Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
America's disquiet with the body is not just the familiar tale of dieting, obesity, frenetic ex-
ercising, or trying to thread your jaws together with wire and a pair of pliers in front of the
bathroom mirror. The country has a problem with the body because it has a problem with
the finite. The desire which drives the nation—its hunger for progress, achievement, expan-
sion, advancement, possession, consumption—is an infinite one which brooks no restraint.
On this view, there are no natural limits to aspiration, only those obstacles thrown up by
one's failure to achieve. It is a vision of reality far removed from Macbeth's “I dare do all
that may become a man;/Who dares do more is none.” It does not see that some confines
are creative rather than obstructive, some limits enabling rather than impeding. In a time-
worn Romantic fallacy, expansion and self-expression are viewed as good in themselves,
and what is bad is whatever reins them in. One thing which thwarts them is the body, which
must therefore be worked upon intensively. Human flesh is appallingly feeble. It must be
disciplined and remoulded if anything good is to be plucked from it, rather as some conser-
vatives hold that people must be bawled out and knocked around if they are to give of their
best.
On this view, what is supremely positive is the will. In a certain sense, it is all that exists.
The will is a raw force that pounds the world into order, and occasionally pounds it to
pieces. This includes the body, which is the bit of the material world which is part of us.
In order to shape things to its needs, however, the will risks knocking the stuffing out of
them, leaving them void, valueless, and so not really worth shaping in the first place. Yet it
can do its work all the better if there is no meaning inherent in the world itself. Once things
are drained of significance, they put up less resistance to one's projects. Reality becomes
endlessly pliable stuff. It can be pummelled into whatever form you fancy, as in the gym
or cosmetic surgery. “Political principles, laws, and human institutions,” comments de Toc-
queville of America, “seem malleable things which can at will be adopted and combined.”
Maybe even our mortality will buckle in the end to the all-conquering mind. Among the
most typically American features of Michael Jackson was the fact that he wanted to live
forever, a wish which not every member of the world's population was eager to see real-
ised.
The will lies at the core of the self, which means that the self is what bestows meaning
and value on things. But the self is also part of material reality. So we, too, are part of what
has to be hammered into shape. We are clay in our own hands, awaiting the moment when
we will transform ourselves into an artefact of great splendour. The self is always a work
in progress. It is a kind of wilderness which must be cultivated, mixed with one's labour,
before it can become meaningful. It is part of Puritan doctrine that human labour is what
makes things real. Before we happened along, there was just chaos. Ceaseless activity is
what keeps the world in existence. American optimism thus conceals a darker vision. It
springs as much from a scepticism about material reality as from an affirmation of it. In
themselves, Nature and the flesh are chaotic stuff. They are worthless until the spirit invests
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