THE BRIGHT NEW DAWN
Created | Updated Mar 1, 2011
THE BRIGHT NEW DAWN
A case can be made for the thesis that, as the art of politics and government is so heavily weighted towards dealing with the negative aspects of life, those who are, or think that they should be, part of the political class try to tap into the quite primitive and down-to-earth dynamics that power human life at the grass roots reality in the absence of more substantive reasons to be cheerful.
Common wisdom argues that you should never go to bed on an argument for the nighttime should presage a bright new dawn. In the same way moon-months, seasons, years, decades, generations, lifetimes, centuries, and millennia are all either linked in to the very real essence and spring of life, or the convenient ways that governments have developed to deal with them.
So it may not be just historical precedent that has made the late eighties of a century a time when the people are prepared to answer to the call that, with only one more decade left, the problems of their century should be finally dealt with so as not to blight the next one. So the build up to a new century [and much more a Millennium] is characterised not only by dealing with old problems and challenges, but also preparing the groundwork for things to be done differently in the new era.
The "new dawn" effect does seem to encourage those, who believe in power and force, to believe that "the force is with us". And this may apply to those in power, and those who wish to challenge that power. Thus a first decade, it seems, often sees small groups, sometimes plotters and conspirators, challenging domestically or internationally the authority aspired to by the regional great power, leading to a war.
In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries the wars that broke out often around the 03 year have resulted in an inconclusive and unsettled condition prevailing internally and externally in the 08-09 years. And the two British General Elections of 1910 showed, like that of 2010, that the first past the post, two-party system, did not always produce a clear verdict. In the January 1910 election the Liberals won 275 seats to the Unionists 273. In the December election the Liberals won 272 to the Unionists 272, but in both cases the Liberals were able to stay in power thanks to the support of the Irish Nationalists and the Labour Party members, who saw their prime duty in the promoting the interests of their particular constituencies, which happened to coincide with the Liberal Party support for the Parliament Bill, emasculating the House of Lords, and the Home Rule for Ireland bill.
As Britain is discovering in 2011, however, Government by coalition tends if anything to internalise the fissiparous forces associated with different views and the necessary compromises, that always risk being attacked as self-serving, opportunistic and not based upon the high principles that politicians are expected to, and/or claim to espouse. And it is interesting to look back at the chronology of 1911 at the end of January 2011 with massive street demonstrations reflecting a destabilising "Wind of Change" that has already toppled one long-established regime in Tunisia and has spread to Egypt.
1911 was a year when in foreign affairs long-established Turkish rule was being heavily challenged in the Balkans, and even longer-established Imperial rule in China was finally toppled. The Turkish and Chinese revolutions, coming after the Russian Revolution of 1905 were just three of the major elements of political and military instability at this time. And internally the year was energised by the passing of the Parliament Bill against the rearguard action of "the conservative mind", the introduction of a National Health Bill, and almost unprecedented militancy by trade unionists and the 'Suffragettes', who variously challenged the right of Parliament and men in general to govern the country. A new Parliament Bill, a new National Health Bill and widespread Trade Union action to contest the right of the Coalition Government to rule all appear to be on the agenda for 2011.
This is not to say that History repeats itself and if we look at history with other eyes than those that look for the danger signs that flagged up the approach of the Age of Catastrophe, it is probably true that there was nothing "inevitable" about the drift to the First World War, except that a culture that was preoccupied with danger signs and disaster had come to dominate public debate, in a way that it still does.
Hence perhaps Stephen Fry's adolescent fascination with his particular literary heroes from Cambridge- E.M.Forster, G.E.Moore and the Cambridge Apostles of that 'clubs' most famous era, "and their associated Bloomsbury satellites Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Lytton Strachey as well as the more illustrious planets in that system, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig Wittgenstein." (page 69) To many of these young men the whole idea of a great war fought by modern industrial nations was such a ludicrous idea before 1914 that it seemed that no intelligent country could possibly countenance it.
