    18

    Scapegoats and Sexual Hysteria

    The social climb--or fall--of a superorganism radically redecorates the

    psychic interior of the individuals who form its constituent parts.  Being

    bounced from one rung to another reshapes personal emotions, warps the

    lenses of perception, and twists the course of behavior.  In the next few

    chapters, we'll dig into a few of the more peculiar consequences for the world

    in which we live in today.

    Case number one: when the pecking order status of a national

    superorganism slides, a frustrated populace looks for someone to blame...

    preferably a character located conveniently close to home.  A declining

    Victorian England seized on Oscar Wilde.

    Oscar Wilde was perhaps the most dazzling literary genius of his day.

    His plays, short stories, fairy tales and essays scintillated.  His wit was

    exquisite, his cynicism startling.  The frenzy that led to Wilde's imprisonment

    all began with a book.

    It was 1893 when Max Nordau published Degeneration.  England's

    Great Depression had been dragging on for twenty years.32  The island

    kingdom which had led the world into brave new technologies at the turn of

    the 19th century was becoming a technological and industrial backwater.

    The English knew they were in trouble, but they didn't know why.

    Then Max Nordau uncovered the real cause.  The culprits behind Britain's

    fall?  Modern philosophy, modern art and modern novels.  As historian

    Barbara Tuchman puts it in The Proud Tower,

    Through six hundred pages of mounting hysteria, he [Max Nordau]

    traced the decay lurking impartially in the realism of Zola, the symbolism of

    Mallarmé, the mysticism of Maeterlinck, in Wagner's music, Ibsen's dramas,

    Manet's pictures, Tolstoy's novels, Nietzsche's philosophy, Dr. Jaeger's

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