This entire letter must be read to appreciate Lovecraft’s admirable reconcilation of Einstein and materialism. I have no doubt that he derived much of his data from contemporary literature on the subject—perhaps in the form of magazine or newspaper articles— but the vigour of his writing argues for a reasoned synthesis that is surely his own.
Lovecraft had a little more difficulty with quantum theory, which affects Elliot’s first principle, and which Lovecraft seems to have absorbed around this time. Quantum theory asserts that the action of certain sub-atomic particles is inherently random, so that we can only establish statistical averages of how a given reaction will turn out. Lovecraft addresses quantum theory significantly, to my knowledge, only once in his correspondence—in a letter to Long in late 1930:
What most physicists take the quantum theory, at present, to mean, is not that any cosmic uncertainty exists as to which of several courses a given reaction will take; but that in certain instances no conceivable channel of information can ever tell human beings which courses will be taken, or by what exact course a certain observed result came about.5
It is clear from this that Lovecraft is merely repeating the views of experts. The point he is trying to establish is that the ‘uncertainty’ of quantum theory is not ontological but epistemological; that it is only our inability (an inherent inability, not merely some deficiency in our sense-perception or general reasoning capacity) to predict the behaviour of sub-atomic particles that results in uncertainty. This conclusion—although accepted by Einstein in his celebrated dictum ‘God does not play dice with the cosmos’—appears to be wrong. Bertrand Russell has declared that the ‘absence of complete determinism is not due to any incompleteness in the theory, but is a genuine characteristic of small-scale occurrences’;6 although he goes on to say that atomic and molecular reactions are still largely deterministic.
And yet, in the late 1920s and early 1930s quantum theory was hailed as shattering the first of Elliot’s materialistic principles—the uniformity of law—just as relativity was thought to have shattered, or at least qualified, the second and third. We now know—in so far as we really know the ultimate ramifications of quantum theory— that the uniformity of law is itself only qualified, and perhaps not even in a way that has any philosophical significance. The relation between quantum theory and, say, the possibility of free will is anything but clear, and there is as yet no reason to carry the effects of quantum theory into the behaviour of macrocosmic phenomena.
Some of the most bracing pages in Lovecraft’s letters of this period deal with his emphatic assertion of atheism against those of his colleagues (especially Frank Long) who felt that the ‘uncertainty’ revealed by modern astrophysics left room for the recrudescence of conventional religious belief. Lovecraft was well aware that he was living in a time of both social and intellectual ferment; but he had nothing but contempt for those thinkers who were using the relativity and quantum theories to resurrect old-time belief:
Although these new turns of science don’t really mean a thing in relation to the myth of cosmic consciousness and teleology, a new brood of despairing and horrified moderns is seizing on the doubt of all positive knowledge which they imply; and is deducing therefrom that, since nothing is true, therefore anything can be true … whence one may invent or revive any sort of mythology that fancy or nostalgia or desperation may dictate, and defy anyone to prove that it isn’t ‘emotionally’ true—whatever that means. This sickly, decadent neomysticism—a protest not only against machine materialism but against pure science with its destruction of the mystery and dignity of human emotion and experience —will be the dominant creed of middle twentieth centuries aesthetes.7
Lovecraft’s later ethics is in many ways a direct outgrowth of his metaphysics, and it is also intimately connected with his evolving social and political views. The question for Lovecraft was: how to conduct oneself with the realization that the human race was an insignificant atom in the vast realms of the cosmos? One solution was to adopt the perspective of a sort of bland cosmic spectator upon the human race. But this is not a very useful yardstick for actual behaviour, and Lovecraft had to devise some system of conduct, at least for himself, that might be consistent with cosmicism. It is only at this time that he came to espouse an aesthetic retention of tradition as a bulwark against the potential nihilism of his metaphysics. This view had no doubt been evolving unconsciously for many years, but it becomes explicit only now; but in so doing, Lovecraft leaves himself open to criticism at several points.
Throughout his life Lovecraft wavered between (validly) recommending tradition for himself and (invalidly) recommending it for everyone. In 1928 he had properly asserted the relativity of values (the only thing possible in a universe that has no governing deity): ‘Value is wholly relative, and the very idea of such a thing as meaning postulates a symmetrical relation to something else. No one thing, cosmically speaking, can be either good or evil, beautiful or unbeautiful; for entity is simply entity.’8
All this is unexceptionable, and yet it gradually gives way to a much less defensible view: that, given the relativity of values, the only true anchor of fixity is tradition—specifically the racial and cultural tradition out of which each person grows. The matter crops up in a discussion with Morton, who appears to have questioned why Lovecraft was so passionately concerned about the preservation of Western civilization when he believed in a purposeless cosmos:
It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which gave us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is—since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever.9
That ‘we’ is very ominous. Lovecraft seems unaware that it is only those, like himself, in whom the sense of tradition has been strongly ingrained who will clutch at tradition—racial, cultural, political, and aesthetic—as the only bulwark against nihilism.
It should now be clear not only why Lovecraft clung to tradition so firmly but why he so ardently sought to preserve his civilization against onslaughts from all sides—from foreigners, from the rising tide of mechanization, and even from radical aesthetic movements. As the 1920s progressed, Lovecraft began to sense that the greatest foe to tradition was the machine culture. His views on the subject are by no means original to him, but his remarks are both incisive and compelling. Two books powerfully affected Lovecraft’s thinking on these matters, although he could say with justice that he had arrived at least nebulously at the same fundamental conceptions prior to reading them. They were Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–22); translated in two volumes in 1926 and 1928) and Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Modern Temper (1929). Lovecraft read the first volume of Spengler (he never read the second, so far as I can tell) in the spring of 1927, and seems to have read Krutch no later than the fall of 1929.