And better relations between England and Germany were dear to D.H.Lawrence who had eloped to Europe with his German wife Else and in 1913 he started to write his longest and most ambitious novel, the one that would somehow knit together a life astride the worlds of his working class coal-miner father and brothers, his lower-middle class mother, his native region of Nottinghamshire neither truly North or South, his own rise through education to become a schoolteacher and then a professional writer, and then his marriage to Else and his first periods of residence in Germany and Italy.
To such young men who still had great hopes for the twentieth century by 1913 and 1914 there were really signs of a Bright New Dawn. In his account of the life of John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883-1920, Robert Skidelsky quotes an essay written by Clive Bell in 1917 entitled "Before the War". In it he wrote: "In the spring of 1914 Society offered the new-comer precisely what the new-comer wanted, not cut-and-dried ideas, still less a perfect civilization, but an intellectual flutter, faint and feverish no doubt, a certain receptivity to new ways of thinking and feeling, a mind at least ajar, and the luxurious tolerance of inherited wealth. Not, I suppose, since 1789 have days seemed more full of promise". (page 284)
Skidelsky developed this theme: "For Bloomsbury, promise meant chiefly culture; culture in 1914 meant to them, above all, ballet. Ballet was the art form which defined the age just as thirty years previously it had been Wagnerian opera. It owed its ascendancy mainly to Diaghilev, the greatest of the twentieth-century impressarios. Diaghilev not only introduced to the West the genius singer Chaliapin and the dancers Karsavina and Nijinsky, but he was determined to make ballet a catalyst for all that was modern and exciting in the arts. He coaxed miraculous scores out of Ravel, Stravinsky, Strauss and Debussy; the visual impact of his productions-with scenery and costumes designed by Benois and Bakst and Nijinsky's miraculous elevation- was profound.." (page 284) Diaghelev's Ballets Russes had a tremendous effect on the developed world. A shock of the new from a modernising Russia, whose Finance Minister in 1910 predicted that his country would catch up with the most developed countries if it could have ten years of peace.
Skidelsky went on: "But the effect of the Ballets Russes was not just confined to the arts. It brought Society and the arts into contact in a way which Post-Impressionism had not, and in this Bloomsbury, naively no doubt, saw a great hope; the governing class was becoming civilised at last... The civilising and elevating mission of the arts was taken seriously by Bloomsbury. It was bound up with their optimism about the future. There is no hint in pre-war London of aestheticism as an escape from a crumbling society, which is said to have dominated the cultural consciousness of pre-1914 Vienna. Rather the arts, 'progressive' politics, economic improvement seemed to be marching hand in hand towards a better future. The political vocation itself might be held in low esteem; certainly the Bloomsbury publicists had only the haziest notion of where the masses were to fit into this newly civilised world; but that things were getting better they had no doubt. " ( page 284-5)
But while they may not have understood just how either their privileged class or the industrial working class would fit into the new world that was dawning, the great "Rite of Spring" ballet, set to Stravinsky's revolutionary score, featured a choreography by Nijinsky that drew upon ancient folk styles and movements that showed a continuity with humankind's first struggles to capture the energy of the burgeoning new year.
And if Michelangelo's statue of David and his painting of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel revealed the man in flesh and bone to the eye of the observer, so Nijinsky, whether as a Faun or as The Spectre of the Rose was all man in flesh and bone too and a reminder that nothing raises up humankind as much as brilliant art.
As for the British working class, D.H. Lawrence was now part of this "arty" world through the patronage of Lady Ottoline Morrell, and was continuing to weave together his love of the English countryside, and increasingly foreign ones too, and his affection for the people of his roots, who suffered from the effort by those in power to still act on the basis of "cut-and-dried ideas" and mould them to their will. And his work was informed by his love and understanding of the thrill of just being alive that he had observed in his mining father and brother, and their community. In a much less hopeful time he went back in his writing to the long agony of the mining community after the First World War and the General Strike, in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. But as that Great War began he was still working on that great writing project that he started in 1913, and carried on after the outbreak of war brought him new stigma as the English husband of a German wife. And when the book was published in 1915, it was banned.
Such are the choices that shape history. But 'life will out': and there will be rainbows.
