GRGR (15): Good & Evil: Utilitarianism

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Seb Thirlway wrote:

> 
> Dismal all right!  Who was it made the connection between
> Utilitarianism and the Panopticon, that ideally efficient
> surveiilance device?  

I don' think it was Dickens. 



The philosophy of Utilitarianism influenced many of the
social reforms in Great Britain during the early half of the
nineteenth century. Bentham's philosophical principles
extended into the realm of government and had a profound
influence on the poor, the infirm, and children. ---- the
Factory Act of 1833, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, the
Prison Act of 1835, the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835,
the Committee on Education in 1839,the Lunacy Act of 1845,
and the Public Health Act of 1845. One of Utilitarianisms
greatest opponents was the great novelist, Charles Dickens.  

Hard Times is, among other things, Dickens' 19th-century
attack on the utilitarian philosophers. 

We know Pynchon studied Dickens and although we may disagree
on the "lit crit" terminology, it seems that we all agree
that Pynchon's characters are beautiful, complex,
multidimentional creations. Taking Pointsman as the example
here, Pointy is invested with Pavlovian theory, but as David
has noted in his post, Pointsman, after the dog scene with
Roger and Jessica, considers "branching out" and:

"Pointy IS looking for a door out of the maze, knowing  he's
heading for a dead end, and starts to veer from orthodox
Pavlovianism.   He does go "ultra-paradoxical" through his
obsession with Slothrop." D.M.

And as Jody has pointed out, Pointsman is NOT Pavlov.
However he does it, Pynchon invests abstract ideas and
theories---Pavlovian, Utilitarian, for example-in Pointsman
and his other characters. He also reflects or as he says in
the Slow Learner Introduction "steals, or let me say
"derive[s]," in more subtle ways," from literature. Like
Melville's Ahab, Pointsman is Shakespearean and like
Melville Pynchon tells us whom he has stolen from
Shakespeare, in this example, Pointsman is a literary
descendent of Richard III. And like Melville and Dickens,
Pynchon has invested his personal political attacks into
Pointsman.  Of course Pointsman is so much more than an
aggregate of abstractions, literary theft and person
political vengeance, but I think it is worth while to
consider Dickens' Gradgrind of Hard Times and Pointsman, and
how information, and other mediums of exchange, function in
GR and Hard Times and how  Pynchon's Pointsman is a relative
of Dickens' Gradgrind. 

Trying to stay with Pain and Pleasure (thanks again Paul).  

Bentham claimed that pleasure and pain are our sovereign
masters and he introduced what he called the principle of
utility. This is what I meant Paul, when I said Pleasure and
Pain are philosophical notions and happiness, that mother of
all philosophical notions surely needs to be account for as
well. Bentham's principle of utility can be summarized as:

 "every action should be judged right or wrong according to
how far it tends to promote or damage the happiness of the
community." 
And 
"the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the
measure of right and wrong"

Bentham thought that human were, at least, in part,
motivated by the desire to obtain certain pleasures and to
avoid certain pains. He believed in his idea so strongly,
that he even went so far as to
suggest that legislators should regulate the ways in which
individuals sought their own happiness.

Sounds great right?

And how did Bentham think this could be accomplished? Well,
howabout a little S&M? Not exactly, but howabout a little
dominance and submission? Well, what he thought was that
punishment and reward were to be the means by which the
legislator could control the people's pursuit of happiness.
Of course, like all Control the people and make the happy
sort of guys, he preferred the sticks to the carrots. So by
exacting the threat of and the very real pain of social
punishment the masses would be motivated to be happy and
abstain from certain behaviors deemed to be harmful to
themselves and the state. Sounds rather frightening to my
paranoid sentiments bent over awaiting the whip of life,
liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, but at
least, I think, I should have been permitted to read Dickens
in the Panopticon penitentiary.
In the penitentiary: 


"The jailer in his central lodge would be able to see into
each of the prisoner's cells,  but screens and lighting
would be so arranged that he himself could not be seen by 
them...so they would all have the impression of an invisible
omnipresence."

