The sea, the sublime, the social

A sympathetic critique of modern social progressivism, with some help from Iris Murdoch.

Karl Boehme, Evening Sun, 1915

I. The sea and the individual

I am about to give some medium-level thematic/character spoilers for The Sea, the Sea, which won Iris Murdoch the Booker Prize. I will state upfront that I very much enjoyed reading it unspoiled.

The Sea, the Sea is a novel that starts slowly. A reader could be forgiven for wondering if this is going to be one of those novels where nothing much happens, but which is supposed to improve you by reading it. It is not. The novel needs to start slowly, because it is, very deliberately, introducing us to the inside of the narrator’s head, unadulterated by the presence of other people. For an entire first section, the narrator’s self-introduction as a successful director of the theatre is punctuated only by the sea, the cottage to which he has recently retired, and what another character will later refer to as his “mysticism” about food — meaning, a set of deep personal preferences, codified over a lifetime into strict and idiosyncratic rules! Oof.

There are, even at the start, small discrepancies. Charles Arrowby is, he tells us, not one of those directors who takes sexual advantage of aspiring actors. Really, he doesn’t get into relationships all that much, except for Rosemary and Lizzie and Rosina and … sundry other women, not a few of whom he will refer to himself as having “made.” Today, after #MeToo, it would be standard to wonder about the ethics involved in such power dynamics. In this novel, it is a quiet early warning sign.

The Sea, the Sea starts complicating itself at an increasing rate as soon as other people show up. Arrowby’s perceptions of himself and others are never quite validated by the way that other people see and interact with him. In Charles Arrowby, we see an overlap between misogyny and a specific type of failure identified by Murdoch in her essays, the failure to see other people because we are enclosed in a fantasy world of our own.

Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. … The enemies of art and of morals, the enemies that is of love, are the same: social convention and neurosis. One may fail to see the individual because of Hegel’s totality, because we are ourselves sunk in a social whole which we allow to uncritically determine our reactions, or because we see each other exclusively as so determined. Or we may fail to see the individual because we are completely enclosed in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream objects of our own.¹

When I say that we see this overlap in Arrowby, I mean that he is one example of it, not that he is an archetypal figure. It is, in fact, foundational to Murdoch’s understanding of the role of love in the art of the novel that characters should be contingent individuals, rather than being purely symbolic of some wider tendency². While we do see several feminist themes, this is not a novel about patriarchy. This is a novel about a specific person with very human flaws.

II. Feminism and the internet

In the late 1990s and the early 2000s, increasingly many people found their way to the internet. Many of them discovered like-minded people with whom they could discuss personal topics that they might not have spoken nearly so freely of, in person. It was in this context that a specific kind of feminism began to develop. Like the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, it was based in personal experience, now shared online rather than face-to-face. There was a lot of confessional writing, and a lot of venting about the personal problems faced by (usually young) women.

People complained about casual sexist comments, and offensive jokes that they were tired of hearing. Women talked about having been singled out for chores more often than their brothers, or about relatives who wouldn’t believe them when they said they didn’t want children. And, of course, there was plenty of discussion of relationships, and sex, and sexual harassment, and an oft-denounced broader tendency of men in these contexts to simply not see women as individuals with their own reality and independence.

Feminism has a lot of analysis on this “not seeing” of women by men. A first culprit given by feminists is that of perspective differences between men and women, some based in bodily differences and some stemming from a society that does not treat women in the same way that it treats men. This will naturally make it harder for men to sympathise with certain things. This gulf is widened by overtly negative views about women — for example, that women are naturally deceptive, or that it is normal for women to be silly in a way that men shouldn’t bother to try to understand. In addition, the long history of male dominance in society allows whole systems to be set up in such a way that female perspectives are silenced or made awkward and difficult to look at.

Every single one of these explanations is specifically about men and women. Iris Murdoch would surely counter that “not seeing people” is an ongoing aspect of the human condition. Arrowby is not the only person who fails at love in this way; the novel portrays both thoughtlessness and outright abuse from some of its women. Moreover, while Arrowby is overtly called out by several characters as misogynistic, this is not his main problem. Arrowby does not really see men, either, both in the sense that he prefers to imagine, whenever possible, that it does not really matter if he has wronged them, and also in the sense that he is quite happy to exploit men emotionally, even if he is less interested in them sexually. He is accustomed to being powerful, and prefers to avoid conflict by getting people to act as though his behaviour is perfectly fine. From Arrowby’s perspective, this very conflict-avoidance is evidence that he is a nice person and not scary at all.

