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Anyone with aesthetic sense doesn't find much to savour in modern architecture. The point I made in 'Auden' (below) applies here too: the modernists have cut themselves off from tradition in the name of originality and free expression and ended up creating a new dogma, which is far more narrow-minded and far uglier in its effects than the old standards ever were. Michael Totten's post is right on (and with a good discussion in the comments box).
In recent times I've come to think that Larkin's work represents the highest achievement of English poetry in the twentieth century. But that's a provisional and reluctant conclusion. Eliot and Auden both have strong claims, Eliot mainly for Four Quartets. Even if one didn't know his biography one could tell that 4Q was a case of per aspera ad astra.
But Auden's achievement was in some ways just as great. His later stuff is more to my taste than the earlier, but the early poems had some fine moments. A lot of it was a (necessarily) veiled exploration of the forbidden passion, the love that dared not speak its name, and yet at the same time it managed to be universal, as in 'Death's Echo':
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The second-best is a formal order,
The dance's pattern; dance while you can.
Dance, dance for the figure is easy,
The tune is catching and will not stop;
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
After the war his characteristic mood changed, partly because he'd learned, like the rest of us, just how low man could sink, and partly also, presumably, because his own passions were cooling. He became very classical, and used the style to express a sense of apocalypse - suited to an age of anxiety. This could either be fairly restrained, as in 'Bucolics: II, Woods':
A small grove massacred to the last ash,
An oak with heart-rot, give away the show;
This great society is going smash;
They cannot fool us with how fast they go,
How much they cost each other and the gods!
A culture is no better than its woods.
Or flat-out horrified, as in 'The Shield of Achilles' - hard to know which bit of it to quote:
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
All of which may make him particularly relevant to our times. It would be useful to have him now, a real poet who could put our griefs into verse and help us feel less scared: he was a good bloke at heart and would have wanted to help. The current crop of poets seem to have no such concerns, or if they have they've separated themselves so far from tradition (and called doing so liberation which was in fact amputation) that they have no way of expressing them in a way that is both intelligible and humane.
‘Of course John Kerry’s an awful candidate. He’s a Democrat!’ Michael Moore can be quite funny when he remembers he’s a comedian. It’s a common dream of left-wing comics that they can or should make a Serious Political Contribution. Rory Bremner and Mark Thomas, who are both quite capable of being funny, have fallen prey to the same delusion. But that’s not what I came here to talk about.
Even a mindless reactionary like me finds some lefty culture worthwhile. Germaine Greer is a daffy moonbat whose political ideas never progressed beyond 1968, but The Female Eunuch is well written, even if I disagree with virtually all of it. Furthermore her little book on Shakespeare is the best short introduction to the Man, showing what she’s capable of when she knows what she’s talking about. Similarly Raymond Williams was a hardcore Marxist who thought Margaret Thatcher was a bigger enemy of civilisation than Pol Pot, but he wrote one novel well worth reading, Border Country. (Best of all might have been ‘Going, going’, by Philip Larkin, which could almost be a left-wing poem in its denunciations of the grinning capitalist polluters, except that he gives the game away by not blaming the System but by blaming us. We are the kids ‘screaming for more’, the ones inventing excuses to pretend our greed is need.)
Explicitly Leftish music can also be the genuine article, such as some of Tracy Chapman’s or Joni Mitchell’s heartfelt, honestly naïve songs. The Men They Couldn’t Hang once did a jolly little song called ‘Colours’ on their album Waiting for Bonaparte about the naval mutinies of 1797. ('Jacobean' should be 'Jacobin' on the site linked to.) It doesn't exactly mince its words, but it's a fine tune. (The mutinies of 1797 are a good instance of the policy of crush and concede, by the way.)
Pete Atkin’s album A King at Nightfall has some songs on it which are pretty clearly left-oriented, the better of the two being ‘Carnations on the Roof’. That has “he was used and discarded in a game he didn’t own”, a strong line in anyone’s money, even if you favour chaining the workers to their machines and forcing them to eat gravel.
Latest Church of England wheeze is to encourage religious devotion with a reward of chocolate.
Shame Saint Augustine or Saint Francis never thought of that, really, just think how much more successful they could have been...
