WORK IN PROGRESS ..Part Three
Created | Updated Oct 13, 2010
WORK IN PROGRESS. Part 3
THE DISCOURSE OF CATASTROPHE AND DISASTER
Lytton Strachey could be excused for thinking of the Houses of Parliament as the fount of English law because that was where the young “Romanesque Senators” of his generation were expected to live up to Roman traditions of law-giving and good-governance. In many ways the really "top people", however, as Strachey should have been aware, were of the Florence Nightingale model - the people running things from places outside of Parliament. For during her era there had been a great expansion in the Civil Service and state bureaucracy. Hence Richard Law could speculate in 1947 that the English tradition of endless campaigns against tyranny might eventually make the people turn on the bureaucracy. For the extensive powers and responsibilites taken on by the State during the two world wars, while it may have convinced the "establishment" that it was capable of winning the peace the way that the war had been won, had also shown once again to the British people that, almost more often than not, "the system" worked because "the common people" both adapted it and adapted to it.
Writing in 1551 in a document entitled “De Republica Anglorum” Sir Thomas Smith wrote of the fourth class of English society:- “These have no voice nor authority in our commonwealth, and no account is made of them but only to be ruled, not to rule other, and yet they be not altogether neglected. For in cities and corporate towns for default of yeomen, inquests and juries are impanelled of such manner of people. And in villages they be commonly made churchwardens, aleconners, and many times constables, which office toucheth more upon the commonwealth and at the first was not employed upon such low and base persons.”
It is obvious here that Sir Thomas is focussing on the working of the state, and it was mostly constables drawn from the common people themselves who were “the front line” of State contact with the citizen. One might call them “the working class”, but this nineteenth century terminology did not fit neatly into the economic world of the Middle Ages and Tudor times. Within the many towns and the few cities many trades were organised, and ruled, by Guilds to which master, journeymen and apprentice all belonged, while within the great Open Field Villages of Lowland England the functioning of village life depended upon the way that elected officials performed their various offices including those of the crucial field juries. Generally they did not ask or seek to rule others, and prized most the arts of successfully minding their own business so that the conditions under which they worked were only subject to the familiar vagaries of the English weather.
But by 1551, when Sir Thomas Smith was writing, Parliament was beginning to emerge as a key part of the English constitution, and its inbuilt potential bias towards the discourse of catastrophe and disaster was already strongly established. The whole idea of ‘parleys’ between the King on the one side and the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the representatives of the common people was really all to do with problem solving. Usually, if the King called a Parliament, he had a problem, and increasingly problems could be solved by money. But the job specification of the throne of England was fairly specific. The monarch was required to keep the peace of England safe from internal and external threats, and was financed accordingly. It was, therefore, always in the interests of the monarch to paint as grave a picture as possible in order to justify the decision to call a parliament and demands for additional funds.
The basis of English parliamentary democracy, however, was the right of the common people to “redress of grievances” before agreeing to the ‘grant of supply’. It was therefore in the interests of the common people to make their plight and their grievances appear really grievous and disastrous. Of course parliaments were held irregularly and, as in France when the States General were called in 1789, after a gap of about 160 years, grievances might well have piled up. In fact the way out of all of this negativity in the crisis hour was often the quite separate petitioning of the King by groups and communities that saw an opportunity opening up by which good fortune might be pursued, if only it was sanctioned by Royal Charter. It was by such mechanisms that the common people shaped English history towards growth and expansion.
‘The Reformation Parliaments’ of the late 1520's and early 1530's, however, were quite a significant turning point as G.R. Elton has shown. It suited the King Henry VIII and 'Mister Secretary Cromwell' to encourage the negative potential of a Parliament; and Cromwell quite deliberately and consciously manipulated Parliament, encouraging the representatives of the commons to express violent grievances against the Church and Cardinal Wolsey. The King could therefore play upon the extreme danger of such hostility from such a quarter: and remind Rome that he had already earned the title of ‘Defender of the Faith’.
Sir Thomas More famously said that the King should always be advised as to what he should do, and not what he could do, for, should a lion know his strength , then none of us would be safe: and it seems that the King and Cromwell showed Parliament its strength. When Henry’s daughter Mary came to the throne confronted with the reverse crisis, the problem of restoring the Church to Rome, Parliament refused to agree to the Queen's demands that Church lands that had been bought legally from her father should now just be handed back. It was to be the start of a long struggle between Crown and Parliament.
Yet Parliament for a long time was never more than an occasional assemblage, and, like the English nation itself, only pulled together to fight against things that threatened the "tide in the affairs of man" . And things could fall apart in storm-winds with incompetent people at the helm. So the Reverend John Fell, writing in the crisis 1659, when affairs were drifting after the death of Oliver Cromwell, listed “the several pretensions carried on in the nation apart”. He identified various particular “interests” being pressed- “the Roman Catholic, the Royalist, the Presbyterian, the Anabaptist, the Army, the Protectorian, and that of Parliament”.
Of the last he wrote:- “’Tis the wish of the present Parliament (as far as they have one common design) to continue themselves in absolute power, by the specious name of a popular government; to new-model and divide and at last take-down the Army; and finally, under the pretense of a Committee of Parliament, or Council of State, set up an oligarchy resembling that of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens.” (page 192-3) Parliament had learned what it could do, not what it should do.
But Fell went on: “Lastly,’tis the Interest of the Nation to establish the ancient fundamental laws, upon which every one’s property and liberty are built, to settle religion, to procure a general indemnity for all actions past, to revive their languishing and almost dead trade, gain an alliance with our neighbour states; to put the government in such hands as, besides present force, can plead a legal title to it- into the hands of such with whose private interest that of the public not only consists, but in which ‘tis necessarily involved; which likewise does least contradict the aims of particular parties. Lastly, the hands of such whose counsel is fit to direct in matters of deliberation and courage fit to vindicate the injuries of the nation.” (page 193)
With the nation so divided the common sense solution was for England to retrace its steps and go back to the known, familiar practices. That would make it possible to avoid past errors and mistakes: and the “The Declaration of Breda” made it clear that a restored Charles II would be determined not to allow history to repeat itself. What followed was The Restoration of 1660: and in many ways the "Merry Monarch" might be said to have tried to get back to style of the Elizabethan Golden Age. Nothing was perhaps more noteworthy than the Restoration Drama and the opening of new theatres, as part the restoration of the hustle and bustle of London life after the Puritan Commonwealth. Significantly, however, Charles had spent long enough abroad to appreciate the way that the Dutch were pioneering a new age. The founding of the Royal Society produced something of a scientific revolution, while other returned exiles "planted the seeds" of the agricultural revolution which was another key element in creating the England's first industrial revolution.
But industrialism once more created "a nation apart" and the British establishment support for the Beveridge Report during the Second World War could be compared to the Declaration of Breda. During the inter-war period small bands of revolutionaries had sown discontent and discord. Approving the Beveridge Report, which all parties did, was one way by which "the establishment" signalled its intention not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
In fact one of the things that had been drilled into this generation of the establishment was that it was essential to learn the "lessons of history. Thus if Charles II's age looked back to the Elizabethan "Golden Age" those faced with the task of restoring Britain after 1945 looked back to the Golden Mid-Victorian Age for inspiration and example. By general consent the opening of that age had been the Great Exhibition of All the Nations in 1851. So, as soon as was at all feasible, plans were laid for a Festival of Britain to be held in a new complex on the South Bank of the Thames in 1951.
THE DYMNAMICS OF EUROPE
But the most obvious lesson from history for the English people in 1945 was that England's main problems were Europe and the wider world. And, if the Atlantic Ocean was the main source of its weather, the European continent had been the main source of the great storms that had tested and tried the English/British people. Thus England/Britain had been actively involved for centuries in attempting to tackle what C.Deslisle Burns called "The problem [of]... the relationship between armed force and moral authority in the art of government and social organization generally" on the European mainland, not least because the outreach of European power sought often sought to impose tyrannical government on the English people.
In the Preface to "The First Europe", written in 1941 and published in 1947, Burns explains that having studied Classics at Cambridge before the First World War, he had then spent four years in Italy, studying on the ground the ruins of the Roman Empire and the early Christian world. Between 1917 and 1934 he worked in various offices connected with social reconstruction. "I thought I was watching the establishment of the third Europe. Only after the 'first barbarian kingdoms' collapsed in 1932 and 1934, as in the sixth century, did I turn back to the history of the first 'black out' ". (page 15)
Taking as his theme the transition from the Roman Empire in A.D 400 to medieval Europe in A.D 800 he wrote : "New moral standards and new conceptions of the moral worth of all human beings began at that time to dominate western Europe. The political and economic changes were less important than these, just as at present we are faced by moral problems more fundamental than the economic and political. Also, we know what it is to feel that the barbarians are at the gate. But the decay of an old civilization is less important than the creation of a new". (page 9-10)
With the "barbarians at the gate" in 1941, however, it was apparent that age-old dynamics of this European part of the human habitat had been activated:- " Also, about a thousand years ago in western Europe were to be found the beginnings of those rivalries which still obstruct the establishment of peace: for example, the long-standing rivalry between the peoples living to the East and the West of the Rhine, may be traced to the manner in which the so-called Holy Roman Empire came into existence. In that far past may be found the first traces of what is now called the 'Axis', connecting Italy and Germany, and of the common Christian tradition of England and France." (page 10)
In fact, thinking of European history in this almost geological way, it is surely obvious that the stability or instability of an "Axis" running from north to south, from Italy to Germany, has throughout history been intimately involved with the stability or instability of the world to the East to which these regions are exposed by the Mediterranean sea-ways and the vast open plains of Eurasia.
Roman power had managed to bring much of this vast potential into one system. But:-"The dissolution of the social system of which the Roman Empire was the last defence, left western Europe a chaos out of which a new world was created. But much more attention has been paid by historians to the ruins of the Roman system than to the laying of the foundations of that Europe which we now inhabit." (page 11) Nevertheless Burns' own analysis shows that his "First Europe" of the Middle Ages could only emerge when Charlemagne -"The Play Emperor"- had brought some kind of peace, stability, law and order to the northern plains on both sides of the Rhine in his role as the Holy Roman Emperor, while the See of Rome at the southern end of 'the axis' had established a moral authority over the whole of Western Christendom, to which its bishop acted as "Papa"-the father figure.
This Medieval system endured and evolved without massive armies. That is, as long as Byzantium, the Eastern Empire, was strong enough to hold at bay the dynamic of the East. Constantinople placed at the gateway into the Black Sea, was able to channel those energies between East and West into trade and commerce so that the Christian states of the East Europe, Orthodox and Roman Catholic, also profited. So the Fall of Constantinople unleashed the changes that ended the Middle Ages. Italy became a land of wars and the Roman city-state once more a military power, harnessing the genius of the Renaissance in an effort to re-establish its moral authority through the new magnificence of the Vatican City.
But northern and eastern Europe was changed too. Constantinople was now a Muslim city and Eastern Europe was now an unstable place. It seems symbolic that it was now that the Polish mathematician and astronomer Copernicus worked out that the Earth was not the centre of God's universe. A more obvious reflection of this time of uncertainty, was Martin Luther's challenge to the Roman Catholic Church. The challenge along the Axis occupied and vexed perhaps the most famous Holy Roman Emperor in history, Charles V, who spent his active life fighting wars to protect Europe from the threat in the East and trying to repair the damage done to the authority of the Church, including the sacking of Rome by his own armies.
In Dr Huxley's Darwinian terms these were the revolutionary circumstances that shaped the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, a really Dark Age of European history that England fought hard to keep at bay, with some success. Eventually, however, some of that darkness that reached unprecedented depths of horror during the Thirty Years War came to the British Isles with the "English Revolution" of the Civil War and Commonwealth period.
By the time that C.Delisle Burns book was published in 1947 an historian looking for patterns might have noted that Eric Hobsbawm's "Age of Catastrophe" 1914-1945" could just as well be called another "Thirty One Years War": and like that great and bloody episode its root causes lay in the dynamics of the "Eastern Question" and the way that the "Axis powers" responded to them.
The decline in Turkish power in the nineteenth century coincided with nationalist aspirations around the Mediterranean world, none more significant that that in Italy which achieved Unification in 1860. At the same time various forces, including the historical scholarship being applied to the Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was making people look with fresh appreciation at old values and virtues. As part of a Roman Catholic revival the bodily ascension into Heaven of the Virgin Mary had been made part of the Church's doctrine, and in 1870 the Vatican Decrees proclaimed the doctrine of Papal Infallibity.
Meanwhile in Northern Europe the eighteenth century had seen the growth of Prussian and Russian power. By the end of the century Poland was partitioned between these two expanding neighbours. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Prussia was conquered by its old enemy- the people to the West of the Rhine- while Russia defeated Napoleon's great invasion in 1812. Prussia learned the lessons of defeat and shared the victory at Waterloo with Britain. Soon, like the newly created Belgium, it, and much of the rest of the German region, was embracing industrialism.
Russia was slower to undertake modernisation, but in many ways the potential of Russian expansion was the most important factor in international affairs from the 1860's until arguably the present day. Already with vast territories there were actual or feared initiatives that other countries had to take account of in their foreign policies. And for the German region there were the ambitions of Napoleon III to revive French dreams of "glory"; so the pressures for the German states, "piggies in the middle", to create a stronger political and military entity were very great.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and the Prussian occupation of Paris clinched the affair. A new German Empire was declared in 1871: and soon enough Queen Victoria's daughter remarked to Her Majesty at a function that she, though the daughter, now took precedence because she was now an Empress. Victoria asked Disraeli whether she should not officially be Empress of India. In this and other ways British policy too turned towards Imperialism. The Lost Generation had risen to the challenge. But the First World War had destroyed so many and so much. The Second World War even more. So Kenneth Clark could end his 1969 BBC TV series “Civilisation” with this statement and poem :-
“This series has been filled with great works of genius, in architecture, scupture and painting,in philosophy, poetry and music; in science and engineering.There they are; you can't disniss them. And they are only a fraction of what western man has achieved in the last thousand years, often after setbacks and deviations at least as destructive as those of our own time. Western civilisation has been a series of rebirths. Surely this should give us confidence in ourselves.
I said at the beginning that it is a lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. Fifty years ago W.B. Yeats, who was more like a man of genius than anyone I have ever known, wrote a famous prophetic poem.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity”
(page 347)
Well, that was certainly true between the wars, and it nearly destroyed us. Is it true today? Not quite, because good people have convictions, rather too many of them. The trouble is that there is still no centre. The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn't enough. One may be optimistic, but one can't exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.
THE FAILINGS OF THE BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT
By 1969 a whole generation had grown up in a post-war global "rebirth" that suffered from at least three factors, which had been integral to the "establishment culture" constructed in Britain after 1870.
(a) The Confusion of the Real and the Apparent.
For a start the new intensity brought to the study of Classical Civilization had been opportunistic and "Utilitarian", in keeping with recent British culture. The new improved educational institutions would, like some "Workshop of the World", produce a generation capable of carrying the “Torch of Civilization” and leading the next chapter of World history.