As the #MeToo movement slowly played out, there was some overly-hopeful speculation that a world that succeeded in removing sexual harassers from power might be a world with fewer powerful assholes, in general. Some sexual harassers are, in a sense, “equal opportunity offenders” when it comes to exploiting other people, it’s just that some people present more “opportunities” to “equally” “offend,” and such exploitation can be worse when it is specifically sexual exploitation. Many sexual harassers are also genuinely pathetic in their inability to understand how their target is experiencing what they are doing. In The Sea, the Sea, Charles Arrowby will take blindly pathetic devotion to absurd lengths. Alas, being pathetic is compatible with being dangerous.

III. Norms and preferences

There is an essentially liberal way to respond to sexual harassment that involves the assertion of a preference: “Even if some people like it, I don’t like it, and you should stop.” I am an individual, and I should be understood as an individual and respected as an individual. This approach has pitfalls, however. It is of limited use in dealing with strangers, who may not care to know us as individuals. It can easily be ignored or waved away by the mundanely self-absorbed, particularly if the target does not seem likely to back up their statement with any kind of force. If it is not ignored, it may be taken as rudeness, and it may meet with retaliation. It requires more courage than you might think.

The Irritating Gentleman, by Berthold Woltze, 1874. Note that the young woman is in full mourning. Note that her hair is “down” in public, which is an indication that she would be no older than 16. Note also that she is reaching for her hatpin.

Even in a liberal society, an individual is a small thing. So perhaps it is not surprising that feminists often prefer solutions based not in their value as unique individuals but in their lack of uniqueness — in the fact that many of their issues are, in a sense, shared. For sexual harassment, the argument became: “It is not just some personal quirk that I do not like this. Lots of women do not like this. You should not have expected me to like it in the first place.”

Internet feminism went on to develop an entire social epistemology based on listening to groups of people. Inspired by pre-existing academic theories on intersectionality and privilege, they bolstered their claim that “men should listen to women” by willingly taking on a responsibility to listen to other groups that they designated as having been marginalised. Just as the solution to sexual harassment was “listen to women,” the solution to heteronormativity was “listen to gay people,” and the solution to racial microaggressions was “listen to people of colour.”

Some of this was genuinely useful. There are avoidable behaviours that specific groups frequently experience that, on the whole, most members of that group would rather not have to deal with. Asian-Americans often dislike it when people insist on classifying them as “from” an Asian country rather than from America. Black people with natural hair don’t want you to ask to touch it. People who use wheelchairs don’t want you to push them without warning, not even if they look like they might be struggling. Listening to people affected by these issues has led to improved social norms.

Still, listening to a group is not the same as listening to a person, and social norms, while important, are not a substitute for caring about individuals. In the Iris Murdoch quote above, there are two ways of not seeing other people as fully real. Self-absorption is one. The other is “because we are ourselves sunk in a social whole which we allow to uncritically determine our reactions, or because we see each other exclusively as so determined.” Group-based “listening” inevitably sees people as determined not by their individuality but by their part in a social whole. It avoids self-absorption by falling down on the other side.

IV. The sublime and the social

It is difficult to truly see one other person, let alone a whole society full of them. The “sublime” of Murdoch’s essay titles takes inspiration from Immanuel Kant’s theory of aesthetics. Kant’s sublime is found in the vastness of a mountain or the night sky, in natural wonders that are simply too big to comprehend. Murdoch describes it as like “a segment of a circle, grasped by imagination, with the rest of the circle demanded and as it were dreamt of by reason, but not given.” But Murdoch also has her own sublime, found in the vast humanity that makes up a society:

The tragic freedom implied by love is this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves. Nor is there any social totality within which we can come to comprehend differences as placed and reconciled. We have only a segment of the circle.³

The social progressivism that has grown out of internet feminism is one that fails to appreciate the social sublime. We want to be seen. The golden rule thus implies that we must try to see people and respect them. Individual preferences must be respected, but this is not enough. We must form into groups, for how can we ever expect our individual pains and yearnings to be large enough to see on their own? When groups come into conflict, their competing claims must cohere, there must be answers. There must be a social totality in which to comprehend our differences.