In story after story, no more clearly stated than in
Pynchon's "The Secret Integration", Pynchon, like Dickens is
concerned with the ridiculous and dangerous complacency bred
in the souls of citizens-those that succeed during economic
revolutions. 

Utilitarianism appealed to the middle class, it was popular
with those members who had benefited financially from the
Industrial Revolution. In fact, as is often the case, those
that benefited most endorsed it most vigorously. Like the
50s economic revolution in America, the industrao revolution
claimed to have brough great power of the individual and
with this economic power came the powerful consumer. The
business of the war, according to GR, is work, as Pointy
says, and consumption-in large measure of Pornographic
substitutes for life and of more wealth, Profits, but not
Profits alone Mr. Marx. 

In Pointsman we find these utilitarian ideas pushed to an
obscene extreme. At the time, critics, like Dickens
satirized Utilitarianism, claiming that the utilitarian
measures, the broad and extensive legislation of utilitarian
principles turned life into a mechanized, anti-human, social
madness with NO WAY OUT.

Enfetishment is an ironic process because it invests the
inanimate with human characteristics and inanimates human
subtly, by first divesting them of human characteristics
through reification and then re-investing them with pseudo-
human characteristics, turning them into fetishes.

We know of Pynchon's debt to T.S. Eliot, and Swift and
Conrad, but what about Dickens? The early short stories tell
us a bunch about how the early Eliot, Conrad, Swift, and
Dickens influenced Pynchon, but here, I think it is Hard
Times that rings in my ears. 

Pointsman and Gradgrind



CHAPTER II - MURDERING THE INNOCENTS

THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir.  A man of realities.  A man of facts
and calculations.  A man who proceeds upon the principle
that two and  two are four, and nothing over, and who is not
to be talked
Into allowing for anything over.  Thomas Gradgrind, sir -
peremptorily Thomas - Thomas Gradgrind.  With a rule and a
pair of scales, and  the multiplication table always in his
pocket, sir, ready to
Weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you
exactly what it comes to.  It is a mere question of figures,
a case ofsimplearithmetic.  You might hope to get some other
nonsensicalbelief into the head of George Gradgrind, or
Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind
(all supposititious, non-existent  persons), but into the
head of Thomas Gradgrind - no, sir!  In such terms Mr.
Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself,  whether to
his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in
general.  In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words
'boys and  girls,' for 'sir,' Thomas Gradgrind now presented
Thomas Gradgrind  to the little pitchers before him, who
were to be filled so full of  facts. Indeed, as he eagerly
sparkled at them from the cell a rage before  mentioned, he
seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and
prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood
at one discharge.  He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too,
charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the
tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.

            XI  NO WAY OUT

THE Fairy palaces burst into illumination, before pale
morning showed the monstrous serpents of smoke trailing
themselves over  Coketown.  A clattering of clogs upon the
pavement; a rapid ringing  of bells; and all the melancholy
mad elephants, polished and oiled  up for the day's
monotony, were at their heavy exercise again. Stephen bent
over his loom, quiet, watchful, and steady.  A special
contrast, as every man was in the forest of looms where
Stephen worked, to the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of
mechanism at
which he laboured.  Never fear, good people of an anxious
turn of mind, that Art will consign Nature to oblivion.  Set
anywhere, side  by side, the work of GOD and the work of
man; and the former, even though it be a troop of Hands of
very small account, will gain in  dignity from the
comparison. So many hundred Hands in this Mill; so many
hundred horse Steam  Power.  It is known, to the force of a
single pound  eight,
what  the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of
the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil,
for love or hatred,  for patriotism or discontent, for the
decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at any
single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet
servants, with the composed faces and the
regulated actions.  There is no mystery in it; there is an
unfathomable mystery in the meanest of them, for ever. -
Supposing we were to reverse our arithmetic for material
objects, and to govern these awful unknown quantities by
other means!

TBC