The Dark Mountain Rises

I’d like before the world is ripe

to make men cry for what they are

once and for all so that

they never cry again

and this old top

stops spinning –

for then we can begin. . .

[from Where Babylon Ends by Nathaniel Tarn]

A Cautionary Tale

The only sounds that Adam could hear were the cries of the red kites and buzzards as they searched for carrion. That and the sloshing of water everywhere. As he stepped onto an iron girder he squeezed the water from his dirty trouser legs.

He wasn’t sure whether there were any other living humans as he clambered over what had once been an ocean-going cruise liner. The aquatic monstrosity was now lying virtually upside down in the middle of the river Tyne. Adam thought he might be able to find something edible if he could find an entry point.

It seemed odd to Adam that he had only seen a few rotting bodies during his hand to mouth existence. Maybe the profusion of kites and buzzards had cleared the high ground of many of the corpses. On second thoughts Adam knew that this was not an adequate explanation; if it had been he would have seen plenty of skeletal remains on higher ground. A much more likely explanation was that the majority of the population had been washed out to sea, or had simply sunk beneath the water which was now enveloping what had once been the Newcastle and Gateshead city centres.

He was now standing on firm ‘ground’ – or rather, on the ship’s belly which lay diagonally a good three or four metres above the polluted water. He had to use his hands to maintain balance as he edged towards a broken window. Once inside the hulk he pulled on his mask and began to explore the drowned leviathan. Even with the mask on he could smell the familiar bouquet of death. Bloated bodies, looking like shoals of puffer fish, floated just inches below the surface of the water.

Greta Thunberg tells us to be scared: T.S.Eliot said ‘mankind cannot bear too much reality: Gurdjieff said we are automata; we live like sleepwalkers and that planet Earth is a far outpost in the galaxy, populated by psychotic beings (so did Douglas Adams); Eckhart Tolle says many of us are living ‘unconscious lives.’ David Attenborough appears on countless television programmes warning us about species extinction and climate catastrophe; Gandhi said there was enough produce on the planet for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed; William Blake said we are blind, that the fool sees not the same tree as the wise person and that heaven is in a wild flower; Extinction Rebellion disrupts city life; Friday School Protests become global, and in 2008 a project called Dark Mountain launches its Manifesto. Here are some quotes from it:

The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature. The first tells us that we are destined for greatness; the second tells us that greatness is cost-free. Each is intimately bound up with the other. Both tell us that we are apart from the world; that we began grunting in the primeval swamps, as a humble part of something called ‘nature’, which we have now triumphantly subdued. The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won. In this, our unique glory is contained.

The authors point out that thinkers have always been aware of the fragility of life and that ‘civilisation’ is skin deep. They quote Joseph Conrad and then this apt simile from Bertrand Russell:

Bertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad’s worldview, suggesting that the novelist ‘thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.’ What both Russell and Conrad were getting at was a simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.

It is tempting to quote more and more but I’ll leave it to readers to read the whole Manifesto online (it’s on the Dark Mountain website: https://dark-mountain.net/) I’ll just quote one more part:

We are the first generations born into a new and unprecedented age – the age of ecocide. To name it thus is not to presume the outcome, but simply to describe a process which is underway. The ground, the sea, the air, the elemental backdrops to our existence – all these our economics has taken for granted, to be used as a bottomless tip, endlessly able to dilute and disperse the tailings of our extraction, production, consumption. The sheer scale of the sky or the weight of a swollen river makes it hard to imagine that creatures as flimsy as you and I could do that much damage.

For those of us who can bear as much reality as is necessary, reading the Manifesto will confirm what we have been aware of all along. Other people may regard it as alarmist but this position is being shown to be based on wishful thinking and ignorance as the evidence of the human-caused destruction mounts each day.

First, we have to diagnose the problem. I would suggest the Manifesto does this clearly, radically and evidentially. Then we have to seek remedies. This seems straightforward doesn’t it?

(Actually, Dark Mountain’s approach is quite modest: it is primarily about the arts; that is, the project is about providing a platform for writers and artists as we head into the unknown.)

In this article, I simple want to address the predicament we find ourselves in now, more generally. It takes a pandemic to wake us up it seems. It has forced many of us to differentiate between the inessential and the essential. Do we really intend to carry on having two or three holidays abroad? How many businesses are benefiting humankind as opposed to destroying the environment or alienating human beings with their soul-destroying products? [Not to mention arms production and other life-destroying technology!]

