Lovecraft, Cthuhlhu and ted kaczynski

[TransconaSlim]

Jake W started the converstation on Lovecraft and technological society in this Thead but I would like to explore the idea a little more.  

Feral House recently released a book called Technological Slavery: The Collected works of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. "The Unabomber".  In the book, Kaczynski criticizes anarchist primitvists like John Zerzan who have a view of utopian ideals in primitive societies.  The "Utopian primitivists"  attach themselves to anthropological ideals of primitive cultures being  ones of no wars, no inequality, no chauvinism and no racism.  Kaczynski argues that cultures that were of that type were a rarity, and that primitive cultures were often violent, bigoted and darwinistic.

To be TRULY primitivist, Kaczynski asserts, is to embrace this problems, deal with them, and to understand that if these past cultures (and "hopefully" future ones) were violent, and bigoted they were so for the RIGHT reasons. People killed others out of free will, not out of a command by an army officer.   Primitivist societies were, and will be, full of war and hatred, but based on free will.

Obviously this is pretty crazy stuff, but I am surprised on how close this idea is reflected in The Call of Cthulhu.   "Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. "

I wonder how HPL understood the anti-technological/anti-civilization critique and how much of a luddite he was.  I don't think it would be proper to call HPL a primitivists, since I recall reading about how HPL and Robert E. Howard would argue over "Civilization vs. Barbarianism" (with HPL, unfortunately, pointing to Fascist Italy the height of civilization)...

What do you think?  Was HPL a primitivist?  Anti-technologist?  The 1930s Literary Una-bomber?  

[Paul Baack]

... 

"Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

I wonder how HPL understood the anti-technological/anti-civilization critique and how much of a luddite he was.  I don't think it would be proper to call HPL a primitivists, since I recall reading about how HPL and Robert E. Howard would argue over "Civilization vs. Barbarianism" (with HPL, unfortunately, pointing to Fascist Italy the height of civilization)...

What do you think?  Was HPL a primitivist?  Anti-technologist?  The 1930s Literary Una-bomber?  

Your question reminds me of a conversation about "right wing" vs. "left wing" horror.  The former being concerned with The Other, in whatever form it might take, as an evil force (Dracula would be a good example,) which must be destroyed by the forces of good.  The latter type focuses more inwardly, examining that dark force that all of us, to some extent, carry inside.

Very generally speaking, HPL's fiction is understood by many to fall within the "left wing" camp, with a couple of notable exceptions -- "The Dunwich Horror" jumps to mind.  I don't know if "The Call of Cthulhu" belongs there, but the quote you provide piques my interest.  You italicize the word "freedom" and, in that context, I'm reminded of the "freedom" Satanists talk about (NOT theistic Satanists, by the way; more like the Anton LeVay type).  That ecstatic, terrifying, chaotic freedom one attains after completely jettisoning all the moral, ethical, and societal precepts that otherwise help to govern our behavior.

Lovecraft, being the materialist and rationalist that he was, would, I think, have a loathing of such an untethered state of being.  The horror we derive from his fiction comes from his standpoint that, ultimately, such chaos will successfully defy resistance.  But it's certainly something he -- and hopefully we -- would never embrace; rather, it's something to fight against, even if the best we can achieve is to merely forestall it.  So maybe that makes TCOC a "right-wing" horror story.

Robert E. Howard, for all his stated preference for "barbarianism," still knew right from wrong and light from dark.  H.P. Lovecraft, despite his love of "antiquarianism," still embraced culture and technology, even if they ultimately proved to be of no point.  I think he would have looked askance at the Unabomber, as a backslider and quitter who had given up the good fight against the forces of chaos.  And as a nut job.

Just my two cents...

[Genus Unknown]

Your question reminds me of a conversation about "right wing" vs. "left wing" horror.  The former being concerned with The Other, in whatever form it might take, as an evil force (Dracula would be a good example,) which must be destroyed by the forces of good.  The latter type focuses more inwardly, examining that dark force that all of us, to some extent, carry inside.

