NEW YEAR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FUTURE-2
Created | Updated Jan 27, 2017
NEW YEAR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FUTURE-2
A DISASTROUS INTERLUDE
For in 1947 there was no prospect of peace and it was only in 1967 that Donald Read felt able to write that “in an important sense the world of the 1960s is continuing from the point where Cobden hopefully left the world of the 1860s a century ago”, the intervening period having been “an era of high protection, extreme nationalism and rampant militarism [that]…culminated in two global wars, [an era that] is now seen as a disastrous interlude”.
The use of the word “now”, however, suggests that it had taken till 1967 to see this period as “disastrous,” which is to totally misunderstand the sad fate of “The Lost Generation”, whose unparalleled sacrifice we remember and mark each Armistice Day as something seemingly incomprehensible, largely because we have forgotten the History behind it.
For there can be little doubt that the students who listened to Lord Acton’s first ‘Lecture on Modern History’ in 1895 understood their own History only too well, and they understood too the terrible fate that was inexorably moving towards them when Acton pin-pointed the coronation of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor in 1530 as the moment when: “The motive of domination became a reigning force in Europe…For centuries it was constantly asserted as a claim of necessity and of right. It was the supreme manifestation of the modern state, according to the image which Machiavelli had set up, the state that suffers neither limit nor equality, and is bound by no duty to nations or to men, that thrives on destruction, and sanctifies whatever things contributed to increase of power….This law of the modern world that power tends to expand indefinitely, and will transcend all barriers, abroad and at home, until met by some superior force, produces the rhythmic movement of History..[For] The threatened interests were compelled to unite for the self-government of nations, the toleration of religions, and the rights of men. And it is by the combined efforts of the weak, made under compulsion, to resist the reign of force and constant wrong, that, in the rapid change but slow progress of four hundred years, liberty has been preserved, and secured, and extended, and finally understood.”
And over those four hundred years English youths had understood what they owed to the valour and fortitude of their forebears and in 1895 no-one knew better than Lord Acton, who had spent the most crucial years of his life working in Germany, the threat posed by the new German Empire. In fairness, however, it was not only Germany that had embraced the politics of “high protection, extreme nationalism and rampant militarism”, for the USA and Russia had also set out on a new phase of their History in the mid-1860s, each pursuing the politics of “modernization” and “industrial revolution” that offered both their vast and scattered populations and their central governments at least a modicum of security in what could be a savage world. But Aristotle had written of the Greek tyrants of antiquity that their great public works were all in fact designed to keep the mass of the people “poor and occupied”, and ‘modernization’ was undertaken with much the same purpose in the context of the times-i.e. to either pre-empt revolution, or to create enough military strength to crush revolutionary movements and impose submission and subservience.
And to this end the railway building that was the real catalyst for these changes first and foremost served the strategic, military and political purposes of central governments that often showed a callous indifference to the well-being of sections of their own population The railways put many places “on the map” for the first time, but in doing so turned formerly remote and isolated regions into provinces that were permanently bound into imperial systems and structures whether they liked it or not: and in 1914, as A.J.P. Taylor showed, it was the way that the great railway systems operated that forced the Great Powers into the First World War, whether they liked it or not.
THE MALTHUSIAN DEVIL OF WAR
In fact the reality of life in these continental empires was summed up in the case of Germany by J.M.Keynes, who wrote that the German Empire before 1914 had become a great economic motor that needed to be kept working at full throttle in order to keep the huge German population, and that of its satellite states, living a way of life that just about lifted them out of the reach of the Malthusian devils of chronic famine and disease. But the politics of militarism, imperialism and protectionism did not necessarily place the people out of reach of the Malthusian devil of war, quite the reverse in fact. For the ‘economic motor’ only worked “at full throttle” when the government was developing and deploying its vast military capability, imposing its central authority right from the capital to the furthermost borders and beyond, and investing heavily in national service and militarized policing. And this oppressive weight of the State quite naturally not only spawned resentment and resistance of various kinds, but it also provided opportunities like the one that presented itself when some great military manoeuvres brought the Austrian Archduke and his wife to Sarajevo on that fateful day in 1914 when the Black Hand Gang set the wheels in motion that dragged the world into the First World War, because the pressures on the common people were such that a great conflict of some kind seemed to have become inevitable.
