Proud Man

Book 527: Gateway Essentials

by Murray Constantine

Genres: Science Fiction; Alternative History sci-fi; Dystopian

Synopsis

Originally published in England in 1934, this searing, still timely novel offers and incisive critique of the sexual politics and militarism of England, and the West as a whole. Proud Man is told from the perspective of a "Genuine Person" who has been thrown back in time thousands of years from a peaceful future society. The Genuine Person comes from a people that are androgynous, self-fertilizing, and vegetarian; they live without a national government and artificial social divisions of gender and class. Taking on first female, then male form, the "Genuine Person" confronts the deeply troubled reality of England in the 1930s, still battered after one World War and on the road to another.

Release date: October 27, 2016

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 176

Sample

I AM writing this account of a unique experience while it is fresh in my memory, to preserve it clear-cut before the ordinary humanity of my existence makes it seem, what of course it actually is, dreamlike and unreal. Some day I may meet you, and after referring to this written account I will communicate more to you than is in it, for there is necessarily much that I cannot write down, unless I wish to spend some years in such a primitive occupation. So, though I have not written anything except a message or two for about forty, or it might be fifty or sixty years, I will write this, and write it to you, as if it were a very long, tedious, and entirely unnecessary message. For I cannot tell whether my present interest in the experience is a human feeling, or would be shared by other human beings; and I am inclined to think that the interest, like the experience itself is of an atavistic nature, showing that I am, for some reason I shall never know, behind, or as one might put it below the rest of humanity, and capable to some extent of subhuman feeling.

To begin with, this experience came in the form of a dream, and we human beings do not dream, except in a purely physical way caused by an accidental discomfort of the body. Dreams other than simple physical dreams are not possible to human beings, as they are fully conscious, with minds permanently welded into one piece. They have neither fears nor unfulfilled wishes, nor conflict; and dreams, in the subhuman sense, are made up of these.

Well, then, I lay down to sleep some forty days ago, for I have taken that time to meditate, before writing you this account, and dreamed that you, I, and some other persons were all thinking together, sitting under the shade of a big tree. One of our number was thinking that there was, either in some other place or some other time, a race of creatures that was neither animal nor human, but in a transition state between the two. They were, this person thought, half-conscious, but not fully conscious; able to speak and write, but not able to communicate clearly by thought alone; and in a state of confusion as to the true relation of the self to the not-self. They had not yet developed any human instinct of unselfishness, yet they were not at ease in the instinctive selfishness of animals. This person thought that these curious creatures might possibly be our ancestors, or, if they were contemporary with us, like our ancestors had been, and that someone should go to them and live among them for a while, and find out if they were likely ever to evolve into humanity, or whether they were stagnant in their chrysalis stage, and would remain, while their sun shone, subhuman. This interest is, as you see, not a human thing nor even an animal quality, for what butterfly cares about its dead chrysalis hanging on a branch? If these subhumans ever really existed, or were our ancestors, it has been for many thousands of years a matter of no moment to us as human beings, and all record of our transition stage, or race infancy, has long since been lost. We neither know nor care what our past has been, since we are contented with our present. The subhumans, who were never contented with their present, were intensely interested in resurrecting their past and trying to forecast their future. But my interest in them, (for of course these human beings in the dream were all part of myself) was, like the whole experience, unnatural and atavistic.

To return to my dream, this person thought that either you or I should go among these subhumans, and you, though willing to go, were a shade less willing than I. So it was decided that I was to go, and when I asked this person, who had been thinking to us about these creatures, how I should come to them, seeing that they were either on another planet or in another time, the way thither was made clear to me, for all I had to do was to wish to be there with them, and there, wherever or whenever it was, I should be.

I am much inclined to think it was not on another planet, but on the same planet in another time. The days seemed to be about the same length, though we do not, like the subhumans, divide time into minute artificial portions and keep count of the portions. The moon’s span, from full to full was twenty-eight days. The year was approximately three hundred and sixty-five. Also the natural features of our planet had not changed unrecognizably, though there were differences, particularly of climate. When I woke (in the dream) I was on an island, with a damp mild climate, equable and temperate.