The response to Covid has been global (is global) and has radically changed our lifestyles. This shows that governments, organisations and individuals can use the wonderful gift we have as humans – that is, we can get together to collectively use our brains to affect change and solve problems. (Obviously some countries have dealt with the pandemic much better than we in the UK have.) Notwithstanding the note of absolutism sounded by Dark Mountain, that of ecocide being an unprecedented challenge, it should be possible to turn the tide even at this late stage. Unfortunately, species extinction and climate catastrophe don’t seem to be as immediate challenges compared to Covid 19. They are more amorphous, less graspable than the pandemic. Which is ironic as climate change and habitat destruction could end up with the extinction of homo sapiens (I always think it ironic; this classification of us as ‘wise’).

I am not an economist but recently I saw a book with the title, The End of Capitalism. This idea that our political systems are becoming outmoded seems to be in the air. In my opinion, and that of the Manifesto authors, Capitalism as we have know it is the ultimate cause of our present predicament. With its crude credo of economic growth at all costs, it has raped the earth, caused ongoing species extinction, displaced whole populations, alienated us from each other (Marx was not alone in thinking this; there were also Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to name two other contemporary figures); caused climate change and even caused the various pandemics we have witnessed. (Would viruses jump from animal to human if we didn’t have hundreds of thousands -millions?- of human beings working in appalling sanitary conditions killing and handling animals, many of them wild animals?)

William Blake’s little drawing, I want, represents the ‘engine’ of the capitalist project and shows how consumerism feeds on itself. There is no end to ‘wanting more’ and we need to learn how to be content with less. This was the message of a lot of writers in the sixties such as E. F. Schumacher with his Small is Beautiful.

If capitalism is not replaced with something more equitable, more humane and more ecological it could be responsible for the ultimate extinction.

We can’t say we haven’t seen this coming; to the names of Conrad and Bertrand Russell could be added the following random selection:

William Wordsworth, H. G. Wells, Theodore Rosak, Krishnamurti, Eric Fromm, Henry David Thoreau, William Blake, Rachel Carson, Marjory Stoneman, Jane Goodall, Walt Whitman and Wendell Berry.

I am not so idealistic as to imagine capitalism will be dismantled tomorrow. I am thinking long term; fifty or a hundred years from now. If we survive that long I imagine capitalism will be viewed as a primitive system on a par with feudalism.

Societies cannot be transformed to become more humane and equitable without a concomitant transformation of consciousness. This may well be a subject of my future posts.

An Addendum to Ruskin: Didactic Art and Climate Warming.

To put Ruskin into context regarding the purpose of art, it has to be recognised that art has had a didactic purpose for thousands of years since the very origins of art. Prehistoric cave paintings almost certainly had a ceremonial or spiritual purpose. Some are in such dark inaccessible tunnels that they must have had a ritual meaning. [They were not ‘on show’ as in a public space.]

Religious art has always been made to communicate and promote the doctrines of the religion. On a more sinister note, totalitarian states have used art as propaganda.

The earliest Christian art is to be seen in the catacombs of Rome, dating from the third century. These are underground tombs where families buried their dead. There are over one hundred images of the ‘good shepherd’ in these catacombs; probably influenced by earlier Roman and Greek images. In the Christian tradition it is a symbol of protection in the afterlife.

Later on Christian art was made for cathedrals, churches, palaces, public spaces and private homes. And we mustn’t forget the rich tradition of Illuminated manuscripts. Not so well know is the fact that Illuminated manuscripts were also made to illustrate secular subjects, such as fables or medicinal cures; and there is even one illustrating a game of chess.

In the Mediaeval Period books were hand-made to prepare people for death. They were actually called The Art of Dying manuals! In them, the dying person had to look at pictures representing temptations and, each day, determine to overcome them in order for their souls to ascend to Heaven.

It is often said that Christian imagery in churches are ‘books for the illiterate.’ The origin of the idea, when the majority of the population was illiterate, goes back to Pope Gregory the Great (590 – 604). He wrote a letter to Bishop Serenus in which he says, ‘ What writing does for the literate, a picture does for the illiterate looking at it.’ and ‘Painted likenesses are made for the instruction of the ignorant so they may understand the stories and so learn what occurred.’

As Christianity developed elaborate altarpieces were constructed and painted for churches. They usually had side panels and predellas (a panel beneath the main picture-panel) so that the whole Christian narrative could be told by opening and closing certain panels on different occasions. Private homes would have smaller versions for private contemplation.

Buddhism, particularly Mahayana Buddhism, is rich in iconography. Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism has a large cast of Bodhisattvas, each representing a particular spiritual virtue such as compassion, wisdom or determination. Again, many Buddhists have altars in their homes with a Buddha statue as a central focus to aid meditation.

