Alex Comfort’s Discussion of Human Responsibility in The Novel in Our Time

(an abridged paraphrase prepared by Matthew Evans-Cockle)

Human beings possess what Alex Comfort calls autonomous mind. This means not only that we possess the ability to think for ourselves, but also that our consciousness is characterized by the feeling of separation. We do not only participate in the constant activity of the world, but we reflect upon that participation. As human beings, we reflect upon our own desires and needs, and we reflect on how best to use the things of the world in order to satisfy these needs and desires.

Because human beings possess autonomous mind, we see ourselves in a constant state of conflict with the external universe. The external universe not only offers us what we need, it also withholds it. We are forced to work, in one way or another, in order to get the good things that we want. But there is more. The external universe also threatens us. It threatens us with scarcity. It threatens us with stark and dangerous landscapes. It threatens us with storms and natural disasters. And it threatens each and every one of us with the eventual death that none of us can escape. This last threat, the threat of death, underlies all the others.

Comfort writes that our constant conflict with the external universe is motivated by our instinct for survival. Ours is a conflict with death, but also with those members of the human race who have lost their nerve and sided with death against humanity. Comfort holds that we all possess, in some degree, a sense of biological human responsibility to assist other human beings—both to protect them and, as far as we are able, to help them thrive. Comfort appears to link this sense of biological human responsibility to our instinctive life: just as we instinctively struggle to survive, so too we will instinctively catch a child who is about to tumble down a set of stairs. This sense of biological human responsibility moves us to stand not only against death but against oppression.

According to Comfort, then, humanity (or the human community) is in a conflict with death and with those who have lost their nerve, lost their courage, and chosen to side with death against humanity as “the advocates of power.” Comfort is using “power,” here, to refer to a combination of the ability to oppress others and the intention to oppress others. Power, in this sense, is the opposite of cooperation. The advocates of power do not cooperate with the greater community in order to get the good things they desire. Instead, the advocates of power find ways to force others to provide them with the good things they desire. In this way, the advocates of power destroy the lives of others. Acting at the expense of others, pretending they are somehow different and therefore should be spared the suffering others face, they destroy the communities in which they live, from the inside.[1]

To feel “compassion” is, literally, to share suffering (com=together, passio=suffering). To the extent that all human beings die, we are all fellow sufferers—we all look ahead with the awareness of our own approaching and inevitable deaths and we suffer that awareness.[2] When Comfort says that the advocates of power have lost their nerve, he means that they are unwilling to struggle with others towards the good things of life. The advocates of power have traded their connection with others as fellow-strugglers and fellow-sufferers for a relation of power. The advocates of power have chosen to make others suffer more so that they themselves suffer less. When we lose our nerve and side with death and power, we renounce and gradually lose our ability to hold others in our hearts and to feel as they do, either to suffer with them or to celebrate with them. The advocates of power have chosen to harden their hearts and to renounce empathy for others.

Comfort conceives humanity and the human community as being necessarily involved in a conflict… with death, and with those members of the human race who have lost their nerve and sided with death against humanity as the advocates of power. In accordance with this view of human existence, Comfort draws two conclusions. His first conclusion has already been stated: The main ethical value that defines our humanity is a sense of biological human responsibility, against death and against power. His second conclusion is essentially an extension of the first: human standards such as beauty and justice…which are the essential supporting pillars of human community exist only so long as we assert them (12).

Comfort stresses the ultimate importance of collectively asserted human standards, yet he still insists that no external standard, value, or idea should be given priority over an individual’s natural biological sense of responsibility. Aligning irresponsible allegiances with barbarity, Comfort writes that, “artists are forced, at an early stage to make up their minds whether they regard themselves as human beings or disguised quadrupeds (19). In this vein, Comfort defines the authorial artist’s responsibility as the refusal to abandon the basic conception of humanness for any extraneous object whatsoever—victory, democracy, the nation, the party, the civil list, or even the libraries (19).

Comfort sees author-artists as being presented with a vital choice when they recognize that their culture is in a state of crisis: When one is faced with a prospect of disintegration, and when one feels one has a duty, an impulse, or an inner compulsion to react to it by writing, there are four courses open…. One can make one’s escape into the contemplation of true form, or into lunacy, or into a policy of making terms with barbarism; or one can consciously assume responsibility for one’s work and one’s times, and interpret what one sees in the light of one’s humanity (21). … Such artists know that if you kill a man he dies, whatever your intentions were; that if your convictions are leading you into officially-sponsored acts like Dachau and the atom bomb, you are, humanly speaking, insane; such artists know that it is to the person under your own feet that you owe responsibility (22).

In terms of the escape-routes that lead away from human responsibility, the seekers of pure form… produce work, often of great merit, but which ultimately imprisons them. The surrealists, escaping into lunacy, are brave enough to confront the grimace of barbarism with a mirror grimace, but purchase their satire at the cost of distintegrating themselves. As for the collaborators, who make terms with barbarism, they obey; they are the people who believe, because it is unpopular or tiresome or unprofitable to stand when other people are running. Tell them that you are fighting for the Good, and they will cheer any beastliness, or tell them you are going to rescue the kitten on the roof and they will follow you down any number of flights (22).

Comfort speaks of two levels of authorial achievement. Most basically, there is the quality of narration, style, humour, and a sense of magnitudes that qualify an author’s work as a major achievement. Beyond this, however, a great novel or other work of literature is distinguished by its author’s sanity, which is to say his or her responsible understanding of social and historical events… and consequent immunity from being bamboozled or being paid or flattered to bamboozle—from being an S.S. man or an atom-bomb dropper on the one hand, or a Government stooge on the other (22).

In medicine, Comfort writes, one talks of insight, meaning the ability to recognize a delusion for a delusion, to distinguish a product of one’s mind from a manifestation of an outer reality. Such insight implies a wholeness of personality, an absence of division in the mind. One can repeat sociological or historical criticism parrot-fashion and still be as much taken in by it as a lunatic by his claims to the throne. Comfort proposes a simple test: the reader might attend not primarily to what authors say but to how far they show themselves able to see a man for a man, and a woman for a woman, with nothing interposed. In Comfort’s view, the sane and responsible writer sees everyone naked, himself or herself included. Such authors are not devoid of political and moral judgements, but they make them equally. In reading, therefore, Comfort suggests that we ask: Is this writer capable of recognizing a human being? Is this writer able to reject the art of diverse weights, for which an act identical in every respect is a heroic but regrettable necessity when done by Our Side and a contemptible atrocity when done by Their Side? Is this writer’s judgement of human decisions level or weighted; does this writer know filth from food, whatever the wrapper? If the writer does, then he or she is capable of being a great artist under barbarism, and if not, he or she is another part of barbarism made manifest (24).

[1] In terms of modern popular culture, the figure of the vampire appears as a symbolic representation of the agents of power and oppression within human communities. The vampire lives by inflicting death on others. In order to avoid death for itself, the vampire becomes death. Similarly, in order to avoid suffering, the oppressive advocate of power comes to embody suffering: seeking to escape suffering he or she now inflicts it upon others. Whereas the members of a cooperative community naturally share the good things of life, the advocate of power, refuses cooperation, and chooses to share suffering.

[2] Looking back to the origin of the word, to draw “courage” is to draw motivation from those things we love, those things we hold in our hearts–courage has its etymological root in coeur, the French word for heart.