Where do these spectacularly naff ideas keep coming from? There must be a machine in Lambeth Palace or somewhere like that, the Naffomatic, which randomly associates ideas that the Church thinks of as cool and comes out with a new initiative every few months. In this case, the chocolate is Fair Trade. A worthy cause (I think, though as with most such nice-sounding initiatives it's probably economically illiterate), but folk just don't go to church to be told what to think about international trade, Iraq, Chechnya and foxhunting. Ever since the clergy became the Liberal Democrat party at prayer that's what we've been getting, and that is a major reason, I think, why the decline in church attendance has been so sharp. We can get sentimental warmed-over half-understood ideas on those subjects from the BBC, after all.
In fact, we go to hear the message of love and hope, what a cynic might call popular opium. The value of the sacred space that a congregation creates in its special building is precisely that for an hour the world can be left behind and the heart can respond freely: we can remove our quotidian armour. Is that so hard to understand? If we have hearts we will know what to do once we leave the church in order to try to make the world better: we are adults and can work it out for ourselves. 'Freely have you received, freely give.' We don't need detailed instructions on what to get from Sainsbury's.
to shut up about current affairs, but these two strong men from the ends of the earth deserve at least a link.
If Allawi isn't the genuine article, then he's doing a very good job of imitation.
And as for Norm, he would have been given his own Guardian column ages ago if they had any sense.
Via Damian, a fine review of what looks like a remarkable book. My bits are in italics:
'The author of Icarus Fallen is Chantal Delsol, a professor of philosophy at the Université de Marne-la-Vallée near Paris. Her thesis here is that man has become something of a Sisyphus (my metaphor, not hers). Having pushed the rock of his utopian dreams to the top of the hill, he has had it roll back down over him. The nightmarish ideologies of Nazism and communism, as well as the lesser sins of consumerism and the innumerable other –isms of the 20th century, have all failed to bring happiness. But the longing for utopia still prevails. And unlike previous generations, who lived through wars and depressions and were on close terms with death, modern man has attempted to cocoon himself in a nest of technological and physical comfort. Thus he is appalled when faced with a grim reality: despite all our efforts, human nature has not changed. Tragedy is still a part of life.'
How about this as a credo:
1. Life is short.
2. There are gods out to get you.
3. They will succeed sooner or later.
4. People are stupid.
5. Only loving something outside yourself brings meaning.
'Icarus Fallen does not name names; Delsol assumes that the reader will recognize the ubiquity in our culture of what she calls “the clandestine ideology of our time.” There is no need to finger individuals, she asserts, when the theology of political correctness is in the very air we breathe. It is its own orthodoxy, with a specific idea of what man is—a person cut off from and not obligated to any tradition from the past, someone who can pursue any kind of happiness as long as it does not affect others, a man whose entire concept of self-actualization is based on ever-expanding rights. To say otherwise is heresy. “In our societies,” she writes, “there are a certain number of political, moral and other opinions that the individual contests at the point of being marginalized.” One must be for “the equal representation of both sexes in all spheres of power.” We must consider delinquency the result of poverty. We must “hate all moral order …[we] must equate the Catholic Church with the Inquisition, but never equate communism with its gulags.” The virtuous are to be suspect, because “invariably they must be disguising hypocritical vices.” The clandestine ideology “aims to equalize the value of all behavior.”'
Mentioning the gulags is a red herring in this context. It doesn’t add to the argument, strong enough by itself, which is that Catholic apologists, for instance, are presumed guilty until, by making the right ritual noises, they prove themselves innocent, whereas atheism is treated as though it were a brave and controversial position.
Having said that, it’s time to make some ritual noises:
'Delsol is no ideologue roughly demanding that we blindly return to the old ways, embracing them without question. She defends, for example, the fear of certainty as largely reasonable, at least when based on the fact that certainties about what constitutes the truth have in the past led to pogroms, inquisitions, and even the Holocaust. Yet she admits that man by his very nature hunts for truth and meaning, for something he is willing to die for. Thus we find ourselves stuck: by nature we long for what Delsol calls “reference points” that direct us towards absolute verities, yet by ideology we are suspect of anything that can provide the answers.'
The Golden Rule isn’t called Golden for nothing. ‘Do as you would be done by’ – it’s a Confucian as well as Christian rule, so there’s a prima facie case for thinking it’s as good a universal rule as we’re likely to find. It also provides a strong vaccination against imposing a narrow set of beliefs by means of stake, whip, show trial and concentration camp. Such a rule, if sincerely felt, renders absolute faiths safe rather than poisonous. In fact a Christian should have stronger feelings against Torquemada than an atheist. To the atheist, the Inquisitor is merely a deadly enemy: to Christians, a traitor.
Another huge quote coming up, but I can’t cut anything without losing the thread:
'“Dominated by emotion,” she writes, “[O]ur era overflows with treacly sentiment. It is almost as if the feelings that were once associated with a certain type of piety have contaminated the whole population …. Seeking the good while remaining indifferent to the truth gives rise to a morality of sentimentality. Reactive judgment, deprived of thoughtful reflection, engenders fanatical emotion and an absolute priority of feeling over thought. In fact, it is not actually a question of sentiment, since sentiment supposes a historical and rationally consistent background. We are dealing here less with a reaction of the heart than a gut reaction.
'Anyone who recalls the controversy over “The Passion of the Christ” knows exactly what Delsol is talking about. Yet Icarus Fallen has a flaw. It is the same one that afflicted the late, brilliant Christopher Lasch, whose style and philosophy are so similar to Delsol’s: like Lasch, she lacks answers. Delsol and Lasch diagnose modern ills with preternatural precision, yet both are reluctant, or unable, to prescribe a cure. Towards the end of his life Lasch seemed at last to find an answer, or at least a system that embraced man’s fallen nature and the danger of utopian fantasies, in Christianity—at least if his last book, The Revolt of the Elites, is an example. At the end of that book Lasch made an observation that Delsol echoes time and again in Icarus Fallen: “the key to happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy.”'
Just last weekend, as I wandered through the Warwickshire countryside, I fell to musing on just this point, or rather on the marring of the American Constitution by that odious phrase ‘the pursuit of happiness’. Sheer late-Enlightenment sentimental hogwash: John Locke’s theory was that the fundamental rights were ‘life, liberty and estate’, what we would nowadays call private property. But then Locke lived at the end of the seventeenth century, right at the start of the Enlightenment, before Rousseau and his ilk came along with their drivelling sentimentality. Happiness has nothing to do with politics. The damage done to America’s national psyche (to turn metaphysical for a moment) by that phrase must have been huge. The implication of the phrase is that acquiring private property is necessary to happiness, or contentment – true up to a point –but it can easily be misunderstood to mean that acquisition is sufficient to happiness. No wonder California is awash with head-shrinkers.
To resume the review where we left off:
'The idea (i.e. of the need for renunciation – GSTQ) points to a Christian acceptance of limits and the notion that, as Lasch wrote, “human happiness may not be the be-all and end-all of God’s plan.” We must, in effect, rein ourselves in. We must realize that we are human, that the reality of death hangs over every life, and that if we deny these things and attempt to achieve utopia by continually expanding rights and accumulating more and more toys we will warp and distort the very humanity we ostensibly are trying to achieve.
'Delsol does not go as far as Lasch and, regrettably, does not provide concrete proposals at all Her prescription for what vexes us is a call for “a new anthropology,” which is never very clearly defined, and the acceptance of our human limits—limits that we must admit will never change. (When asked to summarize the thesis of his massive work, Christopher Lasch answered, “limits and hope.”)'
My own turn from know-it-all atheism to critical endorsement of Christianity took a long time but at every stage I found myself drawn further by a realisation that the Christian world-view had more intellectual rigour and emotional depth than any other. It has two big advantages over any other system of thought (two that come immediately to mind: there are probably others).
First, it does not seek to encourage illusions about human nature. What is important is what is inside us; we are not capable of perfection by our own efforts, whether individual or collective (we can improve, but that might take a huge effort for a tiny step); we are here to grow in wisdom and love, but don’t assume that either or both will make you happy – for some of us, such growth leads to be nailed to trees by people who find growing scary. Because human nature has twisted roots. Second, it actually gives us some indications for how we are to live in a practical way. There is no more practical and down-to-earth system of thought than Christianity. Mystical union with the Godhead – absolutely, if you can receive it. But don’t let such blessings make you forget that it’s your turn to wash up.