The more rigid this fictitious “social totality” becomes, the more it becomes an obstacle to true seeing. Racial issues in America present a particularly large number of examples, here. The narrative that Black Americans are always opposed to policing fails to appreciate the very real desire for law and order in low-income communities, regardless of race. The term “Latinx” was created as a gender-neutral term for “Latino” by people who don’t speak Spanish and don’t realise how grammatically unpleasant such a declension would be in the original language. That some Asian-Americans would be strongly opposed to affirmative action makes perfect sense when you look at the consequences of such policies, but may become invisible if all non-white people are subsumed into the group “people of colour.” Any one of these issues could have been detected by actually listening to individuals who were part of these groups, but true listening is very hard and often gives uncertain results. Social progressivism has therefore replaced it in many cases with “listening” — that is, with uncritically accepting the demands of specific groups of activists.

V. Tolerance and love

Reading The Sea, the Sea did not immediately prompt me to political conclusions, not even when I was reading parts of it that clearly interacted with political ideas. I think that’s the correct way to read it, as a novel. Even or especially when the politics get loud, it matters that we can slow down and see people in detail, and be interested in them for themselves and not just for what they mean for our politics.

When I think about how Murdoch’s fiction and essays relate to each other, however, I draw politics from her philosophy. Her essays include ideas that I already believe in, contextualised in a way that illuminates their strengths and that points out weaknesses that will arise when we attempt to act on them. As a social progressive, myself, I see considerations that can pull us away from impulsive struggling and towards a centre around which we can bend.

Kant’s man stands alone confronting the mountains or the sea and feels defiant pride in the free power of his reason. His reason, it is true, is at that moment frustrated and conscious of its inability to achieve complete understanding; but there is nothing humbling or regrettable about this frustration. On the contrary, it brings with it a larger consciousness of the dignity of rationality. Whereas the man I have in mind, faced by the manifold of humanity, may feel, as well as terror, delight, but not, if he really sees what is before him, superiority. He will suffer that undramatic, because un-self-centred, agnosticism which goes with tolerance. To understand other people is a task which does not come to an end. This man will possess ‘spirit’ in the sense intended by Pascal when he said: ‘The more spirit one has the more original men one discovers. Ordinary people do not notice differences between men.’ And a better name for spirit here is not reason, not tolerance even, but love.⁴

They say that “wokeness” might be over, now. Progressive activists are chastened by electoral loss. Corporate power-chasers are rushing to ingratiate themselves with Donald Trump. Moreover, the left just doesn’t seem to have the moral power it once felt it had. Instead, there is a sense that we on the left have discredited ourselves.

I hope this reckoning spurs us to rethink the closed circles that we have attempted to draw around our social totality. I hope we can bring ourselves to see that there is no prefabricated harmony, that there will always be tradeoffs, and that the social will always contain an element of the tragic. I hope we try to see people in their own right, even when they are people like Charles Arrowby.

Yet, I also hope that the difficult realities do not wholly daunt us. Notwithstanding the pitfalls, in the end I still believe, not in any particular woke or intersectional dogma, but in the spirit that animates such movements at their best. I still believe in listening to people’s account of themselves and their lives. I still believe in shifting social norms towards greater respect for people whose voices might be harder to hear. I still believe in making room for individuals wherever we can, even when this is inconvenient or makes our social structures fuzzy at the edges. I still believe, in the end, in a kind of tolerance that is almost like love.

Many thanks to

Mary Jane Eyre

for providing helpful comments on this piece! Remaining flaws are my own responsibility.

British Sea-Anemone and Corals, Philip Henry Gosse, 1860

1. Iris Murdoch, The Sublime and the Good, essay in Existentialists and Mystics.

2. Iris Murdoch, The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited, also in Existentialists and Mystics.

3. Iris Murdoch, The Sublime and the Good.

4. Iris Murdoch, The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited.