There was so much idiotic hype and so many stupid, superficial reviews of Houellebecq’s novel Submission, that I almost decided not to read it. Houellebecq did the unthinkable and mentioned that which shall not be named – Muslims – which immediately unleashed a tsunami of “Islamophobia!” on the one side and “Scary Muslims!” on the other. Besides, most people have a very low readerly culture and can’t distinguish between a book’s author and its first-person narrator. If the character is not “likeable” and people can’t “identify” with him, the author must be an evildoer deserving of nothing but supercilious dismissal. As a result, reviews of anything more complex than Hunger Games are massively useless.
Houellebecq’s novel is about the terrifying ease with which all gains of civilization can be lost almost instantly and imperceptibly. The culture of consumerism creates crowds of spoiled, infantile people who are incapable of dealing with any discomfort. And preserving civilization presupposes complexity, struggle, and difficulty.
Women’s rights, the welfare state, scholarship, literary criticism, the traditions of intellectual inquiry – all these earth – shattering, incredible gains of the Western civilization can be easily lost to religious fanaticism with its cocooning, imbecilic certainties, to empty blabber about free markets and family values that are supposed to cure all ills, to intellectual sloth, to meaningless pseudo-liberalism of brain-dead multiculturalists.
This is a very angry novel. Houellebecq goes to enormous lengths to provoke and enrage his readers. Most of all, I believe, he banks on provoking women by reminding us how crucial the achievements of the Western civilization are for women who want to have a life of a human being and not an insect.
The great paradox of the Western civilization, points out Houellebecq, is that its greatest achievements – women’s liberation, the rights of individuals to pursue happiness on their own terms – make the civilization more vulnerable. There is no freedom possible without the greatest form of liberty of all: an individual’s right to control what comes in and goes out of her or his body. Bluntly put, a civilization where an individual matters will always be less numerous than a civilization where the concept of an individual has no currency. Producing mindless, patient ants who toil stupidly without a single thought of their own is easy. Creating individuals who find their own meaning and construct their own lives is hard. And mass production tends to overwhelm creative artisanship.
[To be continued. . .]
Clarissa's Blog 
This post is a really fine piece of writing, Clarissa.
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Thank you. This means a lot.
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I agree. And how about writing a paper on Submission?
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Late here, but thought I’d go for some mass downvotes.
“Bluntly put, a civilization where an individual matters will always be less numerous than a civilization where the concept of an individual has no currency”
This is very important, and I’m about to make a comparison that is either helpful or horribly horribly misguided.
The difference between the collective (extended family, clan, tribe) orientation on thinking and the individualistic orientation that (first) emerged in the west seems as vast as the difference between the pre-consciousness bicameral mind of Julian Jaynes and consciousness as we know it.
To recap: Jaynes, postulated that human consciousness (as in self-awareness of oneself as an individual which requires the capability of imagining oneself in different circumstances) is a relatively recent phenomenon in human cognitive history, just a few thousand years old (and presumably absent in populations of gatherers or other pre-industrial peoples).
Prior to that, he hypothesized that cognitive functions were specialized between a “speaking” part and a part that heard and obeyed. Ulysses, for example in Homer’s telling never wonders about what to do, a god appears tells him what to do and he does it. (in this model ‘hearing voices’ is a kind of vestigal feature).
Now I’m wondering about individualism. Thinking of oneself as “Me” who can and should act to increase one’s own happiness instead of part of “Us” (whose main purpose is to work for “our” common good) is an even newer phenomenon (that is dominant only in a few places on the globe) and may involve changes in cognition that we don’t understand yet.
There’s also the probability that it’s at least partly mal-adaptive in that it leads to falling birthrates and a population that is all but helpless against populations where life is an eternal war of attrition between “Us (good people) and Them” (the rest of the world).
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Yes, this is crucial and I hope more people understood this. The human subjectivity of an individual is very historically recent. In our literature classes as students we’d be able to date a text immediately based on whether the authorial voice used the word “I.” Because for the longest time, it did not even occur to anybody to do that.
And then, the emergence of the I was very geographical, too.
The rise of individual subjectivity gave us everything I believe makes life worth living. Human rights, progress, modern medicine, technology, feminism, everything. But it isn’t without its costs, as you observe. And these are high costs, of course.
I will write about what makes civilizations die or survive in the 3rd part of this review.
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Also, children are not born with the capacity to distinguish themselves from the rest of the world. That capacity develops by the age of 3, roughly. And now let’s consider the differences in how it might develop depending on whether the cultural environment encourages it or not.
It is an enormous mistake to believe everybody’s subjectivity works in exactly the same way.
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