But, in keeping with the Utilitarian test of 'the end' justifying 'the means', the importance of ends and means was reversed. This was very obvious in the system of examinations and assessment that achieved near universality. Students did not need to fully embrace their subjects, disciplines and Muses, but merely focussed on the much more mundane reality of the requirement and expectation of “the examiner”. By 1912 G.M. Trevelyan observed that most academic historians that he knew were too busy teaching, marking, and producing the text-books that would facilitate the challenge of preparing their students for the examination to do really innovative and independent research. Consequently "useful knowledge" could be acquired “off the peg”, with any who were struggling being given access to "crammers"- both books and people. For most it was easier to learn and understand things that had already been learned and understood than to produce original thought: and this was particularly the case with the challenge of the great literature of Greece and Rome. A candidate for Oxford entry like Hugh Richard Laurie Sheppard ["Dick"] was crammed with a crib-transalation, that he just memorised for the oral translation test. On a lucky day he would have passed. But he did not know enough to associate the Latin text, with the right piece of translation.
No doubt under gifted teachers, studying amidst "dreaming spires" or pleasant estabishments set in England's "green and pleasant land", the exposure to the classics and the great works of European Civilisation could be inspiring. Kenneth Clark, who was born in 1902, was educated at Winchester and Oxford- arguably the best combination for an intellectual education: and in his Foreward to the book version of the scripts for his great TV series he acknowledged that he was publishing partly out of gratitude. "As I looked through the scripts I recognised that they were an expression of gratitude for all the life-giving experience I have enjoyed in the last fifty years." (page xvi)
This sense of veneration and gratitude showed in the programmes in which Lord Clark’s gentle journey through Civilization was that of an enlightened Barbarian who, by his own admission knew nothing of science and the current apparent forward thrust of his times. But he had learned to admire and analyse the “glittering prizes” of Western Civilization, and hoped that others might yet be capable of carrying it forward. The culmination of this culture, as was reflected in the writing of E.M.Forster or Henry James, was the "Anglo-Saxon" tourist "doing Italy".
One of the best moments in the whole Civilisation series comes when the viewer is shown Michaelangelo's statue of David in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and hears Lord Clark talking about it. Then Lord Clark steps out of the obscurity behind the statue, and gives the viewer the shock appreciation of the monumentalism of Michaelangelo's masterpiece. Lord Clark, not a particularly short man, is hardly any taller than the plynth on which David is standing. There in one shot is the stature of mankind as perceived by Renaissance Humanism and stature of a Lord and art expert in the twentieth century.
Already before the First World War there had been attempts to make sure that access to this "establishment" education was not totally bound up with money, class and social connections. But during the Second World War (1941) Dr. Julian Huxley reflected on those students who had got to Oxford on their performance in the purely intellectual sphere."More change has occurred in the universities than in the schools; the latter have in a very considerable measure been thrown open to the less well-to-do. But the channel of approach to them is through a highly competitive scholarship system, and is both over-intellectual and over-specialized, with the result that the average of the young men and women who reach university on merit instead of on money, are, in the view of many of those responsible for them during their undergraduate career, in many ways far below the standard to be expected of an elite- in all-round character and interests, in intellectual initiative , and even in general education."(page 184)
By the late Sixties state secondary education for all, and the 11+ selection process, had opened up a much wider "ladder of opportunity" intended to make it possible to to recruit the most able into the "elite"; and in Huddersfield enough children from working class backgrounds had been right through the system for Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden to study "Education and the Working Class" (published 1962) Their investigation showed the challenge faced by those, who had the chance to "reach university on merit" without coming from the kind of background of people like T.B. Macaulay, Matthew Arnold and Julian Huxley, who all grew up in an environment rich in learning, erudition and books.
For many it was a steep learning curve, but the success stories- as a far as the school was concerned- were those pupils who became "pillars of the system" for they had learned to "play up, play the game". In many cases, however, as implied in Dr. Huxley's comment they "plateaued" out at university, when the 'over-intellectal and over-specialized" process of "climbing the ladder" was finished. In a university environment and in later graduate life they could feel that they had not really become "civilized", merely detached from their working class roots.
Jackson and Marsden quoted one of these:-
"I've often said in the past that I wouldn't send my children to public school, but when I think of the lack of self-confidence in myself I think that perhaps I will. I was having a discussion about this confidence at work with a man the other day. There's two men there and you hear them on the phone, and you'd think they knew all about everything. And sometimes you know that they know absolutely nothing, but there they are on the phone 'No, no, old boy, you've got that absolutely wrong.' And then if anything goes wrong, it's never their responsibility. They may make an awful blunder but to them it's just something out there, the great irresistible force. It's drilled into them as soon as they go to public schools. They're born to rule, and all the way through its drummed into them and they come to believe it." (page 202-3)
But this man obviously understood that "being educated" in the eyes of the world was largely an act designed to produce certain results. The "educated man" was someone who appeared to know everything about something, and something about everything: and to him those with a public school finish were more convincing than he was, though they knew "absolutely nothing". Presumably by this he meant that they knew much less than he did. But all his own learning had left him lacking self-confidence and convinced that "they" just knew that they had been "born to rule" while he was not.
It was simple traditional class prejudice and stereotyping that the "Romanesque" Victorian culture had created in order to defend 'culture' against 'anarchy'. But this 'witness' knew himself and his school from the inside, and, it was difficult for him to believe that "boys will be boys" and that those who had gone through the public school system had gone through an experience that was essentially similar to his own.
Speech day at Uppingham in 1914, for example, had been a triumph for Roland Leighton, who collected a record number of seven prizes. But, as with some of the working class children of Huddersfield in the Sixties study, Roland's remarkable success may have been due to other factors than his sheer intelligence. It is obvious from his letters to Vera Brittain that his mother, had to struggle hard to find the means to keep her son at Uppingham. The letters show that the whole venture depended upon him being the star pupil of his year, for only with some bursary or scholarship from the Headmaster would it be possible for Roland to go to Oxford at the same time as Vera and Edward Brittain. The Brittain's businessman father, on the other hand, had the money to help them, but not much else. Vera especially felt detached from her business man father's world.
E.M. Forster too only had his mother in his immediate family: and, many of Forster's novels deal with the shallow and superficial nature of a Britain in which he always seems to have felt something of an outsider. In his auto-biography, David Niven may have used some dramatic licence, in character, in his own account of the trials and tribulations of his poor French widowed mother, and others, as they tried to get him appropriately educated. He finally 'fell on his feet' when he had the chance to go to the new and imposing school at Stowe House founded in 1923. It was very different from any other school. But Niven, who had been 'removed from the list' for Eton, the appropriate school for someone from his background, proved an asset to Stowe School because he brought a touch of genuine class. It was a role as a 'classy Englishman' that he managed to play with great success throughout a long career.
Jackson and Marsden, however, investigating the ongoing class-divide within and the class bias within received culture quoted Matthew Arnold' vision of a truly national one:-
"Again and again I have insisted how these are happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people's life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive. Only it must be real thought and real beauty; real sweetness and real light. Plenty of people will try to give the masses, as they call them, an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper for the actual condition of the masses. The ordinary popular literature is an example of this way of working on the masses. Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set of ideas and judgements constituting the creed of their own profession or party. Our religious and political organizations give an example of this way of working on the masses. I condemn neither way; but culture works differently. It does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgements and watchwords. It seeks to do away with the classes; to make the best of what has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely- nourished, and and not bound by them.
This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who have a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that is harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore of sweetness and light."(pages 243-244)
Jackson and Marsden saw in this vision the answer to the continuing significance of the class divide in Britain:-
"Since the war there has been a whole wealth of documentation of the most stringent nature to refreshen our sense of what working-class life can offer, and to sharpen our discriminations in accepting and refusing aspects of it. Two and a half centuries of urban life have established distinct styles of living with very real values of their own, values which are perhaps essential to civilization, and yet which do not flourish that strongly in other reaches of society. Of course, working-class life has its limits, its distortions, its raw and ugly patches; and since research has been heavily weighted in favour of abnormality and delinquency we are not short of the record. But as a society are we in any position to neglect our inherited stores of strength, or to obliterate them?"
But really Jackson and Marsden needed to go back further than 250 years, as J.R. Green did in his "History of the English People", to find successful patterns and modes of "urban life" that were not distorted by the forces of revolution and industrialization creating a non-Society fragmented by the economic system. In 1869 Matthew Arnold could still see the Elizabethan Age as one of his 'Golden Ages" when a great artist like William Shakespeare worked within a national culture.
But 1869, the year of the publication of 'Culture and Anarchy", was set in a transitional period. By then Germany had become the apparent pacemaker and trendsetter of a new phase of "Romanesque" Civilization. And Erich Heller in his 1952 study "The Disinherited Mind" pinpointed 1794 as the key moment in modern German, and therefore world, history. That is when, Goethe, just returned from Italy with sunshine and optimism, found Weimar deeply troubled by the French reign of terror and the prospect of a French invasion. There was also a deeper background of persistent 'darkness' from which he had fled to the 'light' of Italy. It was to be year of troubles and tribulations, but Goethe was determined to stick to both poetry and science- and optimism.
But looking back on Goethe's unique contribution to that age of burgeoning scientific thought Heller wrote :- "Goethe's science has contributed nothing substantial to the scientific progress between his time and ours, and nothing whatsoever to the advancement of techniques for the mastery and exploitation of Nature; but he did, by his opposition to contemporary science, lay bare in his time, with remarkable precision. the very roots of that crisis and revolution in scientific method in which the twentieth- century scientist finds himself involved...There may come a day when this Cinderella story will find the conclusion proper to such tales- but perhaps not before the new ecclesia of technology has had its consummate triumph by bringing to their explosive fusion the iciest mathematical abstractions and the hot appetite for power." (page 7)
(b) Power versus Moral Authority
The whole question of power, and its relationship with authority was central to the birth of the modern age in Renaissance Italy: and Michaelangelo's David was a great statement of Florentine defiance against Rome as both lawgiver and law enforcer. Much of Renaissance art was consciously modelled not on Rome but on Ancient Greece: for it was the Medieval model of Roman Christendom that was old and decaying, whereas Ancient Greece was rediscovered by Italians as an injection of new thought. And nothing could be a greater contrast to decayed Medievalism than this bold and monumental statement of self-confidence in a naked young man. Later, when Michaelangelo had accepted to work for Rome and the Papacy, he was to show the Adam as such a young man in his famous ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
The Renaissance challenge to Medievalism, however, was more than art, fashion and design. There was also Humanism and science, two branches of Greek thought that were integral to Greek art. As Professor Thomas Huxley said " Our ancestors learned..that the earth is the centre of the visible universe, and that man is the cynosure of things terrestial; and more especially was it inculcated that the course of nature had no fixed order, but that it could be, and constantly was, altered." Such alteration might be by the Hand of God, and this might be activated by the Holy Church. The Black Death had thrown all of this into question: and an increasingly questionning age was intrigued to find that the Ancient Greeks had already tackled some of these questions. This was the moment when "The Western Intellectual Tradition" was launched, and Bronowski and Mazlish began their 1960 study of that title with Leonardo da Vinci:
"Stubborn, prodigal, and peverse with his gifts, balked, Leonardo lived in the richest and in the most menacing age of Europe. There was suddenly disclosed to the men of his generation a store of wealth and power in the world which they were too stunned and intoxicated to use well..Leonardo, too, was fascinated and dominated by power in others; he lay under the spell that has bound men for five hundred years, so that they cannot tear themselves away from the loved and brutal image of the gangster and the tyrant...In that heady modern-seeming age, he was the prototype of the inveterate explorer of the unknown, the inspired man of genius who gazed in a new way at the microcosm within and the macrocosm without." (page 38)
In the second chapter Bronowski and Mazlish put Leonardo's life into context:-
"The world of Leonardo is familiar to us in a way in which the worlds of St. Thomas Aquinas and of Geoffrey Chaucer, for instance, are not. We recognize it as modern. We recognize the problems and attitudes of the close of the fifteenth century as similar to our own. The Renaissance is the birth of modern history, and the Italian Peninsula is its birthplace...The concentrations of power in the Italian Renaissance were the city-states.. As Jacob Burckhardt put it, in these cities..the state became a work of art. It ceased to be dominated by the authority of the church. Indeed, in the struggle between city-states, the papacy itself became transformed into a secular power. The new state was no longer moulded and guided by custom, but by men. Therefore the state as a work of art created (because it had to be created by) a new art: the art of statesmanship..The dealings of states with one another, too, were no longer regulated by church and feudal authority. From the intrigues and alliances by which city-states tried to outwit one another grew a second art: the art of diplomacy." (page 39)
One might add a third art to the list- the art of survival- for surely this period too was one in which someone could have written "the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". Rome, that had emerged as the focal point of an Omnicompetent Church at the end of the Dark Ages, had served as the central hub of Medieval Christendom much as it had served as the hub of the Roman Empire. The Italian Wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, provided an excuse and opportunity for newly sovereign secular powers to invade, notably the Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire.
Thus the wider pattern of modern history was set, and as the inspiration of art diminished from that great Renaissance dawn, highwater mark of the ability art to unleash the power for good within Humanity, the plodding and steady progress of science, and its offspring technology, turned History and other arts towards the scientific approach that offered the states, still fighting wars when the arts of statesmanship and diplomacy failed, the possibility of mastery over Nature and its awesome power.
Leonardo da Vinci had settled in France: and France became the first ascendant Nation State in Europe, a master of the arts of statesmanship, diplomacy and, it was generally accepted, 'the good life'. In the next century the complex at Versailles was the great achievement of the state as a work of art in an attempt, just like the new St.Peter's of the Renaissance had been, to reveal in material form God's annointing touch. And, when the tensions within an embattled France, divided into capital and province, privileged estates and commoners, produced the French Revolution, it too tried to capture that French conviction that life is a magic art.
British politicians and later historians were appalled, that the National Assembly in 1789 spent weeks creating the great Declaration of the Rights of Man amidst the chronic problems of mass hunger that had swelled Paris with a volatile population of distressed persons. But, like the Palace of Versailles, the document is still regarded as a monument to the aspirations of the French people. The painter David captured some of the Romanesque drama of the great history changing scenes that were acted out. The traditional show and spectacle put on by the Old Regime was swept away, to be replaced by a new religion of the worship of Nature. As Kenneth Clark said: “...there is something rather touching about the religion of nature as we see it in a print of baptism according to the new rite, taking place in a de-Christianised church. People who hold forth about the modern world often say that what we need is a new religion. It may be true, but it isn’t easy to establish”.
For religion requires conviction and not opportunism, and Great Britain, and, at the last, Prussia, defeated the French dreams through what Lord Clark labelled "Heroic Materialism"- still dominant in 1969. As he explains in his Foreward, Kenneth Clark, in fact, had initially been asked to make a series of films on the art of Europe, and he freely acknowledges that much even of the art alone was missing or underrepresented. It was David Attenborough , the head of BBC2, who started using the word "Civilisation" perhaps intending to show the kind of Darwinian forces in action here in human "evolution" as in his later "Life on Earth" series.