Very generally speaking, HPL's fiction is understood by many to fall within the "left wing" camp, with a couple of notable exceptions -- "The Dunwich Horror" jumps to mind.

Wait, isn't fear of The Other HPL's favorite device? His Great Old Ones, his alien dimensions that we can never understand, his decidedly foreign cults, and so forth? Isn't that all explicitly Other? Hell, we all know what a xenophobe HPL was, and it's reinforced in almost all of his alien monsters and lost civilizations.

Even when he does treat the "dark force within," it's usually (always?) in the form of something like monstrous ancestry, an intrusion of the foreign into the very body and nature of a character who thought he was "normal."  

I also don't see HPL as being "primitivist" or anti-technological. The opposite, in fact. He had a great interest in scientific and technological matters, as evidenced in his letters, as well as At the Mountains of Madness, "From Beyond," and other stories. And there's no discernible link between HPL and Kaczynski's ideas. The only possible connection is the mention of "freedom." By that reasoning, just about everyone would be a Kaczynskiite!

And let's not forget that the "holocaust of ecstasy and freedom" hoped for by the primitive Cthulhu cult is seen as a bad thing in the story. I know we're all fans here, but let's not forget that Cthulhu and his ilk are supposed to be objects of horror. When does he ever portray primitivism in a positive light?

[TransconaSlim]

I also don't see HPL as being "primitivist" or anti-technological. The opposite, in fact. He had a great interest in scientific and technological matters, as evidenced in his letters, as well as At the Mountains of Madness, "From Beyond," and other stories. And there's no discernible link between HPL and Kaczynski's ideas. The only possible connection is the mention of "freedom." By that reasoning, just about everyone would be a Kaczynskiite!

And let's not forget that the "holocaust of ecstasy and freedom" hoped for by the primitive Cthulhu cult is seen as a bad thing in the story. I know we're all fans here, but let's not forget that Cthulhu and his ilk are supposed to be objects of horror. When does he ever portray primitivism in a positive light?

While it is true that HPL does use and was interested in the advancements of science and technology, the use of technology and science in his stories is usually in a negative fashion.  With the exception of the tinfoil hat dream machine in "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", we have the Pineal gland tickler in "From Beyond" that unveils the true horror of the air around us, the science formule of "Cool Air" that eventually makes you melt, "The Colour Out of Space", where the inability of science to comprehend a contaminated meteorite leads to horror, etc etc.

At a time when men viewed science as limitless and powerful, Lovecraft imagined alternative potential and fearful outcomes.  His negative portrayal of the potential of technology somewhat inline with the primitive critique of science and technology.  Primivitivst argue that the values and goals of those who produce and control technology are to believed always to be embedded within it.  So, if your going to build a machine that revals the true horror of whats in the air to show up your best friend who thought it was a little kooky, the machine itself is going to have those values attached to it (I don't know if you can use Tillinghasts machine in a way that wasn't negative, eh?)


Kaczynski's "freedom" and Cthuhlu's "freedom" are directly related as they are both freedom without morality and that's what I thought was the big connection between the ideas.  Of course HPL sees this freedom as a negative while Kaczynski sees this as a positive.  But HPL also presents the "freedom" that Cthuhlu brings as an inevitability no matter how much resisitance our rational, "civilized" minds put up against it. 

Just a thought.  I think that there is a counter point to this in that allot of HPLs stories are about the idea of civilization struggling against more barbaric, primitive elements, even on a individual level. 

So, I don't think that it would be fair to say that HPL was a primitivist, but I do think that there is an anti-technological current that runs somewhere in the dark underground of his work.  HPL saw "real civilization" in a very specific, pre-Industrial Revolution America that is being destroyed, maybe by the advancement in science specifically by... you know... those "sinewy barbarian" foreigners....

[MAS]

Fascinating discussion people - I'm enjoying your thoughts on the subject.

