ON NORMAN O. BROWN
273
dozing miles of jungle that may have been "infested" with "gooks,"
etc. The military ineffectuality of most of these enterprises does not
seem to be demoralizing; on the contrary, there is a note of uplift
in reports of the sheer choreography of each logistically intricate
"operation." A week-long undertaking which flattens the countryside
but makes no contact with opposing troops
is
felt to
be
"the biggest
operation of the war" and
ipso facto
worthwhile. To account for this
patent lunacy one must ask in all seriousness how the observed action
expresses our society's needs to standardize its environment, to exercise
its technical skills cathartically, to excrete its most dangerous products
without staying to observe the mess and to "show its muscle" before
potentially mocking bystanders. At the very least we should expect
our political scientists not to confine the notion of mass irrationality
to Nazi Germany, as they like to do. We need an Erik Erikson and
a Norman Cohn to analyze the Hitler within ourselves, and beyond
this we need a theory that will make allowance for the element of
fantasy-enactment in social dealings generally. It is conceivable that
our survival might depend on a willingness to abandon utilitarian
models of strife and instead to isolate the syndrome of
homo economi–
cus,
who grasps and hoards, sublimates and rationalizes, purifies
himself and contaminates others, shrinks from strangers and finally
attributes to them the implacable destructiveness of his own tem–
perament.
In recent years only Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown
have dared to speculate at length about a future order that could be
based on a new mental economy. On close inspection, however,
Marcuse's commitment to psychoanalysis appears far from revolution–
ary. The unfettering of instinct he rather circumspectly entertains in
Eros and Civilization
entails no rupture with the status quo.
It
would
be "predicated not upon the arrest, but upon the liberation, of prog–
ress"; it could only be attempted
"after
culture had done its work
and created the mankind and the world that could be free." With
this accommodation to the institutions he criticizes, it is little wonder
that Marcuse arrives at a wistful sentimentalism, offering little more
than a vague prospect that death "can be made rational-painless."
Again, in
One-Dimensional Man
Marcuse locates his hope in "the
completion of the technological reality," which would
be
"not only
the
prerequisite, but also the rationale for
transcending
the techno–
logical reality." This may be good dialectics but it amounts to fatal-