But chapter 13, the last, on "Heroic Materialism" reflects Lord Clark's struggle to find justification for any optimism that a humankind capable of producing such great art in the past might yet find a way of making the most of the new-found potential to dominate the material world in the age of science and technology. Looking at New York's Manhattan Island he said:-
"It's godless, it's brutal, it's violent- but one can't laugh it off, because in the energy, strength of will and mental grasp that have gone to make New York, materialism has transcended itself..At which point a very obvious reflection crosses one's mind: that the cathedrals were built to the glory of God, New York was built to the glory of mammon- money, gain, the new god of the Nineteenth century... Come closer and it's not so good. Lots of squalor, and, in the luxury, something parasitical. One sees why heroic materialism is till linked with an uneasy conscience. It has been from the start."(page 321)
But perhaps that is because the Age of Revolution, like the building up of Manhattan, was "less like a work of man than like some tremendous natural upheaval". As H.G. Wells and Julian Huxley wrote in "The Science of Life" in 1927, revolutions are times of destruction and progress: and the destruction "gives opportunity to smaller and less specialized creatures, which have been hardy or quck witted enough to make a place for themselves in the shade of the vested interests of earlier life; and new adaptations are forced by necessity on to many survivors."
In fact revolutions may prove to be very favorable to more specialised creatures to whom the new conditions are uniquely favourable. This certainly applied to the artist at the time of the Renaissance, when the technique, impact and portent of the visual arts made a great leap forward; and in the same way it applied to the engineer, inventor and scientist during the Age of Revolution- and our subsequent seemingly permanent revolution.
After the great succes of Lord Clark’s “Civilisation” the BBC made a follow up series that was very different in character because of its content and its author. Dr. Jacob Bronowski author of "The Ascent of Man" (1973) was not only an historian, but a mathematician and scientist. He had been born in Poland in 1908 during that long agony for the once great Polish people that had started with the partitions of the late eighteenth century. Throughout the efforts to impose a domination of the Russian language and culture, the Poles had clung on to their own, and Poland was re-established by the Treaties of Versailles. Bronowski’s family, however, came to live in Britain, bringing their values and traditions with them: and nothing in the series is more poignant than the moment when Bronowski is kneeling by a pool in Auschwitz and says that he owes it to the members of his extended family whose ashes might be mingled in this very pool to cling on to his belief in a future to which they had all clung.
"It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by arrogance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always on the brink of the known, we aways feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgement in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible." (page 374)
But surely in the whole series Dr. Bronowski shows himself to belong to the same brotherhood as Leonardo da Vinci "the prototype of the inveterate explorer of the unknown, the inspired man of genius who gazed in a new way at the microcosm within and the macrocosm without": and, just as the art of the Renaissance bent itself to the worldy purposes of the patrons without whose material support the "great leap forward" would not have been possible, so the geniuses of the age of Heroic Materialism learned to serve their partners and patrons.
Thus James Watt with all his genius was really "going nowhere" until the Carron Ironworks in Scotland transferred its 'interest' in Watt's steam engine to the Birmingham industrialist Matthew Boulton. Soon Boulton was able to say to Boswell visiting his Soho works "We sell what the whole world wants- power"- and Boulton and Watt steam engines drove Britains DIY industrial revolution. It was Prince Albert who realised that Britain's achievements in this respect were worthy of being placed in a Great Exhibition of the Works of All the Nations in 1851: and it was nations with a different history and culture of the respective roles of the citizen and the state that made patronage of education, science and technology a national priority.
By the end of the nineteenth century German science and technology had arguably achieved world leadership with other members of an international brotherhood being swept along with the thrill of "being on the brink of the known", while their patrons weighed up the implications for the state of competition among rivals in the struggle for the survival of the fittest. So without the "marriage" of the German State to science and technology the aggressive policies of Kaiser Willhelm I, and the Nazi era would not have happened or not happened as they did. Nor would Aushwitz.. And, in the aftermath of war, German Nazi science did much to shape both the Space and the Arms Races between the USA and the USSR.
Of course some German scientists saw the danger of the way things were going. Jacob Bronowski tells of his friend Leo Szilard, a Hungarian scientist whose university life was spent in Germany. He left Germany in 1933, when the Nazi take over seemed inevitable, and he set himself to thinking about a remark made that year by Lord Rutherford to the effect that atomic energy would never become real. One day walking to work at Bart's Hospital he "realised that if you hit an atom with one neutron, and it happens to break up and release two, then you would have a chain reaction. He patented the idea in 1934: but wished to keep it a secret. ..But meanwhile war was becoming more and more threatening. The march of progress in nuclear physics and the march of Hitler went step by step, pace by pace, in a way that we forget." (page 369)
Eventually in August 1939 Szilard wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, that was signed by Albert Einstein. "In the course of the last four months it has been made probable -through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America- that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power ..would be generated...[This]could be achieved in the immediate future..[It] would lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable-though much less certain- that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed." Research being carried out "within the limits of the budgets of university laboratories" should be speeded up. And the letter ends with the sinister information that the Germans have stopped the sale of the uranium produced in the Czech mines they have taken over while the science institute in Berlin was repeating "some of the American work on uranium". (page 371)
In 1945, once the war in Germany had been won without nuclear weapons, Szilard tried to activate the international community of scientists to persuade the politicians not to use the atomic bomb on the Japanese. "As you know, Szilard failed, and with him the community of scientists failed..The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan on 6 August 1945 at 8.15 in the morning. I had not long been back from Hiroshima when I heard someone say, in Szilard's presence, that it was the tragedy of scientists that their discoveries were used for destruction. Szilard replied, as he more than anyone else had the right to reply, that it was not the tragedy of scientists: 'It is the tragedy of mankind.' "
It was a tragedy that encompassed both Auschwitz where the Nazis had done their worst and Hiroshima where the Allies had done their best. For science and technology served mankind's potential for both good and evil indifferently. And yet scientists and engineers were claiming the right to guide and inform the future even, or perhaps that should be especially, the great prophets of the science of economics riven by a great divide potentially even more terrible in its consequences than the Protestant v Catholic divide at the birth of the modern age.
The idea that government should be guided by the economic laws of nature was put forward forcefully by Adam Smith (1723-90) in "The Wealth of Nations" in 1776. It was right in the middle of that period (1760-90) that Steven Watson describes as "A Civilised Security"- though tensions between the American colonies and the British Crown were drifting towards revolutionary war. It is inconceivable, however, that Smith, sometime the Scottish commissioner of customs, was not unconscious of the fact that his book offered the solution to the issues in contention. As Steven Watson put it:-
"Adam Smith was not preaching revolution or prophesying change. If left to themselves, he urged, the laws of nature would produce ideally just results. He did not foresee...that 'natural' freedom would result in the building of a new world and shuffling of all accepted standards. On the contrary he assumed that the world and certain types of human behaviour were constant; he failed to perceive their historical relativeness. So he surveyed the existing state of things and lamented the minor follies of kings and ministers in whom 'it is the highest impertinence to pretend to watch over the economy of private people'. Governments should cease to impose restrictions on industry and commerce, and leave individuals free to seek their own profit. The result of private profit would be public wealth. The theory was destructive of the mercantile system of the day: it dealt contemptuously with human laws which too often obstructed the natural march towards prosperity. The state, he said, had only three proper functions: the protection of its members against violence from without, the administration of justice, and the carrying out of certain public works which were too large to be left to private persons." ( pages 329-330)
The same year, 1776, saw the publication of the first of the major works of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)- his "Fragment of Government". Bentham's method was that of the laboratory or the engineers workshop, for he sought to remove the layers of mysticism surrounding the laws and institutions of the English system of government which had been treated with veneration by Blackstone, the great authority. "Bentham...boldly declared that law was quite simply a set of rules to achieve certain ends effectively. When it ceased, by age, to answer its purpose it should be altered. He proposed a refurbishing, a codification, of the whole legal system. The ultimate end of society was simply the greatest happiness of the greatest number, each counting for one and none for more than one. As attainment of happiness was the good each set before himself it was therefore the standard by which the whole society should be judged.Every institution might be tested to see if its aim was consistent with the greatest happiness: if it was, then it should be examined to see if it achieved its end efficiently: if it was not, then it should be thrown on the scrap heap." (page 330-331)
It was perhaps not surprising that during the Age of Enlightenment the mood amongst the emerging intellectual community should have taken the view that peace was a natural condition. The Middle Ages had been shaped by the Omnicompetence of the Church, as G.G. Coulton put it. But the Decline and Fall of "Mother Church" had provided the opportunity for secular princes to institute a period of the Omnicompetence of the State. A tradition of war, coercion and violence was taken up by Kings, Princes and Emperors of States that were no longer compelled to be Brothers in Christ by the "Holy Father in Rome". English history, however, showed that the English people had preferred the channel that would preserve as much of English peace as possible. And the miraculous achievements of the Seven Years' War (1756-63) had left Britain in such a strong position that both Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham could assumed a secure and stable reality if the destabilising impact of both Church and State were minimised.
But, in the event, as Steven Watson said- "..we justly associate the whole revolution in social relationships, the expansion of Britain as the world's greatest industrial power, and the prevailing social philosophy of the early nineteenth century with Adam Smith's influence."
It did not take long to show the consequences of allowing free rein to the law of the market. In 1783 the American War was lost and the American colonies were now free from irksome British "mercantilist" restrictions. They no longer accepted any 'transported' British convicts as a source of Labour. On the other hand the Africa "triangular trade" was now deregulated, and the year saw the 'Zong affair', when 132 African slaves were deliberately thrown overboard in the open sea to drown, or worse as suggested by the Turner painting. In economic terms it was a case of "market failure". The insurers appear to have over-estimated the value of slaves in an America that had endured a seven year break in the slave trade.
The British triangular trade had allegedly been the most lucrative trade the world has ever known, and now a new entrepreneurial 'America' had access to a free market. Conditions of accumulated Demand in the Americas promised rich rewards, but were mirrored by conditions of accumulated Supply on the coast of West Africa. In such conditions the market price for slaves fell: and, with unit prices falling, captains were forced by the laws of economics to cram their ships to a degree that would be deliterious to the health of the individual slave, gambling on getting enough of the 'cargo' across the Atlantic to make the whole trip worthwhile.
The American Quakers who had been combating slavery since the work of John Woolman feared the transformation of a land of 'brotherly love' into one huge complex of slave plantations, and they found a powerful ally in England in William Wilberforce. In his first speech to Parliament on the slave trade he confronted the implications of trade of this nature and this scale:
"When we consider the vastness of the continent of Africa; when we reflect how all other countries have for some centuries past been advancing in happiness and civilization; when we think how in this same period all improvement in Africa has been defeated by her intercourse with Britain; when we reflect it is we ourselves that have degraded them to that wretched brutishness and barbarity which we now plead as justification of our guilt; how the slave trade has enslaved their minds, blackened their character , and sunk them so low in the scale of animal beings so that some consider them to be lower than the apes and that even the ourangutang has passed them by."
In fact Wilberforce saw that this economic revolution with its unrestrained pursuit of wealth with no restraining moral influence had much the same impact within Britain. As an Evangelist he was appalled at the "lower than the apes" conduct of "the populous districts" that were being created in the booming port cities engaged in the trade, and the Lancashire region, so badly served by the Christian Church. Drunkenness, sexual immorality, promiscuity, vanity in dress and appearance, singing, dancing, failure to observe the Sabbath properly- all of these too were produced by the worship of 'Mammon'-worldliness. It was to go on and change the world, as Lord Clark said, with its "Heroic Materialism". And it was to lead to Auschwitz and Dr. Bronowksi crouching in the ashes near its crematorium.
Auschwitz and Hiroshima were tragedies and savagery far greater than anything apes could accomplish. Dr. Bronowksi said that Auschwitz was the consequence of people daring to try to think like Gods; the kind of God like that of Florence Nightingale, who created an ordered universe, the kind of universe that is "an expression of a definite order, with which nothing interferes". And Auschwitz is all the more chilling because it was such a triumph of mankind's ability to impose order within his own world. Nazism was a desperate response to World Chaos. But the end of the Second World War was accomplished by unleashing the potentiality of chaos. Scientists had pursued the challenge of working out how to set up a chain reaction, and then to create one with explosive potential without really any precise idea of what the result would be. "Brighter than a thousand suns" came the answer from the test at El Alamo. But what would happen if such a bomb were to be used on a city?
In fact modern science had brought humanity back to the condition that Professor Huxley had described as typical of the middle ages. Back then religion portrayed life as having no fixed order. Life was subject to the whim of God. By the second half of the twentieth century "cutting edge" science created a constant threat or promise of change - potentially a condition of "Living in a Permanent Revolution" driven by an ever-changing body of scientific thinking and technological empowerment.
So Dr. Bronowski squating in the muddy pond at Auschwitz suggests a different image of the God of creation from Michaelangelo's famous Sistine Chapel scene. Here is a God, who has already created a 'whizz-bang', fire-cracker, inanimate universe capable of perpetual motion, who, knowing all things, and therefore that eventually this man will arrive at this place and this moment. God picks up this small handfull of earth and weighs up in his mind "Do I really want to make humankind?"
Bronowski too hesitates. "We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people." (page 374) That was the value that Dr. Bronowski learned when he first came to England and felt "the sense of pleasure in the companionship of civilised minds". (page 429) Bronowski's "whizz-bang, fire-cracker' mind was 'at home' with similar minds like his cherished colleagues at Cambrridge, people who contributed to the "intellectual leadership of the twentieth century". But intellectual leadership, he said :- "... poses a grave problem, because science is also a source of power that walks close to government and that the state wants to harness. But if science allows itself to go that way, the beliefs of the twentieth century will fall to pieces in cynicism. We shall be left without belief, because no beliefs can be built in this century that are not based upon science as the recognition of the uniqueness of man, and a pride in his gifts and works. It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral indignation; because without that man and beliefs and science will perish together." (pages 431-432)
(c) Fighting the Good Fight
It was significant that Dr. Bronowski highlighted 'moral indignation' because this was the power that was evoked to counter and correct the monstrous realities of a new world that blindly followed 'Laws of Nature'.
Had Lytton Strachey got around to "Eminent Georgians" like William Wilberforce he might well have highlighted the significance of the roots of this Yorkshireman from Hull, formerly the second city in the country on the basis of the great Yorkshire woollen industry ( exports) and the age-old Baltic trade, which imported from the vast territories of Eastern Europe, many of which had systems of slavery or virtual slavery. But, whereas local MP's like Wilberforce had a long and well-established tradition and right to seek redress of the grievances of their constituencies, Wilberforce did not make the positive case for wool and the need to protect such "Staple" trades- as others had done for three hundred years. Instead of looking back Wilberforce looked forward towards the kind of future in a world not dominated by either organised religion, or the State, or even solid Yorkshire tradition; and he was able to tap into a mood of almost "delicious" insecurity.
Bronowki and Mazlish wrote that Leonardo was "fascinated and dominated by power in others; he lay under the spell that has bound men for five hundred years" - and Wilberforce was able to exploit that fascination in "England's green and pleasant" land as it embraced the cult of Gothic Horror- what happened "beyond the veil" and in foreign parts.