The global railway revolution had vastly increased the exploitation of the Earth’s Land resources, and increased the supply of raw materials, commodities and food, depressing global prices between 1870 and 1914 by an average of 30%, leaving millions of people feeling trapped into a nightmarish world from which there was no escape, a malaise that spread from the rural economies to the industrial cities to which unemployed or underemployed rural labour migrated, adding to the supply of labour and further depressing industrial wages.
Between 1870 and 1904 money wages in Britain were stagnant, and then in the last ten years before 1914 even real wages started to fall, while the ever increasing costs of the arms race and state activity created a palpable sense of crisis in every English home. People clamoured for different kinds of change within Britain. But the crucial determining element seemed to be the way that Germany was squeezing the very life out of Great Britain, by not ‘playing by the rules’ as the German Empire sought to take over Britain’s place in the “Comity of Nations” and rule it by overwhelming force.
THE PALL OF GERMANIC GLOOM AND DOOM AND ENGLISH RAINBOWS
Not that there were not voices in Great Britain that argued that this was the ‘way of the world’. Thomas Carlyle had been a prophet of all things German and the cult of the heroic since the 1840s; and the appointment of Lord Acton to the History Chair at Cambridge in 1895 was only one of many signs of the increasing prominence of German thought and culture in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century, starting right at the top where Queen Victoria insisted on living the life of a widowed German Empress presiding over a royal court run in accordance with German strictness, the slightly more relaxed family breaks on the Isle of Wight being shared with her favourite grandson, the future Kaiser William, who did his best to exploit her disappointment with her son and heir and the fact that he could carry his grandmother’s hopes that something of the greatness of her much-loved Albert had descended to his grandson.
But “Kaiser Bill” did not endear himself to the British people: and in fact just before the Great War both G.M.Trevelyan published an article celebrating the signs of an English liberation from the influence of what Eric Heller called “The Disinherited Mind” of Germany, a theme that was acted upon by Lytton Strachey’s debunking of “Eminent Victorians” in 1818.
Heller published this study of German thought over the last 150 years in 1952 when there was a chronic need to understanding just how a country like Germany that had advanced so far in so short a time, could have produced Nazism and the Holocaust and drag the world into two world wars, for the mood in Great Britain this time was against making all the Germans pay “till the pips squeaked” and in favour of putting only war criminals on trial. So Heller traced the story from Goethe’s return to Weimar in the 1790s, having spent some years in Italian sunshine, only to find the old dark, Gothic mood that he had left behind and to try to mitigate the gloom with some of that Mediterranean brightness: but a turbulent history provoked and inspired dark thoughts about the human condition that ended up with works like Karl Kraus’ “The Last Days of Mankind” and Oswald Spengler’s apocalyptic 1918 vision of “The Decline of the West”.
Heller, who had come to England in 1939, felt entitled to point out, however, that the English had not been immune to what had seemed to be the inexorably gloomy new way of looking at the world, and, as he pointed out, though it was true that Spengler’s book had come to be generally dismissed in England as “utterly out of date”, those who expressed such a conviction did so “with some uneasiness”:
“For the history of the West since 1917 looks like the work of children clumsily filling in with lurid colours a design drawn in outlines by Oswald Spengler. The spiritual exhaustion of the age has been the dominant theme of our most-discussed writers, of D.H.Lawrence, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, not to mention the gloomily vigorous Americans: and when they indulge in prophetic visions of the future, in the manner of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, or even the dying Fabian H.G. Wells, the emerging picture is invariably an elaboration of themes from The Decline of the West.”
But while it is true that all those writers often did give a lurid and apocalyptic view of just where the modern world was heading, the main thrust of all them all was a powerful conviction that there could be, and indeed should be, a very different way ahead inspired by the long history that had shaped ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. And I suppose it was in the hope of reconnecting with my rainbow homeland in the midst of a rather gloomy exile in France in the summer of 2016, that I finally turned to Phillip Guedalla’s book on Lord Palmerston, and quickly recognised it as a contribution to that attempt to rescue English History from the domination of ‘the German School”: and I recognized too that when Guedalla’s book was published in 1926, it must have served as a very appropriate riposte to all those who had been telling people that the Peace Settlement of 1919 was bound to collapse “because those who supported it were moved by ideals which were too exalted for practical politics”.
