Flesh in the Age of Reason (23 page)

Transvalued into enlightened self-interest and clad in conventional mores and pious clichés, self-seeking did not, in short, have to be malignant: in fact, the astute would prize it as the very yeast of society. The war of all against all was socialized into emulative competition – flaunting more liveried servants or a finer taffeta gown than your neighbours. Once harnessed, selfishness worked to the general good, vice became a virtue, and private vices, public benefits. High-minded moralistic platitudes filled the air – it was all hypocrisy, but
that
hypocrisy was salutary because it was an open secret. The art of conflict management was down to the craftiness of the astute politician, resourceful in channelling gut urges into artificial wants.

Thus every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradise;
Flatter’d in Peace, and fear’d in Wars,
They were th’Esteem of Foreigners,
And lavish of their Wealth and Lives,
The Ballance of all other Hives.
Such were the Blessings of that State;
Their Crimes conspired to make ’em Great.

What was the secret, the grand arcanum, of the thriving hive? Vice made the world go round – or, translated from Christian censure into plain English, self-interest:

Thus Vice nursed Ingenuity,
Which join’d with Time and Industry,
Had carry’d Life’s Conveniences,
It’s real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease,
To such a Height, the very Poor
Lived better than the Rich before,
And nothing could be added more.

What happened, by contrast, at that fateful moment when the ‘knaves turn’d honest’, revealed Mandeville, was that the new honesty precipitated social collapse. The ban on egoism and the craving for honour and glory meant that emulativeness vanished, and with it socio-economic ambition and the social integration that brought. All returned to acorns and frugality.

A choice was thus presented: either accept human nature (egoism) as Nature dictated and civilize it to general advantage, or embrace the superhuman rectitude of the rigorist morality-mongers, and accept the ruinous social consequences. (As part of his campaign to expose the sanctimonious and their double-think, Mandeville dropped innuendoes that the ‘honesty’ plank was itself a yet more pernicious mode of hypocrisy.) His own preference was clear: people should get real:

Then leave complaints; Fools only strive
To make a great an honest hive…
Fraud, luxury and pride must live
While we the benefits receive.

Mandeville, in other words, would deny his contemporaries any easy moral self-congratulation:

T’enjoy the world’s conveniences,
Be famed in war, yet live in ease,
Without great vices, is a vain
Eutopia seated in the brain.

Mandeville’s anatomical realism extended beyond showing how greed was good. His
The Virgin Unmask’d: Or, Female Dialogues Betwixt
an Elderly Maiden Lady, and her Niece, On several Diverting Discourses on Love, Marriage, Memoirs, and Morals, &c. of the Times
(1709) and
A Modest Defence of the Public Stews
(1724) addressed hypocrisies about sex – the denial of desire – in particular the social charade of female ‘virtue’. Despite pretences about their modesty, women were as lascivious as men, revealed Dr Mandeville, echoing the frankness, or misogyny, of the Restoration. Animal urges ruled – it was all a matter of reproductive biology or ‘the Constitution of Females’. ‘A View of the Fortifications, which Nature has made to preserve their Chastity’ was provided by the cynical physician, so as to explain ‘the Reason why it so often surrender’d’:

Every Woman who is capable of Conception, must have those Parts which officiate, so fram’d, that they may be able to perform whatever is necessary at that Juncture. Now, to have those Parts so rightly adapted for the Use which Nature design’d them, it is requisite that they should have a very quick Sensation, and, upon the Application of the
Male Organ
, afford the Woman an exquisite Pleasure; for, without this extravagant Pleasure in Fruition, the recipient Organs could never exert themselves to promote Conception.

Biologically, in other words, women had thus to be libidinous for reproduction to work. Socially speaking, good order – the marriage market, the transfer of property, the need for legitimacy – required checks on that libidinousness:

To counterballance this violent natural Desire, all young Women have strong Notions of Honour carefully inculcated into them from their Infancy. Young Girls are taught to hate a
Whore
, before they know what the Word means; and when they grow up, they find their worldly Interest entirely depending upon the Reputation of their Chastity.