Hansard quotes Wilberforce's first great speech on the slave trade in Parliament in March 1789:-
"When I consider the magnitude of the subject which I am to bring before the House- a subject, in which the interests, not only of this country, nor of Europe alone, but of the whole world, and of posterity, are involved: and when I think, at the same time, on the weakness of the advocate who has undertaken this great cause- when these reflections press upon my mind, it is impossible for me not to feel both terrified and concerned at my own inadequacy to such a task...I mean not to accuse any one, but to take the shame upon myself, in common , indeed, with the whole parliament of Great Britain, for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority. We are all guilty- we ought all to plead guilty, and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others: and I therefore deprecate every kind of reflection against the various descriptions of people who are more immediately involved in this wretched business."
Wiberforce , and the evangelical Christian "community" to which he belonged, did not belong to the Smith/Bentham school but to those ardent Christians, who were disgusted by other aspects of the prosperous stability that England had enjoyed to some extent since the Restoration. Writing of this revivalism Dr. Kitson Clark observed that those Methodists, who broke away from the Church of England "came to control a very considerable section of the nation's life, the largest after the Church of England. Nor was the development of this body the only result of the Evangelical revival. From about 1800 the older Dissenting bodies seem to have caught fire from the revival, particularly the Congegationalists, or Independents, and the Baptists, and the numbers of their chapels, and ,where these can be ascertained, of their Church members increased continually , and, although John Wesley's followers had formed a separate body which gradually diverged, the leaven continued to spread in the Church."(page 36)
It was this constituency, he went on, that was prepared to fight to "unmake the England of the old regime": but at the same time- "Many of those who came under its influence shrank from the godless Jacobin revolution." Moral reform, however, offered the possibility of a great cleansing, while reinforcing rather than destroying the stability of English society. And William Wilberforce and his band of Clapham Saints forged the weapon that would succeed where Dr. Guillotine failed. To quote Dr. Kitson Clark one more:-
"But the anti-slavery crusade had another significance in British domestic history. In order to bring it to success a new political weapon had been forged, the weapon of organized moral indignation. All sorts of expedients were used to excite opinion against slavery and to bring it to bear on Parliament, and these expedients appealed to relatively humble people who would not otherwise have had much influence in politics. It gave importance in the nation's affairs to a new section of the population, and it provided a precedent. Other moral agitations followed, to protect the aborgines in areas into which European settlers or traders were penetrating, to put down heavy drinking and to abolish the Corn Laws." (page 38)
But Adam Smith's Law of Supply and Demand applied to the market for moral indignation once it had clearly been established. It is very obvious from the material produced by the Anti-Slavery movement that all of the researches that were carried out were aimed at finding evidence-for-the- prosecution, evidence that would sway an English readership almost totally ignorant of the realities of sub-Saharan Africa. In the English legal tradition it was not the responsibility of those who knew that they were "Fighting the Good Fight" to put forward a balanced and reasoned argument.
Naturally, the impact of Wilberforce's "weapon" was not lost on others, as is obvious from the briefest perusal of E. Royston Pike's "Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution". Mary Shelley was not the only person to realise that this Age of Revolution had a taste for the horrible and macabre. Thus, as Parliament increasingly represented the views of the literate middle class, who were determined to be guided by the "dismal science" of 'Political Economy', the whole question of the common people, and the not so common, seeking "redress of grievanceas" became associated with the kind of hyperbole, exaggeration, sensationalism, and exploitation that eventually became (and remains) the stock in trade of the popular press. Documents like the letter "presented" to the local authorities at Ringmer in 1830 at the start of the Last Labourers Revolt reflected traditonal values that were dying out:-
"We the labourers of Ringmer and surrounding villages, have for a long period suffered the greatest privations and endured the most debasing treatment with the greatest resignation and forebearance, in the hope that time and circumstance would bring about an amelioration of our condition, till, worn out by hope deferred and disappointed in our fond expectations, we have taken this method of assembling ourselves in one general body, for the purpose of making known our grievances, and, in a peaceable, quiet and orderly manner, to ask redress: and we would rather appeal to the good sense of the magistracy, instead of inflaming the passions of our fellow labourers..." (page 52-3)
The trend towards reform in accordance with Bentham and Smith was accentuated by the Great Reform Act of 1832. And T.B. Macaulay felt confident that the genius of the English constitution would now enable learned men such as himself to solve the problems of government. Dr. Kitson Clark noted the particular nature of public discourse in Victorian England: "To Bagehot, very reasonably, the most satisfactory result of political evolution was government by discussion. Government by discussion seems to imply the civilised exchange of reasonable views in language which one educated man might use to another. But many of the contributions to public discussion in the middle of the nineteenth century did not seem to be couched in such language, many particularly of the contributions of the leaders of nonconformity.They seemed to be inflated and rhetorical, heavy with chiches, often grossly sentimental with an irresistible tendency towards bathos. Against this the clear masculine intelligence of the educated mid-Victorian reacted strongly; what they thought about it can still be read in the trenchant pages of the Saturday Review, or in the contemptuous language with which Matthew Arnold describes the modes of thought of the Philistines."
To some extent one could summarise this situation as being one of single issue topics being raised as appropriate subjects for moral outrage by those who worked on public opinion, while the governing class considered the bigger picture and the risks and dangers of these violently changing times. In other words the discourse of disaster and catastrophe.
Appropriately Lord Clark selected a sea-faring image in his Civilisation series, when he moved his story out from the enclosed and contained order of the Augustan Age into the revolutionary age. In those terms it had been possible during a period of stability, a lull before the storm, for Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham to believe that centuries of experience should now be discarded: and T.B. Macaulay in his piece on William Pitt the Younger (1859) made a clear distinction between Pitt's brilliance as a peace time Prime Minister trying to recreate conditions of 'civilized security' and his failings in time of war:-
"On one occasion , and one alone, Pitt, during the first half of his long administration, acted in a manner unworthy of an enlightened Whig..With this single exception, his conduct from the end of 1783 to the middle of 1792 was that of an honest friend of civil and religious liberty....
And this man, whose name, if he had been so fortunate as to die in 1792, would now have been associated with peace, with freedom, with philanthropy, with temperate reform, with mild and constitutional administration, lived to associate his name with arbitrary government, with harsh laws harshly executed, with alien bills, with gagging bills, with suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act, with cruel punishments inflicted upon some political agitators, with unjustifiable prosecutions instituted against others, and with the most costly and sanguinary wars of modern times. He lived to be held up to obluquy as the stern oppressor of England, and the indefatigable disturber of Europe." (page 418)
But this piece was written for the Encyclopedia Britannica in the full glow of mid-Victorian prosperity in which someone from an Evangelical background like Macaulay could feel that an era of peace, stability and prosperity had arrived. This was a period when moral indignation, as well as praise, esteem and flattery, were directed to those individuals who made all the difference, or whose personal disaster merited outrage. Hence Matthew Arnold was induced to a vehement protest by a complacent headline story one day about what a felicitous people the English were, when down at the bottom of the page, in the briefest of references the same paper told the sad story of "the Wragg affair". A young mother named Wragg had checked herself and her child out of the casual ward of the workhouse: and the next morning their bodies were found up on a lonely moor.
Perhaps Macaulay himself was "fortunate as to die in 1859 leaving the world with his great best-selling "History of England" which A.W. Palmer summed up as "reflecting the comfortable optimism of the prosperous middle class which formed his reading public." This Mid-Victorian prosperity was another age when it was possible for some people to believe with Adam Smith that the State should only be involved in "the protection of its members against violence from without, the administration of justice, and the carrying out of certain public works which were too large to be left to private persons".
But Macaulay was not just and fair to Pitt. The period 1783 to 1792 had been particularly favourable to Pitt's "Tory Revolution", for the national mood when he took office was one of deep discontent over the failings of the previous administration, and those, who might have opposed Pitt in his reforming period, had to be mindfull of their own past record. In much the same way, the Whig/Liberals of the years of Macaulay's final pomp and fame enjoyed the situation after the repeal of The Corn Laws in 1846, which had left Toryism in disarray. The Anti Corn Law League had consciously copied the Wilberforce campaign and the moral indignation had split the Conservative Party for almost a generation, for it was Peel's Tory Government that had repealed the Law.
Plain sailing, however, is easy. A government really "earns its keep" in moments of great national crisis and danger: and it was thanks to Pitt's work between 1783 and 1792 that the British government was strong enough, and sufficiently supported by the people, to win through twenty years of unprecendented warfare. Moreover the Tory harshness of which Macaulay complained was not a violation of English liberties, but the inevitable consequence of that English tradition of the liberty of the individual. For Florence Nightingale was right. There never had been, and there had never been the need for, any English, let alone British, common view on "such matters as Belief in God, the Plan of Creation, the Origin of Evil, the Future of Life, Necessity and Free Will, Law, and the Nature of Morality". Toleration of those not fully bound into the Commonweal was traditionally related to the test of the "Darkest Hour", when most showed themselves to be Englishmen first, and anything else second. Most but not all, and dealing with them lawfully was also part of the challenge of being English.
In his concluding remarks Lord Clark reveals himself to be very much a traditional English-gentleman in admitting to "a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence , forgiveness to vendetta . On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years: and in consequence we must still try to learn from history...I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters. Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible." (page 346-7)
These are surely not beliefs about the essential nature and purpose of life as Florence Nightingale conceived them. But they are the beliefs that have allowed Englishfolk to collectively navigate their way around some of these problems that so vex other countries. The kind of beliefs that made it possible to live successfully with diversity and even division, including those of strongly "deviant" and hostile views capable of weakening the Nation in the hour of crisis. Yes. England was a country in which the people held precious the right of Habeaus Corpus; but could also understand that in moments of national danger it might have to be suspended; or that those who corresponded with "the enemy" or spread possibly seditious material might have to be brought to trial, like Horne Tooke, who was found "Not Guilty" by a jury of "his peers".
In fact Macaulay's disapproval of the second phase of Pitt's premiership was probably related to the fact that, after Pitt's early resignation and premature death, the period of repressive government endured way beyond Waterloo in 1815. For the reform process that he had begun in the years 1783-1792 was not ressumed until the Great Reform Act of 1832. For a Whig politician it was quite acceptable to show up the disastrous Tory consequences of Tory policy.
But not everyone was as happy as Macaulay to see a reform agenda based upon Adam Smith , Jeremy Bentham and the Nonconformist tradition. In 1833 John Keble preached a sermon in Oxford on the theme of "National Apostacy"-the abandonment of the principles of commonweal and mutual obligation on which English life had been founded. Like Wilberforce Keble could take the moral high ground about the way things were going. The old English relationship of the individual and the community seemed to be breaking down in this new England of the laws of economics and ultitarianism.
Soon after the Keble sermon, John Henry Newman (1801-90), the Vicar at St. Mary's, the University Church in Oxford, published the first of the 'Tracts for the Times' developing this theme. Newman held that the ruling classes were abandonning their pastoral responsibilities to the wider community, and this was particularly evident in the attitude to clerical careers. In the English tradition the parish had been at the heart of communal life, and the fact that many clergymen had been younger sons of powerful families had been a source of strength and leadership to local parishes. Nonconformity had recently been emancipated, as had Roman Catholicism, and so there was a new potential for ministers from these congregations to make a positive contribution to national life. But Dissenting ministers, he argued, were in a position of dependence, drawing their strength from their congregations for they had to "sell themselves" to win election/selection for a post in church or chapel. And moral indignation against the sins and failings of wider society was often most effective when preaching to the converted. Newman stressed, on the other hand, that the Anglican Church still practiced the 'laying on of hands' by which Christ's ministry had been literally 'handed-down' since the days of the apostles, and the duty of ministry to all.
Such ideas got Newman into trouble with the Church authorities, and by stages he moved towards the Roman Catholic Church. Thus in 1871 Matthew Arnold could write to "Cardinal Newman" recalling the impact that Newman had had on him back in his student days:
"I cannot forbear adding, what I have often wished to tell you, that no words can be too strong to express the interest with which I used to hear you at Oxford, and the pleasure with which I continue to read your writings now. We are all of us carried in ways not of our own making or choosing, but nothing can ever do away the effects you have produced on me, for it consists in a general disposition of mind rather than in a particular set of ideas. In all the conflicts I have with modern Liberalism and Dissent, and with their pretensions and shortcomings, I recognize your work.."
The work of Newman, and a few Oxford friends and colleagues, like Pusey, came to be referred to as "The Oxford Movement"; and Arnold in another piece, while hailing his old University as "the home of lost causes", also came to believe that in fact the current had sunk deep and flowed with the times until it was ready to surface again. By 1871 there was an acceptance that more collective action by national bodies was required in order to address the scale of Britain's problems. Forster's Education Act of 1870 had given the Churches a last chance deadline for the building of "faith schools"; and the results were really quite staggering as vountary contributions poured in. Nevertheless the importance given to education that this reflected, also suggested that there would be an acceptance of state education. For there was still plenty of other necessary work to save the nation's soul for individuals and small groups to do. Even Prime Minister Gladstone, in his later populist and reforming mode, made a practice of going out from 10 Downing Street, to the less salubrious parts of London, where he found prostitutes to take home to tea with his wife- and try to save them. And among many initiatives one directly related to "Tractarianism" was G.W. Wilkinson's street preaching in Piccadily Circus in 1868. It proved to be the opening of a Tractarian offensive on the East End of London. Oxford and Cambridge set up slum missions there, as did many of the "top" schools.
In his inaugural lecture as the Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1869 John Ruskin urged the young men assembled there in the Sheldonian Theatre to take up the struggle of the time, the need to do missionary work both at home and abroad. By this time the emerging German Empire was keen to catch up with overseas empire-building, just like every other feature of British greatness. It was easy to portray conditions in Africa as catastrophic in the light of the picture painted by the Wilberforce team and newly reported attrocities like that of the Ugandan Martyrs. Africa and the African people would be much better if the great states of Europe took over the continent and put it on the road to improvement. Britain's inner cities too needed as much state and private help as they could get; and the lurid descriptions of the Gothic filth and squalor of the early industrial age "added to the impact" of current problems. So "The Salvation Army" was set up to "Fight the Good Fight" very visibly; and it was an inner city school mission that re-programmed the life of Britain's first Socialist Prime Minister.
Clement Attlee was born into the new Victorian ruling class, that of the great professions. His childhood was that of upper middle class privilege- including strict observance of the sabbath- no games, but Church and Bible reading . He was later to write: "I think that the first place in the influence that built up the Socialist Movement must be given to religion...to put the Bible in the hands of an Englishman is to do a very dangerous thing."
Attlee was educated at home till the age of nine, went to prep school as a boarder, and then to Haileybury Public School. University College Oxford followed, and when he came down in 1904 everything seemed set for him to aim for the bar and a career in the family law firm. Then in 1905 he visited Haileybury House, the schools 'mission' in Limehouse. It was the start of a long journey during which he gradually moved towards socialism, being recruited by the Webbs to lecture in the London School of Economics. Forty years after that first visit to Limehouse, Attlee became Prime Minister of a Labour Government in 1945 charged with finishing off the war, dealing with the aftermath, and making a start at building a new Britain as part of a new World. Now it really would be possible to Fight the Good Fight.
But,when Attlee flew back to the Postdam talks as the new Prime Minister, the first thing he was told was that an atom bomb had been successfully exploded at Los Alamos. Attlee agreed with Truman that an atom bomb should be dropped on a Japanese city to speed up the end of the war. One more disaster would shorten the catastrophe of war. Then the task of building a New World could commence.