A few years ago NASA came up with a new slogan for its missions: ‘faster, better, cheaper’. This followed some embarrassing failures and scandals: spacecraft that crashed, missed their targets or went dead in transit, costing millions. The slogan was meant to reflect the improvements that would be achieved by better management and planning.
NASA workers had their own version of the slogan: ‘faster, better, cheaper – pick two’. Anyone with any understanding of engineering problems (i.e. anyone except most management consultants and accountants) would know that a project which is fast and cheap will be shoddy. A project delivered quickly to high quality will cost a lot. And a economical space mission that actually gets to its objective will likely take a long time, because one of the key limiting factors is fuel: the Galileo probe, for instance, went to Jupiter via Venus: it travelled towards the Sun before heading towards the distant, frozen giant.
One could say that restaurants display similar characteristics, though it is rare to find one which serves good food quickly at any price.
Armed forces typically face similar problems. We expect them to deliver victory (1) at negligible cost to themselves (2) and in a humane manner (3). Which means that no commander is ever going to be able to satisfy everyone. Faced with a city defended by a determined enemy, a commander has the choice of not attacking at all (failing test 1), suffering hugely in street fighting (failing test 2) or levelling the place with stand-off weapons (failing test 3).
The rule applies quite widely. Welfare benefits are meant to protect the poor from destitution. But governments and electorates also expect them to be simple to administer (avoiding the need for large bureaucracies) and cheap to fund.
Pick two. Generous, flat-rate or non-means-tested benefits – universal basic income schemes, for instance - would (probably) help the poor and are easy to run but would cost more than the hardworking taxpayer would tolerate. (Such systems do exist – they have something of the sort in Germany, for instance – but are looking unsustainable.) Stingy flat-rate benefits would also be simple and quite cheap but would cause a public outcry even from quite conservative folk over the horror stories of mass deprivation and injustice that would result. So in the end we opt for targeted benefits, which relieve the worst poverty and don’t cost too much – around 15% of GDP, say – but turn the system into a mind-boggling labyrinth.
Isaiah Berlin would call this the incommensurability of goods. It is the way of things, and the only safe reaction to anyone – opposition politicians, journalists, academics – who claim or imply that they know how to deliver it all is to treat them like snake-oil salesmen. They’re either deceitful rogues or, possibly worse, sincere fools. Lower your expectations: as a general rule, governments should be considered to be doing a tolerable job so long as they’re not the sort who might actively try to kill you.
Three-quarters of the way down the track there is a path that branches off to the left, leading up into a cluster of set-aside meadows. To the right there is a new housing estate.
The meadows might have been there for centuries. The first meadow that one passes into on that side-path was certainly there a decade ago, and today abounds with the species that are common in the area: hawthorn hedgerows overgrown with bramble and dog roses, studded with ash and oak trees. Spiders and ladybirds and bees bustle through the grasses and clover and dandelions. But if you’d stood there four years ago you’d have been underneath thousands of tons of rubble and earth. That first meadow contained a spoil heap from the opencast mine that was where the housing estate now is. The views from the top were pretty good.
So a meadow can certainly recover from having a spoil heap on top of it. Drive nature out with a pitch-fork, she will get in again: so long, that is, as you play by the rules. We don’t always nowadays.
The track used to be a railway, a spur off the line that ran (and still runs) between two of the Midlands’ larger cities. It served the old mine – not the opencast, which was only opened up for a couple of years at the end of the nineties. Before that the site was derelict industrial land. But the old mine went decades ago and the so did the spur line. An enlightened local council turned it into a good footpath for the inhabitants of the local housing estates, some of which denizens then turned parts of it into a tip for burnt-out motorcycles plus a lot of more mundane litter. But you have to expect that sort of thing if you go round being enlightened. A pond of sorts has emerged at one point, now colonised by frogs and sticklebacks who don’t seem to mind the bits of broken furniture they share their immediate environment with.
‘History teaches us only that no-one ever learnt anything from history.’ Possibly, George: I think that conclusion’s too optimistic. Klio has taught me that the default settings of human society are xenophobia, tyranny and superstition, and that only rarely have human communities made partial escapes from any of them. Such communities are in rebellion against nature, and cannot win. But they shed a fine light down the ages.
