The Peace and Safety of a New Dark Age
Thoughts on the prophetic quality of H.P. Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu"
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“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
“The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
— “The Call of Cthulhu,” H.P. Lovecraft
H.P. Lovecraft has always been, and will probably always be, a baffling figure.
His prose is melodramatic and comically over-baked at times, failing to achieve almost any modern definition of “good writing.” Added to his stylistic oddity is the fact that his plots almost never, well, plot anything. A typical Lovecraft tale is mostly a speech, written in archaic, tense language, by a man who has seen too much, but can’t really describe what he’s seen. The reader is left to infer that “there is some pretty wild shit out there, man. Believe me. You don’t even want to know.”
For these literary reasons, Lovecraft’s place among “serious literature” has always been suspect. I was in grad school when the Library of America anthologized some of his best work, in a collection entitled Tales, and there was immense debate among literary types about the meaning of this act.
Added to these artistic debates about Lovecraft the writer are serious humanistic debates about Lovecraft the man. He was mainly a terrible person, racist and xenophobic, and probably a living archetype for the current phenomenon of the “Incel.”
Yet despite all this, Lovecraft endures and, shockingly, fascinates still today. His influence on modern culture probably can’t be calculated. His work, including his style and his creation of the Cthluhu Mythos and the idea of cosmic horror, places Lovecraft’s fingerprints on so much of the horror and science fiction that came after him. It’s frankly impossible to imagine genre fiction and film as they exist today without Lovecraft’s influence.
What Lovecraft Knew About Us
I’m currently teaching a winter-term class on Lovecraft and I have to say there is something about this man’s work. Archaic and hammy, yes it is. And that somehow works for him. It’s utterly captivating, the depths of this man’s paranoia.
But what really stands out to me is the quasi-prophetic nature of his view of the world.
Perhaps his most famous words are the opening lines of “The Call of Cthulhu:”
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
These words sum up virtually every Lovecraft story. Someone has crossed a line and has learned too much about our insignificant place in the universe, which is completely indifferent to our existence. It is simply better not to know.
I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing lately, as I watch so many people I care about wreck their mental and emotional health by living too much of their lives in various social media.
In a previous post, I wrote about learning to navigating certain tensions. And social media presents another one. Pulling in one direction is the fact that knowledge about the world is good and platforms like Twitter make it possible for a person to be helpfully engaged in the struggles that others face. Pulling in the opposite direction is the fact that perpetually living in sadness or rage about things that you can do literally nothing about will burn a person’s spirit to ash. This is the tension on which Twitter is constructed, no matter who owns it.
One might say that Twitter and the other social media ecosystems have created the “progress” that allows a single human mind to “correlate all its contents.” And not just the contents of that single mind, but the contents of an infinite number of minds. The good that Twitter and the socials do is based on their ability to reveal that which has been hidden from an individual mind. The truth that Lovecraft is uniquely in touch with, however, is that such knowledge, unless it’s carefully monitored, will have a devastating effect on mental health.
“Call of Cthulhu” traces the findings of such a man. The narrator of the story walks the reader through the various pieces of evidence he has found for the existence of dread Cthulhu and the isolated cults dedicated to resurrecting him into our blissfully unaware world.
The second half of that prophetic opening paragraph is even more harrowing today than when it was written:
“The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
I love that final phrase. “The peace and safety of a new dark age.”
One of the current obsessions that people like me bring to social media is a fixation on other people’s conspiracy theories (never our own, of course), particularly those of a reactionary right wing. Frankly, Lovecraft himself was a member of that group. Therefore, his insights here bear special consideration.
What if conspiracy, cryptozoology, the occult, and Graham Hancock Netflix shows are not an aberration? What if they are not failures of our modern internet age? What if they are the necessary outcome of this moment and all its technology?
I wonder if the internet, that tool of collecting and disseminating all the world’s “dissociated knowledge,” as Lovecraft puts it, has done just what he said such an activity would do.
When I was in humanities graduate school (2005-2012), there was a broadly-accepted Utopianism embedded in the discourse around social media. The Arab Spring and all. You may remember. It was all talk of democracy and decentralizing gatekeepers and liberation. You still hear echoes of that today in the wrenching discourse about Elon Musk’s Twitter. There are still voices saying that pre-Elon Twitter was a place of true community and beauty — hilariously blind to what Twitter has actually been all along.
Then 2016 happened and now those same dreamers wail at what has happened to their Utopia, never accepting that it is exactly what they said it would be: decentralizing gatekeepers and liberation. It’s just that we can now see what that looks like and it has, to quote Lovecraft again, made some of us “go mad from the revelation.”
At the same time, while some of us still delude ourselves into thinking you can “teach someone to spot fake news,” the internet has created scores of people seeking “the peace and safety of a new dark age,” in their conspiracies and racism and xenophobia — just as Lovecraft himself did.
The image I embedded in this post is from a collection of Cthulhu stories by Lovecraft and others published in the 1960s. I love the cover art and I say it basically captures the zeitgeist of the internet age.
Social media has shown us that Lovecraft was, in his twisted way, correct; you can know too much for your own good. And the world is full of cults beckoning us to catastrophe and many of those cults are brought into being on our social media platforms. And many of us belong to one or another of those cults. And I fear that Cthulhu calls for us all now.
I think Lovecraft Country is a solid corrective to this. While the classic lovecraftian fear of cults seeking to allow dark powers into the world is there, it also reveals that the real cosmic horror is racism (duh!) it’s appeal to me is that it doesn’t allow that the horror is only outside our reality, but around us (sundown towns are just as terrifying as any Cthulhu). I’m not a Twitter user but it strikes me that many of those who lament were perhaps able to enjoy the dialogue there without being targeted, like so many have been because of ethnicity, gender, or political persuasion (especially any evangelicals who move even slightly away from the Conservative party lines)(I’m willing to be corrected on this if wrong). I feel the lovecraftian insight myself; I’m not dumb or ignorant, but the modern world can be terrifying to me, to the point where I sometimes seek ignorance just to avoid the crushing weight of it. I mean, what is more uncaring than an elder god if not a modern bureaucracy that is structured to see you as a number? *shudder*
Thanks Danny. Yes, without wishing to be excessively dystopian, definitely something of Babel at work with the modern data beasts. It seems indisputable they drive atomisation and division in order to prey on the attendant loss of authentic connection and affirmation. It’s like introducing a virus specifically designed to attack the human soul. One might reverse the imagery and argue that this is more accurately the red dawn of a new dark age, one of false enlightenment and mass manipulation... Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? As Eliot brilliantly expressed it. I suspect the multi-tentacled disciples of Cthulhu know exactly where!