THE DISCOURSE OF CATASTROPHE AND DISASTER
Lytton Strachey could be excused for thinking of the Houses of Parliament as the fount of English law because that was where the young “Romanesque Senators” of his generation were expected to live up to Roman traditions of law-giving and good-governance. In many ways the really "top people", however, as Strachey should have been aware, were of the Florence Nightingale model - the people running things from places outside of Parliament. For during her era there had been a great expansion in the Civil Service and state bureaucracy. Hence Richard Law could speculate in 1947 that the English tradition of endless campaigns against tyranny might eventually make the people turn on the bureaucracy. For the extensive powers and responsibilites taken on by the State during the two world wars, while it may have convinced the "establishment" that it was capable of winning the peace the way that the war had been won, had also shown once again to the British people that, almost more often than not, "the system" worked because "the common people" both adapted it and adapted to it.
Writing in 1551 in a document entitled “De Republica Anglorum” Sir Thomas Smith wrote of the fourth class of English society:- “These have no voice nor authority in our commonwealth, and no account is made of them but only to be ruled, not to rule other, and yet they be not altogether neglected. For in cities and corporate towns for default of yeomen, inquests and juries are impanelled of such manner of people. And in villages they be commonly made churchwardens, aleconners, and many times constables, which office toucheth more upon the commonwealth and at the first was not employed upon such low and base persons.”
It is obvious here that Sir Thomas is focussing on the working of the state, and it was mostly constables drawn from the common people themselves who were “the front line” of State contact with the citizen. One might call them “the working class”, but this nineteenth century terminology did not fit neatly into the economic world of the Middle Ages and Tudor times. Within the many towns and the few cities many trades were organised, and ruled, by Guilds to which master, journeymen and apprentice all belonged, while within the great Open Field Villages of Lowland England the functioning of village life depended upon the way that elected officials performed their various offices including those of the crucial field juries. Generally they did not ask or seek to rule others, and prized most the arts of successfully minding their own business so that the conditions under which they worked were only subject to the familiar vagaries of the English weather.
But by 1551, when Sir Thomas Smith was writing, Parliament was beginning to emerge as a key part of the English constitution, and its inbuilt potential bias towards the discourse of catastrophe and disaster was already strongly established. The whole idea of ‘parleys’ between the King on the one side and the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the representatives of the common people was really all to do with problem solving. Usually, if the King called a Parliament, he had a problem, and increasingly problems could be solved by money. But the job specification of the throne of England was fairly specific. The monarch was required to keep the peace of England safe from internal and external threats, and was financed accordingly. It was, therefore, always in the interests of the monarch to paint as grave a picture as possible in order to justify the decision to call a parliament and demands for additional funds.
The basis of English parliamentary democracy, however, was the right of the common people to “redress of grievances” before agreeing to the ‘grant of supply’. It was therefore in the interests of the common people to make their plight and their grievances appear really grievous and disastrous. Of course parliaments were held irregularly and, as in France when the States General were called in 1789, after a gap of about 160 years, grievances might well have piled up. In fact the way out of all of this negativity in the crisis hour was often the quite separate petitioning of the King by groups and communities that saw an opportunity opening up by which good fortune might be pursued, if only it was sanctioned by Royal Charter. It was by such mechanisms that the common people shaped English history towards growth and expansion.
‘The Reformation Parliaments’ of the late 1520's and early 1530's, however, were quite a significant turning point as G.R. Elton has shown. It suited the King Henry VIII and 'Mister Secretary Cromwell' to encourage the negative potential of a Parliament; and Cromwell quite deliberately and consciously manipulated Parliament, encouraging the representatives of the commons to express violent grievances against the Church and Cardinal Wolsey. The King could therefore play upon the extreme danger of such hostility from such a quarter: and remind Rome that he had already earned the title of ‘Defender of the Faith’.
Sir Thomas More famously said that the King should always be advised as to what he should do, and not what he could do, for, should a lion know his strength , then none of us would be safe: and it seems that the King and Cromwell showed Parliament its strength. When Henry’s daughter Mary came to the throne confronted with the reverse crisis, the problem of restoring the Church to Rome, Parliament refused to agree to the Queen's demands that Church lands that had been bought legally from her father should now just be handed back. It was to be the start of a long struggle between Crown and Parliament.
Yet Parliament for a long time was never more than an occasional assemblage, and, like the English nation itself, only pulled together to fight against things that threatened the "tide in the affairs of man" . And things could fall apart in storm-winds with incompetent people at the helm. So the Reverend John Fell, writing in the crisis 1659, when affairs were drifting after the death of Oliver Cromwell, listed “the several pretensions carried on in the nation apart”. He identified various particular “interests” being pressed- “the Roman Catholic, the Royalist, the Presbyterian, the Anabaptist, the Army, the Protectorian, and that of Parliament”.
Of the last he wrote:- “’Tis the wish of the present Parliament (as far as they have one common design) to continue themselves in absolute power, by the specious name of a popular government; to new-model and divide and at last take-down the Army; and finally, under the pretense of a Committee of Parliament, or Council of State, set up an oligarchy resembling that of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens.” (page 192-3) Parliament had learned what it could do, not what it should do.
But Fell went on: “Lastly,’tis the Interest of the Nation to establish the ancient fundamental laws, upon which every one’s property and liberty are built, to settle religion, to procure a general indemnity for all actions past, to revive their languishing and almost dead trade, gain an alliance with our neighbour states; to put the government in such hands as, besides present force, can plead a legal title to it- into the hands of such with whose private interest that of the public not only consists, but in which ‘tis necessarily involved; which likewise does least contradict the aims of particular parties. Lastly, the hands of such whose counsel is fit to direct in matters of deliberation and courage fit to vindicate the injuries of the nation.” (page 193)
With the nation so divided the common sense solution was for England to retrace its steps and go back to the known, familiar practices. That would make it possible to avoid past errors and mistakes: and the “The Declaration of Breda” made it clear that a restored Charles II would be determined not to allow history to repeat itself. What followed was The Restoration of 1660: and in many ways the "Merry Monarch" might be said to have tried to get back to style of the Elizabethan Golden Age. Nothing was perhaps more noteworthy than the Restoration Drama and the opening of new theatres, as part the restoration of the hustle and bustle of London life after the Puritan Commonwealth. Significantly, however, Charles had spent long enough abroad to appreciate the way that the Dutch were pioneering a new age. The founding of the Royal Society produced something of a scientific revolution, while other returned exiles "planted the seeds" of the agricultural revolution which was another key element in creating the England's first industrial revolution.
But industrialism once more created "a nation apart" and the British establishment support for the Beveridge Report during the Second World War could be compared to the Declaration of Breda. During the inter-war period small bands of revolutionaries had sown discontent and discord. Approving the Beveridge Report, which all parties did, was one way by which "the establishment" signalled its intention not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
In fact one of the things that had been drilled into this generation of the establishment was that it was essential to learn the "lessons of history. Thus if Charles II's age looked back to the Elizabethan "Golden Age" those faced with the task of restoring Britain after 1945 looked back to the Golden Mid-Victorian Age for inspiration and example. By general consent the opening of that age had been the Great Exhibition of All the Nations in 1851. So, as soon as was at all feasible, plans were laid for a Festival of Britain to be held in a new complex on the South Bank of the Thames in 1951.
THE DYMNAMICS OF EUROPE
But the most obvious lesson from history for the English people in 1945 was that England's main problems were Europe and the wider world. And, if the Atlantic Ocean was the main source of its weather, the European continent had been the main source of the great storms that had tested and tried the English/British people. Thus England/Britain had been actively involved for centuries in attempting to tackle what C.Deslisle Burns called "The problem [of]... the relationship between armed force and moral authority in the art of government and social organization generally" on the European mainland, not least because the outreach of European power sought often sought to impose tyrannical government on the English people.
In the Preface to "The First Europe", written in 1941 and published in 1947, Burns explains that having studied Classics at Cambridge before the First World War, he had then spent four years in Italy, studying on the ground the ruins of the Roman Empire and the early Christian world. Between 1917 and 1934 he worked in various offices connected with social reconstruction. "I thought I was watching the establishment of the third Europe. Only after the 'first barbarian kingdoms' collapsed in 1932 and 1934, as in the sixth century, did I turn back to the history of the first 'black out' ". (page 15)
Taking as his theme the transition from the Roman Empire in A.D 400 to medieval Europe in A.D 800 he wrote : "New moral standards and new conceptions of the moral worth of all human beings began at that time to dominate western Europe. The political and economic changes were less important than these, just as at present we are faced by moral problems more fundamental than the economic and political. Also, we know what it is to feel that the barbarians are at the gate. But the decay of an old civilization is less important than the creation of a new". (page 9-10)
With the "barbarians at the gate" in 1941, however, it was apparent that age-old dynamics of this European part of the human habitat had been activated:- " Also, about a thousand years ago in western Europe were to be found the beginnings of those rivalries which still obstruct the establishment of peace: for example, the long-standing rivalry between the peoples living to the East and the West of the Rhine, may be traced to the manner in which the so-called Holy Roman Empire came into existence. In that far past may be found the first traces of what is now called the 'Axis', connecting Italy and Germany, and of the common Christian tradition of England and France." (page 10)
In fact, thinking of European history in this almost geological way, it is surely obvious that the stability or instability of an "Axis" running from north to south, from Italy to Germany, has throughout history been intimately involved with the stability or instability of the world to the East to which these regions are exposed by the Mediterranean sea-ways and the vast open plains of Eurasia.
Roman power had managed to bring much of this vast potential into one system. But:-"The dissolution of the social system of which the Roman Empire was the last defence, left western Europe a chaos out of which a new world was created. But much more attention has been paid by historians to the ruins of the Roman system than to the laying of the foundations of that Europe which we now inhabit." (page 11) Nevertheless Burns' own analysis shows that his "First Europe" of the Middle Ages could only emerge when Charlemagne -"The Play Emperor"- had brought some kind of peace, stability, law and order to the northern plains on both sides of the Rhine in his role as the Holy Roman Emperor, while the See of Rome at the southern end of 'the axis' had established a moral authority over the whole of Western Christendom, to which its bishop acted as "Papa"-the father figure.
This Medieval system endured and evolved without massive armies. That is, as long as Byzantium, the Eastern Empire, was strong enough to hold at bay the dynamic of the East. Constantinople placed at the gateway into the Black Sea, was able to channel those energies between East and West into trade and commerce so that the Christian states of the East Europe, Orthodox and Roman Catholic, also profited. So the Fall of Constantinople unleashed the changes that ended the Middle Ages. Italy became a land of wars and the Roman city-state once more a military power, harnessing the genius of the Renaissance in an effort to re-establish its moral authority through the new magnificence of the Vatican City.
But northern and eastern Europe was changed too. Constantinople was now a Muslim city and Eastern Europe was now an unstable place. It seems symbolic that it was now that the Polish mathematician and astronomer Copernicus worked out that the Earth was not the centre of God's universe. A more obvious reflection of this time of uncertainty, was Martin Luther's challenge to the Roman Catholic Church. The challenge along the Axis occupied and vexed perhaps the most famous Holy Roman Emperor in history, Charles V, who spent his active life fighting wars to protect Europe from the threat in the East and trying to repair the damage done to the authority of the Church, including the sacking of Rome by his own armies.
In Dr Huxley's Darwinian terms these were the revolutionary circumstances that shaped the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, a really Dark Age of European history that England fought hard to keep at bay, with some success. Eventually, however, some of that darkness that reached unprecedented depths of horror during the Thirty Years War came to the British Isles with the "English Revolution" of the Civil War and Commonwealth period.
By the time that C.Delisle Burns book was published in 1947 an historian looking for patterns might have noted that Eric Hobsbawm's "Age of Catastrophe" 1914-1945" could just as well be called another "Thirty One Years War": and like that great and bloody episode its root causes lay in the dynamics of the "Eastern Question" and the way that the "Axis powers" responded to them.
The decline in Turkish power in the nineteenth century coincided with nationalist aspirations around the Mediterranean world, none more significant that that in Italy which achieved Unification in 1860. At the same time various forces, including the historical scholarship being applied to the Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was making people look with fresh appreciation at old values and virtues. As part of a Roman Catholic revival the bodily ascension into Heaven of the Virgin Mary had been made part of the Church's doctrine, and in 1870 the Vatican Decrees proclaimed the doctrine of Papal Infallibity.
Meanwhile in Northern Europe the eighteenth century had seen the growth of Prussian and Russian power. By the end of the century Poland was partitioned between these two expanding neighbours. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Prussia was conquered by its old enemy- the people to the West of the Rhine- while Russia defeated Napoleon's great invasion in 1812. Prussia learned the lessons of defeat and shared the victory at Waterloo with Britain. Soon, like the newly created Belgium, it, and much of the rest of the German region, was embracing industrialism.
Russia was slower to undertake modernisation, but in many ways the potential of Russian expansion was the most important factor in international affairs from the 1860's until arguably the present day. Already with vast territories there were actual or feared initiatives that other countries had to take account of in their foreign policies. And for the German region there were the ambitions of Napoleon III to revive French dreams of "glory"; so the pressures for the German states, "piggies in the middle", to create a stronger political and military entity were very great.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and the Prussian occupation of Paris clinched the affair. A new German Empire was declared in 1871: and soon enough Queen Victoria's daughter remarked to Her Majesty at a function that she, though the daughter, now took precedence because she was now an Empress. Victoria asked Disraeli whether she should not officially be Empress of India. In this and other ways British policy too turned towards Imperialism. The Lost Generation had risen to the challenge. But the First World War had destroyed so many and so much. The Second World War even more. So Kenneth Clark could end his 1969 BBC TV series “Civilisation” with this statement and poem :-
“This series has been filled with great works of genius, in architecture, scupture and painting,in philosophy, poetry and music; in science and engineering.There they are; you can't disniss them. And they are only a fraction of what western man has achieved in the last thousand years, often after setbacks and deviations at least as destructive as those of our own time. Western civilisation has been a series of rebirths. Surely this should give us confidence in ourselves.
I said at the beginning that it is a lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. Fifty years ago W.B. Yeats, who was more like a man of genius than anyone I have ever known, wrote a famous prophetic poem.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity”
(page 347)
Well, that was certainly true between the wars, and it nearly destroyed us. Is it true today? Not quite, because good people have convictions, rather too many of them. The trouble is that there is still no centre. The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn't enough. One may be optimistic, but one can't exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.
THE FAILINGS OF THE BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT
By 1969 a whole generation had grown up in a post-war global "rebirth" that suffered from at least three factors, which had been integral to the "establishment culture" constructed in Britain after 1870.
(a) The Confusion of the Real and the Apparent.
For a start the new intensity brought to the study of Classical Civilization had been opportunistic and "Utilitarian", in keeping with recent British culture. The new improved educational institutions would, like some "Workshop of the World", produce a generation capable of carrying the “Torch of Civilization” and leading the next chapter of World history.
