The Liberty of Privacy

SIX years ago, speaking to a group of American professors of literature, I delivered what I—rather naively—assumed to be an innocuous little lecture entitled “Trousered Apes.” Having quoted an extract from Pride and Prejudice and another, for purposes of contrast, from John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (not that Osborne’s play represented, even then, the ultimate in modernity), I concluded: “Water pollution and air pollution are now quantitatively measurable facts of life; but is it not possible that a psychological poison is also at work in our society, destroying man’s mind and moral fiber, leading him back to the primitive jungle from whence he came, before that same jungle, devoid alike of civilized man and trousered ape, returns to its pristine, uninhabited state, the only real victor after all?” These words, to my surprise, unleashed a furious discussion and controversy lasting well into the night and resuming the following day.

Since then, nothing has happened on either the domestic or the international scene to change my opinion that the Western world and its culture are currently saturated with violence and animalism. On the contrary, I think that no one who reads a newspaper, or watches a television news program, or reads an avant garde novel, can doubt the truth of this judgment. Yet few seem to understand why this should be so.

DW

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Duncan Williams

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SIX years ago, speaking to a group of American professors of literature, I delivered what I—rather naively—assumed to be an innocuous little lecture entitled “Trousered Apes.” Having quoted an extract from Pride and Prejudice and another, for purposes of contrast, from John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (not that Osborne’s play represented, even then, the ultimate in modernity), I concluded: “Water pollution and air pollution are now quantitatively measurable facts of life; but is it not possible that a psychological poison is also at work in our society, destroying man’s mind and moral fiber, leading him back to the primitive jungle from whence he came, before that same jungle, devoid alike of civilized man and trousered ape, returns to its pristine, uninhabited state, the only real victor after all?” These words, to my surprise, unleashed a furious discussion and controversy lasting well into the night and resuming the following day.

Since then, nothing has happened on either the domestic or the international scene to change my opinion that the Western world and its culture are currently saturated with violence and animalism. On the contrary, I think that no one who reads a newspaper, or watches a television news program, or reads an avant garde novel, can doubt the truth of this judgment. Yet few seem to understand why this should be so.