h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Worth a listen:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/mainframe.shtml?http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/nineteenthcenturygreens


In yesterdays Grauniad, there was a Wordsworth quote about the beauty of the city in the morning.

Ed. Shall check out later.

Yeah, have listened to about a third. Shall hopefully listen to rest later. So far they've said nothing I didn't already know. Romantics such as Blake are as close to my heart as much for their politics for *people* as their nature mysticism. But the reason I identify with them is that they have both. Modern environmentalists, although I sympathise with some of their aims and ideas, don't chime with me in the same way. I'm certainly no one eyed, anti car, anti nuclear, anti this, anti that, backward looking Luddite. I love the Romantics because of their forward thinkingness.

I just got to the bit where they talk of their *humanism* I need to listen to more. But they were after all 19 century, so their world view would have been more universalist. I agree with the Romantics perspective of caring as much for people as for nature, but that is about those people in western cultural situation, but not as a universal thing. In fact I see 'environmentalists* as universalists. That's one thing that puts me off them sometimes. i won't say there isn't a 'biosphere' that affects all of us, of course there is. But I don't agree with western environmentalists marching in with their size 9s, telling people from other cultures what they must do to save the planet. It's a difficult one though. As ever its hard to know the real facts of things like global warming. Environmantalists should be concentrating all their efforts on highlighting the real *facts* of things, to educate people about the *probabilities* of effects of pollution, so that people themselves can pressurize their governments etc to act accordingly.

Anyway, as ever i find myself conflcited about all these issues.

That's why I love a good Romantic poem. The conflicts and ambiguities in the poem can just be indulged in with pure pleasure......

You'll not thank me for saying this...but you've touched on the reasons I'm a Marxist. Marx was a typical C19th Romantic. Without Goethe and Schiller (And Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron) there would be no Marx.

These 'conflicts and ambiguities' you talk about...precisely what Marx was talking about with his 'Dialectical Materialism.

Rundon'twalk to 'Marx for Beginners' by Ruis. Don't be put off by the patronising title. It's a fine book.

And also try this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20080612.shtml
(from Lord Melvyn of Buttermere's show)

I swam in the same pool that Wordsworth and Coleridge used to frequent the other week, above Rydal Water. Maaaan...no wonder they were poets.

>Shelley, Byron) there would be no Marx. <

So are you saying we have Percy Bysshe to thank for Stalin?

Without Marx there'd be no Lenin, (well there would, but he might not have become the man he did), and without Lenin, ditto Stalin........

I'm going off these Romantics rapidly.......

Of course, raising Lenin and Stalin is valid. And you could have added Mao and Pol Pot. All I'll say was that there wasn't a straight line from Marx to them. Quote from Marx on some of his admirers, notably the Russian Bolsheviks and Nihilists:

'If these people are Marxists, then I'm not.'

And, yes, if there's a line from Marx to them, there's also one from Shelley. Question is whether there are any granny knots in the lines along the way.

But there's much, *much* more to Marx than the (purported) inspiration for Soviet State Capitalism. You need to know about how his politics arose from his economics and how his economics arose from his philosophy. And you need to know about Dialectical Materialism and how it sits in the history of ideas. That Ruis book is very good at tracing it back to Platonism vs Aristotelianism, via Empiricism and Kant.