NEW YEAR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FUTURE-4
Created | Updated Jan 27, 2017
NEW YEAR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FUTURE-4
THE AGE OF ROGUE POLITICS
So in 1932-3 the world descended into World Chaos, and this was when C. Delisle Burns saw his hopes for a Third Europe of “peace between nations and between social classes” finally shattered as some of the new democracies set up at Versailles collapsed, with the people turning against democracy in favour of strong leaders, usually people who had learned to act decisively and, if necessary ‘roguishly’, in accordance with idea that the ‘end justifies the means’.
It was a change that Burns blamed on the fact that those who had framed the Peace of Versailles were still “thinking in terms of Sovereign States- terms which “belonged to the Renaissance”. For many of these strong men dictators were “populists” with widespread support among the masses, who could insist on their right as a “Sovereign people” to have the style of government of their choice, rather than the style of the Westminster “mother of parliaments”. And Burns followed Lord Acton in seeing the crucial drama of the change- over from ‘Medieval’ to ‘Modern’ times as having been played out centre-stage in Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century in a period of “The Bursting of the Dykes” when, as the American historian S Harrison Thomson put it in 1963, the “whole Pandora’s box of ambition, greed, deceit and cynical opportunism” was let lose.
And, in truth, English History in that age was in many ways only an interesting side-show in the wings. For though England had not been immune from the shock waves, it had sufficed for the English people to turn away from the various continental dynasties that had ruled for almost 500 years, turning instead to the Welsh Tudors, who were roguish enough for England, but also willing to be persuaded that the power of English Kings and Queens was stronger when it was supported by the people and their Parliament. And so the English were one of the few ‘commons’ in Christendom to keep the Medieval right to ‘parley’ and to have monarchies with an elective element, preserving therefore their rights and liberties and their ability to handle change constitutionally. And this meant that in the World Chaos, the Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald, could decide to use the constitutional device of a government of national unity in order to navigate carefully through such dangerous times. And Great Britain called a World Economic Conference to assemble in London’s National History Museum in order to search for a common approach to the crisis.
THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE
But each of the three superpowers reacted to the World Chaos by setting out on yet another radically new chapter of History. For each in its own way tried to catch what some people called a “Wave of the Future” that was being created by the new Science and Technology that exploited the developments that had been fast-tracked during the Great War, with each superpower falling under the guidance of ‘great leader’ vested with unparalleled powers and the authority to play the rogue if necessary by forcing through new policies of modernization and industrialization : and within six years the fear engendered by these leaders, and the superpowers that they led, plunged the world into the Second World War.
For that ‘marriage of convenience’ between Darwinism and Evolution had not survived the gloomy times. Evolution too had its periods when it was a matter of adapting at revolutionary speed or suffering extinction, and, as wars began to break out in various places it became obvious that it had been possible some states to ‘steal a march” in this “armed and arming world” in which Great Britain could not possibly be the only power to be disarmed. So around about the time that I was born in 1944 Dr.Julian Huxley published collection of pieces that he had written during the war on the theme of “On Living in a Revolution” asserting that - “Today we had better accept the revolution. Woe to those who resist it- they are at best delaying the inevitable, at worst risking more violence and bloodshed, in any case uselessly increasing the frictions of the evolutionary machine and adding to the discomforts and distresses of mankind.” (page xii)
But Dr. Julian Huxley was not necessarily more enamoured, as a Biologist, than his brother Aldous with the “Brave New World” of Science and Technology. It was, he said, something of a “dubious privilege” to be living through this period of History. But he saw it as an inevitable part of the new Civilization that he himself was helping to create as an Oxford Biology Don and the grandson of the illustrious Victorian Darwinist Dr, Thomas Huxley: and many people whose backgrounds lay in the Pan-German and Pan-Slav regions of Northern, Central and Eastern Europe struggled to come to terms with this new age of the machine, notably some great authors with roots in Europe’s longstanding Jewish diaspora. For Jewish families been able to settle for centuries throughout an old ramshackle, multi-racial, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic world, that was now being swept away.
Simone Weil’s family, for example, was one of many to leave Russia, in their case moving to Belgium and then to France, where in 1932-3 Simone spent year of working on the Renault factory floor, and wrote about the challenge of working with machines, pin-pointing the most distressing feature as being the “unpredictability”. Much the same point is elaborated in the work of Franz Kafka in which ‘K’ is invariably caught up in the demonic workings of some great mechanism that runs in a nightmarish way, leaving him feeling metamorphosed into some less than human creature. And the hero of Italo Svevo’s “Confessions of Zeno” (1923) believed himself to be sick for years until war broke out, when he found he was not sick, but the world was.