Let us return to the Ruskin quote. He does say that art is there to ‘please.’ so he isn’t saying all art should be didactic. However, he does say it should ‘exalt and refine.’ Now a quick look in my Oxford dictionary has this entry for ‘exalt.’ 1, praise or regard highly. 2. raise to a higher rank or position. 3. make noble in character; dignify. Now, one phrase which has characterised modernity is ‘the disenchantment of the world.’ [I forget who coined it] The idea is that with the ‘death of God’, and the moral vacuum left, the world has fragmented and art inevitably depicts the subsequent anxiety and alienation. All well and good; we can all respond to Munch’s Scream. However, the danger is that the status of the human being is diminished, we become cogs in an impersonal machine. To go back to that little word, ‘exalt’. One thing most of us will agree about is that we don’t dignify what it is to be human; we hardly ‘raise to a higher rank’ or ‘make noble’ our humanity. If we think of Tracy Emin’s Bed, for example, we can see that we ‘make ignoble’. Many artists glorify, or seem to celebrate our depravity; our various hatreds, greeds and delusions. Ruskin would despair if he returned to our times.

So, what am I suggesting? Is there a place in the twenty first century for a didactic art with a moral purpose? I definitely suggest that there might be. The challenge could hardly be greater. Annihilation of vast numbers of the global population through climate change. Can artists address this problem? Why not? There could even be a ‘re-enchantment of the world’ if such a movement went hand in hand with practical/political change.

Christianity managed to convey a unifying message with its millions of art works created throughout two millennia. Imagine if artists now united under a banner of ‘artists against climate catastrophe’ – how energising and positive such a project would be.

 

 

The Visitors

This piece is based on something that happened to my mother in her old age. This is a stressful time of the year for lots of people especially those who live alone. Our society is dysfuntional in so many ways; the increase in social isolation and the way the elderly are regarded are symptoms of a deep malaise.

 

When you find yourself automatically turning on the television for the six o’clock news, when you become aware once again of the dull throb in the left side of your head, when you stretch your right hand down to rub your aching thigh, when you decide it’s time to shuffle towards the kitchen and see what’s in the fridge, when you scrape off the morning’s coagulated porridge from the saucepan and empty it down the lavatory, when you slowly eat your solitary microwaved meal, when you return to your sofa and continue to watch the television, when you find yourself drifting off to sleep; you come to with a start – then suddenly you feel there is someone standing behind your sofa.

 

The visitors are here again. Although you are not sure if they are the same men as before, you think you recognise the taller one. He has a moustache and black hair. As you get up from the sofa the men turn to face you and edge round the furniture. The smaller of the two, the one with the shaved head, crosses the room to sit in a chair opposite the sofa. You feel agitated and find you cannot focus on the intruders sufficiently. The smaller of the two is speaking and his words sound loudly in your head. You look to see where the tall man is and cannot quite make out a figure in the darkness of the hallway. You decide to speak.

“I’m alright you know. You don’t need to worry; I have two sons who visit me and a nurse comes on Fridays.”

The bald man is speaking again in a low voice now. You can only catch some of the words,

“Trying to. . worry. .keep the door.. . .safety.”

You have the front door key and can’t understand why the man is talking about the door.

You start to feel anxious and snap,

“Get out, get out!”

You see quite clearly the tall man walking past you towards the front door. When you look around for the bald man he is not to be seen. Then you hear a voice but you are not sure who is speaking.

“We’ll make sure you are ok.”

This does not make you feel secure and now that the men have left there is an empty silence.

 

You sit down on the sofa with a loud expulsion of breath and notice your right hand is shaking.

“Why, why?” you say out loud, and again,

“What would Albert think about me talking to strange men?”

You get up with some effort and walk slowly towards the kitchen to put on the kettle. As you fill up the kettle you wonder how the men get inside your flat. You drink the hot tea and wonder if they are from the council, and that you probably forgot that you let them in. You sit down and notice your hand has stopped shaking.

You retire to bed earlier than usual. It is half past nine. You notice you haven’t put the pile of washing in the washer. You tell yourself to do this tomorrow morning and move the pile to the kitchen.

 

It is six o’clock the following evening. You have had your meal of mackerel and mashed potatoes. You are watching the six o’clock news. The body count from Syria doesn’t register and the latest plan for improving the NHS somehow gets mixed up with statistics about prisons. You press the remote control eager to find something less confusing. You find a nature programme about badgers when you hear the doorbell. You get up and see two men in the hall. You wonder if they are from the council. You haven’t seen them before. The tall one has a moustache and black hair. . .