"And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.".
THE END (page 495)
A case can be made for the thesis that, as the art of politics and government is so heavily weighted towards dealing with the negative aspects of life, those who are, or think that they should be, part of the political class try to tap into the quite primitive and down-to-earth dynamics that power human life at the grass roots reality in the absence of more substantive reasons to be cheerful.
Common wisdom argues that you should never go to bed on an argument for the nighttime should presage a bright new dawn. In the same way moon-months, seasons, years, decades, generations, lifetimes, centuries, and millennia are all either linked in to the very real essence and spring of life, or the convenient ways that governments have developed to deal with them.
So it may not be just historical precedent that has made the late eighties of a century a time when the people are prepared to answer to the call that, with only one more decade left, the problems of their century should be finally dealt with so as not to blight the next one. So the build up to a new century [and much more a Millennium] is characterised not only by dealing with old problems and challenges, but also preparing the groundwork for things to be done differently in the new era.
The "new dawn" effect does seem to encourage those, who believe in power and force, to believe that "the force is with us". And this may apply to those in power, and those who wish to challenge that power. Thus a first decade, it seems, often sees small groups, sometimes plotters and conspirators, challenging domestically or internationally the authority aspired to by the regional great power, leading to a war.
In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries the wars that broke out often around the 03 year have resulted in an inconclusive and unsettled condition prevailing internally and externally in the 08-09 years. And the two British General Elections of 1910 showed, like that of 2010, that the first past the post, two-party system, did not always produce a clear verdict. In the January 1910 election the Liberals won 275 seats to the Unionists 273. In the December election the Liberals won 272 to the Unionists 272, but in both cases the Liberals were able to stay in power thanks to the support of the Irish Nationalists and the Labour Party members, who saw their prime duty in the promoting the interests of their particular constituencies, which happened to coincide with the Liberal Party support for the Parliament Bill, emasculating the House of Lords, and the Home Rule for Ireland bill.
As Britain is discovering in 2011, however, Government by coalition tends if anything to internalise the fissiparous forces associated with different views and the necessary compromises, that always risk being attacked as self-serving, opportunistic and not based upon the high principles that politicians are expected to, and/or claim to espouse. And it is interesting to look back at the chronology of 1911 at the end of January 2011 with massive street demonstrations reflecting a destabilising "Wind of Change" that has already toppled one long-established regime in Tunisia and has spread to Egypt.
1911 was a year when in foreign affairs long-established Turkish rule was being heavily challenged in the Balkans, and even longer-established Imperial rule in China was finally toppled. The Turkish and Chinese revolutions, coming after the Russian Revolution of 1905 were just three of the major elements of political and military instability at this time. And internally the year was energised by the passing of the Parliament Bill against the rearguard action of "the conservative mind", the introduction of a National Health Bill, and almost unprecedented militancy by trade unionists and the 'Suffragettes', who variously challenged the right of Parliament and men in general to govern the country. A new Parliament Bill, a new National Health Bill and widespread Trade Union action to contest the right of the Coalition Government to rule all appear to be on the agenda for 2011.
This is not to say that History repeats itself and if we look at history with other eyes than those that look for the danger signs that flagged up the approach of the Age of Catastrophe, it is probably true that there was nothing "inevitable" about the drift to the First World War, except that a culture that was preoccupied with danger signs and disaster had come to dominate public debate, in a way that it still does.
Hence perhaps Stephen Fry's adolescent fascination with his particular literary heroes from Cambridge- E.M.Forster, G.E.Moore and the Cambridge Apostles of that 'clubs' most famous era, "and their associated Bloomsbury satellites Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Lytton Strachey as well as the more illustrious planets in that system, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig Wittgenstein." (page 69) To many of these young men the whole idea of a great war fought by modern industrial nations was such a ludicrous idea before 1914 that it seemed that no intelligent country could possibly countenance it.