“Our life today is poisoned to the root. Man has ousted the beasts and trees, has poisoned the air and filled up the open spaces… Every effort to procure health is in vain”…for the world of machines and mechanisms just gets stronger and more intelligent while “man goes on getting weaker and more cunning”. Eventually- “When all the poison gases are exhausted, a man, made like all other men of flesh and blood, will in the quiet of his room invent an explosive of such potency that all the other explosives in existence will seem like harmless toys beside it… There will be a tremendous explosion, but no one will hear it and the earth will return to its nebulous state and go wandering through the sky, free at last from parasites and disease.”
THE SHAPE OF THINGS STILL TO COME
Well so far we have avoided blowing up the Earth. But the ongoing story of the three superpowers has continued to act as the major source of uncertainty and security, and seems likely to do so for the foreseeable future. It could be argued, however, that these great states, operating in a world much of which can “know no peace” as the great Merlin said of the Britons, have at least minimised the scale of conflict by achieving what Richard Cobden envisaged in 1863 when he wondered whether “the world will be indebted for its civilisation…less to the precepts of religion…than to the progress of physical science, whose laws will bind all countries in equal and inevitable subjection.”
For after 1945 there was no Versailles-type attempt to make a peace, and the new world order that was charged with making sure that there was no return to World Chaos, or any Third World War, was given the right to make war on behalf of the international community, as just one of the weapons in the kind of armoury of measures that the League of Nations had lacked. And it also offered a platform for every nation to openly air its grievances against others. But again it could be argued that bringing conflicts out into the open air was healthier than the ‘old ways’ of backstairs diplomacy, ‘cloak and dagger’ intrigue and assassination, though they have never gone away.
Nevertheless, as Sir Ernest Barker had foreseen in 1947, people will not long accept the ways of war once the actual fighting is over, even if the government does do its best to maintain the idea that they face some immediate threat: and by the mid-1950s citizens in Alabama and Budapest were taking to the streets and demanding the right to live under regimes “with a human face”: and even while the “Rogue Politics” sought to maintain itself by means of its ‘thought police’ and control of the Mass media, the written word offered hope to those who could feel connected to another reality in the ‘quiet’ of their own rooms, where indeed they did read Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Franz Kafka, while others like Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller and Albert Camus wrote.
And perhaps it was because of this that Dr. Harrison Thomson found the roots of the Renaissance in “The World of Dante”. For, indeed, there was something truly modern in Dante’s work. It breathed “an individualism that was completely at odds with the medieval mind. It rejects the claim of the Church to rule every part of man’s life…[and] When popes and cardinals are consigned to Hell by a layman, a revolution in authority and doctrine is on the way. The poem is also well ahead of the Middle Ages in its rejection of the sacred Latin of the Church, the schools…in favour of the vernacular, the language of the bourgeoisie, the businessman, the craftsman, and the peasant, who together were to make the modern world.” (page 27)
And, just as Dante’s description of “The Inferno” leapt of the page for some people in a post-war modern purgatory, it had leapt off the page when the Black Death hit Europe in 1348, plunging the continent into a chaos that felt like some kind of Holocaust, with Florence being hit especially hard. But Florence bounced back and offered re-birth to Europe with a powerful restatement of a belief in Humanity that had been so strong in Greek antiquity, funded by the wealth of the Medici family that tried to make that city a place of ‘happy days’ and celebrations of life itself in all aspects, not least rediscovering through its art the innocence of Eden before Adam and Eve were taught to be ashamed of themselves, and producing some of the greatest works in our rich world heritage.
And among the students of the Sixties the campus culture that encircled the Earth did something similar, offering a place and a space for healing that encouraged self-expression through creative activity that swelled into a collective impulse to heal the world, producing art and music that have continued to enthral successive generations, not least because, like the art of the Renaissance, it was a genuine flowering of Civilization, and was similarly based around a great and dynamic international city well equipped to “make the modern world”.
For London in the Sixties was also a city that had bounced back from “darkest hours”, and was similarly experiencing something like a “Brexit”, breaking away from the “Goliath” reach of more ambitious powers. And on the personal level the end of National Service in Britain in 1960 was just part of a “Wind of Change” in which the final break-up of the British Empire also meant more independence for young men in the UK too, for they suddenly got two more years of their life to spend as they wished. And, as in England after 1763, many embraced the idea, that, given freedom to choose, people should work for the benefit of their fellow men, improving the lot of humanity in the emerging global reality, and spreading the kinds of rights, and liberties, and the opportunity to live in “civilized security”, that English people had regarded as their ‘inalienable’ birth right.
And many seized the opportunity to set out to change the world by art, music, poetry and song rather than by force of arms. And they did: sowing seeds that lie dormant until the right season comes along, a season in which once more the impulse may come from below and “all people of goodwill” can say, “I do nobody harm, I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish everybody good.” And we can at least hope for the moment that the new ‘Brexit Britain’ will make the same kinds of choices.