 

 

 

Homeless Again

It is that time of the year again when politicians will talk of the scourge of homelessness but do little to solve the problem. This is something I wrote a couple of years ago when I was in a writing group: I seem to remember I recited it as a semi-rap. A couple of centuries ago William Blake talked of how the church and state needed the poor so we could feel good dishing out ‘charity.’ An audio file of me reading this is on my FB page.

NOTE: If you see someone sleeping rough and you are concerned phone -0300 500 0914 – in the UK. They should send someone to speak to the person and arrange emergency accommodation.

 

Regeneration

Please keep our streets clean

5000 people sleep on ’em;

Lets rally round, lets turn the tide

and restore national pride!

It’s the end of austerity –

so our PM said with due temerity.

So – Please keep our streets clean

5000 people sleep on ’em; lets not be mean.

There’s no room to swing a cat

in a cardboard box but perhaps a rat.

Private development equals – cardboard

encampments along embankments.

Public space isn’t aesthetic– its tragicomic

not economic – there – that’s rhyme,

rhythm, deception, division.

Please keep our streets clean

5000 people sleep on ’em.

The recession and no-choice austerity’s

like an infection – not good for your complexion;

a national disgrace – is it too late to save face?

Home is where the heart is -what happened to common land?

House of Commons – fit for purpose? Social Housing for the commoner?

You say they’re scum: I say we need a civilised outcome –

a cool solution to this obscene disconnection,

protection-no-protection and disaffection.

There’s incomprehension- disconsolate empty buildings,

standing there while fattening speculators

go on long self-promotion A-list vacations.

Please keep our streets clean

5000 people sleep on ’em.

At number 10 talk of legislation to

dispossess squatters’ rights (desperation)

sick people dying in the shadows

there ain’t no regeneration once your dead.

Save upmarket properties from desecration

while bloated billionaires aren’t there

to see the aggression of the recession

casting shadows in Parliament Square.

We can’t afford to be doctrinaire

but each of us can say a heartfelt prayer.

There are corpses on the street but please don’t stare.

That homeless upstart has a heart – he’d like

a part in this re-gen-er-a-tion just to

live a good life free of temptation,

frustration and consternation –

four walls and roof over his head.

Please keep our streets clean

5000 people sleep on ’em.

There’s no re-gen-er-a-tion once you’re dead –

only speculation, desecration and recapitulation.

Let’s restore national pride:

for too long duplicity and iniquity

have despoiled our green and pleasant land.

Please keep our streets clean.

 

 

Extinction [No Longer]

no longer

[Part 1 – Items from a zoological survey discovered in a derelict Unesco library]

Darwin’s Frogs no longer leap in the shrinking wetlands of Chile

the Formosan Clouded Leopard no longer hunts in the mountains of Taiwan

the Sri Lankan Spiny Eel no longer swims in the rivers of Sri Lanka

the Eskimo Curlew no longer calls over the snowy grasslands of Greenland

the Santa Cruz Pupfish is extinct to be confirmed

the Western Black Rhinoceros no longer trundles across African plains

the Angel Shark no longer swims in the Black Sea latest data 2023

the Crescent Nail-Tailed Wallaby no longer lopes across the Australian Outback

the Giant Golden-Crowned Flying Fox no longer gorges on figs in the forest of Panay

Pallas’s Cormorant no longer fishes in the polluted rivers or toxic lakes of Russia

the Labrador Duck is extinct dead as a Dodo

the Javan Lapwing no longer flaps its wings in Indonesian skies

the Tahiti Sandpiper no longer plaintively pipes on the river banks of Tahiti

even our house sparrows are in the shit

[Part 2 – Gleanings from Professor Avaritia’s papers found in her desiccated garden shed]

there’s a sapient product of natural selection who

no longer harnesses wind-power or utilises solar energy

no longer holidays in the Bahamas or Thailand

no longer cultivates his own garden

no longer considers the categorical imperative

no longer gets the bullet train to work

no longer measures the rise in average temperature

no longer checks-in at the inter-city-airport Terminal

no longer rushes home to watch the World Cup

no longer develops a military capability second to none

no longer speculates as to whether she is a brain-in-a-vat

no longer does the school run before nine o’clock

no longer views the Holocaust exhibit of discarded shoes

no longer speculates whether the table still exists if there is no one to see it

no longer does the night shift on the maternity ward

no longer prepares ingenious explosive devices

no longer validates cogito ergo sum

no longer orders ‘seed potatoes’ early from a first-rate suppliers in London

no longer tackles the problem of social isolation among the elderly

no longer checks in at the local gym or does press ups before breakfast

no longer sets a moral compass in line with the Golden Rule

no longer scans next year’s seed catalogue for new variety perennials

no longer formulates any messages of reconciliation or peace

no longer takes the dog for a walk in the park

no longer asks if the ‘free-will defence’ is adequate to account for the problem of evil

