Another unpopular opinion
Jun. 24th, 2006 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbI am a great lover of marches, patriotic hymns, and national anthems. I can sing with equal pleasure and enthusiasm many of the old Communist songs and "Charlie is my Darling" or the Marseillaise or the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Any song that expresses a great enthusiasm for something felt to be good and noble, and a desire to march and fight together to achieve it, does something for me; even though I may, as with Communism or the Confederacy, disapprove of the cause that produced it.
Nonetheless, there is one popular patriotic song that I like less and less, the more I hear it: Jerusalem by Blake and Parry. There is something about its spirit that repels me, and I think I know what it is. It is self-righteousness in its pure state. Think about what it says, and how it says it: "building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land". Not waiting for God's purposes, not even presuming to collaborate with God or with Providence or with History or with Nature - no, we shall do it ourselves, in fact, I will do it Myself. That is the sacred element in this song: I. And pay attention to the music: not, like the Marseillaise, urgent and avenging; not, like the Battle Hymn of the Republic, marching in step with an overwhelming common vision; no, it is of a piece with the poetry - muscular, self-glorifying, overwhelmingly convinced of its own value. It is a music which proclaims to you that the eschatological renewal of the world, the New Morning, the Millennium, comes from - ourselves. As if anyone who made any modest and honest bit of self-examination could ever imagine that that lump of compromise, half-measures, confused aspirations to decency, poorly controlled lusts, and fierce selfishness, that is the personality of most of us, could be the agent and inspiration of a cosmic renewal!
It is strange that I should have heard so many Communist songs, and that yet I should find in this one, which is not even Communist, the worst of the spirit which has done so much damage in the twentieth century - the spirit of worldly millenarianism, of "building the New Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land" in the face of whatever God or history or providence may have decided to do with it. But I would say that that shows exactly where the trap for the human spirit lay. Only an egotism of stupendous proportions, and stupendously corrupted by generations of lies piled upon lies, could claim to build a cosmic renewal upon what is to be found in individual people. You have to have built up a whole culture that is simply desensitized to the darkness and the confusion in man. What made Fascism and Communism powerful is that they handed an outside justification for the search for the Millennium, an apparent law of development within nature to which human beings had to align themselves, commit themselves, with which they had to collaborate. There has always been an instinct in people that there is a cosmic order with which the goodness of man is aligned and against which the darkness and ignorance of man is in rebellion. To be in harmony with nature is one definition of virtue that goes back at least to classical times. Marxism and Fascism simply altered the definition of that Nature with which the human spirit had to be in harmony, from something static, whose prescriptions were eternal or eternally repeating, to something dynamic. Consequently collaborating with nature or providence did not merely mean happiness in the present life of man, by as much as we can align ourselves to that everlasting measure, but working towards a future where a kind of perfecion will be achieved. In Fascism and Communism, the future is not only positive, but it is a kind of goal towards which men must strive - not the obliged road towards which we all progress at a rate of sixty seconds a minute.
It follows that there is a great deal, even as you hate the idea and its result, to admire about the old Communists. There is a last letter from an eighteen-year-old Greek Communist partisan girl that is branded into my memory like fire. "Do not weep for me, Mother. I may die, but the Idea will live on, luminous, great and beautiful. And I can hardly bring myself to believe that I, an ordinary peasant girl, should have the privilege to die in its service..." Nobody can read sentences like that without tears in their eyes. And yet you have to bring your mind down to earth, remember where - not only Communists in general, but that specific Communist group - were coming from; what Greek Communism really meant in very thoroughly recorded history; what an enormity of evil even a brief period of that "idea", brought by Communist partisans to mainland Greece, did until they were forced out by those they had intended to kill, in a fierce civil war. What someone said about war is even more true of Fascism and Communism: that they took the best of man, to do the worst.
Fascism and Communism are dead. The enormous flaws in their theories made them unacceptable to many thinking people, and their sheer and obvious failure in practice, condemned them. Fascism promised martial victory and conquest; it ended in unprecedented military disaster, in the middle of a riot of unmartial moral collapse, mutual violence, betrayal, and surrender. Communism promised an economic paradise; it ended in poverty and economic collapse in Russia, and in a peculiarly rapacious and uncontrolled kind of capitalism in China. Truly, by their fruit you shall know them.
However, the heresy incarnate in Parry's Jerusalem is more present than ever. It is as though the ideological and intellectual apparati of Communism and Fascism were mere trellises to train the power of human egotism to grow upwards, until it has grown so thick and so massive that it could survive without the trellis - without the pseudo-scientific or phiosophical justification, without anything much by way of reason at all. Ask anyone whether they want to make a better world; the answer will always be unthinkingly positive. Nobody will stop to wonder whether a better world is possible, how anyone would define it, whether we are all agreed on what it should be like, and whether, even if we were, our views would be of any value, is not something anyone stops to think.
