Martin Eden, Radical Rightist

In Jack London's Martin Eden the eponymous protagonist, discovering the world of books and the ideas in them, early on happens on the work of Herbert Spencer, which--along with his later discovery of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche--becomes a profound if ultimately destructive influence on him.

In that, as in so many other ways, the book had a very contemporary ring.

That may seem odd, as Spencer and Nietzsche hardly enjoy the same vogue today that they did in London's time. But they stand in a tradition that endures--the radical right's hostility to egalitarianism, with Social Darwinism, nihilism and the rest invoked in opposition to liberalism and the left. And Eden's discovering those ideas so early on, and being influenced by them, should seem obviously contemporary to anyone looking at the "alt-right" and related phenomena today.

I cannot credit London with saying much about why Eden came across those thinkers and ideas that held him so spellbound--but the question of why this happened seems easy enough to answer. Simply put, the ideas of even the extreme right are given a publicity that the ideas of the left are not. Often they are lent a fair amount of prestige through their having rich, powerful champions. Even when the publicity is not wholly positive it tends to be somewhat respectful, and even if less than respectful it still creates a wider awareness of them, and may promote interest in them, in a way that it does not with leftist ideas. And so a young person who starts looking for answers is far more likely to encounter them than they are those of the left (certainly if we are speaking of the actual left, and not the conservative centrists to which our lobotomized political discourse refers as left), as endlessly demonstrated by how much more easily a young person finds their way to, for example, Ayn Rand or Jordan Peterson, than to socialism.

It may also be that for a young person looking for answers severe, elitist, ideas like the ones discussed here have some attraction. The fact that they are looking for answers, after all, is likely to bespeak a measure of dissatisfaction--with the society in which they find themselves, with the people around them . . . with all that means in a society which speaks endlessly of equality, democracy, etc.. (That society may in fact be extremely unequal, the democratic pretensions threadbare at best, but if, as is often the case, they take the rhetoric seriously they are easily persuaded that this is part of the problem.) The idea that there is rightfully an elite may not be unappealing, even when they are clearly not part for it--telling themselves that they really belong in such an elite, that they have somehow been deprived of their rightful place by those from whom they feel alienated, the "herd" somehow responsible for their being down here rather than up there where they ought to be. Indeed, the very severity of the views can fit in well with all of this--their adopting "tough-minded" ideas seeming to them to be proof that they are themselves "tough," unlike all those others spouting what seems to them namby-pamby claptrap, and therefore part of that circle above and better than all the others, because they see life as it is, all as, even if their situation is none too estimable at the moment, they entertain hopes for what they might become, attaining to their rightful place. (This may go especially for those who have found delusions of grandeur a necessary coping mechanism for their hard actual circumstances, or the challenge of going out into a world turning a very hard and ugly face toward a young person of modest background--especially until they learn just how rough the going will actually be, how irrelevant their estimation of themselves.)

Thus did it go with the would-be superman Eden, disdainful of the "herd," and intent on winning his way to some place higher and better--who only very late, too late, realized that for all his very many and real gifts he was nothing of the kind, and just when he should have reaped the rewards of his struggles, threw everything away.