no longer speculates what it is like to be a bat

no longer puts flowers on the family headstone

[Part 3 – Requiem]

no longer reproduces

no longer eats

no longer drinks

no longer sleeps

no longer laughs

no longer cries

no longer questions

no longer loves

no longer hates

no longer creates

no longer dreams

no longer breathes

Note: It is frightening but true: Our planet is now in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals — the sixth wave of extinctions in the past half-billion years. We’re currently experiencing the worst spate of species die-offs since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural “background” rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we’re now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day [1]. It could be a scary future indeed, with as many as 30 to 50 percent of all species possibly heading toward extinction by mid-century.

1. Centre For Biological Diversity

Remembrance

My father lost two older brothers in the war; both were in their early twenties. This must have had a profound effect on him which at the time I didn’t fully appreciate. As far as I can tell he wrote this poem in his late sixties or perhaps even in his seventh decade. It was published in a Quaker booklet in 1975. (He and my mother joined the Society of Friends [Quakers] in the 1950s.)

Remembrance Days

The toy soldiers stiffly stand

the picture horses prance;

Established Persons of our Land

assume the ritual stance.

*

As dank November drizzle falls,

Cenotaph an ageing ghost,

sharply a brazen bugle calls

living and dead to a Last Post.

The stale and spectral pageant past,

strained puppets break their string;

the tired flag creeps up the mast,

and swinging London resumes her swing.

*

But a distant summer day I see,

an anxious schoolboy, when my mother

steadied a hand against a tree

and told me I had lost a brother.

So comes it every drear November

I cannot stiffen to command;

so many days when I remember

a mother’s voice, her deathly hand.

 

Fred J. Nicholson

1903-1990

War to end war

via War to end war

Walt Disney, Big Brother & Fake News

“Minnie Mouse” in Tokyo-Disneyland, Japan

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno see progress as a kind of trap in which we ensnare ourselves. Discuss these thinkers with others who also see progress as a trap.

If an alien landed on Earth today it would observe that the most dominant life form on the planet has appendages growing out of its ears and that one hand has morphed into a non-organic shiny oblong.

The majority of people who spend much of their waking hours using smart-phones do not consider that they may have been enmeshed in a technological trap all in the name of progress. On the contrary, they believe they are exercising considerable freedom and that they are engaging in quality communication, even if that communication is with a computer algorithm.

This paradoxical nature of modernity – that global, technological progress also results in a form of oppression; a kind of cultural own goal – can be witnessed in many areas of life. Recently, to take one example, Facebook has been indicted for allowing personal information to be available to third parties. Another example is the phenomenon of ‘fake news.’ We live in an information overload era when it is extremely difficult to sort the truth from half-truths and lies. Donald Trump is, of course, the expert manipulator of facts to fit his own agenda. In his world facts are no longer what can be verified by intellectual investigation; they are whatever he wants them to be- he’s just like Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland. We may smile at his crassness but lots of people seem to believe what he says. The globalisation of mass media not only allows this but promotes such aberrations.

None of this is really new, however; George Orwell had his Newspeak, Ivan Illich had his Deschooling Society and Paulo Freire had his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. They, along with Horkheimer and Adorno, critiqued modernity in terms of how we all participate in our own oppression.

In 1947 Adorno and Horkheimer published Dialectic of Enlightenment which opens with an indictment of the West:

“Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of triumphant disaster.”

They wonder how Kant’s ‘dare to find out’ – with its call to defeat ignorance – can also produce a world where we become cogs in a ‘megamachine’ and where genocide and exploitation are rampant.

It is foolhardy to select a single cause for cultural tendencies but it is undeniable that since the Enlightenment science and rationalism have been the engines for progress and imagination, ethics, intuition and subjectivity have been sidelined. The destructive forces of technology were devastatingly demonstrated in two world wars. Would it be possible to develop nuclear bombs, for instance, if empathy for fellow human beings and ethical considerations were paramount? The scientific project has resulted in more and more specialisation; a by-product of this tendency has been a kind of existential emptiness; a fragmentation of the psyche. Some commentators have referred to this as the ‘disenchantment of the world.’

