The most terrible nightmare is not the one that comes from the deep space or from the furious bowels of the earth. The ancestral horror that fought the dreams of Howard P. Lovecraft-one of the largest and most prolific writers of all time-was not only the one incarnated in the abomination of Cthulhu or Shub-Niggurath, although examples of unheard of monstrosity. No, that horror is nothing compared to that aroused by the human race. Hell, someone said, are the others. And it can be said that, with some variations on the topic, the concept also applies to Lovecraft, not for nothing nicknamed the solitaire of Providence, the city of the Rhode Island where it was born in 1890 and died in 1937. He was, as Michel Houellebecq, against the world and against life, summarized. More precisely, it was terrified of modernity, by the “rebellion of the masses” and by the shape that was taking the European West. This fierce misanthropy is at the origin of the bad fame that the American writer has always enjoyed. On the one hand, he inspired all the weird and fantastic contemporary literature, difficult to find someone influential like him. Yet, at the same time, and even if his works are constantly republished (also in the form of a comic or television series), an aura of negativity remains around him. In some ways it is still confined to gender literature, and certainly does not advertise its philosophical and political approach. Only by virtue of this forced marginality has not been excessively demonized during the wave Woke, even if they are constantly reiterating the accusations of racism against him. It is true: Lovecraft was not a fan of ethnic minorities. But, in fact, he was not a fan of humanity in general. However, reducing his social and political ideas to a generic manifestation of hatred for mankind fruit of personal disturbances is deeply unfair and wrong.
Lovecraft was able to grasp the distortions of what he called with contempt civilization of the machines, and although not a religious man at all (for him the sky was empty or populated with disturbing creatures) he was able to undermine the rationality that was preparing to dominate the world. He has injected new fears under the skin of the West, to demonstrate that the standard bearers of quantity, those who demand that everything is measurable and knowable, are wrong. It always remains an unbalanced share of unknowable, of mystery. Although for Lovecraft this mystery is better not to reveal it because it would only be infinite horror.
His criticism of modernity unfolds with power in letters, in particular in the 381 of 1929, addressed to Woodburn Harris, who was one of his main correspondents. The letter is now published in full by Adelphi by Ottavio effort, chosen from thousands and thousands of others as the most emblematic of HP philosophy, and right.
“As I see it,” writes Lovecraft, “American civilization is almost extinct but authentic where it survives: in certain groups scattered throughout the country and in certain geographical areas, in western Virginia in particular, and in some points of New England. What the conservatories deplorate and fight is certainly not our ancestral culture but a new and outrageous barbarism of villani redone based on quantity, cars, speed, trade, industry, opulence and ostentation of luxury, which has sprung up in the midst of us as an infesting plant around 1830 with the rise of the becera mass. It has little to do with our civilization-the main current of classical and English thought and sensitivity established in these colonies for over two centuries of uninterrupted presence, 1607-1820. (…) It is a plague to be eradicated, if possible, otherwise to escape, that’s all. But calling it “American civilization” would be an affront to our ancestors. It is American only in a geographical sense and everything is less than a civilization, if not according to the Spenglerian definition of the term. It is a totally avulse and totally childish barbarism, based on physical well -being instead of mental superiority, and has no titles to be taken into consideration by the descendants of the settlers. Certainly also from there, as from other forms of barbarism, one day a culture could be born, but that culture would not be ours and for us it is natural to counter its incursions in a territory that we want to preserve for our culture. We would beat if the Japanese tried to spread their culture, although of the highest level, in the United States; Consequently we beat in front of a foreign system intent on imposing itself on the earth that has known the ascendant of New England and Virginia. At the end of the seventeenth century and at the beginning of the eighteenth century we fought against the French ascendant who advanced by crawling from Canada and the Mississippi Valley. Today we beat against the “culture” of the machines that drags itself towards us by the hive of an artificially fed industry and a limited taste. The fact of being sentenced to defeat does not change the substance of things. Nor the imminent victory of the invader order changes its intrinsic nature ».
In reality, Lovecraft was not beating if not externalizing his opinions by letter and writing novels. But his opposition was perhaps even more effective for this: he knew how to infect the imagination or, if you want, reveal the infection that was already underway. In some ways, his attitude recalls that of Oswald Spengler, for which in fact Lovecraft spends words of admiration.
HP despises democracy, in its own way remains an aristocrat that creates for western decline. “The general sentiment, typical of the era of machines, collectivism and paternism in socio-political organization, which is bragging the sense of individuality, independence and confidentiality on which family life is based, to replace it with an almost public, communistized life, in which the promiscuity authorized by the state will be much more natural than marriage”.
Above all, he detested the mass: “I believe”, he writes, “in the inevitable coming of a devastating barbarism of mechanism and democracy at least as much as a financier of the trust of the sausages without fantasies or a socialist from the drunk lounge of ethics. I hate it like poison, but I see it coming. Here is the proof that I do not even allow the strongest feelings to influence my intellectual opinion in the least ». The conclusion of the reasoning is of relentless hardness: «As far as democracy is concerned, I don’t find much to add to what I said previously. The whole matter is an illusion, just like the “romantic love”, only that it is the illusion of the twentieth century instead of the nineteenth. It is the mere divinization of the ethical abstraction of “justice”, plus the rough modernist attachment to the quantity opposed to quality. If they make a cardinal principle, it can only damage civilization and yet, as I said before, I do not let my opinion interfer with the evaluation of the situation ».
And again: “It is an evil that is growing inexorably and it is likely that it will spread to reduce our culture to a barely bearable level for a civil being-unless, for a fortuitous case, an intellectual-aesthetic aristocracy counter-movement can he knows how to coexist with a state of socio-political democracy. The socio-political future of the United States is to be dominated by vast economic interests consecrated to ideals of material profit, activities without purpose and physical comfort; interests controlled by cunning, insensitive and rarely educated authorities, recruited in the midst of a pack approved through a competition of sharp acumen and practical cunning, a struggle for the position and power that will eliminate the truth and the beauty as an objective, to replace them with the fort, the huge and the mechanically effective. I would detect to have descendants who live in such a barbarism, a barbarism so tragically different from the old civilization of New England and Virginia that belongs by right to this land. Thank God I am the last of my family: Requiescamus in peace! ». Faced with the horror of the world, any other horror is secondary, and even life becomes a disease to be eradicated.