[old book]

I don't think Lovecraft would have automatically used the conjunction AND between science and technology. He made the distinction between learning and observation, i.e., science, and the use of tools, or technology. The technology in Lovecraft's tales is often alien: the mindjars in Whisperer in Darkness for transporting brains to Yith (or was it Yig?), the purplish beam used in the Evil Clergyman fragment, the odd machinery and archive equipment in Shadow out of Time (or whatever the anti-cosmic Library of Alexandria tale was called). There is also the talk that Lovecraft used Tesla and Tesla's public showings to inform the idea of an avatar of the Crawling Chaos that laughs, gibbering and blind, at the center of the universe, surrounded by the amd piping of a thousand demon servants.

On the other hand, HPL doesn't really exhibit any technophobia, except his fear of techno music in the far-flung future in He My guess is he saw technology in our service as good or neutral, and alien technology used to enslave us as bad or neutral. In the Walls of Eryx features some advanced Venusian technology that is fatal. That mindjars abovementioned carry the same sort of fear of endless imprisonment. They might have inspired later technophobic tales such as Ellison's I Have No Mouth, idk.

One thing I liked was a crazy clock HPL used somewhere in a room with some odd characters gathered there. Recently I've heard some arguments that our technology colors our view of the universe, so in the Middle Ages we came up with a clockwork world and the paradigm has now shifted to computing. I find the argument about clocks slightly wrong. They've got it backwards. Clocks arose as a way to model celestial relationships, the earliest "computers" were Greek clockwork mechanisms for calculating phases of the moon and such (at least the earliest ones we know of are Greek, presumably). We didn't take the model and then map the universe according to it, we mapped the universe and then used that map for mundane things as well, such as keeping an appointment with our dentist or setting the television to record a movie. Anyway, I liked HPL's crazy clock. I guess it was in the story about the guy who made his way back to worth after being trapped in an alien wormlike body lightyears away, I forget the title.

[Genus Unknown]

That was "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," and the poor shlub in the alien body is none other than Randolph Carter.

As far as his negative portrayals of technology, it may mean something (though I don't know what) that much of Lovecraft's "bad" technology either comes from Outside, or is otherwise engaged in giving humans a taste (or an overdose) of the unknown: the Mi-Go brain canisters, the hokey brain-wave machine in "Behind the Wall of Sleep," Crawford Tillinghast's Extra-Dimensional Lava Lamp of Doom™, etc. These are essentially magical devices dressed up in scientific lingo; they do the impossible, no attempt is made to explain how they work, and their effects border on the flat-out supernatural. 

Lovecraftian technologies either come directly from another world, or they show you another world. That says to me that they're not so much a commentary on technology as such, and are more just plot shortcuts so Lovecraft can bring the unknown and unknowable into his stories, replacing black magic with nuts and bolts and weird purple lights for variety or believability (in some cases, anyway; the black magic is definitely there in other stories). The Unknown was, after all, Lovecraft's favorite subject, and I don't know how much we can glean about his opinions on technology from the devices he uses to invoke it in his fiction. Besides, there are a lot of things in his fiction that he didn't personally believe in ("gods," magic, and the like). His opinions on these sort of things are most likely to be found more reliably in his letters.  The nerdy bastard wrote tons of correspondence on every conceivable subject, so I'm sure if we waded into that ocean for a while, we'd find a clear statement or two. 

[catamount]

Crawford Tillinghast's Extra-Dimensional Lava Lamp of Doom™

Nice...will those be out in time for Christmas???

[T. Kelly Lee]

I think HPL was responding to Nietzsche with his statements on morality.  We know he read a lot of Nietzsche and held strong opinions on the same.  Nietzsche was arguing for a transvaluation of morals - in which he predicted an age in which, if we did not re-evaluate our morality - we would become some hyper-sensitive that we would become decadent and stagnate.  He argued that you needed to exercise the Will to Power to "cut through the BS" and get things done, not focus on the process of right and wrong. 

I think HPL feared this a great deal.  I think he saw that as just ANOTHER form of decadence.  It's a "who watches the watchmen" Catch-22.  If the Ubermensch transcends morality, what is guiding him?  Only his will to power?  If that's the case then what's to stop him from just enjoying mindless revelry?