A DISASTROUS INTERLUDE
For in 1947 there was no prospect of peace and it was only in 1967 that Donald Read felt able to write that “in an important sense the world of the 1960s is continuing from the point where Cobden hopefully left the world of the 1860s a century ago”, the intervening period having been “an era of high protection, extreme nationalism and rampant militarism [that]…culminated in two global wars, [an era that] is now seen as a disastrous interlude”.
The use of the word “now”, however, suggests that it had taken till 1967 to see this period as “disastrous,” which is to totally misunderstand the sad fate of “The Lost Generation”, whose unparalleled sacrifice we remember and mark each Armistice Day as something seemingly incomprehensible, largely because we have forgotten the History behind it.
For there can be little doubt that the students who listened to Lord Acton’s first ‘Lecture on Modern History’ in 1895 understood their own History only too well, and they understood too the terrible fate that was inexorably moving towards them when Acton pin-pointed the coronation of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor in 1530 as the moment when: “The motive of domination became a reigning force in Europe…For centuries it was constantly asserted as a claim of necessity and of right. It was the supreme manifestation of the modern state, according to the image which Machiavelli had set up, the state that suffers neither limit nor equality, and is bound by no duty to nations or to men, that thrives on destruction, and sanctifies whatever things contributed to increase of power….This law of the modern world that power tends to expand indefinitely, and will transcend all barriers, abroad and at home, until met by some superior force, produces the rhythmic movement of History..[For] The threatened interests were compelled to unite for the self-government of nations, the toleration of religions, and the rights of men. And it is by the combined efforts of the weak, made under compulsion, to resist the reign of force and constant wrong, that, in the rapid change but slow progress of four hundred years, liberty has been preserved, and secured, and extended, and finally understood.”
And over those four hundred years English youths had understood what they owed to the valour and fortitude of their forebears and in 1895 no-one knew better than Lord Acton, who had spent the most crucial years of his life working in Germany, the threat posed by the new German Empire. In fairness, however, it was not only Germany that had embraced the politics of “high protection, extreme nationalism and rampant militarism”, for the USA and Russia had also set out on a new phase of their History in the mid-1860s, each pursuing the politics of “modernization” and “industrial revolution” that offered both their vast and scattered populations and their central governments at least a modicum of security in what could be a savage world. But Aristotle had written of the Greek tyrants of antiquity that their great public works were all in fact designed to keep the mass of the people “poor and occupied”, and ‘modernization’ was undertaken with much the same purpose in the context of the times-i.e. to either pre-empt revolution, or to create enough military strength to crush revolutionary movements and impose submission and subservience.
And to this end the railway building that was the real catalyst for these changes first and foremost served the strategic, military and political purposes of central governments that often showed a callous indifference to the well-being of sections of their own population The railways put many places “on the map” for the first time, but in doing so turned formerly remote and isolated regions into provinces that were permanently bound into imperial systems and structures whether they liked it or not: and in 1914, as A.J.P. Taylor showed, it was the way that the great railway systems operated that forced the Great Powers into the First World War, whether they liked it or not.
THE MALTHUSIAN DEVIL OF WAR
In fact the reality of life in these continental empires was summed up in the case of Germany by J.M.Keynes, who wrote that the German Empire before 1914 had become a great economic motor that needed to be kept working at full throttle in order to keep the huge German population, and that of its satellite states, living a way of life that just about lifted them out of the reach of the Malthusian devils of chronic famine and disease. But the politics of militarism, imperialism and protectionism did not necessarily place the people out of reach of the Malthusian devil of war, quite the reverse in fact. For the ‘economic motor’ only worked “at full throttle” when the government was developing and deploying its vast military capability, imposing its central authority right from the capital to the furthermost borders and beyond, and investing heavily in national service and militarized policing. And this oppressive weight of the State quite naturally not only spawned resentment and resistance of various kinds, but it also provided opportunities like the one that presented itself when some great military manoeuvres brought the Austrian Archduke and his wife to Sarajevo on that fateful day in 1914 when the Black Hand Gang set the wheels in motion that dragged the world into the First World War, because the pressures on the common people were such that a great conflict of some kind seemed to have become inevitable.