This island was called England, and is the cradle, as they sometimes call it themselves, of the English race. (A cradle is a box on rockers into which they put, or used to put their young, rocking the child from side to side so that the soothing motion might send it unwillingly to sleep. The subhuman children’s response to rocking may be an unconscious race memory of the time when they were still wholly animal and, possibly, always slept in trees. Of late years, however, the doctors had forbidden the parents to rock the children to sleep in cradles, for they, the doctors, were of the opinion that the rocking might injure the child’s brain. As far as I could see, the unrocked English people have not improved vastly on those who were rocked to sleep as a matter of course, and the history of doctors leads me to believe that they may have made an error. Perhaps I shall have occasion to write later on, of doctors, for the present I must leave them unexplained.) On this small island I stayed for the whole time of my dream, for reasons which will become apparent to you as my account proceeds. The dream appeared to last about two years, though in actual time it only took one night. In these two years I lived among the English people, and though I read about other races and nations (for the subhumans are divided into many peoples, always unsympathetic and frequently hostile) I did not go among them. The subhuman race as a whole, is far more numerous than ours; they inhabit the whole, or almost the whole of the globe, regardless of climate and the fertility of the soil; they multiply heedlessly and starve in thousands, or fight in millions for a higher standard of physical comfort; and there was no reasonably large portion of their world where the animals and birds were left in peace to live their own lives without interference and interruption. Yet, using their own language of good and bad, better and worse, they were not, judging from a human standpoint, better than the animals and birds, but a great deal worse.

One of the major differences between subhumans and human beings, besides the difference between a half-conscious being with a split mind, and a fully conscious being with a whole mind, and perhaps arising out of that difference, is caused by the subhuman concept of privilege. It is not very possible to explain privilege in any human way, as it is not a human thing. But as the subhumans believe that they are all in some way better than animals, so they believe that some subhumans are, by reason of the colour of their skins, or their rearing, or their sex, better and more worthy than other subhumans of different colour, class and sex. This betterness entitles them to privilege, which usually involves greater physical comfort than can be attained by the unprivileged, more power, more liberty and a bigger chance of obtaining what the subhumans call happiness. A privilege of class divides a subhuman society horizontally, while a privilege of sex divides it vertically. Subhumans cannot apparently exist without their societies being divided, preferably in both these ways, though the intense antagonism, either open or secret, conscious or unconscious, which privilege of either kind engenders, prevents any subhuman society from having the stability necessary to its permanent existence. But up to the time when I was among them all that had happened were mere reversals of privilege, leaving the concept exactly where it was before. I could not see that they had got very far towards abolishing the concept, which is bound up with what is still a subhuman necessity, the exercise of power. All subhumans want to exercise power, and the idea of a world where no individual had, or wished to have, any power whatever except over itself, is incomprehensible to them. And if they could imagine it they would find the vision hateful. Nor could they possibly conceive of a world where everyone does that which is right in his own eyes, and yet is doing right; for, if a subhuman were to do that which is right in his own eyes, he was almost certain to be doing wrong, and behaving in an anti-social manner. So their conduct had always to be regulated from outside themselves, and they had to live under laws, which were enforced by physical means. These laws were meant to check the conscious cruelty, predatoriness, and selfishness of the subhumans; for it was feared that if they had no laws their cruelty and selfishness would cease to be conscious, and they might lapse (as they would call it) to the innocent unconscious predatoriness and selfishness of animals. But even these laws, stringent though they were within each nation (that is, a group of subhumans which speaks the same language and has the same customs and ideas) were of little help in checking the cruelty of the subhuman race as a whole. For though a subhuman might not kill another subhuman of his own nation, there was nothing to stop a whole group or nation attacking and killing another nation, for that was against no law, it was not murder, and it was right. These large organized killings were called wars, and are habitual among many primitive, and all civilized nations. Sometimes the war is not between two nations but between two groups within one nation during a reversal of privilege. This kind of war is called civil war or revolution, and is not less cruel than the wars between peoples of different habit and language. A short time before the years of my dream there had been one large and important war involving many nations, and one large and important reversal of class privilege successfully carried out by a nation, the population of which was probably greater than all our human populations combined. These two events had upset the delicate balance of the civilized world, had made the nations involved in them fearful and uneasy beyond their wont, and had tangled their economy probably past unravelling.

When I use the word civilized I do not mean that these nations are composed of people who are nearer to a human conception of the true relation of the self to the not-self than are the primitive or uncivilized nations. They are not, and are in fact often more cruel, predatory, and dishonest than primitive peoples. But they seem to have reached a slightly increased consciousness, and so developed more elaborate escapes from the universal subhuman misery of partial consciousness, such as science, literature and a practical curiosity called invention, which gives them more power over their natural environment. They have no more power over themselves, however, and put their inventions to good or bad uses according to their whim.

