Modern Lessons From Medieval History 6
Created | Updated Apr 26, 2013
Part 6. INHUMANITY AND THE HUMANIST REVOLT
From the moment that Roosevelt launched the Lend Lease programme to provide Britain with whatever it needed to wage war in the “Front Line for Christian Civilization” there were more new jobs in the USA for good pay in a good cause.
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
Woodrow Wilson had argued that the great expenditure on armaments before 1914 had made war seem almost inevitable, and the Versailles Settlements had committed the world to disarmament, releasing industry and technology from a Darwinian struggle for literally “cutting edge technology”. But during the thirties the militarism of the future Axis powers in Manchuria, China, Spain and Ethiopia revealed “The Shape of Things to Come.” including the importance of advanced science and technology. So the attack on Pearl Harbour by aircraft carrier-based Japanese squadrons not only brought the USA into the war, but also emphasized the hi-tech nature of this conflict.
In the continental USA ‘on the job’ and ‘fast track’ training cut across previous divides within US society. Men and women, even those who were not WASPs, including African-Americans, got training, educational and work experiences that would not have been possible before, and the shipyards and factories of US industry became “happening places” at the heart of the momentous and historical dynamics of the present, much as Medici Florence was at the birth of this modern age. For the "common people" were now producing things which were constantly breaking into new frontiers and, for those with an engineering bent, the discussion of the various pieces of "kit" and equipment used by both the Allies and the Axis powers is now a matter of deep fascination similar to that of art lovers comparing Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
Even a young ‘Norma Jean’ posing for a poster as “Molly the Riveter” encouraging young women to join the war effort could feel a sense of value in the overall effort. But giving yourself to the cause brought its more material rewards. Some families with four or five adults all in full-time work and earning good money now had effective purchasing power to fund the building of new homes filled with hi-tech ‘white goods’.
By the end of the war this re-invented and re-invigorated America really did appear to be a land of “the good life” for the common man and the war was followed by a new wave of immigrants eager to be part of it, while the hi-tech American home, and the family life that was based around it in new-electrified suburbias, became the new ideal that inspired the hopes and dreams of a post-war world infinitely more shattered and damaged than the post-1918 world had been. And in 1945, with the both the War in Europe and the War in the Pacific there was a strong feeling of a job well done, but also an inclination to get back home and enjoy the “American Dream” that was now so widely accepted as certainly part at least of the face of the future.
But the some of the British were still “bound to the chariot wheels of the vehicle of world leadership”, as Stephen King-Hall put it, though it seemed very obvious to Winston Churchill, not least during the talks between "The Big Three"- Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill"- that only the USA could now offer the leadership that the "Free world" needed, especially when he had been replaced as British Prime Minister by Clement Attlee and a Labour Government mostly interested in making a New Britain.
THE STRUGGLE FOR CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION GOES ON
For Churchill, however, the struggle for “Christian Civilization”, personal Liberty and individual Human Rights was not yet won. All of these were anathema to Communism, especially in the Soviet-Stalinist form and, if one form of Western Civilization had lost faith with empire, its "antithesis" had not.
So Churchill’s great Fulton speech told his audience that it really was now down to the USA to try to combat the spread of Communism and any further progression of the Iron Curtain that was cutting Eastern Europe off from "Christendom" once again. The USA responded the next year with the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, which set the tone for the history of the USA and the world for almost the next half-century.
During the inter-war period there had been an attempt to step back from a World dominated by 'Great Powers' and this had just created a power-vacuum in which totalitarian regimes had been able to flourish, their order for many people being preferable to chaos or even just to drift and idleness. But during the war the USA had become the workshop of the free world, as mid-Victorian Britain had been, and Americans had enjoyed full employment of Land, Labour and Capital in one great over-arching enterprise in which self-sacrifice brought its rewards, including material prosperity. Now thanks to generous Marshall Aid much of Europe obtained the funds it needed for post-war construction: and much of that money inevitably came back to the USA as Europe, like the Far East, turned to the US for the means with which to reconstruct infrastructure, industries and homes. At the same time the Truman Doctrine committed the USA to fight communist aggression anywhere in the World, and this naturally committed the country to the research and development needed for cutting edge technology along with armaments manufacturing that would equip the US military for an almost infinitely variable range of conflict situations. It all meant jobs and prosperity.
Subsequently American military action based upon "Domino Theory"- the idea that a Communist tide might not be one massive aggression by the Soviet 'bloc' but an unstopable momentum that built up through a succession of small victories- meant an ongoing investment in a vasr arsenal of mixed of weaponry. And almost as long as the Cold War lasted the growing US National Debt did not scare New York as much as the challenge of Communism.
At the same time, however, the USA domestically had to be maintained as a kind of shop-window showcase of the Brave New World that it was championing. If Capitalism prioritised Liberty, Communism championed Equality: and the USSR could point to the US history of racism and the ongoing denial of equality and Civil Rights in Fifties America, These were highlighted by a new militancy inspired in many cases by the opportunities and experiences of the War, during which old barriers and prejudices had come down. In many cases it seemed they had come down only to rise up again. The American soul was still dark and troubled.
ONCE UPON A TIME..
In his introduction in 1958 to pieces he wrote as a war correspondent in 1943 that were being published in book form, John Steinbeck wrote:
“Once upon a time there was a war, but so long ago and so shouldered out of the way by other wars and other kinds of wars that even people who were there are apt to forget.. Reading these old reports sent in with excitement at the time brings back images and emotions completely lost…In ancient Greece it was said that there had to be a war at least every twenty years because every generation of men had to know what it was like. With us, we must forget, or we could never engage in the murderous nonsense again” (page v)
“And, although all war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal, still there was in these memory-wars some gallantry, some bravery, some kindliness. A man got killed, surely, or maimed, but, living, he did not carry crippled seed as a gift to his children.
Now for many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear. Its children are cruelty and deceit and suspicion germinating in our darkness. And just as surely as we are poisoning the air with our test bombs, so are we poisoning our souls by fear, faceless, stupid sarcomic terror.
The pieces in this volume were written under pressure and in tension. My first impulse on rereading them was to correct, to change, to smooth out ragged sentences and remove repetitions, but their very raggedness is, it seems to me, a parcel of their immediacy. They are as real as the wicked witch and the good fairy, as true and tested and edited as any other myth.” (page xiv)
Here Steinbeck shows his lifelong obsession with Malory’s ‘Morte D’Arthur” and that late Medieval nostalgia for an earlier heroic age when men like King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table planted the seeds that would grow into the structural pillars of “European”, and later “Western”, Civilization. A few years later Steinbeck came back to this theme in an exchange of letters with Jackie Kennedy after JFK’s assassination. In the immediacy of the event on November 23, 1963 Steinbeck wrote from Warsaw in Poland:
“This is Sunday after black Friday. I wish you could see our Embassy here. In the great hall is a photograph and beside it is a bust made by a young Pole who asked to bring it in. Since early morning yesterday there has been a long line of people- all kinds but mostly poor people. They move slowly past the picture, place flowers.., and they write their names and feelings in a book. Numbers of volumes have been filled and today the line is longer than ever. It went on all night last night, silent and slow. I have never seen anything like this respect and reverence. And if we weep, seeing it, it is all right because they are weeping.” (page 787)
Back in New York in February he wrote to Mrs Kennedy:
“The 15th century and our own have so much in common- Loss of authority, loss of gods, loss of heroes, and loss of lovely pride. When such a hopeless muddled need occurs, it does seem to me that the hungry hearts of men distil their best and truest essence, and that essence becomes a man, and that man a hero so that all men can be reassured that such things are possible. The fact that all these words- hero, myth, pride, even victory, have been muddied and sicklied by the confusion and pessimism of the times only describes the times. The words and the concepts are permanent, only they must be brought out and verified by the Hero. And this thesis is demonstrable over the ages- Buddha, Jove, Jesus, Apollo, Balder, Arthur- these were men one time who answered the call and so became spirits of direction and hope.” (page 793)
In his next letter Steinbeck wrote:
“You said that you hoped that he was not a lost cause. But you must see that by the terrible accident of his death he can’t be. His cause must get stronger and stronger and it cannot weaken because it is a piece of everyone’s heart. All of us carry a fragment of him. And we must have some goodness in us- else we could not perceive goodness in him.” (page 795)
In 2011, in a new age of confusion, cynicism and pessimism, it is easy to feel at least as divorced from the reality that Steinbeck was trying to convey as he felt himself when rereading his war reports. For we have got accustomed to all kinds of post-mortem analyses of JFK and assessments of just what he achieved. We have seen too many people trying to re-enact and simulate his life, or to replicate that special new image- the ‘Media friendly’ politician- that has influenced politics ever since. But the shock of the new is like a bolt of lightning. It only happens once. And like that lightning bolt, it may seem to come from above, but the highly charge energy in the storm cloud can only bolt when there is an equally highly charged presence below.