Since women were always on heat and no more ‘naturally’ chaste than men, ‘artificial chastity’ had to be inculcated, to produce and preserve ‘actual chastity’.

Lubricity, male and female alike, must (like the economy) be socially managed, for the naked and unrestrained expression of lust
(as of power or greed) brought social catastrophe, not least rape and other casual sexual violence. For such reasons, matrimony had been introduced, and, so as to avoid women being cheapened, their virtue – in other words, their chastity – became prized as a precious commodity, to be traded on the marriage market at the best price. Women must be taught the (cash) value of virginity – or its semblance.

In his
Modest Defence of the Public Stews
, Mandeville similarly proposed public provision of prostitutes as the optimal way of protecting all the aforesaid ‘virtuous’ women, while assuaging the lusts of throngs of men like sailors, newly arrived in port, for whom some ‘drain’ or ‘sluice’ was imperative.

Mandeville’s thinking and language were wilfully gross – how that
enfant terrible
must have loved shocking Shaftesbury! Love was reduced to the purgation of lust, viewed in terms of the hydraulic systems imagined by iatromechanistic medicine. Marriage was a nice problem in commodity demand and supply. Practical solutions must be found to matters which would not go away: the body would have its way. Like Freud, Mandeville taught that no good would come of repressing human nature.

The quarrel between Mandeville and Shaftesbury might be glossed as follows: for the former
all
humans unfailingly behaved as the
vulgar
did for the latter. Mandeville regarded the idealized version of disinterested human nature advanced by Shaftesbury (at least for his peers) as yet another form of hypocrisy or false consciousness, maybe even a product of self-delusory zeal. Overall, pessimistic realism was the best policy; what counted was self-awareness and social management. ‘The Rules I speak of ’, he declared, ‘consist in a dextrous Management of our selves, a stifling of our Appetites, and hiding the real Sentiments of our Hearts before others’, for ‘
private Vices by the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician, may be turn’d into publick Benefits
’.

This chapter’s juxtaposition of Shaftesbury and Mandeville highlights certain tensions prominent in the rethinking of identity at the dawn of the eighteenth century. The Hobbesian spectre loomed – man
reduced to beast or machine, to anti-social egoism. And, in the light of Locke’s model of the mind as a blank sheet of paper, how plausible was Shaftesbury’s counter-attempt to give the mind a Neoplatonic hue, possessed of an innate beauty of thinking, a generous self, a sociable affinity? Would that prove tenable? Or was it just aristocratic confidence – indeed, a confidence-trick – tempting the likes of honest Mandeville to put in the boot?

What is perhaps most significant is one final thing these writers shared: Christianity as such had become irrelevant to both. With Shaftesbury and Mandeville, we are dealing in the realms of philosophy, medicine and science. The Christian immortal soul, set its grand eschatological narrative of sin and redemption, has been left behind.

      *   T
HERE
is in Mankind a certain   *      *      *
      *      *           *         *      *       *       *      *      *
       
Hic multa
     *         *      *        *      *      *      *
      desiderantur   *         *      *        *     *      *      *
      *      *             *         *      *        *       *      *      *
      *      *              *     And this I take to be a clear Solution
      of the matter.

JONATHAN SWIFT

Satire deflates and debases. It is an art which topples greatness, undermines pretension and punishes pride by revealing the low in the pretendedly high, the filth in the pure, the folly in reason. This belittling trick deploys telescopic lenses which picture the human as lesser and lower, or as a machine or beast, driven by depraved desires. Satire reduces what purports to be subtly superior to a repertoire of stigmatizing symbols and cardboard cut-outs, turning character into caricature, signalled by exaggerated physiognomical distortions – the huge nose, gaping mouth and bloated belly, or comparable animalistic traits. In this humbling of the complex into the simplistic, satire finally reduces the mind, soul or spirit to that flesh which always bespeaks inferiority on the Chain of Being.