The situation we are in now, is one in which politics amounts essentially to the desire of creating Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land - or Germany's, America's. France's, Sweden's, Italy's, you name it - purely out of the goodness of our hearts; that is, out of a confused self-regard that has been taught to ignore the very fact that men are not only fallible but failed. Instead of "doing justly, and loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God", as one of the finest verses in the Hebrew Bible demands of us, we have erected our Self into our God, and imagine that what springs therefrom is justice and mercy. The result is the constant reduction of free speech and free behaviour, the unstoppable and indeed hardly noticed tide of Political Correctness. The Better World we want to build is no longer even based on a trellis of scientific or philosophical justification; instead, it is merely a matter of what feels nice to - well, those among us who happen to be influential.
What is the definition of tyranny? To me, it is the Latin Sic uolo, sic iubeo; thus I want, thus I order. And it seems to me that this sentimental hankering after a Better World defined as one that we feel good about and that therefore suits our inclinations, a Jerusalem built by our own effort with no reference to any higher principle except the goodness in our own hearts, comes damned close to Sic uolo, sic iubeo. What we like is what we want; of course. What feels right to us is what we command; of course. But does anyone ever stop to wonder whether we are right in liking and demanding that which pleases us?
Nonetheless, there is one popular patriotic song that I like less and less, the more I hear it: Jerusalem by Blake and Parry. There is something about its spirit that repels me, and I think I know what it is. It is self-righteousness in its pure state. Think about what it says, and how it says it: "building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land". Not waiting for God's purposes, not even presuming to collaborate with God or with Providence or with History or with Nature - no, we shall do it ourselves, in fact, I will do it Myself. That is the sacred element in this song: I. And pay attention to the music: not, like the Marseillaise, urgent and avenging; not, like the Battle Hymn of the Republic, marching in step with an overwhelming common vision; no, it is of a piece with the poetry - muscular, self-glorifying, overwhelmingly convinced of its own value. It is a music which proclaims to you that the eschatological renewal of the world, the New Morning, the Millennium, comes from - ourselves. As if anyone who made any modest and honest bit of self-examination could ever imagine that that lump of compromise, half-measures, confused aspirations to decency, poorly controlled lusts, and fierce selfishness, that is the personality of most of us, could be the agent and inspiration of a cosmic renewal!
It is strange that I should have heard so many Communist songs, and that yet I should find in this one, which is not even Communist, the worst of the spirit which has done so much damage in the twentieth century - the spirit of worldly millenarianism, of "building the New Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land" in the face of whatever God or history or providence may have decided to do with it. But I would say that that shows exactly where the trap for the human spirit lay. Only an egotism of stupendous proportions, and stupendously corrupted by generations of lies piled upon lies, could claim to build a cosmic renewal upon what is to be found in individual people. You have to have built up a whole culture that is simply desensitized to the darkness and the confusion in man. What made Fascism and Communism powerful is that they handed an outside justification for the search for the Millennium, an apparent law of development within nature to which human beings had to align themselves, commit themselves, with which they had to collaborate. There has always been an instinct in people that there is a cosmic order with which the goodness of man is aligned and against which the darkness and ignorance of man is in rebellion. To be in harmony with nature is one definition of virtue that goes back at least to classical times. Marxism and Fascism simply altered the definition of that Nature with which the human spirit had to be in harmony, from something static, whose prescriptions were eternal or eternally repeating, to something dynamic. Consequently collaborating with nature or providence did not merely mean happiness in the present life of man, by as much as we can align ourselves to that everlasting measure, but working towards a future where a kind of perfecion will be achieved. In Fascism and Communism, the future is not only positive, but it is a kind of goal towards which men must strive - not the obliged road towards which we all progress at a rate of sixty seconds a minute.
It follows that there is a great deal, even as you hate the idea and its result, to admire about the old Communists. There is a last letter from an eighteen-year-old Greek Communist partisan girl that is branded into my memory like fire. "Do not weep for me, Mother. I may die, but the Idea will live on, luminous, great and beautiful. And I can hardly bring myself to believe that I, an ordinary peasant girl, should have the privilege to die in its service..." Nobody can read sentences like that without tears in their eyes. And yet you have to bring your mind down to earth, remember where - not only Communists in general, but that specific Communist group - were coming from; what Greek Communism really meant in very thoroughly recorded history; what an enormity of evil even a brief period of that "idea", brought by Communist partisans to mainland Greece, did until they were forced out by those they had intended to kill, in a fierce civil war. What someone said about war is even more true of Fascism and Communism: that they took the best of man, to do the worst.