THE HUNGRY HEARTS OF MEN
For many JFK was a man for the hour in a world of “hungry hearts of men” that had “suckled on fear and fear alone”. And what was important was not what he was, in a life cut so short, but what it seemed that he might become. JFK can be seen like those incomplete sculptures by Michelangelo in which a human figure is struggling to emerge from the granite. One can only wonder or speculate how JFK would have completed the challenges that he had set before himself and ‘all men of goodwill’ to borrow a phrase from another who dared an age to dream. For, above all else, what JFK offered was that Statue of David reminder that an individual, any individual, any one of us may, can take up the challenge to try to shape the Future.
It was a message that had got rather lost in recent history. But story of the Kennedys showed that that the descendants of Irish immigrants could rise to be as close to royalty as could happen in the USA, a fact emphasized by the fact that the daughter of their friends, the Kelly’s, did become European royalty. And in the troubled times of 2011 the beauty of Grace Kelly cast its glow upon two royal weddings to briefly lift up the spirit in challenging times. ‘Jack’ Kennedy and Grace Kelly were manifestly people blessed with wealth, good connections and good genes. But in a way the fact that they were not individuals of genius, who had made it to the top on their own in a ‘meritocratic’ system, was almost a bonus for those who dreamed that they too could ‘make it’.
In contrast the two great and charismatic war leaders, Winston Churchill and F.D. Roosevelt, were both born to face and live up to the challenge of great forebears, and could profit from the association. But by the summer of 1945 it was time for the managers to replace the leaders because dealing with the devastation meant a plodding process of breaking down immense tasks into manageable units. The times called for lawyers, bankers, scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. The lessons of World Chaos had been learned and in future the world economy would be planned, organised, supervised and stabilised, run by experts much as Florence survived its age of catastrophe and settled down to be run by the benevolent despotism of the Medici family. By 1961 there were grounds for some complacency, or at least confidence, over the new managed reality as reflected in the article written by Professor Samuel Beer of Harvard University in 1961.
Under the title “Democratic One-Party Government in Britain” he argued that the Conservative Party in the UK had been in power for most of the twentieth century- either alone of in coalition- and that now the Attlee government had attained all the goals that the Labour Party had set itself at its foundation, all that British politics now required was mere fine-tuning, as there were few remaining issues of fundamental principle. Most debates were now fairly marginal, statistical, quantitative, mere matters of more or less and history proved that the Conservatives were the "natural party of government".
Perhaps Professor Beer in part with America in mind because by 1958 there were causes of fundamental debate in the USA. The country had gone through no equivalent of Britain's ‘Labour revolution’, and old problems had re-emerged. The country was in economic recession with 5 million people unemployed and books published that year included J.K. Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society” and J.E. Meade’s “The Control of Inflation”. Moreover, President Eisenhower, formerly Supreme Commander of the Western Alliance during the Second World War, was a reminder that ‘the West’ lived in a MAD situation in which the ‘men of power’ had control of armaments which could potentially destroy all life on earth within hours. And who could doubt the existence of people who would be prepared to do it. “Better off dead than Red”. No wonder John Steinbeck said that generations had been ‘suckled on fear’.
From its very first Puritan roots there had been an obsession in America with what David Stannard called “The Puritan Way of Death”: and Arthur Miller brought out America's potential for inhumanity in “The Crucible”, his play based on the Salem witch trials. In fact The Age of Catastrophe” had made many people explore the theme of just when it is preferable to choose death rather than life. Jean Anouilh had been writing on this theme since the mid-thirties and by the late fifties and early sixties Anouilh’s plays were becoming popular on stage, television and film outside France. One may disagree with Anouilh as an historian, but like Arthur Miller, he found historical material that served as a vehicle for his theme that throughout history some individuals had decided that they were better dead than abandon their ideals. So Anouilh's characters like Antigone, Thomas Becket, Joan or Arc, and Robespierre did not die because life was not worth living for them personally, but because they all in some ways stood for the possibility of a better way ahead for everyone than that offered by the forces that would destroy them. This was certainly a theme that must have been discussed between John Steinbeck and his friend the English playwright Robert Bolt, not least in connection with Arthur Miller.
Miller’s great plays in the immediate post-war period like “Death of a Salesman” and “All Our Sons” had highlighted the failings of “the American way” in war and peace, and he had written “The Crucible” when the “witch hunts” of Senator MacCarthy and his UnAmerican Activities Committee were scouring the country for “Reds under the beds”. Miller had eventually been brought before the Committee to stand alone, as Steinbeck was ashamed to acknowledge in another letter. As an artist who would tell his truth rather than ‘tow-the-line’ in an industry that had become no more than escapist ‘Happy Day’s entertainment.
By the time of Miller’s appearance before 'The Committee', however, he had amazed the American public with the spectacle of the man, who was arguably the country’s most respected and revered intellectual genius, marrying the country’s greatest sex goddess and ‘dumb blonde’. And art could transcend the political divide too as Arthur Miller accepted the leadership of PENN, that group of writers- poets, essayists, novelists- that had been founded early in the twenties as a mutual support group encouraging authors all around the world. Sometimes such people can see a “View from the Bridge” that spans the divisions and cross-currents, and visiting Moscow in 1965 Miller was able to see a production of this play in Russian, and to learn that productions of his plays like “Death of a Salesman”- suitably modified- had been popular for sometime.
SHADOWLANDS
Such cultural exchanges were a natural development after the death of Stalin in 1953. In Nikita Khrushchev the Soviet Union too got a leader who was perhaps much more of a manager than the dictatorial "Red Tsar". A new policy of “peaceful co-existence” resulted in a TV appearance by Khrushchev and Vice-President Nixon in which, reduced to now familiar format of the small screen, they were almost like the kind of comedy duo that Americans were only too familiar with in vaudeville. A few years afterwards in 1960 Nixon faced the young J.F. Kennedy in a live TV debate on that now familiar and homely small screen. And in the aftermath of this debate between the two candidates for the Presidency the media blamed Nixon’s “Six o’clock shadow’ for his losing the debate, implying that the American public really were so shallow as to be swayed by such trivia when the election of the most powerful man in the world was at stake?
But then this was America of the common man in a modern world in which "experts" were always "blinding people with science" that went beyond their comprehension. What they could assess, however, was the way that they treated other people, and in 1938 Dale Carnegie had written his best-seller "How to Win Friends and Influence People". From the Hollywood era of the “Roaring Twenties” onwards there had been a strong culture that created norms of just how to look good if you really cared about the impression you gave. "First impressions count”. Only those who were foolish or who did not value the opinion of others would not take the trouble to make themselves presentable.
There was, of course, more to it than the "Six o'clock shadow", there was also the shadow of unemployment and the shadow of the Nuclear Holocaust. As Steinbeck wrote there was a hunger for a Hero of the modern age, like those familiar screen idols, and J.F.K looked like the romantic lead in a musical comedy. Such characters were comfortably and reassuringly human: the ideal husband, father, and the man young men would like to grow up to be. They were also those thrust into the front line of war, while the generals and managers ‘did their thing’ out of the war zone. And there were moments in those exchanges when JFK set that jaw and reminded people that he was an ex-navy man accustomed to straight talking, getting to the point and working as part of a ship’s crew.
So when Kennedy, with all the conviction of a military man faced by the ‘tricky’ lawyer, said that he considered rocket thrust to be more important, he somehow seemed to sum up the emergence of a new virility for the USA. And, when President Kennedy first visited the British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, he made MacMillan feel the energy of the times. Soon the Prime Minister made a famous speech about this “wind of change” blowing through Africa. Soon answers were “Blowing in the wind” and “The Times They are A’Changin”.
