The Early Evolutionary Imagination by Emelie Jonsson

Author:Emelie Jonsson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030827380
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

London’s mythologization of naturalistic cosmology was more conscious than that of most Victorians. He openly declared that he was departing from the truth in order to tolerate life and find his way through it. However, his position was based on a truth that was half falsehood. As he faced his naturalistic vision, he was passionately and plausibly urged away from it by his moral emotions. In the same way, because his character and life compelled him to confront realities, he was irked by averting his eyes from the reality of cosmic injustice.

The moral vision in conflict with London’s naturalism was consistently associated with culture. From a young age, he claimed to have glimpsed the cultivated world through literature and associated it with “unselfishness of the spirit, clean and noble thinking,” “all that was fine and noble and gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to life” (1999 [1906], 88). When he found the real cultivated world full of “monstrous selfishness and sodden materialism,” it strengthened his division between reality and morality (1999 [1906], 94). He became a revolutionary socialist; he aimed to “topple” the society that had disappointed him and to create a “new habitation,” where man could “progress upon something worthier than his stomach” (94). From that point on, the revolution was his “ethical romance” and “Holy Grail” (93). Though he claimed to be essentially focused on “the PEOPLE” in this endeavor, he admitted that they were for him an essentially imaginative idea—a “radiant, flashing vision”—and that his fellow warriors were the socialist intellectuals among them: “keen-flashing intellects and brilliant wits” (1982 [1913], 1066; 1999 [1906], 91). Political idealism had replaced the moral idealism initially associated with cultivated society, but they were both pursued through culture, and conceived as forces of culture in conflict with the natural world.

London’s socialism was in direct combat with cosmic injustices: “FATE,” “hardships” and “accidents,” and the powers in society that left some people more vulnerable than others to such injustices (1982 [1903]-b, 1118). When he wrote up his muckraking experience of the East End of London, he set socialist reform openly against his naturalistic vision, and couched it in religious terms:The application of the Golden Rule determines that East London is an unfit place in which to live. Where you would not have your own babe live, and develop, and gather to itself knowledge of life and the things of life, is not a fit place for the babes of other men to live, and develop, and gather to themselves knowledge of life and the things of life. It is a simple thing, this Golden Rule, and all that is required. Political economy and the survival of the fittest can go hang if they say otherwise. (1982 [1903]-a, 125)

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