When Adorno went to live in the USA he was appalled by the materialism and consumerism he witnessed. He called Walt Disney ‘the most dangerous man in America.’ This comment reveals more than mere cultural snobbery. He was rebelling against the postmodernist agenda of moral relativism and the commodification of everything including human beings. The proliferation of multinationals in the entertainment industry as well as in manufacturing and retail are part of that mega-structure of domination.

Adorno wrote:

“Everything has a value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself.”

This would seem to echo Marx’s critique but Adorno wasn’t interested in class struggle as such. He foresaw how, for example, the media world would become such a force of domination; he criticised the art world in terms of the art object becoming a fetish and market forces destroying the genuine aesthetic experience of the art object.

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was another key figure who described media-culture as consumed, “by an effect of self referentiality.”

He goes as far as to say much of the media world no longer refers to any reality outside itself. ‘Simulations’ have replaced ‘normal’ reality, rather like in the film, The Matrix. In The Evil Demon of Images he writes:

“It is the reference principle of images which must be doubted, this strategy by means of which they always appear to refer to a real world, to real objects, and to reproduce something which is logically, and chronologically, anterior to themselves. None of this is true. . . images precede the real to the extent that they invert the causal and logical order of the real and its reproduction.”

Frederic Jameson (Born 1934) goes further in that he does not hide his disgust with the superficiality of mass media/culture. As an example, he contrast the painting of Peasant Shoes by Vincent Van Gogh with Diamond Dust Shoes by Andy Warhol. While Van Gogh’s painting is embedded in a real, social context, Warhol’s, in contrast, is of shoes not derived from an actual context; they are merely decorative like a glossy advertising image. The method of screen printing is impersonal and in Jameson’s view reflects the anonymity of cosmopolitan life. What Warhol sees as a celebratory reflection of pop culture Jameson sees as a debasement of art. His critique should not be seen only in terms of art criticism; his point is much broader; that we are in danger of being swamped by flashy images and hyperreality. He thinks it important to have a historical perspective, and that our image-obsessed culture ignores historical context and is overtly ephemeral.

Like Adorno, he sees the Americanisation of the world as problematic:

“For when we talk about the spreading power and influence of globalization, aren’t we really referring to the spreading economic and military might of the US? […] Looming behind the anxieties expressed here is a new version of what used to be called imperialism.”[From Globalisation and Political Strategy, New Left Review (2000)]

What we see, with these thinkers, is a common denominator: impersonal forces are at work which result in our oppression in some form or other.

It is difficult to see how we can resist all of these forces of insidious control. Perhaps the recent examples of ‘people-power’ (for example in Catalonia or the protests in the UK against Trump) show that not all people are content to remain passive. On the other hand, climate change, populist movements of exclusion worldwide, genocide, human trafficking, population displacement and fake news suggest that perhaps we have reached a critical point in a downward spiral. Perhaps things need to reach a nadir before they can rise up in a new form which pays responsible heed to a fragile Earth and our fragile lives.

References: Postmodernism, Glen Ward, Teach Yourself Books, 1997.

Darwin & Nietzsche: Prophets for Today

This is my third essay for the Modernism MOOC I am doing. The tilte is: Darwin wrote ‘Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’ Compare Darwin’s view of the persistent effects of the past with Nietzsche’s work.

A mere eighteen years separate Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (1887) from Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859). What do these two intellectual giants have in common? Well, much more than appears at first sight. Nietzsche is credited with ‘killing off God’ and Darwin responsible for de-deifying humankind. In Darwin’s theory of evolution, we are not uniquely created by a creator-God. The nineteenth century was the century par excellence of the shaking of the foundations of eternal values and absolutes. Both of these men described homo sapiens as a creature determined by a long history: Nietzsche in terms of civilisation’s decadence and Darwin by the engine of natural selection. Darwin had also read Lyell’s Principles of Geology and realised the fossils he’d found proved the earth was many millions of years old. (Biblical accounts put the Earth at 6,000 years in age!)

Darwin only broached the subject of humankind’s descent in his The Descent of Man (1871) but he was well aware of the shock waves it would send throughout the world. He wrote:

The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely, that man is descended from some lowly organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many.

The cultural abyss brought about by the nineteenth century’s collapse of values has been described as ‘the disenchantment of the world.’ In this view, we are left seemingly to fend for ourselves in a mechanistic, meaningless world. However, neither Nietzsche or Darwin were philosophical nihilists or pessimists! Both thinkers analysed the past to shed light on the present and future. That subsequent thinkers have appropriated their ideas for their own ends is regrettable. (Scientific reductionism, for example, sees life as purely quantifiable and without intrinsic moral values. The Nazis appropriated ‘survival of the fittest’ in their ‘final solution.’)