Just a few years earlier Mr. Macmillan had been famous for reacting to expressions of discontent about life in the New Britain with his comment that “They’ve never had it so good”. But Britain had no Senator McCarthy and in 1954 the authoress Dorothy L. Sayers wrote scathingly about the new order in a piece on Dante's 'Inferno' :
"That the Inferno is a picture of human society in a state of sin and corruption, everybody will readily agree. And since we are today fairly well convinced that society is in a bad way and not necessarily evolving in the direction of perfectability, we find it easy enough to recognise the various stages by which the deep of corruption is reached. Futility; lack of living faith; the drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled bad temper; a self-opinionated individualism: violence, sterility, and lack of reverence for life and property including one's own; the exploitation of sex, the debasing of language by advertisement and propaganda, the commercialisation of religion, the pandering to superstition and the conditioning of people's minds by mass-hysteria and 'spell-binding' of all kinds, venality and string-pulling in public affairs, hypocrisy, dishonesty in material things, intellectual dishonesty, the fomenting of discord (class against class, nation against nation) for what one can get out of it, the falsification and destruction of all means of communication; the exploitation of the lowest and stupidist mass-emotions; treachery even to the fundamentals of kingship, country, the chosen friend, and the sworn allegiance: these are all the too-recognisable stages that lead to the cold death of society and the extinguishing of all civilised relations."( quoted by E.F. Schumacher ‘a guide to the perplexed” page 151-152)
Not surprisingly such opinions led some people to feelings of revolt and rebellion, which rose to a mass break-out from “the Road to Hell”. And Fifties Britain saw some of its youth, growing up in the shadow of wars and uniforms, consciously creating their own ‘uniforms’. The Teddy Boys and later the ‘Mods’ and ‘Rockers’ were out on the streets and public spaces, while the Beatniks were a more pensive and ‘cool’ transatlantic tribe.
SHAKING OFF THE WORRYSOME BLUES
But just as the Second World War was an unprecendended catastrophe, the children growing up in the shadow of that conflagration were an unprecedented global generation.
In 1948 Dale Carnegie produced another book "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" that offered its readership various ways of tackling the modern malaise of worrying so much that life hardly seemed worth living. Mr Carnegie opened with a description of himself 35 years before as "one of the unhappiest lads in New York"(page xi). And his first solution was that discovered by Sir William Osler in 1871 at the age of 21 when, as a young medical student, he read these words of Thomas Carlyle "Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand". (page 17) Sir William Osler went on to have an illustrious carreer and in 1913 he addressed the students at Yale University advising them to live in "day-tight compartments". But clearly any student is involved daily in learning and developing as much as possible, learning is a forward orientated process, and those were days when people did not go to university without the active support of their families.
But what about worries later in life. An extreme solution was that offered by R.V.C. Bodley, descendant of the founder of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. His crisis came in 1918. His life had been rich in experience- childhood years in France, schooling at Eton and then Sandhurst, years in the British Army in India, and then four years on the Western Front. He had believed that the struggle was to save civilization, but as a military attache sent to Versailles he was disgusted with the "selfish politicians laying the groundwork for the Second World War.. each country grabbing what it could for itself" (page 321)He became "sick of war, sick of the army, sick of society..For the first time in my career, I spent sleepless nights, worrying about what I should do with my life". But a brief conversation with Lawrence of Arabia changed his life.."I turned my back on the world I had known and went to north-west Africa and lived with the Arabs in the Sahara, the Garden of Allah. I lived there seven years. I learned to speak the language of the nomads. I wore their clothes, I ate their food, and adopted their mode of life, which changed very little during the last twenty centuries. I became an owner of sheep and slept on the ground in Arab's tents. I also made a detailed study of their religion. In fact, I later wrote a book about Mohammed, entitled 'The Messenger'."(page 320)
After the World Chaos of the thirties the attractions of more "organic" and traditional ways of life away from the economic treadmill had paled, but what of the prospects offered by Economics that "Dismal Science". The "Famous Economist" Roger W. Bacon had his own remedy for the times he was "depressed over present conditions". He just went to the history section of his library, chose a book at random and read for an hour. And "the more I read, the more sharply I realise that the world has always been in the throes of agony, that civilisation has always been tottering on the brink. The pages of history fairly shreak with tragic tales of war, famine, poverty pestilence, and man's inhumanity to man. After reading history for an hour, I realise that bas as conditions are now, they are infinitely better than they used to be."(page 313-4) Well! At the worst Mr. Bacon was reminded that he has a nice Libary stocked with his favourite books and where he can just settle down to spend a quiet hour without being disturbed: all quite manifest reminders of a far from "mis-spent life". The remedy was not likely to work for young people born into this tragic history with "all of life" yet before them. And most, probably, did not have that rare resource that proved such a comfort to Dale Carnegie.
Having in his younger days possibly been destined to spread another form of "Good Word" and entering the Church ministry, Carhegie detailed those developments that had made him and so many of his generation lose their religious faith. But, interviewing Henry Ford in his old age, he had asked the great industrialist whether he was plagued with worries about the Future, given his great burden of responsibility. Ford had replied that he was convinced that God was in control, and had no need of his assistance. And, in fact, Carnegie found that modern pyschology just showed the wisdom in the teachings of Jesus, and the health benefits of religious faith. Then he thought of his mother and his childhood on a farm in Missouri."Neither floods, nor debts nor disasters could suppress her happy , radiant and victorious spirit. I can still hear her singing as she worked." (page 205)
By 1899 the family smallholding had been almost through the whole spectrum of calamities that impacted on the small farmer in those decades, and his mother often worried, when her husband went out to the barn and did not come back as soon as she expected, that she might go and find him hanging from a rope. One day, after a bad meeting with a bank-manager, he had stopped his horses on a bridge and spent some time looking at the deep waters. Only his wife's joyous belief in God stopped him from jumping. So he survived for another 42 happy years,and Dale Carnegie also drew on her strength "going back to religion" with an new appreciation and "tremendously interested in what religion does for me.. It banishes tensions, anxieties, fears, and worries. It gives purpose to my life- and direction. It vastly improves my happiness. It helps me to create for myself "an oasis of peace amidst the whirling sands of life"." (pages 207-8)
But these stories of the individuals who had come through more than seventy years of difficult times, were no real consolation for a generation growing up in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, foreshadowing the awesome and unprecedented potential of this new age. And for many adults there was no adequate memory of a such a triumphant mother. In fact, partly ignoring Sir William Osler's advice, there was a great tendency to look at the happy faces of children and believe in bright tomorrows. Hollywood had paved the way, and the post-war baby-boom signified a collective sense of investment in a better new future, in a better world. Just as immigration into the USA implied a "New Start" so across the war-torn world it became axiomatic that "our children are our Future". It was to be a New Start
LESSONS FROM THE OLD AND ANCIENT WORLD
Yet Mr. Bacon was perhaps right in looking to the lessons of the Old and Ancient World- a much older, more complex and informative one than this "adolescent" USA, for the histories that he gave as examples were Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico" and Suetonius' "Lives of the Twelve Caesars". And Mr Bodley could point to the ancient wisdom of North-West Africa.
It was on such cultures and histories that Albert Camus was able to draw in writing his great novel "La Peste", which was published in 1947 the year before Mr. Carnegie's opus.In the next ten years of Cold War gradually moving towards peaceful co-existence the international reputation of the novel and the author grew, Camus receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
Albert Camus had been brought up by his Spanish-born mother in French North Africa and it was there that he formed his ideas about the sickness of modern times compared to the Hellenic ideals of a world whose remains were still part of the local landscape. Coming to work in France his sense of alienation came through the work "L'Etranger", which was published in 1942, a time of deep soul searching in a France that was trying to understand the disaster of 1940 and the ongoing consequences.
But perhaps nowhere else in Europe had embraced the full-spectrum of modern thought as much as France. There was the struggle between Private and Public materialistic philosophies because the tradition of State involvement in promoting economic growth went right back to Medieval times. And there was the struggle between nationalists and internationalists, with the French Communist Party initially observing the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact on orders from Moscow, only to leap into action once Germany attacked the USSR. Then the CP activist structure made it a very useful pre-existing basis around which to organise the French resistance. Communists became patriots too and many were numbered among the martyrs of the resistance, so once the war was over it was quite normal that the French Communist Party and the Socialist Party should have taken a leading part in national politics. And this carried on into the intellectual and political life in the Fifties and Sixties, with French art and culture, once again offering a much more vital and dynamic view of life and its possibilities than its Anglo-Saxon equivalent, not least because some of its leading politicians and thinkers aspired to bridging the East-West divide.
Jean Paul Sartre was an internationally respected thinker and his sixties collection of pieces in “Intimacy” made up a “brilliant study of the corruption of love” and according to 'Punch’ that it “Leaves Lady Chatterly’s Lover asleep at the post.” Camus too, having been active during the resistance, had ended the war with his reputation enhanced. Yet some of his old-comrades in the Resistance did not fully appreciate “The Plague” because it tried to tell the story of the war as a Europeanwide disaster not unlike the Black Death.