THE AGE OF ROGUE POLITICS
So in 1932-3 the world descended into World Chaos, and this was when C. Delisle Burns saw his hopes for a Third Europe of “peace between nations and between social classes” finally shattered as some of the new democracies set up at Versailles collapsed, with the people turning against democracy in favour of strong leaders, usually people who had learned to act decisively and, if necessary ‘roguishly’, in accordance with idea that the ‘end justifies the means’.
It was a change that Burns blamed on the fact that those who had framed the Peace of Versailles were still “thinking in terms of Sovereign States- terms which “belonged to the Renaissance”. For many of these strong men dictators were “populists” with widespread support among the masses, who could insist on their right as a “Sovereign people” to have the style of government of their choice, rather than the style of the Westminster “mother of parliaments”. And Burns followed Lord Acton in seeing the crucial drama of the change- over from ‘Medieval’ to ‘Modern’ times as having been played out centre-stage in Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century in a period of “The Bursting of the Dykes” when, as the American historian S Harrison Thomson put it in 1963, the “whole Pandora’s box of ambition, greed, deceit and cynical opportunism” was let lose.
And, in truth, English History in that age was in many ways only an interesting side-show in the wings. For though England had not been immune from the shock waves, it had sufficed for the English people to turn away from the various continental dynasties that had ruled for almost 500 years, turning instead to the Welsh Tudors, who were roguish enough for England, but also willing to be persuaded that the power of English Kings and Queens was stronger when it was supported by the people and their Parliament. And so the English were one of the few ‘commons’ in Christendom to keep the Medieval right to ‘parley’ and to have monarchies with an elective element, preserving therefore their rights and liberties and their ability to handle change constitutionally. And this meant that in the World Chaos, the Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald, could decide to use the constitutional device of a government of national unity in order to navigate carefully through such dangerous times. And Great Britain called a World Economic Conference to assemble in London’s National History Museum in order to search for a common approach to the crisis.
THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE
But each of the three superpowers reacted to the World Chaos by setting out on yet another radically new chapter of History. For each in its own way tried to catch what some people called a “Wave of the Future” that was being created by the new Science and Technology that exploited the developments that had been fast-tracked during the Great War, with each superpower falling under the guidance of ‘great leader’ vested with unparalleled powers and the authority to play the rogue if necessary by forcing through new policies of modernization and industrialization : and within six years the fear engendered by these leaders, and the superpowers that they led, plunged the world into the Second World War.
For that ‘marriage of convenience’ between Darwinism and Evolution had not survived the gloomy times. Evolution too had its periods when it was a matter of adapting at revolutionary speed or suffering extinction, and, as wars began to break out in various places it became obvious that it had been possible some states to ‘steal a march” in this “armed and arming world” in which Great Britain could not possibly be the only power to be disarmed. So around about the time that I was born in 1944 Dr.Julian Huxley published collection of pieces that he had written during the war on the theme of “On Living in a Revolution” asserting that - “Today we had better accept the revolution. Woe to those who resist it- they are at best delaying the inevitable, at worst risking more violence and bloodshed, in any case uselessly increasing the frictions of the evolutionary machine and adding to the discomforts and distresses of mankind.” (page xii)
But Dr. Julian Huxley was not necessarily more enamoured, as a Biologist, than his brother Aldous with the “Brave New World” of Science and Technology. It was, he said, something of a “dubious privilege” to be living through this period of History. But he saw it as an inevitable part of the new Civilization that he himself was helping to create as an Oxford Biology Don and the grandson of the illustrious Victorian Darwinist Dr, Thomas Huxley: and many people whose backgrounds lay in the Pan-German and Pan-Slav regions of Northern, Central and Eastern Europe struggled to come to terms with this new age of the machine, notably some great authors with roots in Europe’s longstanding Jewish diaspora. For Jewish families been able to settle for centuries throughout an old ramshackle, multi-racial, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic world, that was now being swept away.
Simone Weil’s family, for example, was one of many to leave Russia, in their case moving to Belgium and then to France, where in 1932-3 Simone spent year of working on the Renault factory floor, and wrote about the challenge of working with machines, pin-pointing the most distressing feature as being the “unpredictability”. Much the same point is elaborated in the work of Franz Kafka in which ‘K’ is invariably caught up in the demonic workings of some great mechanism that runs in a nightmarish way, leaving him feeling metamorphosed into some less than human creature. And the hero of Italo Svevo’s “Confessions of Zeno” (1923) believed himself to be sick for years until war broke out, when he found he was not sick, but the world was.
