Is Jaspers Beer Good for You?: Mass Society and Counter Culture in Herbert's 'Santaroga Barrier'
That we are in for a portentious rendering of great issues in philosophy is signaled at the outset [of Santaroga Barrier] by the name of the hero, Dr. Gilbert Dasein. Dasein in German means "being there" and is the key concept of existential thinking in the philosophy of Karl Jaspers, whose own name figures in the drug with which the townsmen of Santaroga infuse their beer, cheese, and other foods.
Karl Jaspers … is associated with a number of critics of modern society who together have built what is probably the most influential social theory of our day: the theory of mass society…. [They] are concerned less with the general conditions of freedom in society than with the freedom of those persons who possess the intelligence to cultivate a sense of the individual self over and above the dim self-awareness of mass man. The criticism of mass society brought to bear by Karl Jaspers is above all an aristocratic critique. Therein lies the source of his appeal: the defense of creative individuality. (p. 160)
The decline of cultural standards in order to meet the consensus needs of the classless multitudes of average people has brought about a crisis of individual consciousness…. In the absence of a cultured elite born or educated to command, true leadership is replaced by organization men who strive for position and power with an opportunistic cunning that stands in the way of responsibility for one's actions, with the result that true selfhood is denied to others as well; for where power depends on the mobilization of popular appetites in politics and business, leadership cannot tolerate individuality, reason or self-expression in the target population. It is a world of mass mediocrity, from top to bottom. Given this cultural decline, is the realization of the self still a possibility?
To that question the inhabitants of Santaroga, a small town in California, answer yes. They have erected a barrier against mass society behind which the personal values of their counter-culture may flourish. But their unanimity of purpose is mediated by a drug, Jaspers, whose pernicious effects result in the heightening of empathy and the awareness of others at the expense of self-awareness…. But ironically, in their reliance on the drug Jaspers to restore a traditional sense of community which the individual may imbue with his selfhood, they too are reduced to a mindless mass of functional parts….
In the course of finding an answer to [the question of why Santarogans won't trade with outsiders], Dr. Dasein himself [an outside investigator] becomes a Santarogan. (p. 161)
In tracing the hero's philosophical progress, Frank Herbert is faithful to the essential pessimism of Karl Jaspers' message: that people in general lack the capacity to resist deception; that both the manipulators and the manipulated in mass society lack the will to see reality as it is actually constituted. And the reality is human mendacity; people are not, in fact, honest or kind. The discovery that life among dishonest men is not worth living is the discovery made by the Santarogans, and Dr. Dasein joins with them in creating a community of like minds. The stress in the philosophy of Karl Jaspers is the dependence of the self upon social and linguistic interaction. The Santarogans are living examples of Jaspers' belief that we humans are what we are only through a community of mutually conscious understandings, that truth is communicability.
The fallacy that makes Santaroga a black utopia is that it is a community of vital sympathies merely, minus the freedom to reject the communications of one's fellows in favor of the promptings from an inner source. This enforced awareness of others, mediated by the drug Jaspers, makes for a caricature of everything Karl Jaspers the philosopher ever stood for…. It is all group awareness and no individual freedom. In fact, the Santarogans are not aware individually that their collective will communicates hostility to outsiders. They murdered a number of outside investigators but actually believe these deaths resulted from unfortunate accidents….
The first thing that Dasein notes about Santaroga, when it is his turn to investigate it, is its conservatism; it resists change.
[Far] from pioneering an exportable counter-culture against mass society, as it believes it is doing, the rest of the world is moving away from it. (p. 162)
In the end, Dasein understands the Santarogans so well that he becomes one of them. But not before he is addicted to Jaspers for life when he ingests a massive dose of the drug abstracted from a wheel of Jaspers cheese…. Up until this time he had escaped unharmed from all attempts to murder him…. The collective will to kill him finally almost succeeds in the person of Jenny, but like the others she lacks any individual knowledge of this; Dasein understands and forgives her. After his conversion, he himself murders Dr. Selador, a psychiatrist colleague, in the same unconscious manner. (p. 164)
[The] unconscious communication of hatred for outsiders is Santaroga's version of raw, ungoverned power; the Santarogans take Jaspers as their "Consciousness Fuel,"… but it fuels a sense of communal awareness at the total expense of individual awareness…. [With] his engagement to Jenny, Dasein leaves behind all such attempts to intellectualize his experience:
He settled his mind firmly then onto thoughts of the home Jenny had described, pictured himself carrying her across the threshold—his wife. There'd be presents: Jaspers from 'the gang,' furniture … Santaroga took care of its own.
It'll be a beautiful life, he thought. Beautiful … beautiful … beautiful….
These concluding words are meant to be ironic; the Santarogan utopia turns out to be a totalitarian utopia, in which men are domesticated for community life at the sacrifice of their souls. Like all utopian goals, those of Santaroga are beyond human reach—they intended nothing less than to overcome the sum of human alienation caused by the rise of modern civilization. But the result was a replication of the worst feature of mass society—"all people … everywhere alike." In addition, there were a number of individuals who did not respond well to the drug; it turned them into nullities, moronic rejects who were chained to the production lines of Santaroga's cheese industry. For the others, all that remains in place of a spiritually informed existence is a collectivity of primal selves. (p. 165)
In conclusion, I believe that Frank Herbert's presentation of Santaroga as a black utopia is the means by which he criticizes the theory of mass society itself and its romantic hostility to the modern world. Everyone is against atomism and for organic living, but if we substitute "totalitarian" for "organic" and "individualistic" for "atomistic," the argument is turned around. The picture of mass society as debauched by concessions to popular taste is overdrawn. And if it be granted that mass society is superficial in personal relations, utilitarian, competitive, acquisitive and mobile, the good side must also be shown—the right to privacy, the free choice of occupation and friends, social status on the basis of merit not pedigree, a plurality of norms and standards rather than monopolistic control by a single dominant group.
For mass society, Dr. counter-culture prescribes Jaspers beer and cheese. Once again, the cure is worse than the disease. (pp. 166-67)
Leon E. Stover, "Is Jaspers Beer Good for You?: Mass Society and Counter Culture in Herbert's 'Santaroga Barrier'," in Extrapolation (copyright 1976 by Thomas D. and Alice S. Clareson), May, 1976, pp. 160-67.
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