Consciously linking his story to great plagues that have tested humankind since antiquity, Camus described a city that was suddenly invaded by a plague of rats. To a French readership, whose country had been occupied by Germany, it was not hard to think of the Germans as rats, especially the Nazis. But in Camus’ story, though as in the Bubonic Plague the plague spread from the rats to the humans, the rats suffered from the plague in even greater numbers than the people, so that they too were the victims. As Camus explained in other pieces,for him the plague was that whole trend of violent, divisive, aggressive and ideological European culture that had turned people into willing instruments of death. In the pieces that he wrote for "The Theatre of the Absurd", that dramtic art that could be popular and reach the "masses" more easily than the printed word, Camus tried to revive that spirit of Greek Hellenism that he had studied in philosophy and had seen still reflected in the ruins of his boyhood world.
Two years after Camus' death in a car accident in 1960 D.R. Haggis of Glasgow University wrote in an appraisal of "La Peste":
"We may regret whatever limits his journalistic activities may have imposed on the output of the creative artist, but we are, I think, bound to admit that the moral climate of post-war France would have been the poorer without the humanizing influence that Albert Camus exercised in the realm of social and political thinking..But creative writing was not for Camus simply a process of analysis and enquiry; it was also an act of affirmation. It was his own personal way of opposing the temptation to nihilism and despair that the spectacle and the experience of twentieth century Europe brought; it was, further, a means of establishing contact with other human beings and of entering into a kind of fraternal communion with them". And, above all, Haggis suggests that Camus wished to offer two things to his public "his own zest for living, and a view of life that he derived from his early experience of it"- in particular the light energy of the Mediterranean shores of North Africa. (page 8)
Camus message was very welcome to many of the global post-war generation as it progressed through education and into higher education, growing up in a managed world where change and the true vitality of life was restricted, much as the carefully contrived strapless gowns, corsetry and ‘bras’of the great Hollywood sex symbols. Meanwhile Camus' France, rediscovering the essence of human life lit up by a Mediterranean Sun, offered a very different and more vital view of life, as it had been since the time of Adam, summed up in French performance art most popularly by Roger Vadim's film “And God created Woman” starring Brigitte Bardot.
A rising generation embraced the study of love, peace and harmony, and sought new answers to the challenge of the Future. During the Sixties, in college and university campuses around the world a massive investment in Universities created an unprecedented sense of collective vitality and adventure, as young people thrown together from wide catchments found each other and found a new lust for life in a shrinking world. In line with the post-war New Start philosophy many came from families with no experience of higher education, re-empasising the fact that these young people were pioneers in a new world. And they were away of being a global generation because, for example, by the time of Camus' death "La Peste" had been translated into 16 foreign languages and many editions were cheap paper-back ones.It was a tide that swept up to the high points of "Soixante Huite" in France and Woodstock in the USA. It was time for a changing of the guard.
EVOLUTIONARY- VERSUS REVOLUTIONARY- CHANGE
Teaching in the University of Colorado in 1963 Dr. Harrison Thomson dedicated his book to his students who had to be aware of the current American Civil Rights Movement, just part of that long struggle of common man for simple rights as human beings that was writ large on the pages of history. And being an academic of this generation it is hardly surprising that he was keen to bring out the kind of structuralist interpretation that was very popular at that time. Even D.R. Haggis had to have a chapter on the structure of "La Peste", and so much of the focus of "men of power" planning for the post-war situation had been upon how they would have to create the structures of the New World order.
So Dr. Thomson's assertion about the struggle of common man came as part of his description of a developing social and economic model that reached a point of general crisis. “In the fourteenth century this struggle became a Continent wide phenomenon transcending lines of climate, race and language".
The reader is clearly meant to deduce that it was the economic and social model that "transcended lines of climate, race and language" and that the struggle was implied by intrinsic factors within the way that the structures had evolved. Moreover,the argument validates the lesson of more recent World Chaos that the answer to the problems of the common man was the kind of deliberate economic and social management that had been embraced by global establishments after 1945- even if that meant in the short term "benevolent despotism" by those who "knew best".
But there was a much more chronic and catastrophic challenge to European life and to humane and harmonious living in the fourteenth century that transcended those lines. "La Peste". For The Black Death ravaged Europe between 1348 and 1351 showed no respect for those "lines and divisions" either. The Second World War killed and estimated 55 million people worldwide: but the Black Deathe killed a third of the population in just three years. The traumatic and destabilising impact upon all European societies and states can only be guessed at as the ties of humanity that bonded all units of societies together were destroyed.In May 1945 John Woodhead published a report on the Bengal Famine of 1943- just one of the tragedies of the war, and he stated:" We have been haunted by a deep sense of tragedy. A million and a half of the poor of Bengal fell victim to circumstances for which they were not responsible. Society, together with its organs, failed to protect its weaker members. Indeed, there was a moral and social breakdown, as well as an administrative one." (page 975)
Such has been the eternal pattern of catastrophes, discernible in the very earliest recorded thoughts about the human experience as in the Gilgamesh/Noah stories rooted in Ancient Mesopotamia. The miracle is not that terrible destructive forces like the God Enlil can wreak havoc, but that some people do their best to save enough life to start all over again- not just themselves but "all the animals two, by two etc".For the citizens of Ur knew that, in spite of all of the magnificent building work that went into making that metropolis, Enlil- the God of the Storm, either acting through Nature or with the city's enemies, could destroy the city. Another French novelist of the post-war period used the German invasion and occupation as this kind of flood, and,like Camus, felt that what was of essential importance was to preserve a sense of Humanity, from which all else could grow once again.
The Black Death, as Camus described, was in line with these catastrophes that come from without, the kind of forces that overwhelm the best efforts of humankind to impose there systems and their authority. Systems are designed or evolve to fit certain circumstances and their parameters. This was one of the lessons of the First World War in which, in spite of the massive industrial and material strength of the combatants the main result was not a war that was "won by Christmas", but one that descended into stalemate and ended with exhaustion of resources and not by definitive victory. So evolutionary science had adapted by the late twenties, as H.G.Wells and Julian Huxley wrote in "The Science of Life", to the view that geological times have been punctuated by natural catastrophes in which the large and powerful species that have been well-adjusted to settled conditions were unable to adjust to the violence of the change and smaller species that are more adaptable were able to change the balance of nature. This does seem to be consistent with the catastrophe of the Black Death which was especially difficult for the Medieval Establishment.
The basic institutions of monarchy, nobility and the Church faced a severe challenge of adaptability, as well as the emerging power of the various forms of the "bourgeoisie" or the upper classes within the Italian Republics.And because these were the people others turned to for power and authority, and therefore security, their impotence in the face of this disaster badly affected their prestige and authority. Questions would be asked that eventually produced the answers that heralded the Early Modern Age, and in the short run produced conflicts like the rising of the "ragbags" in Florence and the Peasants' Revolt in England just more or less a "generation" after the Catastrophe, reckoning a generation as something approximate to 20-25 years.
And it is no mere coincidence that John Steinbeck wrote: "In ancient Greece it was said that there had to be a war at least every twenty years because every generation of men had to know what it was like. With us, we must forget, or we could never engage in the murderous nonsense again". He had already seen two-world war generations, and a world which was all-set-up for a third which would be a case of MAD- Mutually Assured Destruction. As Curtis Le May, the military man in charge of the US nuclear deterrent put it, victory would be every one of the enemy dead, and a new Adam and Eve to make a New Start.
But both world wars with all their "murderous nonsense" had only been endurable because of they became associated with the promise of a New Start, and all of the investment in systems and structures after 1945 had been called for and justified on that premis. But in terms of Englsh literature- and films based upon them- in their maturing years of secondary education for all the post-war generation discovered the works of Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and T.E. Lawrence whose attitudes to the First World War had not been "establishment" and whose literary qualities had now won them status as authors of classic works. Aldous Huxley in particular produced ideas that were the antithesis of those put forward by his brother Julian.
Dr. Julian Huxley had followed their illustrious grandfather in becoming a distinguished biologist and his reading of this new age of science and technology was that it was tantamount to a revolution. But it was a revolution that needed massive state backing and its advantages had been harnessed and exploited by the Axis Powers. And during the war in a series of articles he had expounded his view that the Allies would only defeat the Axis through embracing the Revolution. Moreover even before the war was won, in order to really be able to exploit these powers fully, he argued, it was necessary to plan for peace. Science and technology made this possible. And in many ways it could be argued that the successes of this period like putting a man into Space and eventually on the Moon created the idea that "modern man" had achieved mastery of his environment. It was a success that encouraged students in Paris in 1968 and Woodstock USA in 1969 that collectively and individually "we" could have the life that we chose.
But the post-war idea of managed and planned economies as the basis of a "Brave New World" only lasted more or less till 1973. As the authoritative Oxford University Press work on "The Economic System in the UK" said looking back at what happened in 1973 in the light of the crisis of belief that it triggered in this modern "faith system", the planners could not have been foreseen the Opec Oil Crisis. Just as happened with the Black Death in 1348 things from "outside the box" destabilised the whole economic and social system and threw into question whether anyone was actually in control- not even a God unknown.