But, in keeping with the Utilitarian test of 'the end' justifying 'the means', the importance of ends and means was reversed. This was very obvious in the system of examinations and assessment that achieved near universality. Students did not need to fully embrace their subjects, disciplines and Muses, but merely focussed on the much more mundane reality of the requirement and expectation of “the examiner”. By 1912 G.M. Trevelyan observed that most academic historians that he knew were too busy teaching, marking, and producing the text-books that would facilitate the challenge of preparing their students for the examination to do really innovative and independent research. Consequently "useful knowledge" could be acquired “off the peg”, with any who were struggling being given access to "crammers"- both books and people. For most it was easier to learn and understand things that had already been learned and understood than to produce original thought: and this was particularly the case with the challenge of the great literature of Greece and Rome. A candidate for Oxford entry like Hugh Richard Laurie Sheppard ["Dick"] was crammed with a crib-transalation, that he just memorised for the oral translation test. On a lucky day he would have passed. But he did not know enough to associate the Latin text, with the right piece of translation.
No doubt under gifted teachers, studying amidst "dreaming spires" or pleasant estabishments set in England's "green and pleasant land", the exposure to the classics and the great works of European Civilisation could be inspiring. Kenneth Clark, who was born in 1902, was educated at Winchester and Oxford- arguably the best combination for an intellectual education: and in his Foreward to the book version of the scripts for his great TV series he acknowledged that he was publishing partly out of gratitude. "As I looked through the scripts I recognised that they were an expression of gratitude for all the life-giving experience I have enjoyed in the last fifty years." (page xvi)
This sense of veneration and gratitude showed in the programmes in which Lord Clark’s gentle journey through Civilization was that of an enlightened Barbarian who, by his own admission knew nothing of science and the current apparent forward thrust of his times. But he had learned to admire and analyse the “glittering prizes” of Western Civilization, and hoped that others might yet be capable of carrying it forward. The culmination of this culture, as was reflected in the writing of E.M.Forster or Henry James, was the "Anglo-Saxon" tourist "doing Italy".
One of the best moments in the whole Civilisation series comes when the viewer is shown Michaelangelo's statue of David in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and hears Lord Clark talking about it. Then Lord Clark steps out of the obscurity behind the statue, and gives the viewer the shock appreciation of the monumentalism of Michaelangelo's masterpiece. Lord Clark, not a particularly short man, is hardly any taller than the plynth on which David is standing. There in one shot is the stature of mankind as perceived by Renaissance Humanism and stature of a Lord and art expert in the twentieth century.
Already before the First World War there had been attempts to make sure that access to this "establishment" education was not totally bound up with money, class and social connections. But during the Second World War (1941) Dr. Julian Huxley reflected on those students who had got to Oxford on their performance in the purely intellectual sphere."More change has occurred in the universities than in the schools; the latter have in a very considerable measure been thrown open to the less well-to-do. But the channel of approach to them is through a highly competitive scholarship system, and is both over-intellectual and over-specialized, with the result that the average of the young men and women who reach university on merit instead of on money, are, in the view of many of those responsible for them during their undergraduate career, in many ways far below the standard to be expected of an elite- in all-round character and interests, in intellectual initiative , and even in general education."(page 184)
By the late Sixties state secondary education for all, and the 11+ selection process, had opened up a much wider "ladder of opportunity" intended to make it possible to to recruit the most able into the "elite"; and in Huddersfield enough children from working class backgrounds had been right through the system for Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden to study "Education and the Working Class" (published 1962) Their investigation showed the challenge faced by those, who had the chance to "reach university on merit" without coming from the kind of background of people like T.B. Macaulay, Matthew Arnold and Julian Huxley, who all grew up in an environment rich in learning, erudition and books.
For many it was a steep learning curve, but the success stories- as a far as the school was concerned- were those pupils who became "pillars of the system" for they had learned to "play up, play the game". In many cases, however, as implied in Dr. Huxley's comment they "plateaued" out at university, when the 'over-intellectal and over-specialized" process of "climbing the ladder" was finished. In a university environment and in later graduate life they could feel that they had not really become "civilized", merely detached from their working class roots.
Jackson and Marsden quoted one of these:-
"I've often said in the past that I wouldn't send my children to public school, but when I think of the lack of self-confidence in myself I think that perhaps I will. I was having a discussion about this confidence at work with a man the other day. There's two men there and you hear them on the phone, and you'd think they knew all about everything. And sometimes you know that they know absolutely nothing, but there they are on the phone 'No, no, old boy, you've got that absolutely wrong.' And then if anything goes wrong, it's never their responsibility. They may make an awful blunder but to them it's just something out there, the great irresistible force. It's drilled into them as soon as they go to public schools. They're born to rule, and all the way through its drummed into them and they come to believe it." (page 202-3)
But this man obviously understood that "being educated" in the eyes of the world was largely an act designed to produce certain results. The "educated man" was someone who appeared to know everything about something, and something about everything: and to him those with a public school finish were more convincing than he was, though they knew "absolutely nothing". Presumably by this he meant that they knew much less than he did. But all his own learning had left him lacking self-confidence and convinced that "they" just knew that they had been "born to rule" while he was not.
It was simple traditional class prejudice and stereotyping that the "Romanesque" Victorian culture had created in order to defend 'culture' against 'anarchy'. But this 'witness' knew himself and his school from the inside, and, it was difficult for him to believe that "boys will be boys" and that those who had gone through the public school system had gone through an experience that was essentially similar to his own.
Speech day at Uppingham in 1914, for example, had been a triumph for Roland Leighton, who collected a record number of seven prizes. But, as with some of the working class children of Huddersfield in the Sixties study, Roland's remarkable success may have been due to other factors than his sheer intelligence. It is obvious from his letters to Vera Brittain that his mother, had to struggle hard to find the means to keep her son at Uppingham. The letters show that the whole venture depended upon him being the star pupil of his year, for only with some bursary or scholarship from the Headmaster would it be possible for Roland to go to Oxford at the same time as Vera and Edward Brittain. The Brittain's businessman father, on the other hand, had the money to help them, but not much else. Vera especially felt detached from her business man father's world.
E.M. Forster too only had his mother in his immediate family: and, many of Forster's novels deal with the shallow and superficial nature of a Britain in which he always seems to have felt something of an outsider. In his auto-biography, David Niven may have used some dramatic licence, in character, in his own account of the trials and tribulations of his poor French widowed mother, and others, as they tried to get him appropriately educated. He finally 'fell on his feet' when he had the chance to go to the new and imposing school at Stowe House founded in 1923. It was very different from any other school. But Niven, who had been 'removed from the list' for Eton, the appropriate school for someone from his background, proved an asset to Stowe School because he brought a touch of genuine class. It was a role as a 'classy Englishman' that he managed to play with great success throughout a long career.
Jackson and Marsden, however, investigating the ongoing class-divide within and the class bias within received culture quoted Matthew Arnold' vision of a truly national one:-
"Again and again I have insisted how these are happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people's life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive. Only it must be real thought and real beauty; real sweetness and real light. Plenty of people will try to give the masses, as they call them, an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper for the actual condition of the masses. The ordinary popular literature is an example of this way of working on the masses. Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set of ideas and judgements constituting the creed of their own profession or party. Our religious and political organizations give an example of this way of working on the masses. I condemn neither way; but culture works differently. It does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgements and watchwords. It seeks to do away with the classes; to make the best of what has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely- nourished, and and not bound by them.
This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who have a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that is harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore of sweetness and light."(pages 243-244)
Jackson and Marsden saw in this vision the answer to the continuing significance of the class divide in Britain:-
"Since the war there has been a whole wealth of documentation of the most stringent nature to refreshen our sense of what working-class life can offer, and to sharpen our discriminations in accepting and refusing aspects of it. Two and a half centuries of urban life have established distinct styles of living with very real values of their own, values which are perhaps essential to civilization, and yet which do not flourish that strongly in other reaches of society. Of course, working-class life has its limits, its distortions, its raw and ugly patches; and since research has been heavily weighted in favour of abnormality and delinquency we are not short of the record. But as a society are we in any position to neglect our inherited stores of strength, or to obliterate them?"
But really Jackson and Marsden needed to go back further than 250 years, as J.R. Green did in his "History of the English People", to find successful patterns and modes of "urban life" that were not distorted by the forces of revolution and industrialization creating a non-Society fragmented by the economic system. In 1869 Matthew Arnold could still see the Elizabethan Age as one of his 'Golden Ages" when a great artist like William Shakespeare worked within a national culture.
But 1869, the year of the publication of 'Culture and Anarchy", was set in a transitional period. By then Germany had become the apparent pacemaker and trendsetter of a new phase of "Romanesque" Civilization. And Erich Heller in his 1952 study "The Disinherited Mind" pinpointed 1794 as the key moment in modern German, and therefore world, history. That is when, Goethe, just returned from Italy with sunshine and optimism, found Weimar deeply troubled by the French reign of terror and the prospect of a French invasion. There was also a deeper background of persistent 'darkness' from which he had fled to the 'light' of Italy. It was to be year of troubles and tribulations, but Goethe was determined to stick to both poetry and science- and optimism.
But looking back on Goethe's unique contribution to that age of burgeoning scientific thought Heller wrote :- "Goethe's science has contributed nothing substantial to the scientific progress between his time and ours, and nothing whatsoever to the advancement of techniques for the mastery and exploitation of Nature; but he did, by his opposition to contemporary science, lay bare in his time, with remarkable precision. the very roots of that crisis and revolution in scientific method in which the twentieth- century scientist finds himself involved...There may come a day when this Cinderella story will find the conclusion proper to such tales- but perhaps not before the new ecclesia of technology has had its consummate triumph by bringing to their explosive fusion the iciest mathematical abstractions and the hot appetite for power." (page 7)
(b) Power versus Moral Authority
The whole question of power, and its relationship with authority was central to the birth of the modern age in Renaissance Italy: and Michaelangelo's David was a great statement of Florentine defiance against Rome as both lawgiver and law enforcer. Much of Renaissance art was consciously modelled not on Rome but on Ancient Greece: for it was the Medieval model of Roman Christendom that was old and decaying, whereas Ancient Greece was rediscovered by Italians as an injection of new thought. And nothing could be a greater contrast to decayed Medievalism than this bold and monumental statement of self-confidence in a naked young man. Later, when Michaelangelo had accepted to work for Rome and the Papacy, he was to show the Adam as such a young man in his famous ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
The Renaissance challenge to Medievalism, however, was more than art, fashion and design. There was also Humanism and science, two branches of Greek thought that were integral to Greek art. As Professor Thomas Huxley said " Our ancestors learned..that the earth is the centre of the visible universe, and that man is the cynosure of things terrestial; and more especially was it inculcated that the course of nature had no fixed order, but that it could be, and constantly was, altered." Such alteration might be by the Hand of God, and this might be activated by the Holy Church. The Black Death had thrown all of this into question: and an increasingly questionning age was intrigued to find that the Ancient Greeks had already tackled some of these questions. This was the moment when "The Western Intellectual Tradition" was launched, and Bronowski and Mazlish began their 1960 study of that title with Leonardo da Vinci:
"Stubborn, prodigal, and peverse with his gifts, balked, Leonardo lived in the richest and in the most menacing age of Europe. There was suddenly disclosed to the men of his generation a store of wealth and power in the world which they were too stunned and intoxicated to use well..Leonardo, too, was fascinated and dominated by power in others; he lay under the spell that has bound men for five hundred years, so that they cannot tear themselves away from the loved and brutal image of the gangster and the tyrant...In that heady modern-seeming age, he was the prototype of the inveterate explorer of the unknown, the inspired man of genius who gazed in a new way at the microcosm within and the macrocosm without." (page 38)
In the second chapter Bronowski and Mazlish put Leonardo's life into context:-
"The world of Leonardo is familiar to us in a way in which the worlds of St. Thomas Aquinas and of Geoffrey Chaucer, for instance, are not. We recognize it as modern. We recognize the problems and attitudes of the close of the fifteenth century as similar to our own. The Renaissance is the birth of modern history, and the Italian Peninsula is its birthplace...The concentrations of power in the Italian Renaissance were the city-states.. As Jacob Burckhardt put it, in these cities..the state became a work of art. It ceased to be dominated by the authority of the church. Indeed, in the struggle between city-states, the papacy itself became transformed into a secular power. The new state was no longer moulded and guided by custom, but by men. Therefore the state as a work of art created (because it had to be created by) a new art: the art of statesmanship..The dealings of states with one another, too, were no longer regulated by church and feudal authority. From the intrigues and alliances by which city-states tried to outwit one another grew a second art: the art of diplomacy." (page 39)
One might add a third art to the list- the art of survival- for surely this period too was one in which someone could have written "the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". Rome, that had emerged as the focal point of an Omnicompetent Church at the end of the Dark Ages, had served as the central hub of Medieval Christendom much as it had served as the hub of the Roman Empire. The Italian Wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, provided an excuse and opportunity for newly sovereign secular powers to invade, notably the Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire.
Thus the wider pattern of modern history was set, and as the inspiration of art diminished from that great Renaissance dawn, highwater mark of the ability art to unleash the power for good within Humanity, the plodding and steady progress of science, and its offspring technology, turned History and other arts towards the scientific approach that offered the states, still fighting wars when the arts of statesmanship and diplomacy failed, the possibility of mastery over Nature and its awesome power.
Leonardo da Vinci had settled in France: and France became the first ascendant Nation State in Europe, a master of the arts of statesmanship, diplomacy and, it was generally accepted, 'the good life'. In the next century the complex at Versailles was the great achievement of the state as a work of art in an attempt, just like the new St.Peter's of the Renaissance had been, to reveal in material form God's annointing touch. And, when the tensions within an embattled France, divided into capital and province, privileged estates and commoners, produced the French Revolution, it too tried to capture that French conviction that life is a magic art.
British politicians and later historians were appalled, that the National Assembly in 1789 spent weeks creating the great Declaration of the Rights of Man amidst the chronic problems of mass hunger that had swelled Paris with a volatile population of distressed persons. But, like the Palace of Versailles, the document is still regarded as a monument to the aspirations of the French people. The painter David captured some of the Romanesque drama of the great history changing scenes that were acted out. The traditional show and spectacle put on by the Old Regime was swept away, to be replaced by a new religion of the worship of Nature. As Kenneth Clark said: “...there is something rather touching about the religion of nature as we see it in a print of baptism according to the new rite, taking place in a de-Christianised church. People who hold forth about the modern world often say that what we need is a new religion. It may be true, but it isn’t easy to establish”.
For religion requires conviction and not opportunism, and Great Britain, and, at the last, Prussia, defeated the French dreams through what Lord Clark labelled "Heroic Materialism"- still dominant in 1969. As he explains in his Foreward, Kenneth Clark, in fact, had initially been asked to make a series of films on the art of Europe, and he freely acknowledges that much even of the art alone was missing or underrepresented. It was David Attenborough , the head of BBC2, who started using the word "Civilisation" perhaps intending to show the kind of Darwinian forces in action here in human "evolution" as in his later "Life on Earth" series.