The English nation was civilized, and though compared with some other nations, unwarlike in temperament, had taken part in this large, important and highly civilized war, moved thereto by panic and the hope of glory. This odd mixture of motives (though I know you cannot understand what glory is) is not at all uncommon among subhumans; indeed, it supplies a strong mainspring to many of their actions.

Some years before this war the English people, who, though not warlike, are aggressive, greedy and restless, had found outlet for these qualities in land-grabbing or Empire-building. They had succeeded in building such a large Empire, so full of privilege, and so shaken by secret or open antagonism between its component parts, between it and the cradle, and between it and the rest of the world, that it was quite obviously most perilously unstable. But during the war it held together, with the consequence that all the offshoots of the English nation joined in the struggle, which continued without intermission for more than four years. By the end of that time the nations involved had destroyed some ten million of their males, with a handful of females and children, who had accidentally perished by sea or on the land. All these males had obtained glory, but there were a few subhumans in every nation who had an uncomfortable feeling, once the passions of hatred had a little cooled, that it might have been better had these dead males done without the glory, and retained their lives. But subhuman history seems to show that the idea of war, which is the outcome of patriotism or national pride, is necessary at any rate to civilized peoples, for otherwise they would long since have made other ways of settling national difficulties and disputes. They were growing to dislike the physical consequences of highly civilized war; but while the idea is connected in their minds with glory and rightness they cannot exist without war. The fact cannot be abolished until the concept has lost its power to charm, and it seemed to me that the two concepts of privilege and war had still many years of life before them.

The victorious nations, of which England was one, came together in the capital city of one of their countries, and there made a peace, so ungenerous, so harsh, and so intolerably cruel to the vanquished, that to my intelligence it seemed to ensure another war in the near future. But then, as with the best will in the world it is impossible for a human being wholly to understand these subhumans, I am perhaps quite wrong. The vanquished in any war expect to be treated with intolerable harshness, for vindictiveness is not a national quality, but common to all subhumans. This peace was not more malevolent (only more ingenious in its cruelty) than other treaties of peace in the past history of the race.

What makes future wars inevitable are the subhuman qualities of fear, greed, envy, and the hope of glory. Thus, nations often make war because they are afraid of each other, while their soldiers become glorious because they are not afraid of each other. Should a soldier, that is one of these killing males, become afraid of the other nation’s killing males, or even become tender towards them, or for any reason, either good or bad, refuse to go on killing them, he himself is killed by the males of his own side. I puzzled myself for some time over this point, for in most countries the males were conscripted, that is, forced to become killing males whether they would or no; and in England, where they were not at first conscripted, every conceivable mental pressure, including the most revolting moral cruelty by the females, was brought to bear upon them to make them go to the war. So, I thought, if they must go, for one reason or another, and must fight, and must either be brave or lose their lives disgracefully, where then is their glory?

You will have understood by this time that the subhumans are of two sexes, like animals, birds, fish and insects. If evolution is a fact, the whole course of human evolution would seem to be from a single-sexed unconscious being, such as an amoeba, to a single-sexed fully conscious being such as you or I. The subhumans were beyond the animal stage, as they were certainly partially conscious, but they were still two-sexed mammals. They had abandoned a breeding season, and the interest of one sex in another was constant. They bore their young alive, and fed it at the breast. They had no conception of a person, that is, an entity independent of others both physically and emotionally, who is self-fertilizing, and can produce young, if it wishes to, alone and without help. No person as far as I could discover, had yet been born, though there have been cases of a clumsy sex fusion, making it difficult to say whether the individual was a male or a female. But such freaks, as subhumans call all their fellows who differ markedly from themselves, were not true persons, with a human mind or consciousness; and, as far as I know, I was, during the two years of my dream, the only person extant. The idea that one individual should be both male and female, wholly and practically and conveniently within itself, was repugnant to them, even though their bisexuality was the cause of unbelievable pain, discomfort, and grief. They were not persons, and they did not want to be persons; they were males and females, or, as they preferred to call themselves, men and women. Every child that was born of them was either a boy, that is a young male, or a girl, a young female.