From the moment that Roosevelt launched the Lend Lease programme to provide Britain with whatever it needed to wage war in the “Front Line for Christian Civilization” there were more new jobs in the USA for good pay in a good cause.
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
Woodrow Wilson had argued that the great expenditure on armaments before 1914 had made war seem almost inevitable, and the Versailles Settlements had committed the world to disarmament, releasing industry and technology from a Darwinian struggle for literally “cutting edge technology”. But during the thirties the militarism of the future Axis powers in Manchuria, China, Spain and Ethiopia revealed “The Shape of Things to Come.” including the importance of advanced science and technology. So the attack on Pearl Harbour by aircraft carrier-based Japanese squadrons not only brought the USA into the war, but also emphasized the hi-tech nature of this conflict.
In the continental USA ‘on the job’ and ‘fast track’ training cut across previous divides within US society. Men and women, even those who were not WASPs, including African-Americans, got training, educational and work experiences that would not have been possible before, and the shipyards and factories of US industry became “happening places” at the heart of the momentous and historical dynamics of the present, much as Medici Florence was at the birth of this modern age. For the "common people" were now producing things which were constantly breaking into new frontiers and, for those with an engineering bent, the discussion of the various pieces of "kit" and equipment used by both the Allies and the Axis powers is now a matter of deep fascination similar to that of art lovers comparing Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
Even a young ‘Norma Jean’ posing for a poster as “Molly the Riveter” encouraging young women to join the war effort could feel a sense of value in the overall effort. But giving yourself to the cause brought its more material rewards. Some families with four or five adults all in full-time work and earning good money now had effective purchasing power to fund the building of new homes filled with hi-tech ‘white goods’.
By the end of the war this re-invented and re-invigorated America really did appear to be a land of “the good life” for the common man and the war was followed by a new wave of immigrants eager to be part of it, while the hi-tech American home, and the family life that was based around it in new-electrified suburbias, became the new ideal that inspired the hopes and dreams of a post-war world infinitely more shattered and damaged than the post-1918 world had been. And in 1945, with the both the War in Europe and the War in the Pacific there was a strong feeling of a job well done, but also an inclination to get back home and enjoy the “American Dream” that was now so widely accepted as certainly part at least of the face of the future.
But the some of the British were still “bound to the chariot wheels of the vehicle of world leadership”, as Stephen King-Hall put it, though it seemed very obvious to Winston Churchill, not least during the talks between "The Big Three"- Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill"- that only the USA could now offer the leadership that the "Free world" needed, especially when he had been replaced as British Prime Minister by Clement Attlee and a Labour Government mostly interested in making a New Britain.
THE STRUGGLE FOR CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION GOES ON
For Churchill, however, the struggle for “Christian Civilization”, personal Liberty and individual Human Rights was not yet won. All of these were anathema to Communism, especially in the Soviet-Stalinist form and, if one form of Western Civilization had lost faith with empire, its "antithesis" had not.
So Churchill’s great Fulton speech told his audience that it really was now down to the USA to try to combat the spread of Communism and any further progression of the Iron Curtain that was cutting Eastern Europe off from "Christendom" once again. The USA responded the next year with the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, which set the tone for the history of the USA and the world for almost the next half-century.
During the inter-war period there had been an attempt to step back from a World dominated by 'Great Powers' and this had just created a power-vacuum in which totalitarian regimes had been able to flourish, their order for many people being preferable to chaos or even just to drift and idleness. But during the war the USA had become the workshop of the free world, as mid-Victorian Britain had been, and Americans had enjoyed full employment of Land, Labour and Capital in one great over-arching enterprise in which self-sacrifice brought its rewards, including material prosperity. Now thanks to generous Marshall Aid much of Europe obtained the funds it needed for post-war construction: and much of that money inevitably came back to the USA as Europe, like the Far East, turned to the US for the means with which to reconstruct infrastructure, industries and homes. At the same time the Truman Doctrine committed the USA to fight communist aggression anywhere in the World, and this naturally committed the country to the research and development needed for cutting edge technology along with armaments manufacturing that would equip the US military for an almost infinitely variable range of conflict situations. It all meant jobs and prosperity.
Subsequently American military action based upon "Domino Theory"- the idea that a Communist tide might not be one massive aggression by the Soviet 'bloc' but an unstopable momentum that built up through a succession of small victories- meant an ongoing investment in a vasr arsenal of mixed of weaponry. And almost as long as the Cold War lasted the growing US National Debt did not scare New York as much as the challenge of Communism.
At the same time, however, the USA domestically had to be maintained as a kind of shop-window showcase of the Brave New World that it was championing. If Capitalism prioritised Liberty, Communism championed Equality: and the USSR could point to the US history of racism and the ongoing denial of equality and Civil Rights in Fifties America, These were highlighted by a new militancy inspired in many cases by the opportunities and experiences of the War, during which old barriers and prejudices had come down. In many cases it seemed they had come down only to rise up again. The American soul was still dark and troubled.
ONCE UPON A TIME..
In his introduction in 1958 to pieces he wrote as a war correspondent in 1943 that were being published in book form, John Steinbeck wrote:
“Once upon a time there was a war, but so long ago and so shouldered out of the way by other wars and other kinds of wars that even people who were there are apt to forget.. Reading these old reports sent in with excitement at the time brings back images and emotions completely lost…In ancient Greece it was said that there had to be a war at least every twenty years because every generation of men had to know what it was like. With us, we must forget, or we could never engage in the murderous nonsense again” (page v)
“And, although all war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal, still there was in these memory-wars some gallantry, some bravery, some kindliness. A man got killed, surely, or maimed, but, living, he did not carry crippled seed as a gift to his children.
Now for many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear. Its children are cruelty and deceit and suspicion germinating in our darkness. And just as surely as we are poisoning the air with our test bombs, so are we poisoning our souls by fear, faceless, stupid sarcomic terror.
The pieces in this volume were written under pressure and in tension. My first impulse on rereading them was to correct, to change, to smooth out ragged sentences and remove repetitions, but their very raggedness is, it seems to me, a parcel of their immediacy. They are as real as the wicked witch and the good fairy, as true and tested and edited as any other myth.” (page xiv)
Here Steinbeck shows his lifelong obsession with Malory’s ‘Morte D’Arthur” and that late Medieval nostalgia for an earlier heroic age when men like King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table planted the seeds that would grow into the structural pillars of “European”, and later “Western”, Civilization. A few years later Steinbeck came back to this theme in an exchange of letters with Jackie Kennedy after JFK’s assassination. In the immediacy of the event on November 23, 1963 Steinbeck wrote from Warsaw in Poland:
“This is Sunday after black Friday. I wish you could see our Embassy here. In the great hall is a photograph and beside it is a bust made by a young Pole who asked to bring it in. Since early morning yesterday there has been a long line of people- all kinds but mostly poor people. They move slowly past the picture, place flowers.., and they write their names and feelings in a book. Numbers of volumes have been filled and today the line is longer than ever. It went on all night last night, silent and slow. I have never seen anything like this respect and reverence. And if we weep, seeing it, it is all right because they are weeping.” (page 787)
Back in New York in February he wrote to Mrs Kennedy:
“The 15th century and our own have so much in common- Loss of authority, loss of gods, loss of heroes, and loss of lovely pride. When such a hopeless muddled need occurs, it does seem to me that the hungry hearts of men distil their best and truest essence, and that essence becomes a man, and that man a hero so that all men can be reassured that such things are possible. The fact that all these words- hero, myth, pride, even victory, have been muddied and sicklied by the confusion and pessimism of the times only describes the times. The words and the concepts are permanent, only they must be brought out and verified by the Hero. And this thesis is demonstrable over the ages- Buddha, Jove, Jesus, Apollo, Balder, Arthur- these were men one time who answered the call and so became spirits of direction and hope.” (page 793)
In his next letter Steinbeck wrote:
“You said that you hoped that he was not a lost cause. But you must see that by the terrible accident of his death he can’t be. His cause must get stronger and stronger and it cannot weaken because it is a piece of everyone’s heart. All of us carry a fragment of him. And we must have some goodness in us- else we could not perceive goodness in him.” (page 795)
In 2011, in a new age of confusion, cynicism and pessimism, it is easy to feel at least as divorced from the reality that Steinbeck was trying to convey as he felt himself when rereading his war reports. For we have got accustomed to all kinds of post-mortem analyses of JFK and assessments of just what he achieved. We have seen too many people trying to re-enact and simulate his life, or to replicate that special new image- the ‘Media friendly’ politician- that has influenced politics ever since. But the shock of the new is like a bolt of lightning. It only happens once. And like that lightning bolt, it may seem to come from above, but the highly charge energy in the storm cloud can only bolt when there is an equally highly charged presence below.