But chapter 13, the last, on "Heroic Materialism" reflects Lord Clark's struggle to find justification for any optimism that a humankind capable of producing such great art in the past might yet find a way of making the most of the new-found potential to dominate the material world in the age of science and technology. Looking at New York's Manhattan Island he said:-
"It's godless, it's brutal, it's violent- but one can't laugh it off, because in the energy, strength of will and mental grasp that have gone to make New York, materialism has transcended itself..At which point a very obvious reflection crosses one's mind: that the cathedrals were built to the glory of God, New York was built to the glory of mammon- money, gain, the new god of the Nineteenth century... Come closer and it's not so good. Lots of squalor, and, in the luxury, something parasitical. One sees why heroic materialism is till linked with an uneasy conscience. It has been from the start."(page 321)
But perhaps that is because the Age of Revolution, like the building up of Manhattan, was "less like a work of man than like some tremendous natural upheaval". As H.G. Wells and Julian Huxley wrote in "The Science of Life" in 1927, revolutions are times of destruction and progress: and the destruction "gives opportunity to smaller and less specialized creatures, which have been hardy or quck witted enough to make a place for themselves in the shade of the vested interests of earlier life; and new adaptations are forced by necessity on to many survivors."
In fact revolutions may prove to be very favorable to more specialised creatures to whom the new conditions are uniquely favourable. This certainly applied to the artist at the time of the Renaissance, when the technique, impact and portent of the visual arts made a great leap forward; and in the same way it applied to the engineer, inventor and scientist during the Age of Revolution- and our subsequent seemingly permanent revolution.
After the great succes of Lord Clark’s “Civilisation” the BBC made a follow up series that was very different in character because of its content and its author. Dr. Jacob Bronowski author of "The Ascent of Man" (1973) was not only an historian, but a mathematician and scientist. He had been born in Poland in 1908 during that long agony for the once great Polish people that had started with the partitions of the late eighteenth century. Throughout the efforts to impose a domination of the Russian language and culture, the Poles had clung on to their own, and Poland was re-established by the Treaties of Versailles. Bronowski’s family, however, came to live in Britain, bringing their values and traditions with them: and nothing in the series is more poignant than the moment when Bronowski is kneeling by a pool in Auschwitz and says that he owes it to the members of his extended family whose ashes might be mingled in this very pool to cling on to his belief in a future to which they had all clung.
"It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by arrogance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always on the brink of the known, we aways feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgement in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible." (page 374)
But surely in the whole series Dr. Bronowski shows himself to belong to the same brotherhood as Leonardo da Vinci "the prototype of the inveterate explorer of the unknown, the inspired man of genius who gazed in a new way at the microcosm within and the macrocosm without": and, just as the art of the Renaissance bent itself to the worldy purposes of the patrons without whose material support the "great leap forward" would not have been possible, so the geniuses of the age of Heroic Materialism learned to serve their partners and patrons.
Thus James Watt with all his genius was really "going nowhere" until the Carron Ironworks in Scotland transferred its 'interest' in Watt's steam engine to the Birmingham industrialist Matthew Boulton. Soon Boulton was able to say to Boswell visiting his Soho works "We sell what the whole world wants- power"- and Boulton and Watt steam engines drove Britains DIY industrial revolution. It was Prince Albert who realised that Britain's achievements in this respect were worthy of being placed in a Great Exhibition of the Works of All the Nations in 1851: and it was nations with a different history and culture of the respective roles of the citizen and the state that made patronage of education, science and technology a national priority.
By the end of the nineteenth century German science and technology had arguably achieved world leadership with other members of an international brotherhood being swept along with the thrill of "being on the brink of the known", while their patrons weighed up the implications for the state of competition among rivals in the struggle for the survival of the fittest. So without the "marriage" of the German State to science and technology the aggressive policies of Kaiser Willhelm I, and the Nazi era would not have happened or not happened as they did. Nor would Aushwitz.. And, in the aftermath of war, German Nazi science did much to shape both the Space and the Arms Races between the USA and the USSR.
Of course some German scientists saw the danger of the way things were going. Jacob Bronowski tells of his friend Leo Szilard, a Hungarian scientist whose university life was spent in Germany. He left Germany in 1933, when the Nazi take over seemed inevitable, and he set himself to thinking about a remark made that year by Lord Rutherford to the effect that atomic energy would never become real. One day walking to work at Bart's Hospital he "realised that if you hit an atom with one neutron, and it happens to break up and release two, then you would have a chain reaction. He patented the idea in 1934: but wished to keep it a secret. ..But meanwhile war was becoming more and more threatening. The march of progress in nuclear physics and the march of Hitler went step by step, pace by pace, in a way that we forget." (page 369)
Eventually in August 1939 Szilard wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, that was signed by Albert Einstein. "In the course of the last four months it has been made probable -through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America- that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power ..would be generated...[This]could be achieved in the immediate future..[It] would lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable-though much less certain- that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed." Research being carried out "within the limits of the budgets of university laboratories" should be speeded up. And the letter ends with the sinister information that the Germans have stopped the sale of the uranium produced in the Czech mines they have taken over while the science institute in Berlin was repeating "some of the American work on uranium". (page 371)
In 1945, once the war in Germany had been won without nuclear weapons, Szilard tried to activate the international community of scientists to persuade the politicians not to use the atomic bomb on the Japanese. "As you know, Szilard failed, and with him the community of scientists failed..The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan on 6 August 1945 at 8.15 in the morning. I had not long been back from Hiroshima when I heard someone say, in Szilard's presence, that it was the tragedy of scientists that their discoveries were used for destruction. Szilard replied, as he more than anyone else had the right to reply, that it was not the tragedy of scientists: 'It is the tragedy of mankind.' "
It was a tragedy that encompassed both Auschwitz where the Nazis had done their worst and Hiroshima where the Allies had done their best. For science and technology served mankind's potential for both good and evil indifferently. And yet scientists and engineers were claiming the right to guide and inform the future even, or perhaps that should be especially, the great prophets of the science of economics riven by a great divide potentially even more terrible in its consequences than the Protestant v Catholic divide at the birth of the modern age.
The idea that government should be guided by the economic laws of nature was put forward forcefully by Adam Smith (1723-90) in "The Wealth of Nations" in 1776. It was right in the middle of that period (1760-90) that Steven Watson describes as "A Civilised Security"- though tensions between the American colonies and the British Crown were drifting towards revolutionary war. It is inconceivable, however, that Smith, sometime the Scottish commissioner of customs, was not unconscious of the fact that his book offered the solution to the issues in contention. As Steven Watson put it:-
"Adam Smith was not preaching revolution or prophesying change. If left to themselves, he urged, the laws of nature would produce ideally just results. He did not foresee...that 'natural' freedom would result in the building of a new world and shuffling of all accepted standards. On the contrary he assumed that the world and certain types of human behaviour were constant; he failed to perceive their historical relativeness. So he surveyed the existing state of things and lamented the minor follies of kings and ministers in whom 'it is the highest impertinence to pretend to watch over the economy of private people'. Governments should cease to impose restrictions on industry and commerce, and leave individuals free to seek their own profit. The result of private profit would be public wealth. The theory was destructive of the mercantile system of the day: it dealt contemptuously with human laws which too often obstructed the natural march towards prosperity. The state, he said, had only three proper functions: the protection of its members against violence from without, the administration of justice, and the carrying out of certain public works which were too large to be left to private persons." ( pages 329-330)
The same year, 1776, saw the publication of the first of the major works of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)- his "Fragment of Government". Bentham's method was that of the laboratory or the engineers workshop, for he sought to remove the layers of mysticism surrounding the laws and institutions of the English system of government which had been treated with veneration by Blackstone, the great authority. "Bentham...boldly declared that law was quite simply a set of rules to achieve certain ends effectively. When it ceased, by age, to answer its purpose it should be altered. He proposed a refurbishing, a codification, of the whole legal system. The ultimate end of society was simply the greatest happiness of the greatest number, each counting for one and none for more than one. As attainment of happiness was the good each set before himself it was therefore the standard by which the whole society should be judged.Every institution might be tested to see if its aim was consistent with the greatest happiness: if it was, then it should be examined to see if it achieved its end efficiently: if it was not, then it should be thrown on the scrap heap." (page 330-331)
It was perhaps not surprising that during the Age of Enlightenment the mood amongst the emerging intellectual community should have taken the view that peace was a natural condition. The Middle Ages had been shaped by the Omnicompetence of the Church, as G.G. Coulton put it. But the Decline and Fall of "Mother Church" had provided the opportunity for secular princes to institute a period of the Omnicompetence of the State. A tradition of war, coercion and violence was taken up by Kings, Princes and Emperors of States that were no longer compelled to be Brothers in Christ by the "Holy Father in Rome". English history, however, showed that the English people had preferred the channel that would preserve as much of English peace as possible. And the miraculous achievements of the Seven Years' War (1756-63) had left Britain in such a strong position that both Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham could assumed a secure and stable reality if the destabilising impact of both Church and State were minimised.
But, in the event, as Steven Watson said- "..we justly associate the whole revolution in social relationships, the expansion of Britain as the world's greatest industrial power, and the prevailing social philosophy of the early nineteenth century with Adam Smith's influence."
It did not take long to show the consequences of allowing free rein to the law of the market. In 1783 the American War was lost and the American colonies were now free from irksome British "mercantilist" restrictions. They no longer accepted any 'transported' British convicts as a source of Labour. On the other hand the Africa "triangular trade" was now deregulated, and the year saw the 'Zong affair', when 132 African slaves were deliberately thrown overboard in the open sea to drown, or worse as suggested by the Turner painting. In economic terms it was a case of "market failure". The insurers appear to have over-estimated the value of slaves in an America that had endured a seven year break in the slave trade.
The British triangular trade had allegedly been the most lucrative trade the world has ever known, and now a new entrepreneurial 'America' had access to a free market. Conditions of accumulated Demand in the Americas promised rich rewards, but were mirrored by conditions of accumulated Supply on the coast of West Africa. In such conditions the market price for slaves fell: and, with unit prices falling, captains were forced by the laws of economics to cram their ships to a degree that would be deliterious to the health of the individual slave, gambling on getting enough of the 'cargo' across the Atlantic to make the whole trip worthwhile.
The American Quakers who had been combating slavery since the work of John Woolman feared the transformation of a land of 'brotherly love' into one huge complex of slave plantations, and they found a powerful ally in England in William Wilberforce. In his first speech to Parliament on the slave trade he confronted the implications of trade of this nature and this scale:
"When we consider the vastness of the continent of Africa; when we reflect how all other countries have for some centuries past been advancing in happiness and civilization; when we think how in this same period all improvement in Africa has been defeated by her intercourse with Britain; when we reflect it is we ourselves that have degraded them to that wretched brutishness and barbarity which we now plead as justification of our guilt; how the slave trade has enslaved their minds, blackened their character , and sunk them so low in the scale of animal beings so that some consider them to be lower than the apes and that even the ourangutang has passed them by."
In fact Wilberforce saw that this economic revolution with its unrestrained pursuit of wealth with no restraining moral influence had much the same impact within Britain. As an Evangelist he was appalled at the "lower than the apes" conduct of "the populous districts" that were being created in the booming port cities engaged in the trade, and the Lancashire region, so badly served by the Christian Church. Drunkenness, sexual immorality, promiscuity, vanity in dress and appearance, singing, dancing, failure to observe the Sabbath properly- all of these too were produced by the worship of 'Mammon'-worldliness. It was to go on and change the world, as Lord Clark said, with its "Heroic Materialism". And it was to lead to Auschwitz and Dr. Bronowksi crouching in the ashes near its crematorium.
Auschwitz and Hiroshima were tragedies and savagery far greater than anything apes could accomplish. Dr. Bronowksi said that Auschwitz was the consequence of people daring to try to think like Gods; the kind of God like that of Florence Nightingale, who created an ordered universe, the kind of universe that is "an expression of a definite order, with which nothing interferes". And Auschwitz is all the more chilling because it was such a triumph of mankind's ability to impose order within his own world. Nazism was a desperate response to World Chaos. But the end of the Second World War was accomplished by unleashing the potentiality of chaos. Scientists had pursued the challenge of working out how to set up a chain reaction, and then to create one with explosive potential without really any precise idea of what the result would be. "Brighter than a thousand suns" came the answer from the test at El Alamo. But what would happen if such a bomb were to be used on a city?
In fact modern science had brought humanity back to the condition that Professor Huxley had described as typical of the middle ages. Back then religion portrayed life as having no fixed order. Life was subject to the whim of God. By the second half of the twentieth century "cutting edge" science created a constant threat or promise of change - potentially a condition of "Living in a Permanent Revolution" driven by an ever-changing body of scientific thinking and technological empowerment.
So Dr. Bronowski squating in the muddy pond at Auschwitz suggests a different image of the God of creation from Michaelangelo's famous Sistine Chapel scene. Here is a God, who has already created a 'whizz-bang', fire-cracker, inanimate universe capable of perpetual motion, who, knowing all things, and therefore that eventually this man will arrive at this place and this moment. God picks up this small handfull of earth and weighs up in his mind "Do I really want to make humankind?"
Bronowski too hesitates. "We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people." (page 374) That was the value that Dr. Bronowski learned when he first came to England and felt "the sense of pleasure in the companionship of civilised minds". (page 429) Bronowski's "whizz-bang, fire-cracker' mind was 'at home' with similar minds like his cherished colleagues at Cambrridge, people who contributed to the "intellectual leadership of the twentieth century". But intellectual leadership, he said :- "... poses a grave problem, because science is also a source of power that walks close to government and that the state wants to harness. But if science allows itself to go that way, the beliefs of the twentieth century will fall to pieces in cynicism. We shall be left without belief, because no beliefs can be built in this century that are not based upon science as the recognition of the uniqueness of man, and a pride in his gifts and works. It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral indignation; because without that man and beliefs and science will perish together." (pages 431-432)
(c) Fighting the Good Fight
It was significant that Dr. Bronowski highlighted 'moral indignation' because this was the power that was evoked to counter and correct the monstrous realities of a new world that blindly followed 'Laws of Nature'.
Had Lytton Strachey got around to "Eminent Georgians" like William Wilberforce he might well have highlighted the significance of the roots of this Yorkshireman from Hull, formerly the second city in the country on the basis of the great Yorkshire woollen industry ( exports) and the age-old Baltic trade, which imported from the vast territories of Eastern Europe, many of which had systems of slavery or virtual slavery. But, whereas local MP's like Wilberforce had a long and well-established tradition and right to seek redress of the grievances of their constituencies, Wilberforce did not make the positive case for wool and the need to protect such "Staple" trades- as others had done for three hundred years. Instead of looking back Wilberforce looked forward towards the kind of future in a world not dominated by either organised religion, or the State, or even solid Yorkshire tradition; and he was able to tap into a mood of almost "delicious" insecurity.
Bronowki and Mazlish wrote that Leonardo was "fascinated and dominated by power in others; he lay under the spell that has bound men for five hundred years" - and Wilberforce was able to exploit that fascination in "England's green and pleasant" land as it embraced the cult of Gothic Horror- what happened "beyond the veil" and in foreign parts.