Let us examine how these thinkers described the human condition and how, ultimately, today, their findings can be interpreted optimistically rather than being a formula for spiritual disenchantment.

In his Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin describes how he discovered many animals on the different islands of the Galapagos Islands which, although the same genus had different morphic details such as shape and size of beaks in finches:

Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small intimately-related group of birds, one might fancy from an original paucity of birds in the archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.

The huge amount of data he collected enabled him to come up with his theory of evolution by natural selection. The reverberations of his revolutionary theory can be still felt today in the USA where court cases have been held to determine whether evolution should be taught in schools! Evolution in the Darwinian sense is purely biological but perhaps Darwin himself thought that ‘cultural evolution’ would save humankind from its aggressive, dog-eat-dog inheritance. He writes of humankind’s evolution from savagery to ‘god-like intellect’ thus:

and the fact of his having risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, [in the world] may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.

So, for Darwin, evolution does not diminish humankind; he emphasises our lowly origins but recognises our potential for the future. In hindsight, he has demolished our child-like attachment to an anthropomorphic God. However, his theory, once it was examined and argued over, caused a moral upheaval at the time which cannot be overestimated.

Nietzsche, too, caused consternation among the thinkers of his day. He is famously a ‘philosopher with a hammer.’ His approach is iconoclastic and he undermines the assumptions of the church, state and academia of his time. However, it is a mistake to regard him as a nihilist. He may remorselessly tear down the spiritual structures of his day but one of his books, Ecce Homo, is sub-titled, How One Becomes What One Is. Ultimately he is pleading for humankind to rise up from its legacy of consensus thinking and mental somnambulism. His concept of the Ubermensch is of the free-person who has struggled within him or herself and approaches life anew in each moment. Had he been alive today he would agree with Eckhart Tolle’s insistence on being mindful in the present moment. Only mature people will be able to live without the comfort-blanket of a father-figure God:

Few are made for independence – it is a privilege of the strong. (Beyond Good & Evil, 29)

Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful men and peoples, and ask yourself whether a tree, if it is to grow proudly into the sky, can do without bad weather and storms. (The Gay Science)

The independent thinkers create their own values to replace the values of the past which have been based on fear, rewards and punishments. The Ubermensch accepts the totality of his life; the challenges especially.

What is Nietzsche’s legacy? Is it possible today to live a life-affirming life within a secular framework? What will replace God? Isn’t the defining feature of post modernism a moral vacuum or relativist values? Perhaps The Golden Rule would be a good place to start? This is the universal standard which says ‘do unto others what you would wish them to do to you!’ The negative formulation is – ‘don’t do to others what you would not wish them to do to you!’ Many of us today strive for equity, freedom of expression and fellowship based on empathy and compassion. Many of us today realise we live on a finite planet and that all life is connected. Climate change is a warning that we cannot go on exploiting the Earth’s resources; our self-serving short-term greed has not worked in the past. Only be living with more awareness of the consequences of what we do will we create a world fit for our grandchildren. We need to be content with less.

Both Nietzsche and Darwin were revolutionary thinkers who paved the way for a new way of approaching life. Both men dealt in detail with ‘the persistent effects of the past‘ but today we can see that these effects are not a hindrance but a spur to creating a world free from the shackles of superstition and bigotry. Their message is positive. It is rather like lancing a boil; all the rotten-ness had to be dispelled before healing could start.

Marx & Rousseau

 

This is my second essay for the MOOC course on Modernism. The title is: Compare the role of historical progress in the ideas of Marx and Rousseau. Comments welcome.

 

Few thinkers can claim to encapsulate the idea of historical progress as much as Karl Marx, and Rousseau too envisaged a Utopian society; in other words, they both believed in the Enlightenment dictum of progress. However, as Rousseau was also a proto-Romantic, he was also interested in an individual’s subjective life. In the remainder of this essay, I intend to tease out these similarities and differences.

Marx based his dialectical materialism on Hegel’s idea of change and progress. He said that when a thesis was challenged by an antithesis, as a result of the consequent conflicts a synthesis came about which was a new creation. Marx interpreted this in terms of the proletariat rising up against the bourgeoisie and forming a socialist nation. In his Introduction to the Penguin edition of The Communist Manifesto, AJP Taylor writes:

This synthesis was socialism, an ideal society or Utopia where everyone would be happy without conflict for ever more.

Whether Marx would have really believed in the last part of that quote is perhaps questionable, and I’m sure AJP Taylor was being ironic!