THE HUNGRY HEARTS OF MEN
For many JFK was a man for the hour in a world of “hungry hearts of men” that had “suckled on fear and fear alone”. And what was important was not what he was, in a life cut so short, but what it seemed that he might become. JFK can be seen like those incomplete sculptures by Michelangelo in which a human figure is struggling to emerge from the granite. One can only wonder or speculate how JFK would have completed the challenges that he had set before himself and ‘all men of goodwill’ to borrow a phrase from another who dared an age to dream. For, above all else, what JFK offered was that Statue of David reminder that an individual, any individual, any one of us may, can take up the challenge to try to shape the Future.
It was a message that had got rather lost in recent history. But story of the Kennedys showed that that the descendants of Irish immigrants could rise to be as close to royalty as could happen in the USA, a fact emphasized by the fact that the daughter of their friends, the Kelly’s, did become European royalty. And in the troubled times of 2011 the beauty of Grace Kelly cast its glow upon two royal weddings to briefly lift up the spirit in challenging times. ‘Jack’ Kennedy and Grace Kelly were manifestly people blessed with wealth, good connections and good genes. But in a way the fact that they were not individuals of genius, who had made it to the top on their own in a ‘meritocratic’ system, was almost a bonus for those who dreamed that they too could ‘make it’.
In contrast the two great and charismatic war leaders, Winston Churchill and F.D. Roosevelt, were both born to face and live up to the challenge of great forebears, and could profit from the association. But by the summer of 1945 it was time for the managers to replace the leaders because dealing with the devastation meant a plodding process of breaking down immense tasks into manageable units. The times called for lawyers, bankers, scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. The lessons of World Chaos had been learned and in future the world economy would be planned, organised, supervised and stabilised, run by experts much as Florence survived its age of catastrophe and settled down to be run by the benevolent despotism of the Medici family. By 1961 there were grounds for some complacency, or at least confidence, over the new managed reality as reflected in the article written by Professor Samuel Beer of Harvard University in 1961.
Under the title “Democratic One-Party Government in Britain” he argued that the Conservative Party in the UK had been in power for most of the twentieth century- either alone of in coalition- and that now the Attlee government had attained all the goals that the Labour Party had set itself at its foundation, all that British politics now required was mere fine-tuning, as there were few remaining issues of fundamental principle. Most debates were now fairly marginal, statistical, quantitative, mere matters of more or less and history proved that the Conservatives were the "natural party of government".
Perhaps Professor Beer in part with America in mind because by 1958 there were causes of fundamental debate in the USA. The country had gone through no equivalent of Britain's ‘Labour revolution’, and old problems had re-emerged. The country was in economic recession with 5 million people unemployed and books published that year included J.K. Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society” and J.E. Meade’s “The Control of Inflation”. Moreover, President Eisenhower, formerly Supreme Commander of the Western Alliance during the Second World War, was a reminder that ‘the West’ lived in a MAD situation in which the ‘men of power’ had control of armaments which could potentially destroy all life on earth within hours. And who could doubt the existence of people who would be prepared to do it. “Better off dead than Red”. No wonder John Steinbeck said that generations had been ‘suckled on fear’.
From its very first Puritan roots there had been an obsession in America with what David Stannard called “The Puritan Way of Death”: and Arthur Miller brought out America's potential for inhumanity in “The Crucible”, his play based on the Salem witch trials. In fact The Age of Catastrophe” had made many people explore the theme of just when it is preferable to choose death rather than life. Jean Anouilh had been writing on this theme since the mid-thirties and by the late fifties and early sixties Anouilh’s plays were becoming popular on stage, television and film outside France. One may disagree with Anouilh as an historian, but like Arthur Miller, he found historical material that served as a vehicle for his theme that throughout history some individuals had decided that they were better dead than abandon their ideals. So Anouilh's characters like Antigone, Thomas Becket, Joan or Arc, and Robespierre did not die because life was not worth living for them personally, but because they all in some ways stood for the possibility of a better way ahead for everyone than that offered by the forces that would destroy them. This was certainly a theme that must have been discussed between John Steinbeck and his friend the English playwright Robert Bolt, not least in connection with Arthur Miller.
Miller’s great plays in the immediate post-war period like “Death of a Salesman” and “All Our Sons” had highlighted the failings of “the American way” in war and peace, and he had written “The Crucible” when the “witch hunts” of Senator MacCarthy and his UnAmerican Activities Committee were scouring the country for “Reds under the beds”. Miller had eventually been brought before the Committee to stand alone, as Steinbeck was ashamed to acknowledge in another letter. As an artist who would tell his truth rather than ‘tow-the-line’ in an industry that had become no more than escapist ‘Happy Day’s entertainment.
By the time of Miller’s appearance before 'The Committee', however, he had amazed the American public with the spectacle of the man, who was arguably the country’s most respected and revered intellectual genius, marrying the country’s greatest sex goddess and ‘dumb blonde’. And art could transcend the political divide too as Arthur Miller accepted the leadership of PENN, that group of writers- poets, essayists, novelists- that had been founded early in the twenties as a mutual support group encouraging authors all around the world. Sometimes such people can see a “View from the Bridge” that spans the divisions and cross-currents, and visiting Moscow in 1965 Miller was able to see a production of this play in Russian, and to learn that productions of his plays like “Death of a Salesman”- suitably modified- had been popular for sometime.
SHADOWLANDS
Such cultural exchanges were a natural development after the death of Stalin in 1953. In Nikita Khrushchev the Soviet Union too got a leader who was perhaps much more of a manager than the dictatorial "Red Tsar". A new policy of “peaceful co-existence” resulted in a TV appearance by Khrushchev and Vice-President Nixon in which, reduced to now familiar format of the small screen, they were almost like the kind of comedy duo that Americans were only too familiar with in vaudeville. A few years afterwards in 1960 Nixon faced the young J.F. Kennedy in a live TV debate on that now familiar and homely small screen. And in the aftermath of this debate between the two candidates for the Presidency the media blamed Nixon’s “Six o’clock shadow’ for his losing the debate, implying that the American public really were so shallow as to be swayed by such trivia when the election of the most powerful man in the world was at stake?
But then this was America of the common man in a modern world in which "experts" were always "blinding people with science" that went beyond their comprehension. What they could assess, however, was the way that they treated other people, and in 1938 Dale Carnegie had written his best-seller "How to Win Friends and Influence People". From the Hollywood era of the “Roaring Twenties” onwards there had been a strong culture that created norms of just how to look good if you really cared about the impression you gave. "First impressions count”. Only those who were foolish or who did not value the opinion of others would not take the trouble to make themselves presentable.
There was, of course, more to it than the "Six o'clock shadow", there was also the shadow of unemployment and the shadow of the Nuclear Holocaust. As Steinbeck wrote there was a hunger for a Hero of the modern age, like those familiar screen idols, and J.F.K looked like the romantic lead in a musical comedy. Such characters were comfortably and reassuringly human: the ideal husband, father, and the man young men would like to grow up to be. They were also those thrust into the front line of war, while the generals and managers ‘did their thing’ out of the war zone. And there were moments in those exchanges when JFK set that jaw and reminded people that he was an ex-navy man accustomed to straight talking, getting to the point and working as part of a ship’s crew.
So when Kennedy, with all the conviction of a military man faced by the ‘tricky’ lawyer, said that he considered rocket thrust to be more important, he somehow seemed to sum up the emergence of a new virility for the USA. And, when President Kennedy first visited the British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, he made MacMillan feel the energy of the times. Soon the Prime Minister made a famous speech about this “wind of change” blowing through Africa. Soon answers were “Blowing in the wind” and “The Times They are A’Changin”.