In the interest of full discloure, I am very much a left-winger in the modern sense.  So I don't really have a problem with hyper-sensitivity to moral concerns, i.e. animal rights or environmental rights, etc.  And I DO tend to favor horror stories that "come from within" as opposed to being afraid of the other.  That's why, for instance, I don't dig "superhero" stories.  Who cares about wars between super heros and super villains?  But I'm fascinated by stories like "Heart of Darkness" - because that kind of evil lurks in all of us. 


Monsters from the Id.  That scares me. 

[Genus Unknown]

And I DO tend to favor horror stories that "come from within" as opposed to being afraid of the other.  That's why, for instance, I don't dig "superhero" stories.  Who cares about wars between super heros and super villains?

I'd argue that superhero stories serve a completely different function. They're a combination of wish-fulfillment fantasy and moral "pep talk." I certainly don't read Captain America comics because I want to be frightened, or to explore the darkness of the human heart. I read them because it does me good to see a big red-white-and-blue Boy Scout punch Adolf Hitler right square in the face, like BLA-DOW!



How d'ya like that, Mr. Hitler? Not too well, I'd imagine!

[T. Kelly Lee]

Yeah, I think that's totally correct for the Golden and Silver Age comics.  But the modern turn is a lot more about the 'heart of darkness' stuff. 

[Genus Unknown]

It's both, really. Nowadays the wish-fulfillment Hitler-punching happens in between moderate stretches of angst and intrigue.

[ahtzib]

As Old Book noted above, Lovecraft loved science, but didn't much like technology. The two are not identical, though one needs the other to exist (at least initially). He liked scientific exploration, but at the same time understood that it would show us to be insignificant. You'll notice though that his characters continue to keep looking even though it will kill him. As far as I know, Lovecraft never in his letters supported the Frankenstein lesson, that we'll do something awful if we keep exploring. Yes, he outright states that this will happen in "The Call of Cthulhu." But the alternative is a new dark age, and Lovecraft hated the middle ages, and he hated unquestioning non-scientific zealots (he couldn't stand the Puritans, and the Puritans that become the inbred backwoods monstrosities of "The Picture in the House" or Dunwich, are probably pretty close to the new Dark Age mentioned in "The Call of Cthulhu."

Instead, Lovecraft loved science and knowledge, but knew that the reality was our insignificance and cosmic place, regardless of whether we know it or not. I don't think at all he supported not knowing, even though knowing destroys his characters. You'll notice that unlike your typical Frankenstein story, their desire to know is not immoral, not a personality flaw. This was one of my big misgivings in reading the old draft del Toro worked up for ATMoM, it was very Frankenstein, very "amoral cruel scientist antagonist who gets his comeuppance." Knowing the truth is bad for our mental health, but so is denying reality. That's the real problem, the inevitability either way.

Lovecraft did not like the Machine Age, and talks about it regularly. Though again, while he denounced it, he also recognized its inevitability, and complained of those who tried to preserve pre-machine morality (like old religion). Also, while he had no love for technological devices, he didn't hate them so much as hate the larger social changes that resulted from machines and industry. Here though, I think Lovecraft is simply talking out of his rear. He idolized the past for, IMO, personal reasons that he didn't really examine all the much, namely the decline of his family fortune, and his autodidactic education in a library of 19th century books, many of which were conservative in and of themselves, and were more of the pre-industrial world of the 18th century. Unlike Joshi, I don't much care for Lovecraft the philosopher or thinker, except for when it comes to what he's best at, cosmic horror and delivering the grand scope of reality in a fictional package (something he did with various tricks, such as using human-esque imagery to make the past seem more tangible).

I don't think we can understand Lovecraft's take on someone like Kaczynski without knowing what he might have thought of ecology and the potential for self-imposed extinction. An ecologically aware Lovecraft (remember, the notion did not really exist during his lifetime) could have been fascinating, and may have possibly taken a Unabomber of VHEMT turn, though with humans being the only sentient creatures on the planet, he might have still been predisposed to them.