Marx was true to the Enlightenment emphasis on progress. He applauded the ideals of the French Revolution; after all, it had succeeded in replacing the Divine Right of Monarchy with the rights of man in the famous trio of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity! Blanqui said that ‘it takes twenty-four hours to make a revolution.’ Marx, however, knew that a new political order takes much longer. AJP Taylor points out that the post-war Labour government in 1945, in Britain, came to power by a popular vote and ‘did what the people wanted’ (this is a good example of Rousseau’s ‘common will’) and therefore was nearer to the Marxist ideal than the French Republic after the revolution.

Marx famously begins the Manifesto with: ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. . . oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another.’ In 1848 the Industrial Revolution was embryonic; the railways still had to expand in Britain and Europe for example. Nevertheless, Marx saw the already established factory system as dehumanising:

Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world he has called up [. ]

These labourers who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Where Marx and Rousseau agree is when Marx talks of the worker (proletariat) being alienated from his true self, able only to sell his labour in competition with others. In Rousseau’s view, this has come about through the increased complexity of society and by false values over-riding the ‘natural state’ of humanity. Marx sees it as a consequence of economics and the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalist bosses. Marx is embedded in historicism; his aims and analysis can be summed up in one paragraph:

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

Now, let us consider Rousseau both as a political philosopher and as a typical Romantic.

Rousseau’s ‘social contract’ has many antecedents going back to Ancient Greece; think of Plato’s Republic for example. If by historical progress’ we mean belief in the creation of a better society, then Rousseau’s The Social Contract is a seminal work of propaganda. In what is regarded as his major work, he argues in great detail how a state should represent the interests of its people. However, Rousseau was really two personalities! He was the political thinker and the Romantic ‘outsider.’ I will outline what I mean in the remainder of the essay.

First of all, let us summarise his political philosophy which is based in historicism. His idea of ‘the general will’ has a long history. The people of a country have interests, some of which are individual and some are held in common. The challenge is how to govern a state so that the people have their interest upheld and individuals are not in conflict. Rousseau’s ‘common will’ sees society as a ‘social organism’ and the will of this conglomerate is distinguished from the will of any individual. (Perhaps the Highway Code is a good analogy: we don’t make up the rules but each driver is happy to abide by these rules.) The ‘body politic’ is sovereign – being both the ruler and the ruled. Even the head of state (king or statesman) is only carrying out the will of the people. Here we have the origins of modern democracy but we can see how imperfect the application of the idea is too. For example, a dictator can convince people that he is acting in their best interests. We should also remember that general suffrage was non-existent in Rousseau’s time.

Now for Rousseau’s other self. In his later years, he suffered from paranoia and wrote his autobiography which dealt with his inner world. He also wrote Meditations of a Solitary Walker. This is an account of his walks in Switzerland but he spends a great deal of time expounding his personal philosophy which is not at all dependent on any historical perspective. He explores the typical Romantic trope of living apart from society. He writes about his feelings which is, again, typical of Romantics (such as Keats, Shelley or Wordsworth):

Thrown into the whirlpool of life while still a child, I learned from early experience that I was not made for this world, and that in it I would never attain the state to which my heart aspired. . . my imagination learned to leap over the boundaries of a life hardly begun [. . .] in search of a fixed and stable resting place. [. . ] This desire. . . has at all times led me to seek after the nature and purpose of my being with greater determination than I have seen in anyone else.

This is more the kind of statement one would expect from a spiritual seeker; these sentiments can occur to anyone in any time period. He continues:

For my part, when I have set out to learn something, my aim has been to gain knowledge for myself and not be a teacher; I have always thought that before instructing others one should begin by knowing enough for one’s needs, and of all the studies I have undertaken in my life among men, there is hardly one I would not equally have taken if I had been confined to a desert island for the rest of my days. Lonely meditation. . . lead the solitary to seek for the purpose of all he sees and the cause of all he feels.

His inclination is to follow Socrates’ imperative, know thyself. What Socrates spoke of over two thousand years ago is still relevant today; these ‘eternal verities’ do not depend on fashion, time or place.

Rousseau seems to have been a troubled personality but nevertheless perhaps gained some sort of inner peace towards the end of his life. As we all must do, he learnt to accept the transitory nature of life:

I have learnt to bear the yoke of necessity without complaining. Where previously I strove to cling on to a host of things, now, when I have lost hold of them all one after another, I have at last regained a firm footing.

Rousseau had one foot in the historical process and one in the timeless world of self-inquiry.

In conclusion, we can see that Marx was more deeply a ‘man of historical process’ than Rousseau although Rousseau was also a ‘man of progress’ in his political. philosophical work.