The global railway revolution had vastly increased the exploitation of the Earth’s Land resources, and increased the supply of raw materials, commodities and food, depressing global prices between 1870 and 1914 by an average of 30%, leaving millions of people feeling trapped into a nightmarish world from which there was no escape, a malaise that spread from the rural economies to the industrial cities to which unemployed or underemployed rural labour migrated, adding to the supply of labour and further depressing industrial wages.
Between 1870 and 1904 money wages in Britain were stagnant, and then in the last ten years before 1914 even real wages started to fall, while the ever increasing costs of the arms race and state activity created a palpable sense of crisis in every English home. People clamoured for different kinds of change within Britain. But the crucial determining element seemed to be the way that Germany was squeezing the very life out of Great Britain, by not ‘playing by the rules’ as the German Empire sought to take over Britain’s place in the “Comity of Nations” and rule it by overwhelming force.
THE PALL OF GERMANIC GLOOM AND DOOM AND ENGLISH RAINBOWS
Not that there were not voices in Great Britain that argued that this was the ‘way of the world’. Thomas Carlyle had been a prophet of all things German and the cult of the heroic since the 1840s; and the appointment of Lord Acton to the History Chair at Cambridge in 1895 was only one of many signs of the increasing prominence of German thought and culture in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century, starting right at the top where Queen Victoria insisted on living the life of a widowed German Empress presiding over a royal court run in accordance with German strictness, the slightly more relaxed family breaks on the Isle of Wight being shared with her favourite grandson, the future Kaiser William, who did his best to exploit her disappointment with her son and heir and the fact that he could carry his grandmother’s hopes that something of the greatness of her much-loved Albert had descended to his grandson.
But “Kaiser Bill” did not endear himself to the British people: and in fact just before the Great War both G.M.Trevelyan published an article celebrating the signs of an English liberation from the influence of what Eric Heller called “The Disinherited Mind” of Germany, a theme that was acted upon by Lytton Strachey’s debunking of “Eminent Victorians” in 1818.
Heller published this study of German thought over the last 150 years in 1952 when there was a chronic need to understanding just how a country like Germany that had advanced so far in so short a time, could have produced Nazism and the Holocaust and drag the world into two world wars, for the mood in Great Britain this time was against making all the Germans pay “till the pips squeaked” and in favour of putting only war criminals on trial. So Heller traced the story from Goethe’s return to Weimar in the 1790s, having spent some years in Italian sunshine, only to find the old dark, Gothic mood that he had left behind and to try to mitigate the gloom with some of that Mediterranean brightness: but a turbulent history provoked and inspired dark thoughts about the human condition that ended up with works like Karl Kraus’ “The Last Days of Mankind” and Oswald Spengler’s apocalyptic 1918 vision of “The Decline of the West”.
Heller, who had come to England in 1939, felt entitled to point out, however, that the English had not been immune to what had seemed to be the inexorably gloomy new way of looking at the world, and, as he pointed out, though it was true that Spengler’s book had come to be generally dismissed in England as “utterly out of date”, those who expressed such a conviction did so “with some uneasiness”:
“For the history of the West since 1917 looks like the work of children clumsily filling in with lurid colours a design drawn in outlines by Oswald Spengler. The spiritual exhaustion of the age has been the dominant theme of our most-discussed writers, of D.H.Lawrence, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, not to mention the gloomily vigorous Americans: and when they indulge in prophetic visions of the future, in the manner of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, or even the dying Fabian H.G. Wells, the emerging picture is invariably an elaboration of themes from The Decline of the West.”
But while it is true that all those writers often did give a lurid and apocalyptic view of just where the modern world was heading, the main thrust of all them all was a powerful conviction that there could be, and indeed should be, a very different way ahead inspired by the long history that had shaped ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. And I suppose it was in the hope of reconnecting with my rainbow homeland in the midst of a rather gloomy exile in France in the summer of 2016, that I finally turned to Phillip Guedalla’s book on Lord Palmerston, and quickly recognised it as a contribution to that attempt to rescue English History from the domination of ‘the German School”: and I recognized too that when Guedalla’s book was published in 1926, it must have served as a very appropriate riposte to all those who had been telling people that the Peace Settlement of 1919 was bound to collapse “because those who supported it were moved by ideals which were too exalted for practical politics”.