A total escape from the default settings is probably neither possible nor desirable. One can argue the issue more than one way: is the opposite of xenophobia tolerance or self-hatred? If one says that the opposite of xenophobia is tolerance, that leaves no room on the hate-spectrum for self-hatred, a feeling, or disposition, that we know exists. Of course one might suggest that xenophobia and self-hatred are closely related, two sides of the same coin: is it possible to hate others without hating ourselves, at some level? This is certainly a plausible position in spiritual terms.
These considerations will be limited by an Aristotelian framework: I want to suggest that the opposite of one vice is another vice and that virtue lies midway. If Aristotle drives you up the wall feel free to stop reading.
Assuming, then, that the opposite of xenophobia is self-hatred, the midpoint is a cosmopolitan patriotism: the state of mind in which one hates neither oneself or others, but manages to respect and value others while feeling a particular loyalty to one’s home.
Similarly, the opposite of tyranny is anarchy, the virtuous middle being accountable government. The opposite of superstition – believing things regardless of evidence or logic- is cynicism, a refusal to believe in anything.
Consider the ancient Athenians. For a brief space, a century and a half, they achieved all three, opening their borders to the metics, creating a democracy, and fostering the growth of rationalist philosophy. They remained patriotic – indeed they failed to free themselves sufficiently from xenophobia, as one can see from reading Thucydides. Nor did they achieve a properly accountable government – the absence of stabilising intermediate corporations left Athenian policy dangerously unpredictable and subject to the tyranny of the majority. Most of all, they did not manage to free themselves sufficiently from superstition, regardless of all the headlines about Socrates and Plato. The Sicilian Expedition came to grief partly because of a commander’s superstitious dread of a lunar eclipse. The dread of ritual pollution was a force powerful enough to drive the plays of Sophocles. Socrates himself insisted on making a sacrifice to the god Aesculapius in his last hour. The Athenian escape from superstition was very limited in time, degree and numbers.
Yet even this partial achievement of escape from the default settings can move us today: it shines in the ancient world as an example of what might be.
Later, the English achieved the same thing. But if we’ve done better than the Athenians we’ve had some mighty helpers. The universalism of Christian ethics is a powerful corrective to xenophobia: the Athenians could only appeal to reason – a much weaker regulative ideal. Germanic customary law provided (and provides) a much better institutional foundation for accountable government than Kleisthenes could. And the Athenians themselves provided the intellectual toolkit which rendered the English less susceptible than most to superstition – and if that seems like a questionable assertion, Robert Darnton’s book The Great Cat Massacre might be a useful corrective.
But the rebellion had to cross the sea to find its fulfilment in a community that encompassed a mixture of peoples greater than any that Britain could contain. The Native Americans paid the price – a hideous price - for an extraordinary novus ordo seclorum. Bill Whittle, in this essay, described Americans as the Rebels. His frame of reference was Star Wars, but he was actually right: America is a rebellion – a permanent revolution, if you will – against the way things are. It should scarcely need demonstrating that its patriotism is cosmopolitan: there is not a nation in the world which has not sent people to wrap themselves in Old Glory.
Its government is probably as accountable as the government of any extensive territory could be. Incidentally, talk of Americans believing that only their form of democracy is legitimate is wide of the mark: Americans have no difficulty recognising other nations as democratic even if they are monarchies as opposed to republics, even if they use proportional representation instead of first-past-the-post, even if they have an unwritten constitution as opposed to a written one. There is plenty of scope for diversity within the American political model: the essence of that model is accountability. The rest is detail.
As for rationality, America’s escape from superstition has gone as far as most humans can cope with: there is a certain quantum of irrationalism that will always be expressed in any community. Gun fetishism, evangelism and a belief in the objectivity of mainstream media are not the most harmful forms of irrationalism that a country can have.
It can’t last, of course. The default settings will reassert themselves. This is why Bill Whittle’s desire for endless triumph is basically noble but tragic: it won’t happen, though I sympathise greatly with the wish. (After America is gone most of those people who resent American power will wish for it back.) America’s power will wane, all earthly powers do, and new powers will arise who will make the same old-new appeal to the monsters from the id. America’s arche might last another century, or two at most. And the memory – of a glittering, free, brilliant cosmopolis - will endure through the ages. Just like Athens.
I'm off, service resumes Monday.
