouldn't (a) mean much to you (b) would reveal my country of origin.
[2] It can happen by accident, mind. F. Scott Fitzgerald aimed to skewer the damn-near-eldritch vacuity of the mega-rich and the inhumanly care-free and yet we saw, not too long ago, today's mega-rich holding Gatsby-themed parties. It's possible Maugham just wanted to capture a certain sort of character and did so fine a job of it that he captured the attention of those characters and their intellectual heirs as well. Possible, but I judge unlikely.
2362253
I always liked that expression since, if you think about it, the people in the choir are generally only marginally more self-selected to be receptive of the sermon than those in the pews. Preaching is nearly always preaching to the choir.
One difference I've noticed between the deep and the shallow pseudo-deep. Those who are deep and disagree with you will attempt to determine just where your writings clash with reality, and why you are wrong and they are right at that point, or if in fact both of you are some distance away from a true revelation.
The shallow pseudo-intellectuals will call you variations of 'poo-head' for names if you disagree with them, or will heap giant piles of praise on your writing without any substantial identification of just what inside the writing they like if they agree with you (or have no idea what you said, but it sounds nice).
This tends to separate intellectuals as follows: A - The vast crowd of fuzzy thinkers who have nothing but praise for each other, unless one of them steps out of line and criticizes one of their own in which case they become B - Intellectuals who are comfortable criticizing each other despite an unending flood of vitriol and hate from the A group, provided the A's even admit to their existence. I like to think of myself as a somewhat deeply shallow B, and consider nearly all of Ponydom to be variations of the same. Naturally this is a gradient curve that only vaguely fits with reality, but it will do until a better yardstick comes along for me.
2362544
Due to your profound confidence miscalibration, you can assume the former whenever you are in doubt.
2363266
Sometimes they will invent entire vocabularies to convey praise without needing to specify what the praise is for.
2363550
Ah, well, in that case, thank you.
2363550
Not exactly praise, but I do think it falls into the same ballpark and represents the same shallow message thinly disguised as deep phenomenon:
2362188
So like-minded people can know that they're not alone in thinking a thing. If you're looking for something utilitarian: To provide evidence to like-minded people that their conclusions, which may be subject to doubt, may be subject to just a little less doubt, or at least a different kind of doubt.
2366711 2362188 In this case the explanation is the second thing I listed that he mentioned: Maugham said that he never felt any impulse to teach, or cared whether people understood the lessons he could teach.