The effect may be all the more biting when the satirist is himself a fervid Christian, because the preacher’s business, no less than the satirist’s, may be to lash vanity and hypocrisy, to expose the Pharisee masquerading as the godly, to prick pride, and bring man down to his true fallen self, a stinking sink of sin.

Jonathan Swift was both a satirist and a clergyman of the Church of England. His savage indignation was of the savagest: who else could have suggested, in
A Modest Proposal
, that the solution to Ireland’s demographic problems was to tuck into its babies? – ‘a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome Food; whether
Stewed
,
Roasted
,
Baked
, or
Boiled
; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a
Fricasie
, or
Ragoust
’.

Such ferocity owes something (much, surely) to accidents of biography, right from his strange start in life. Born in Dublin in November 1667, some months after the death of his father, baby Jonathan was immediately carried off to Whitehaven in Cumbria by his nurse, where she kept him for three years, quite out of contact with his family; meanwhile, the infant’s mother betook herself to Leicester, where she remained for the rest of her life – her son did not see her again until he was 22.

Swift was sent to school in Kilkenny – he loathed it – graduating to Trinity College, Dublin, where he proved an unruly student. During King William’s wars, he feared trouble as a Protestant when the deposed Catholic James II invaded Ireland, and he fled to England, first to his mother in Leicester, and then to Moor Park in Surrey, home of the diplomat Sir William Temple, who took the young man on as his secretary. It was there that he met Esther Johnson (Stella), the 8-year-old daughter of one of the servants.

In the early 1700s Swift spent much of his time in London, where he wormed his way into the company of coffee-house wits and politicians, and, beginning to publish political tracts, won a reputation as a controversialist. His glory days were between 1710 and 1714, when he threw in his lot with the Tories. They fell, however, and with the Hanoverian succession the Whigs assumed permanent power. That put paid to Swift’s glittering career. He gloomily returned to Ireland to take up a position as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, and a permanent bitterness set in: ‘I reckon no man is thoroughly miserable unless he be condemned to live in Ireland.’

Thither his two great admirers followed him: first Stella, and later
the more insistent Vanessa. On the face of it, he treated both women abominably, but both loved him unstintingly. He spent most of his adulthood in communication with them, and much psycho-biographical ink has been spilt debating what he was up to: did he have sexual relations with them? Did he embark upon clandestine matrimony – with one, or even both? Swift was secretive about his passions, and he handled his women with deep ambivalence, reserve and a style of jokey infantilization suggestive of profound fear both of the feminine and of his own emotional and sexual wants – in short, of intimacy. Misogyny marks the searing disgust driving such poems as ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ (1730), ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph going to Bed’ and ‘Strephon and Chloe’ (1731), all of which dissect women’s defects with unconcealed gusto. The ‘heroine’ of the second of these is an ageing strumpet who uses every cosmetic aid to conceal the ravages of time and the pox, and Swift puts on a display of clinical relish in baring the underlying horrors:

Then, seated on a three-legg’d Chair,
Takes off her artificial Hair:
Now, picking out a Crystal Eye,
She wipes it clean, and lays it by.
Her Eye-Brows from a Mouse’s Hyde,
Stuck on with Art on either Side,
Pulls off with Care, and first displays ’em,
Then in a Play-Book smoothly lays ’em.
Now dextrously her Plumpers draws,
That serve to fill her hollow Jaws.
Untwists a Wire; and from her Gums
A Set of Teeth completely comes.
Pulls out the Rags contriv’d to prop
Her flappy Dugs and down they drop.

‘Never be taken in by false appearances’ was Swift’s habitual satirical message. ‘In most Corporeal Beings, which have fallen under my Cognizance, the Outside hath been infinitely preferable to the In,’ he elsewhere proclaimed; ‘Last Week I saw a Woman flay’d, and
you will hardly believe how much it altered her Person for the worse.’ The sordid reality beneath the mask haunted him: was all civilization just dirt and derangement at heart?