The Soul of Man under Socialism by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“[…]with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they [altruists] have seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.
They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive, or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.
But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it[…]”
“[…]the past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.”
“[…]a man is called selfish if he lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realisation of this own personality, if, in fact, the primary aim of his life is self-development. But this is the way in which everyone should live. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one’s neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.”
Oscar Wilde’s take on Utopia, “the realisation of progress”. In this enjoyable and obviously very quotable essay, he gives his thoughts on how private property does not let people make the best of their potential, to be the perfect artists of themselves. Under Socialism, says Wilde, people would be able to concentrate on being perfect, selfish (in its positive definition, described above) individuals. It is an intriguing but unusual take on things, since Socialism as an ideology has been condemned for its apparent murder of the individual. No, argues the author. That would describe a totalitarian Socialist society, the kind of which wouldn’t appear before several decades after Oscar Wilde had written these words in the late 19th century.
The Soul of Man Under Socialism is an ode to virtue ethics under which each person’s goal, and what makes him or her human, circles around personal excellence and eudaimonia. As an artist himself, Wilde went on a great deal on how artists can be true individuals, but he kind of awkwardly robs this privilege from poor people, whose jobs “more apt for beasts” have little to do with what it really is, or better, what it can mean to be human. For Wilde, Socialism could destroy poverty at its roots, giving people of every class (or what we would today understand it to be) the opportunity to reach their true individualist potential, free of the restraints of posession. After all, “the only people thinking about money more than the rich are the poor” (paraphrase).
There are some very interesting concepts here and I find myself in agreement with most of what I read. However, it’s always clear that Wilde writes from his awesome vantage point of the upper class. His patronising of the less fortunate people among us, however justified and well-argued, just reeks of a kind of superiority complex. Wilde couldn’t decide if he wanted to be an elitist or not and it shows in this piece. He defies his own definition of selfishness by inevitably being selfish himself. Still, as one of the great writers and artists of times past, perhaps we should admit him this privilege to have been able to exercise his full capacity of individualism.
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