Now you may think, Well, if they are still so near to animals as to have two sexes, then like animals, they must be happy in their primitive sex life, finding it enjoyable and unconscious of its slavery. But this is not so; and here, as I came to think, is perhaps the root cause of all the subhuman wretchedness. They are not happy in their bisexuality, because they have become conscious of it. A consciousness, even though partial and affecting only about a third of their minds, combined with a sexuality which is still animal and should be unconscious, is quite possibly the cause of all their troubles. Yet also it is probably the means, and the only means, of continued evolution. Had they not been fearful and wretched they would have made no escapes from their fear and their wretchedness; they would have gained no power over their environment; they would never have gained sufficient ease and leisure further to develop their consciousness. They would, one supposes, have remained animals. One cause of man’s inventiveness is, perhaps, a deep root jealousy of the female’s greater biological importance. Before men were conscious of their own smaller part in making life, they could not be jealous or feel themselves inferior, and they could not react by making other things besides life. The consciousness of sex must come first. Then the fear and doubt, the jealousy, the escape, the leisure, and the heightened consciousness. So it is not possible to say that the misery of subhuman life is either good or bad; it is, if evolution is a fact, necessary.

The misery is very real. The operation of their partially conscious brains upon their animal desires sets up an appalling mental torture called a sense of guilt, a conviction of sin. All subhumans who are sane, and many who are not, are guilty or sinful. This guilt causes mental fears and a disease called doubt, from which none of them are free. Were I to tell you all the extraordinary things that occur in subhuman sex, you would, if you were subhumanly suspicious, find great difficulty in believing me. Sometimes they worship their animal sexuality, and fuse it with their religions. Sometimes they hate it, and pretend as far as possible that it does not exist at all. Sometimes they try to ease their tortured minds by excesses and singular practices no animal would indulge in; then again they may try to get rid of the sex altogether by lives of loneliness for which they are physically quite unfitted. This distortion of sex completely poisons the natural relation of the females to the males, leading to sex privilege, sex dominance, sex antagonism and other subhuman difficulties.

They cannot live with each other in peace because they are always despising, fearing and misunderstanding each other. The root jealousy of the male is balanced by a fully conscious though more superficial jealousy and envy among the females, who are placed in a subordinate and inferior position. Yet they cannot live without the opposite sex, because their animal desires are too strong. From one end of their lives to the other they groan under the intolerable burden of fear, doubt and guilt; and were it not that their agony has forced them to make means of escape they would long ago have perished, each man and each woman, by their own hands.

The three main avenues of escape are religion, art, and war. Each of these avenues has side alleys. For instance, side alleys of war are land-grabbing and empire-building; exploring, that is, going about in places where the inhabitants are strange or non-existent; mountain climbing; long-distance flying, which they have to do in machines; the exercise of civic or personal power; and sport. This last usually means killing wild animals, not for food, but for pleasure. The term, however, may be stretched to include certain games in which there is a small element of personal danger. The side alleys of the war escape must include danger to the escaper, or the chance of shedding blood and causing pain, otherwise it is no escape at all. It is possible, though, for subhumans to enjoy this escape vicariously, as females enjoy war with their imagination, though they may not see it, nor take any active part in it. (This barring of females from any active part, is the chief charm of the concept. It soothes the root jealousy of the male as nothing else can, to feel that though his part in making life is small, he has the sole right to destroy it when it is made.)

Also numbers of people will collect in a certain place to see pairs of men beat each other with their hands, causing bloodshed, pain, and sometimes even death; while in some countries they will gather to enjoy the sight of tame, or domesticated bulls killing tame horses, and men killing the bulls. This, the war escape, is the best outlet for the sadism and restlessness caused by the unnatural misery of their sex lives; while for relieving the sense of guilt, which is at the bottom of the malodorous well of the subhuman mind, religion and art are the chosen avenues. For a curious thing about these creatures is, that while they know they are ignoble, yet never can they accept it; and being ignoble, must feel themselves noble. So, though they are totally unable to do what would seem a simple thing, which is to be happy and live at peace with their mates, they hotly maintain that they can be divine, that is, partake of the nature of God, and create beauty and significance with their art, which is more important than the beauty or significance of the universe. Also they had the idea that because they could think, and the universe does not, that they themselves were more important than matter, greater, and nearer divinity. This exaggerated idea of the importance of being able to think, was perhaps caused by the shortness of the time in which they had been able to do it. I believe they were not, as a race, really used to it. . .