Kathleen Nolt
NOTES ON FEELING AND IDEOLOGY
A character in Rose Macaulay's novel
The Towers of Trebi–
zond
complains that nowadays nobody wants to be good. Speaking as
one who grew up in the great Age of Ideology, I can affirm that in
the '20s and '30s, on the other hand, a very large number of people
passionately aspired to be good: almost everybody, in fact, who ratio–
cinated. We were obsessed with moral anxiety, with a guilty regard for
our fellow human beings, and it was through this moral compulsion that
the various ideologies worked.
If
more people had been able to realize
that this is the way ideologies have always worked, the world might
have been saved a good deal of trouble. I do not feel so sure as Rose
Macaulay that nowadays nobody wants to be good; I suspect that the
ideologies have merely spent their influence--for the time.
If
the
anger of the young were nothing but anger, I should regard it as a
healthy sign; but more likely the anger is combined with anxiety: they
are fidgeting around for a new ideology to rationalize it.
When growing up I myself naturally sniffed at the various ide–
ologies on offer. But as I see now-and in my opinion even more na–
turally-I did not really want to
be
good. Even at the age of seventeen
or eighteen I was dimly aware of radical human ambivalence--I felt
good and bad. (I use this "scientific" term simply to place on record
my recognition of a psychological fact, something which a human
be–
ing cannot be argued, persuaded or exorcised out of.) As policy, I put
this to myself in the form that one should never
be
nice
to people; and
by this I meant that it was a mistake to let yourself feel any compulsion
to like them or their ideas, if in fact you did not. I knew that feelings
are not subject to command, and that it is not sensible to exhort either
oneself or anyone else to be loving. This may seem obvious to some
people. I can only say that I myself was wiser then than I have so
far been since. Si
vieillesse
savait,
si jeunesse
pouvait. And the moral
anxiety which I developed with the years (and am somewhat losing)
was
due
to
my deserting
this
insight, not really at
all
to
my
failure
to
be
good.