Just a few years earlier Mr. Macmillan had been famous for reacting to expressions of discontent about life in the New Britain with his comment that “They’ve never had it so good”. But Britain had no Senator McCarthy and in 1954 the authoress Dorothy L. Sayers wrote scathingly about the new order in a piece on Dante's 'Inferno' :
"That the Inferno is a picture of human society in a state of sin and corruption, everybody will readily agree. And since we are today fairly well convinced that society is in a bad way and not necessarily evolving in the direction of perfectability, we find it easy enough to recognise the various stages by which the deep of corruption is reached. Futility; lack of living faith; the drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled bad temper; a self-opinionated individualism: violence, sterility, and lack of reverence for life and property including one's own; the exploitation of sex, the debasing of language by advertisement and propaganda, the commercialisation of religion, the pandering to superstition and the conditioning of people's minds by mass-hysteria and 'spell-binding' of all kinds, venality and string-pulling in public affairs, hypocrisy, dishonesty in material things, intellectual dishonesty, the fomenting of discord (class against class, nation against nation) for what one can get out of it, the falsification and destruction of all means of communication; the exploitation of the lowest and stupidist mass-emotions; treachery even to the fundamentals of kingship, country, the chosen friend, and the sworn allegiance: these are all the too-recognisable stages that lead to the cold death of society and the extinguishing of all civilised relations."( quoted by E.F. Schumacher ‘a guide to the perplexed” page 151-152)
Not surprisingly such opinions led some people to feelings of revolt and rebellion, which rose to a mass break-out from “the Road to Hell”. And Fifties Britain saw some of its youth, growing up in the shadow of wars and uniforms, consciously creating their own ‘uniforms’. The Teddy Boys and later the ‘Mods’ and ‘Rockers’ were out on the streets and public spaces, while the Beatniks were a more pensive and ‘cool’ transatlantic tribe.
SHAKING OFF THE WORRYSOME BLUES
But just as the Second World War was an unprecendended catastrophe, the children growing up in the shadow of that conflagration were an unprecedented global generation.
In 1948 Dale Carnegie produced another book "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" that offered its readership various ways of tackling the modern malaise of worrying so much that life hardly seemed worth living. Mr Carnegie opened with a description of himself 35 years before as "one of the unhappiest lads in New York"(page xi). And his first solution was that discovered by Sir William Osler in 1871 at the age of 21 when, as a young medical student, he read these words of Thomas Carlyle "Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand". (page 17) Sir William Osler went on to have an illustrious carreer and in 1913 he addressed the students at Yale University advising them to live in "day-tight compartments". But clearly any student is involved daily in learning and developing as much as possible, learning is a forward orientated process, and those were days when people did not go to university without the active support of their families.
But what about worries later in life. An extreme solution was that offered by R.V.C. Bodley, descendant of the founder of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. His crisis came in 1918. His life had been rich in experience- childhood years in France, schooling at Eton and then Sandhurst, years in the British Army in India, and then four years on the Western Front. He had believed that the struggle was to save civilization, but as a military attache sent to Versailles he was disgusted with the "selfish politicians laying the groundwork for the Second World War.. each country grabbing what it could for itself" (page 321)He became "sick of war, sick of the army, sick of society..For the first time in my career, I spent sleepless nights, worrying about what I should do with my life". But a brief conversation with Lawrence of Arabia changed his life.."I turned my back on the world I had known and went to north-west Africa and lived with the Arabs in the Sahara, the Garden of Allah. I lived there seven years. I learned to speak the language of the nomads. I wore their clothes, I ate their food, and adopted their mode of life, which changed very little during the last twenty centuries. I became an owner of sheep and slept on the ground in Arab's tents. I also made a detailed study of their religion. In fact, I later wrote a book about Mohammed, entitled 'The Messenger'."(page 320)
After the World Chaos of the thirties the attractions of more "organic" and traditional ways of life away from the economic treadmill had paled, but what of the prospects offered by Economics that "Dismal Science". The "Famous Economist" Roger W. Bacon had his own remedy for the times he was "depressed over present conditions". He just went to the history section of his library, chose a book at random and read for an hour. And "the more I read, the more sharply I realise that the world has always been in the throes of agony, that civilisation has always been tottering on the brink. The pages of history fairly shreak with tragic tales of war, famine, poverty pestilence, and man's inhumanity to man. After reading history for an hour, I realise that bas as conditions are now, they are infinitely better than they used to be."(page 313-4) Well! At the worst Mr. Bacon was reminded that he has a nice Libary stocked with his favourite books and where he can just settle down to spend a quiet hour without being disturbed: all quite manifest reminders of a far from "mis-spent life". The remedy was not likely to work for young people born into this tragic history with "all of life" yet before them. And most, probably, did not have that rare resource that proved such a comfort to Dale Carnegie.
Having in his younger days possibly been destined to spread another form of "Good Word" and entering the Church ministry, Carhegie detailed those developments that had made him and so many of his generation lose their religious faith. But, interviewing Henry Ford in his old age, he had asked the great industrialist whether he was plagued with worries about the Future, given his great burden of responsibility. Ford had replied that he was convinced that God was in control, and had no need of his assistance. And, in fact, Carnegie found that modern pyschology just showed the wisdom in the teachings of Jesus, and the health benefits of religious faith. Then he thought of his mother and his childhood on a farm in Missouri."Neither floods, nor debts nor disasters could suppress her happy , radiant and victorious spirit. I can still hear her singing as she worked." (page 205)
By 1899 the family smallholding had been almost through the whole spectrum of calamities that impacted on the small farmer in those decades, and his mother often worried, when her husband went out to the barn and did not come back as soon as she expected, that she might go and find him hanging from a rope. One day, after a bad meeting with a bank-manager, he had stopped his horses on a bridge and spent some time looking at the deep waters. Only his wife's joyous belief in God stopped him from jumping. So he survived for another 42 happy years,and Dale Carnegie also drew on her strength "going back to religion" with an new appreciation and "tremendously interested in what religion does for me.. It banishes tensions, anxieties, fears, and worries. It gives purpose to my life- and direction. It vastly improves my happiness. It helps me to create for myself "an oasis of peace amidst the whirling sands of life"." (pages 207-8)
But these stories of the individuals who had come through more than seventy years of difficult times, were no real consolation for a generation growing up in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, foreshadowing the awesome and unprecedented potential of this new age. And for many adults there was no adequate memory of a such a triumphant mother. In fact, partly ignoring Sir William Osler's advice, there was a great tendency to look at the happy faces of children and believe in bright tomorrows. Hollywood had paved the way, and the post-war baby-boom signified a collective sense of investment in a better new future, in a better world. Just as immigration into the USA implied a "New Start" so across the war-torn world it became axiomatic that "our children are our Future". It was to be a New Start
LESSONS FROM THE OLD AND ANCIENT WORLD
Yet Mr. Bacon was perhaps right in looking to the lessons of the Old and Ancient World- a much older, more complex and informative one than this "adolescent" USA, for the histories that he gave as examples were Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico" and Suetonius' "Lives of the Twelve Caesars". And Mr Bodley could point to the ancient wisdom of North-West Africa.
It was on such cultures and histories that Albert Camus was able to draw in writing his great novel "La Peste", which was published in 1947 the year before Mr. Carnegie's opus.In the next ten years of Cold War gradually moving towards peaceful co-existence the international reputation of the novel and the author grew, Camus receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
Albert Camus had been brought up by his Spanish-born mother in French North Africa and it was there that he formed his ideas about the sickness of modern times compared to the Hellenic ideals of a world whose remains were still part of the local landscape. Coming to work in France his sense of alienation came through the work "L'Etranger", which was published in 1942, a time of deep soul searching in a France that was trying to understand the disaster of 1940 and the ongoing consequences.
But perhaps nowhere else in Europe had embraced the full-spectrum of modern thought as much as France. There was the struggle between Private and Public materialistic philosophies because the tradition of State involvement in promoting economic growth went right back to Medieval times. And there was the struggle between nationalists and internationalists, with the French Communist Party initially observing the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact on orders from Moscow, only to leap into action once Germany attacked the USSR. Then the CP activist structure made it a very useful pre-existing basis around which to organise the French resistance. Communists became patriots too and many were numbered among the martyrs of the resistance, so once the war was over it was quite normal that the French Communist Party and the Socialist Party should have taken a leading part in national politics. And this carried on into the intellectual and political life in the Fifties and Sixties, with French art and culture, once again offering a much more vital and dynamic view of life and its possibilities than its Anglo-Saxon equivalent, not least because some of its leading politicians and thinkers aspired to bridging the East-West divide.
Jean Paul Sartre was an internationally respected thinker and his sixties collection of pieces in “Intimacy” made up a “brilliant study of the corruption of love” and according to 'Punch’ that it “Leaves Lady Chatterly’s Lover asleep at the post.” Camus too, having been active during the resistance, had ended the war with his reputation enhanced. Yet some of his old-comrades in the Resistance did not fully appreciate “The Plague” because it tried to tell the story of the war as a Europeanwide disaster not unlike the Black Death.
Consciously linking his story to great plagues that have tested humankind since antiquity, Camus described a city that was suddenly invaded by a plague of rats. To a French readership, whose country had been occupied by Germany, it was not hard to think of the Germans as rats, especially the Nazis. But in Camus’ story, though as in the Bubonic Plague the plague spread from the rats to the humans, the rats suffered from the plague in even greater numbers than the people, so that they too were the victims. As Camus explained in other pieces,for him the plague was that whole trend of violent, divisive, aggressive and ideological European culture that had turned people into willing instruments of death. In the pieces that he wrote for "The Theatre of the Absurd", that dramtic art that could be popular and reach the "masses" more easily than the printed word, Camus tried to revive that spirit of Greek Hellenism that he had studied in philosophy and had seen still reflected in the ruins of his boyhood world.