“Our life today is poisoned to the root. Man has ousted the beasts and trees, has poisoned the air and filled up the open spaces… Every effort to procure health is in vain”…for the world of machines and mechanisms just gets stronger and more intelligent while “man goes on getting weaker and more cunning”. Eventually- “When all the poison gases are exhausted, a man, made like all other men of flesh and blood, will in the quiet of his room invent an explosive of such potency that all the other explosives in existence will seem like harmless toys beside it… There will be a tremendous explosion, but no one will hear it and the earth will return to its nebulous state and go wandering through the sky, free at last from parasites and disease.”
THE SHAPE OF THINGS STILL TO COME
Well so far we have avoided blowing up the Earth. But the ongoing story of the three superpowers has continued to act as the major source of uncertainty and security, and seems likely to do so for the foreseeable future. It could be argued, however, that these great states, operating in a world much of which can “know no peace” as the great Merlin said of the Britons, have at least minimised the scale of conflict by achieving what Richard Cobden envisaged in 1863 when he wondered whether “the world will be indebted for its civilisation…less to the precepts of religion…than to the progress of physical science, whose laws will bind all countries in equal and inevitable subjection.”
For after 1945 there was no Versailles-type attempt to make a peace, and the new world order that was charged with making sure that there was no return to World Chaos, or any Third World War, was given the right to make war on behalf of the international community, as just one of the weapons in the kind of armoury of measures that the League of Nations had lacked. And it also offered a platform for every nation to openly air its grievances against others. But again it could be argued that bringing conflicts out into the open air was healthier than the ‘old ways’ of backstairs diplomacy, ‘cloak and dagger’ intrigue and assassination, though they have never gone away.
Nevertheless, as Sir Ernest Barker had foreseen in 1947, people will not long accept the ways of war once the actual fighting is over, even if the government does do its best to maintain the idea that they face some immediate threat: and by the mid-1950s citizens in Alabama and Budapest were taking to the streets and demanding the right to live under regimes “with a human face”: and even while the “Rogue Politics” sought to maintain itself by means of its ‘thought police’ and control of the Mass media, the written word offered hope to those who could feel connected to another reality in the ‘quiet’ of their own rooms, where indeed they did read Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Franz Kafka, while others like Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller and Albert Camus wrote.
And perhaps it was because of this that Dr. Harrison Thomson found the roots of the Renaissance in “The World of Dante”. For, indeed, there was something truly modern in Dante’s work. It breathed “an individualism that was completely at odds with the medieval mind. It rejects the claim of the Church to rule every part of man’s life…[and] When popes and cardinals are consigned to Hell by a layman, a revolution in authority and doctrine is on the way. The poem is also well ahead of the Middle Ages in its rejection of the sacred Latin of the Church, the schools…in favour of the vernacular, the language of the bourgeoisie, the businessman, the craftsman, and the peasant, who together were to make the modern world.” (page 27)
And, just as Dante’s description of “The Inferno” leapt of the page for some people in a post-war modern purgatory, it had leapt off the page when the Black Death hit Europe in 1348, plunging the continent into a chaos that felt like some kind of Holocaust, with Florence being hit especially hard. But Florence bounced back and offered re-birth to Europe with a powerful restatement of a belief in Humanity that had been so strong in Greek antiquity, funded by the wealth of the Medici family that tried to make that city a place of ‘happy days’ and celebrations of life itself in all aspects, not least rediscovering through its art the innocence of Eden before Adam and Eve were taught to be ashamed of themselves, and producing some of the greatest works in our rich world heritage.
And among the students of the Sixties the campus culture that encircled the Earth did something similar, offering a place and a space for healing that encouraged self-expression through creative activity that swelled into a collective impulse to heal the world, producing art and music that have continued to enthral successive generations, not least because, like the art of the Renaissance, it was a genuine flowering of Civilization, and was similarly based around a great and dynamic international city well equipped to “make the modern world”.
For London in the Sixties was also a city that had bounced back from “darkest hours”, and was similarly experiencing something like a “Brexit”, breaking away from the “Goliath” reach of more ambitious powers. And on the personal level the end of National Service in Britain in 1960 was just part of a “Wind of Change” in which the final break-up of the British Empire also meant more independence for young men in the UK too, for they suddenly got two more years of their life to spend as they wished. And, as in England after 1763, many embraced the idea, that, given freedom to choose, people should work for the benefit of their fellow men, improving the lot of humanity in the emerging global reality, and spreading the kinds of rights, and liberties, and the opportunity to live in “civilized security”, that English people had regarded as their ‘inalienable’ birth right.
And many seized the opportunity to set out to change the world by art, music, poetry and song rather than by force of arms. And they did: sowing seeds that lie dormant until the right season comes along, a season in which once more the impulse may come from below and “all people of goodwill” can say, “I do nobody harm, I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish everybody good.” And we can at least hope for the moment that the new ‘Brexit Britain’ will make the same kinds of choices.
