John Buchan's nightmare

John Buchan (1875-1940), 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, during his time as Governor General of Canada, c. 1935

I’ve been reading a lesser-known early novel by John Buchan called A Lost Lady of Old Years. Buchan is most famous for his “shockers”—what we would now call thrillers—especially the espionage adventure The Thirty-Nine Steps and its first sequel, a World War I thriller set in the Ottoman Middle East, Greenmantle. The novel I’m reading is clearly an early work (he published at the age of 24, having written it during his last years at Oxford), but it’s highly enjoyable and got me interested in Buchan the man again. That led me to “‘Realism colored by poetry,’ rereading John Buchan,” a marvelous essay at The New Criterion. This is an insightful appreciation of Buchan’s work as well as an examination of the man himself. Just the ticket.

But a passage in that essay, quoted from Buchan’s memoir Memory Hold-the-Door, which was published posthumously in 1940 after Buchan’s death in Canada earlier that year, really caught my eye in an unexpected way.

In a chapter near the end, where Buchan reflects on the meaning of civilization in the context of an era of world wars and mass slaughter, he pauses over the idea of “a return to the Dark Ages.” Buchan doesn’t let the snide shorthand of this medieval stereotype go, pointing out the “many points of light” that glowed fervently through the most dislocated and chaotic phases of the period, and concludes that such fears were unfounded.

But—

While Buchan “did not dread a return of the Dark Ages,” he did have profound civilizational worries in another direction:

My nightmare, when I was afflicted by nightmares, was of something very different. My fear was not barbarism, which is civilisation submerged or not yet born, but de-civilisation, which is civilisation gone rotten.

He then describes his nightmare—a world of globalist technocratic mastery combined with soullessness and dissipation—which I quote in toto:

But suppose that science has gained all its major victories, and that there remain only little polishings and adjustments. It has wrested from nature a full provision for human life, so that there is no longer need for long spells of monotonous toil and a bitter struggle for bread. Victory having been won, the impulse to construct has gone. The world has become a huge, dapper, smooth-running mechanism. Would that be the perfecting of civilisation? Would it not rather mean de-civilisation, a loss of the supreme values of life?

In my nightmare I could picture such a world. I assumed—no doubt an impossible assumption—that mankind was as amply provided for as the inmates of a well-managed orphanage. New inventions and a perfecting of transport had caused the whole earth to huddle together. There was no corner of the globe left unexplored and unexploited, no geographical mysteries to fire the imagination. Broad highways crowded with automobiles threaded the remotest lands, and overhead great air-liners carried week-end tourists to the wilds of Africa and Asia. Everywhere there were guest-houses and luxury hotels and wayside camps and filling-stations. What once were the savage tribes of Equatoria and Polynesia were now in reserves as an attraction to trippers, who bought from them curios and holiday mementoes. The globe, too, was full of pleasure-cities where people could escape the rigour of their own climate and enjoy perpetual holiday.

In such a world everyone would have leisure. But everyone would be restless, for there would be no spiritual discipline in life. Some kind of mechanical philosophy of politics would have triumphed, and everybody would have his neat little part in the state machine. Everybody would be comfortable, but since there could be no great demand for intellectual exertion everybody would be also slightly idiotic. Their shallow minds would be easily bored, and therefore unstable. Their life would be largely a quest for amusement. The raffish existence led to-day by certain groups would have become the normal existence of large sections of society.

Some kind of intellectual life no doubt would remain, though the old political disputes would have cancelled each other out, and the world would not have the stimulus of a contest of political ideals, which is, after all, a spiritual thing. Scientists and philosophers would still spin theories about the universe. Art would be in the hands of coteries, and literature dominated by petites chapelles. There would be religion, too, of a kind, in glossy upholstered churches with elaborate music. It would be a feverish, bustling world, self-satisfied and yet malcontent, and under the mask of a riotous life there would be death at the heart. The soil of human nature, which in the Dark Ages lay fallow, would now be worked out. Men would go everywhere and live nowhere; know everything and understand nothing. In the perpetual hurry of life there would be no chance of quiet for the soul. In the tumult of a jazz existence what hope would there be for the still small voices of the prophets and the philosophers and poets? A world which claimed to be a triumph of the human personality, would in truth have killed that personality. In such a bagman’s paradise, where life would be rationalised and added with every material comfort, there would be little satisfaction for the immortal part of man. It would be a new Vanity Fair with Mr. Talkative as the chief figure on the town council. The essence of civilisation lies in man’s defiance of an impersonal universe. It makes no difference that a mechanised universe may be his own creation if he allows his handiwork to enslave him. Not for the first time in history have the idols that humanity has shaped for its own ends become its master.

As pure and prophetic a dystopian vision as anything in Huxley’s Brave New World, and one that I think has mostly come true. Compare Buchan’s description here of the kind of people produced by this nightmare world—comfortable but idiotic, cosmopolitan but deracinated, knowledgeable but unwise, busy but fruitless—with those described by Ernst Jünger in The Forest Passage, which I blogged about here earlier this year.

More if you’re interested

The novel I’m reading, A Lost Lady of Old Years, is set during the Jacobite Rising of 1745 and a fun read so far. You can read the essay that directed me to Buchan’s memoirs at The New Criterion here. And Buchan’s Memory Hold-the-Door is available in its entirety here. And to go slightly further afield, some friends and I talked about Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps on a podcast a few years ago. You can find that here.