Two years after Camus' death in a car accident in 1960 D.R. Haggis of Glasgow University wrote in an appraisal of "La Peste":
"We may regret whatever limits his journalistic activities may have imposed on the output of the creative artist, but we are, I think, bound to admit that the moral climate of post-war France would have been the poorer without the humanizing influence that Albert Camus exercised in the realm of social and political thinking..But creative writing was not for Camus simply a process of analysis and enquiry; it was also an act of affirmation. It was his own personal way of opposing the temptation to nihilism and despair that the spectacle and the experience of twentieth century Europe brought; it was, further, a means of establishing contact with other human beings and of entering into a kind of fraternal communion with them". And, above all, Haggis suggests that Camus wished to offer two things to his public "his own zest for living, and a view of life that he derived from his early experience of it"- in particular the light energy of the Mediterranean shores of North Africa. (page 8)
Camus message was very welcome to many of the global post-war generation as it progressed through education and into higher education, growing up in a managed world where change and the true vitality of life was restricted, much as the carefully contrived strapless gowns, corsetry and ‘bras’of the great Hollywood sex symbols. Meanwhile Camus' France, rediscovering the essence of human life lit up by a Mediterranean Sun, offered a very different and more vital view of life, as it had been since the time of Adam, summed up in French performance art most popularly by Roger Vadim's film “And God created Woman” starring Brigitte Bardot.
A rising generation embraced the study of love, peace and harmony, and sought new answers to the challenge of the Future. During the Sixties, in college and university campuses around the world a massive investment in Universities created an unprecedented sense of collective vitality and adventure, as young people thrown together from wide catchments found each other and found a new lust for life in a shrinking world. In line with the post-war New Start philosophy many came from families with no experience of higher education, re-empasising the fact that these young people were pioneers in a new world. And they were away of being a global generation because, for example, by the time of Camus' death "La Peste" had been translated into 16 foreign languages and many editions were cheap paper-back ones.It was a tide that swept up to the high points of "Soixante Huite" in France and Woodstock in the USA. It was time for a changing of the guard.
EVOLUTIONARY- VERSUS REVOLUTIONARY- CHANGE
Teaching in the University of Colorado in 1963 Dr. Harrison Thomson dedicated his book to his students who had to be aware of the current American Civil Rights Movement, just part of that long struggle of common man for simple rights as human beings that was writ large on the pages of history. And being an academic of this generation it is hardly surprising that he was keen to bring out the kind of structuralist interpretation that was very popular at that time. Even D.R. Haggis had to have a chapter on the structure of "La Peste", and so much of the focus of "men of power" planning for the post-war situation had been upon how they would have to create the structures of the New World order.
So Dr. Thomson's assertion about the struggle of common man came as part of his description of a developing social and economic model that reached a point of general crisis. “In the fourteenth century this struggle became a Continent wide phenomenon transcending lines of climate, race and language".
The reader is clearly meant to deduce that it was the economic and social model that "transcended lines of climate, race and language" and that the struggle was implied by intrinsic factors within the way that the structures had evolved. Moreover,the argument validates the lesson of more recent World Chaos that the answer to the problems of the common man was the kind of deliberate economic and social management that had been embraced by global establishments after 1945- even if that meant in the short term "benevolent despotism" by those who "knew best".
But there was a much more chronic and catastrophic challenge to European life and to humane and harmonious living in the fourteenth century that transcended those lines. "La Peste". For The Black Death ravaged Europe between 1348 and 1351 showed no respect for those "lines and divisions" either. The Second World War killed and estimated 55 million people worldwide: but the Black Deathe killed a third of the population in just three years. The traumatic and destabilising impact upon all European societies and states can only be guessed at as the ties of humanity that bonded all units of societies together were destroyed.In May 1945 John Woodhead published a report on the Bengal Famine of 1943- just one of the tragedies of the war, and he stated:" We have been haunted by a deep sense of tragedy. A million and a half of the poor of Bengal fell victim to circumstances for which they were not responsible. Society, together with its organs, failed to protect its weaker members. Indeed, there was a moral and social breakdown, as well as an administrative one." (page 975)
Such has been the eternal pattern of catastrophes, discernible in the very earliest recorded thoughts about the human experience as in the Gilgamesh/Noah stories rooted in Ancient Mesopotamia. The miracle is not that terrible destructive forces like the God Enlil can wreak havoc, but that some people do their best to save enough life to start all over again- not just themselves but "all the animals two, by two etc".For the citizens of Ur knew that, in spite of all of the magnificent building work that went into making that metropolis, Enlil- the God of the Storm, either acting through Nature or with the city's enemies, could destroy the city. Another French novelist of the post-war period used the German invasion and occupation as this kind of flood, and,like Camus, felt that what was of essential importance was to preserve a sense of Humanity, from which all else could grow once again.
The Black Death, as Camus described, was in line with these catastrophes that come from without, the kind of forces that overwhelm the best efforts of humankind to impose there systems and their authority. Systems are designed or evolve to fit certain circumstances and their parameters. This was one of the lessons of the First World War in which, in spite of the massive industrial and material strength of the combatants the main result was not a war that was "won by Christmas", but one that descended into stalemate and ended with exhaustion of resources and not by definitive victory. So evolutionary science had adapted by the late twenties, as H.G.Wells and Julian Huxley wrote in "The Science of Life", to the view that geological times have been punctuated by natural catastrophes in which the large and powerful species that have been well-adjusted to settled conditions were unable to adjust to the violence of the change and smaller species that are more adaptable were able to change the balance of nature. This does seem to be consistent with the catastrophe of the Black Death which was especially difficult for the Medieval Establishment.
The basic institutions of monarchy, nobility and the Church faced a severe challenge of adaptability, as well as the emerging power of the various forms of the "bourgeoisie" or the upper classes within the Italian Republics.And because these were the people others turned to for power and authority, and therefore security, their impotence in the face of this disaster badly affected their prestige and authority. Questions would be asked that eventually produced the answers that heralded the Early Modern Age, and in the short run produced conflicts like the rising of the "ragbags" in Florence and the Peasants' Revolt in England just more or less a "generation" after the Catastrophe, reckoning a generation as something approximate to 20-25 years.
And it is no mere coincidence that John Steinbeck wrote: "In ancient Greece it was said that there had to be a war at least every twenty years because every generation of men had to know what it was like. With us, we must forget, or we could never engage in the murderous nonsense again". He had already seen two-world war generations, and a world which was all-set-up for a third which would be a case of MAD- Mutually Assured Destruction. As Curtis Le May, the military man in charge of the US nuclear deterrent put it, victory would be every one of the enemy dead, and a new Adam and Eve to make a New Start.
But both world wars with all their "murderous nonsense" had only been endurable because of they became associated with the promise of a New Start, and all of the investment in systems and structures after 1945 had been called for and justified on that premis. But in terms of Englsh literature- and films based upon them- in their maturing years of secondary education for all the post-war generation discovered the works of Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and T.E. Lawrence whose attitudes to the First World War had not been "establishment" and whose literary qualities had now won them status as authors of classic works. Aldous Huxley in particular produced ideas that were the antithesis of those put forward by his brother Julian.
Dr. Julian Huxley had followed their illustrious grandfather in becoming a distinguished biologist and his reading of this new age of science and technology was that it was tantamount to a revolution. But it was a revolution that needed massive state backing and its advantages had been harnessed and exploited by the Axis Powers. And during the war in a series of articles he had expounded his view that the Allies would only defeat the Axis through embracing the Revolution. Moreover even before the war was won, in order to really be able to exploit these powers fully, he argued, it was necessary to plan for peace. Science and technology made this possible. And in many ways it could be argued that the successes of this period like putting a man into Space and eventually on the Moon created the idea that "modern man" had achieved mastery of his environment. It was a success that encouraged students in Paris in 1968 and Woodstock USA in 1969 that collectively and individually "we" could have the life that we chose.
But the post-war idea of managed and planned economies as the basis of a "Brave New World" only lasted more or less till 1973. As the authoritative Oxford University Press work on "The Economic System in the UK" said looking back at what happened in 1973 in the light of the crisis of belief that it triggered in this modern "faith system", the planners could not have been foreseen the Opec Oil Crisis. Just as happened with the Black Death in 1348 things from "outside the box" destabilised the whole economic and social system and threw into question whether anyone was actually in control- not even a God unknown.