And better relations between England and Germany were dear to D.H.Lawrence who had eloped to Europe with his German wife Else and in 1913 he started to write his longest and most ambitious novel, the one that would somehow knit together a life astride the worlds of his working class coal-miner father and brothers, his lower-middle class mother, his native region of Nottinghamshire neither truly North or South, his own rise through education to become a schoolteacher and then a professional writer, and then his marriage to Else and his first periods of residence in Germany and Italy.
To such young men who still had great hopes for the twentieth century by 1913 and 1914 there were really signs of a Bright New Dawn. In his account of the life of John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883-1920, Robert Skidelsky quotes an essay written by Clive Bell in 1917 entitled "Before the War". In it he wrote: "In the spring of 1914 Society offered the new-comer precisely what the new-comer wanted, not cut-and-dried ideas, still less a perfect civilization, but an intellectual flutter, faint and feverish no doubt, a certain receptivity to new ways of thinking and feeling, a mind at least ajar, and the luxurious tolerance of inherited wealth. Not, I suppose, since 1789 have days seemed more full of promise". (page 284)
Skidelsky developed this theme: "For Bloomsbury, promise meant chiefly culture; culture in 1914 meant to them, above all, ballet. Ballet was the art form which defined the age just as thirty years previously it had been Wagnerian opera. It owed its ascendancy mainly to Diaghilev, the greatest of the twentieth-century impressarios. Diaghilev not only introduced to the West the genius singer Chaliapin and the dancers Karsavina and Nijinsky, but he was determined to make ballet a catalyst for all that was modern and exciting in the arts. He coaxed miraculous scores out of Ravel, Stravinsky, Strauss and Debussy; the visual impact of his productions-with scenery and costumes designed by Benois and Bakst and Nijinsky's miraculous elevation- was profound.." (page 284) Diaghelev's Ballets Russes had a tremendous effect on the developed world. A shock of the new from a modernising Russia, whose Finance Minister in 1910 predicted that his country would catch up with the most developed countries if it could have ten years of peace.
Skidelsky went on: "But the effect of the Ballets Russes was not just confined to the arts. It brought Society and the arts into contact in a way which Post-Impressionism had not, and in this Bloomsbury, naively no doubt, saw a great hope; the governing class was becoming civilised at last... The civilising and elevating mission of the arts was taken seriously by Bloomsbury. It was bound up with their optimism about the future. There is no hint in pre-war London of aestheticism as an escape from a crumbling society, which is said to have dominated the cultural consciousness of pre-1914 Vienna. Rather the arts, 'progressive' politics, economic improvement seemed to be marching hand in hand towards a better future. The political vocation itself might be held in low esteem; certainly the Bloomsbury publicists had only the haziest notion of where the masses were to fit into this newly civilised world; but that things were getting better they had no doubt. " ( page 284-5)
But while they may not have understood just how either their privileged class or the industrial working class would fit into the new world that was dawning, the great "Rite of Spring" ballet, set to Stravinsky's revolutionary score, featured a choreography by Nijinsky that drew upon ancient folk styles and movements that showed a continuity with humankind's first struggles to capture the energy of the burgeoning new year.
And if Michelangelo's statue of David and his painting of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel revealed the man in flesh and bone to the eye of the observer, so Nijinsky, whether as a Faun or as The Spectre of the Rose was all man in flesh and bone too and a reminder that nothing raises up humankind as much as brilliant art.
As for the British working class, D.H. Lawrence was now part of this "arty" world through the patronage of Lady Ottoline Morrell, and was continuing to weave together his love of the English countryside, and increasingly foreign ones too, and his affection for the people of his roots, who suffered from the effort by those in power to still act on the basis of "cut-and-dried ideas" and mould them to their will. And his work was informed by his love and understanding of the thrill of just being alive that he had observed in his mining father and brother, and their community. In a much less hopeful time he went back in his writing to the long agony of the mining community after the First World War and the General Strike, in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. But as that Great War began he was still working on that great writing project that he started in 1913, and carried on after the outbreak of war brought him new stigma as the English husband of a German wife. And when the book was published in 1915, it was banned.
Such are the choices that shape history. But 'life will out': and there will be rainbows.
"And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.".
THE END (page 495)