Hansard quotes Wilberforce's first great speech on the slave trade in Parliament in March 1789:-
"When I consider the magnitude of the subject which I am to bring before the House- a subject, in which the interests, not only of this country, nor of Europe alone, but of the whole world, and of posterity, are involved: and when I think, at the same time, on the weakness of the advocate who has undertaken this great cause- when these reflections press upon my mind, it is impossible for me not to feel both terrified and concerned at my own inadequacy to such a task...I mean not to accuse any one, but to take the shame upon myself, in common , indeed, with the whole parliament of Great Britain, for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority. We are all guilty- we ought all to plead guilty, and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others: and I therefore deprecate every kind of reflection against the various descriptions of people who are more immediately involved in this wretched business."
Wiberforce , and the evangelical Christian "community" to which he belonged, did not belong to the Smith/Bentham school but to those ardent Christians, who were disgusted by other aspects of the prosperous stability that England had enjoyed to some extent since the Restoration. Writing of this revivalism Dr. Kitson Clark observed that those Methodists, who broke away from the Church of England "came to control a very considerable section of the nation's life, the largest after the Church of England. Nor was the development of this body the only result of the Evangelical revival. From about 1800 the older Dissenting bodies seem to have caught fire from the revival, particularly the Congegationalists, or Independents, and the Baptists, and the numbers of their chapels, and ,where these can be ascertained, of their Church members increased continually , and, although John Wesley's followers had formed a separate body which gradually diverged, the leaven continued to spread in the Church."(page 36)
It was this constituency, he went on, that was prepared to fight to "unmake the England of the old regime": but at the same time- "Many of those who came under its influence shrank from the godless Jacobin revolution." Moral reform, however, offered the possibility of a great cleansing, while reinforcing rather than destroying the stability of English society. And William Wilberforce and his band of Clapham Saints forged the weapon that would succeed where Dr. Guillotine failed. To quote Dr. Kitson Clark one more:-
"But the anti-slavery crusade had another significance in British domestic history. In order to bring it to success a new political weapon had been forged, the weapon of organized moral indignation. All sorts of expedients were used to excite opinion against slavery and to bring it to bear on Parliament, and these expedients appealed to relatively humble people who would not otherwise have had much influence in politics. It gave importance in the nation's affairs to a new section of the population, and it provided a precedent. Other moral agitations followed, to protect the aborgines in areas into which European settlers or traders were penetrating, to put down heavy drinking and to abolish the Corn Laws." (page 38)
But Adam Smith's Law of Supply and Demand applied to the market for moral indignation once it had clearly been established. It is very obvious from the material produced by the Anti-Slavery movement that all of the researches that were carried out were aimed at finding evidence-for-the- prosecution, evidence that would sway an English readership almost totally ignorant of the realities of sub-Saharan Africa. In the English legal tradition it was not the responsibility of those who knew that they were "Fighting the Good Fight" to put forward a balanced and reasoned argument.
Naturally, the impact of Wilberforce's "weapon" was not lost on others, as is obvious from the briefest perusal of E. Royston Pike's "Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution". Mary Shelley was not the only person to realise that this Age of Revolution had a taste for the horrible and macabre. Thus, as Parliament increasingly represented the views of the literate middle class, who were determined to be guided by the "dismal science" of 'Political Economy', the whole question of the common people, and the not so common, seeking "redress of grievanceas" became associated with the kind of hyperbole, exaggeration, sensationalism, and exploitation that eventually became (and remains) the stock in trade of the popular press. Documents like the letter "presented" to the local authorities at Ringmer in 1830 at the start of the Last Labourers Revolt reflected traditonal values that were dying out:-
"We the labourers of Ringmer and surrounding villages, have for a long period suffered the greatest privations and endured the most debasing treatment with the greatest resignation and forebearance, in the hope that time and circumstance would bring about an amelioration of our condition, till, worn out by hope deferred and disappointed in our fond expectations, we have taken this method of assembling ourselves in one general body, for the purpose of making known our grievances, and, in a peaceable, quiet and orderly manner, to ask redress: and we would rather appeal to the good sense of the magistracy, instead of inflaming the passions of our fellow labourers..." (page 52-3)
The trend towards reform in accordance with Bentham and Smith was accentuated by the Great Reform Act of 1832. And T.B. Macaulay felt confident that the genius of the English constitution would now enable learned men such as himself to solve the problems of government. Dr. Kitson Clark noted the particular nature of public discourse in Victorian England: "To Bagehot, very reasonably, the most satisfactory result of political evolution was government by discussion. Government by discussion seems to imply the civilised exchange of reasonable views in language which one educated man might use to another. But many of the contributions to public discussion in the middle of the nineteenth century did not seem to be couched in such language, many particularly of the contributions of the leaders of nonconformity.They seemed to be inflated and rhetorical, heavy with chiches, often grossly sentimental with an irresistible tendency towards bathos. Against this the clear masculine intelligence of the educated mid-Victorian reacted strongly; what they thought about it can still be read in the trenchant pages of the Saturday Review, or in the contemptuous language with which Matthew Arnold describes the modes of thought of the Philistines."
To some extent one could summarise this situation as being one of single issue topics being raised as appropriate subjects for moral outrage by those who worked on public opinion, while the governing class considered the bigger picture and the risks and dangers of these violently changing times. In other words the discourse of disaster and catastrophe.
Appropriately Lord Clark selected a sea-faring image in his Civilisation series, when he moved his story out from the enclosed and contained order of the Augustan Age into the revolutionary age. In those terms it had been possible during a period of stability, a lull before the storm, for Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham to believe that centuries of experience should now be discarded: and T.B. Macaulay in his piece on William Pitt the Younger (1859) made a clear distinction between Pitt's brilliance as a peace time Prime Minister trying to recreate conditions of 'civilized security' and his failings in time of war:-
"On one occasion , and one alone, Pitt, during the first half of his long administration, acted in a manner unworthy of an enlightened Whig..With this single exception, his conduct from the end of 1783 to the middle of 1792 was that of an honest friend of civil and religious liberty....
And this man, whose name, if he had been so fortunate as to die in 1792, would now have been associated with peace, with freedom, with philanthropy, with temperate reform, with mild and constitutional administration, lived to associate his name with arbitrary government, with harsh laws harshly executed, with alien bills, with gagging bills, with suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act, with cruel punishments inflicted upon some political agitators, with unjustifiable prosecutions instituted against others, and with the most costly and sanguinary wars of modern times. He lived to be held up to obluquy as the stern oppressor of England, and the indefatigable disturber of Europe." (page 418)
But this piece was written for the Encyclopedia Britannica in the full glow of mid-Victorian prosperity in which someone from an Evangelical background like Macaulay could feel that an era of peace, stability and prosperity had arrived. This was a period when moral indignation, as well as praise, esteem and flattery, were directed to those individuals who made all the difference, or whose personal disaster merited outrage. Hence Matthew Arnold was induced to a vehement protest by a complacent headline story one day about what a felicitous people the English were, when down at the bottom of the page, in the briefest of references the same paper told the sad story of "the Wragg affair". A young mother named Wragg had checked herself and her child out of the casual ward of the workhouse: and the next morning their bodies were found up on a lonely moor.
Perhaps Macaulay himself was "fortunate as to die in 1859 leaving the world with his great best-selling "History of England" which A.W. Palmer summed up as "reflecting the comfortable optimism of the prosperous middle class which formed his reading public." This Mid-Victorian prosperity was another age when it was possible for some people to believe with Adam Smith that the State should only be involved in "the protection of its members against violence from without, the administration of justice, and the carrying out of certain public works which were too large to be left to private persons".
But Macaulay was not just and fair to Pitt. The period 1783 to 1792 had been particularly favourable to Pitt's "Tory Revolution", for the national mood when he took office was one of deep discontent over the failings of the previous administration, and those, who might have opposed Pitt in his reforming period, had to be mindfull of their own past record. In much the same way, the Whig/Liberals of the years of Macaulay's final pomp and fame enjoyed the situation after the repeal of The Corn Laws in 1846, which had left Toryism in disarray. The Anti Corn Law League had consciously copied the Wilberforce campaign and the moral indignation had split the Conservative Party for almost a generation, for it was Peel's Tory Government that had repealed the Law.
Plain sailing, however, is easy. A government really "earns its keep" in moments of great national crisis and danger: and it was thanks to Pitt's work between 1783 and 1792 that the British government was strong enough, and sufficiently supported by the people, to win through twenty years of unprecendented warfare. Moreover the Tory harshness of which Macaulay complained was not a violation of English liberties, but the inevitable consequence of that English tradition of the liberty of the individual. For Florence Nightingale was right. There never had been, and there had never been the need for, any English, let alone British, common view on "such matters as Belief in God, the Plan of Creation, the Origin of Evil, the Future of Life, Necessity and Free Will, Law, and the Nature of Morality". Toleration of those not fully bound into the Commonweal was traditionally related to the test of the "Darkest Hour", when most showed themselves to be Englishmen first, and anything else second. Most but not all, and dealing with them lawfully was also part of the challenge of being English.
In his concluding remarks Lord Clark reveals himself to be very much a traditional English-gentleman in admitting to "a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence , forgiveness to vendetta . On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years: and in consequence we must still try to learn from history...I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters. Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible." (page 346-7)
These are surely not beliefs about the essential nature and purpose of life as Florence Nightingale conceived them. But they are the beliefs that have allowed Englishfolk to collectively navigate their way around some of these problems that so vex other countries. The kind of beliefs that made it possible to live successfully with diversity and even division, including those of strongly "deviant" and hostile views capable of weakening the Nation in the hour of crisis. Yes. England was a country in which the people held precious the right of Habeaus Corpus; but could also understand that in moments of national danger it might have to be suspended; or that those who corresponded with "the enemy" or spread possibly seditious material might have to be brought to trial, like Horne Tooke, who was found "Not Guilty" by a jury of "his peers".
In fact Macaulay's disapproval of the second phase of Pitt's premiership was probably related to the fact that, after Pitt's early resignation and premature death, the period of repressive government endured way beyond Waterloo in 1815. For the reform process that he had begun in the years 1783-1792 was not ressumed until the Great Reform Act of 1832. For a Whig politician it was quite acceptable to show up the disastrous Tory consequences of Tory policy.
But not everyone was as happy as Macaulay to see a reform agenda based upon Adam Smith , Jeremy Bentham and the Nonconformist tradition. In 1833 John Keble preached a sermon in Oxford on the theme of "National Apostacy"-the abandonment of the principles of commonweal and mutual obligation on which English life had been founded. Like Wilberforce Keble could take the moral high ground about the way things were going. The old English relationship of the individual and the community seemed to be breaking down in this new England of the laws of economics and ultitarianism.
Soon after the Keble sermon, John Henry Newman (1801-90), the Vicar at St. Mary's, the University Church in Oxford, published the first of the 'Tracts for the Times' developing this theme. Newman held that the ruling classes were abandonning their pastoral responsibilities to the wider community, and this was particularly evident in the attitude to clerical careers. In the English tradition the parish had been at the heart of communal life, and the fact that many clergymen had been younger sons of powerful families had been a source of strength and leadership to local parishes. Nonconformity had recently been emancipated, as had Roman Catholicism, and so there was a new potential for ministers from these congregations to make a positive contribution to national life. But Dissenting ministers, he argued, were in a position of dependence, drawing their strength from their congregations for they had to "sell themselves" to win election/selection for a post in church or chapel. And moral indignation against the sins and failings of wider society was often most effective when preaching to the converted. Newman stressed, on the other hand, that the Anglican Church still practiced the 'laying on of hands' by which Christ's ministry had been literally 'handed-down' since the days of the apostles, and the duty of ministry to all.
Such ideas got Newman into trouble with the Church authorities, and by stages he moved towards the Roman Catholic Church. Thus in 1871 Matthew Arnold could write to "Cardinal Newman" recalling the impact that Newman had had on him back in his student days:
"I cannot forbear adding, what I have often wished to tell you, that no words can be too strong to express the interest with which I used to hear you at Oxford, and the pleasure with which I continue to read your writings now. We are all of us carried in ways not of our own making or choosing, but nothing can ever do away the effects you have produced on me, for it consists in a general disposition of mind rather than in a particular set of ideas. In all the conflicts I have with modern Liberalism and Dissent, and with their pretensions and shortcomings, I recognize your work.."
The work of Newman, and a few Oxford friends and colleagues, like Pusey, came to be referred to as "The Oxford Movement"; and Arnold in another piece, while hailing his old University as "the home of lost causes", also came to believe that in fact the current had sunk deep and flowed with the times until it was ready to surface again. By 1871 there was an acceptance that more collective action by national bodies was required in order to address the scale of Britain's problems. Forster's Education Act of 1870 had given the Churches a last chance deadline for the building of "faith schools"; and the results were really quite staggering as vountary contributions poured in. Nevertheless the importance given to education that this reflected, also suggested that there would be an acceptance of state education. For there was still plenty of other necessary work to save the nation's soul for individuals and small groups to do. Even Prime Minister Gladstone, in his later populist and reforming mode, made a practice of going out from 10 Downing Street, to the less salubrious parts of London, where he found prostitutes to take home to tea with his wife- and try to save them. And among many initiatives one directly related to "Tractarianism" was G.W. Wilkinson's street preaching in Piccadily Circus in 1868. It proved to be the opening of a Tractarian offensive on the East End of London. Oxford and Cambridge set up slum missions there, as did many of the "top" schools.
In his inaugural lecture as the Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1869 John Ruskin urged the young men assembled there in the Sheldonian Theatre to take up the struggle of the time, the need to do missionary work both at home and abroad. By this time the emerging German Empire was keen to catch up with overseas empire-building, just like every other feature of British greatness. It was easy to portray conditions in Africa as catastrophic in the light of the picture painted by the Wilberforce team and newly reported attrocities like that of the Ugandan Martyrs. Africa and the African people would be much better if the great states of Europe took over the continent and put it on the road to improvement. Britain's inner cities too needed as much state and private help as they could get; and the lurid descriptions of the Gothic filth and squalor of the early industrial age "added to the impact" of current problems. So "The Salvation Army" was set up to "Fight the Good Fight" very visibly; and it was an inner city school mission that re-programmed the life of Britain's first Socialist Prime Minister.
Clement Attlee was born into the new Victorian ruling class, that of the great professions. His childhood was that of upper middle class privilege- including strict observance of the sabbath- no games, but Church and Bible reading . He was later to write: "I think that the first place in the influence that built up the Socialist Movement must be given to religion...to put the Bible in the hands of an Englishman is to do a very dangerous thing."
Attlee was educated at home till the age of nine, went to prep school as a boarder, and then to Haileybury Public School. University College Oxford followed, and when he came down in 1904 everything seemed set for him to aim for the bar and a career in the family law firm. Then in 1905 he visited Haileybury House, the schools 'mission' in Limehouse. It was the start of a long journey during which he gradually moved towards socialism, being recruited by the Webbs to lecture in the London School of Economics. Forty years after that first visit to Limehouse, Attlee became Prime Minister of a Labour Government in 1945 charged with finishing off the war, dealing with the aftermath, and making a start at building a new Britain as part of a new World. Now it really would be possible to Fight the Good Fight.
But,when Attlee flew back to the Postdam talks as the new Prime Minister, the first thing he was told was that an atom bomb had been successfully exploded at Los Alamos. Attlee agreed with Truman that an atom bomb should be dropped on a Japanese city to speed up the end of the war. One more disaster would shorten the catastrophe of war. Then the task of building a New World could commence.