Fascism and Communism are dead. The enormous flaws in their theories made them unacceptable to many thinking people, and their sheer and obvious failure in practice, condemned them. Fascism promised martial victory and conquest; it ended in unprecedented military disaster, in the middle of a riot of unmartial moral collapse, mutual violence, betrayal, and surrender. Communism promised an economic paradise; it ended in poverty and economic collapse in Russia, and in a peculiarly rapacious and uncontrolled kind of capitalism in China. Truly, by their fruit you shall know them.
However, the heresy incarnate in Parry's Jerusalem is more present than ever. It is as though the ideological and intellectual apparati of Communism and Fascism were mere trellises to train the power of human egotism to grow upwards, until it has grown so thick and so massive that it could survive without the trellis - without the pseudo-scientific or phiosophical justification, without anything much by way of reason at all. Ask anyone whether they want to make a better world; the answer will always be unthinkingly positive. Nobody will stop to wonder whether a better world is possible, how anyone would define it, whether we are all agreed on what it should be like, and whether, even if we were, our views would be of any value, is not something anyone stops to think.
The situation we are in now, is one in which politics amounts essentially to the desire of creating Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land - or Germany's, America's. France's, Sweden's, Italy's, you name it - purely out of the goodness of our hearts; that is, out of a confused self-regard that has been taught to ignore the very fact that men are not only fallible but failed. Instead of "doing justly, and loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God", as one of the finest verses in the Hebrew Bible demands of us, we have erected our Self into our God, and imagine that what springs therefrom is justice and mercy. The result is the constant reduction of free speech and free behaviour, the unstoppable and indeed hardly noticed tide of Political Correctness. The Better World we want to build is no longer even based on a trellis of scientific or philosophical justification; instead, it is merely a matter of what feels nice to - well, those among us who happen to be influential.
What is the definition of tyranny? To me, it is the Latin Sic uolo, sic iubeo; thus I want, thus I order. And it seems to me that this sentimental hankering after a Better World defined as one that we feel good about and that therefore suits our inclinations, a Jerusalem built by our own effort with no reference to any higher principle except the goodness in our own hearts, comes damned close to Sic uolo, sic iubeo. What we like is what we want; of course. What feels right to us is what we command; of course. But does anyone ever stop to wonder whether we are right in liking and demanding that which pleases us?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-06-24 05:55 pm (UTC)As much as I dislike communists, both USSR's anthem (still in use and even with words now) and Vstavay, strana ogromnaya are great songs of victory.
As a corollary to our one time discussion about Italians and the WW II, must say I've always found Giovinezza rather wimpy :)
Fascism and Communism are dead.
I wish they would be.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 11:22 am (UTC)Not the inspiration, perhaps (although there are plenty of people whose actions are inspirational), but in so far as we are called to 'Act justly' is it not flawed human beings who are to be God's agents in that renewal?
I used to despise 'Jerusalem', but now I can find inspiration in its determination to build a better world than that of the 'dark satanic mills'. The danger is - as you say - that it's too easy to insert one's own vision of 'Jerusalem', which I suppose is what makes the song appealing across the political spectrum. Personally, when I'm in situations where it is being sung, I focus on the vision of Christ in the first half to inform the pledge of action in the second.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 04:05 pm (UTC)May I make two small objections?
1. What you decry may not be quite without philosophical justification. (Or have I misunderstood what you write?) You do understand that, philosophically, I'm much closer to you on this than to the position you decry. From within various philosophical traditions, of course, that view can be squelched. Plato does this in Theatetus, defeating the Pythagorean, "Man is the measure [or maker] of all things" and to a certain extent, as I recall, Herakleitos's "Change alone is unchanging."
But I'm not sure that this is the best test. By that test, for example, Aristotle routinely refutes Plato.
The "Man is the measure" position has been repeatedly made and defended within its system, and other positions equally refuted. This for a long time. We have Gorgias's fragment, On the Non-Existent or On Nature, which my teacher's teacher, Richard McKeon, called a recognition of the tragedy of existence. (McKeon didn't subscribe to this position, either, mind you. He simply recognized it.) In our century, it shows up in Satre's "Philosophy as Humanism" (not the only definition of humanism, certainly) and probably in his Being and Nothingness, which I, shamefully, have not yet read. (I suspect, too, it comes from Derrida as well, though I've read only fragments of his, and know little of him.)
In other words, this is a perennial position which arises because it does have a justification. Not perfect, but then philosophies don't, at least in my reading, have perfect justifications. Here, too, by my memory of Theatetus, Socrates, while he refutes Pythagoras, fails in providing a thoroughly reasoned alternative. (I remember, he has another go at it in Parmenides, but I haven't gotten all the way through that one yet, so I'm not sure how it comes out.) I think to recognize that justification, and also its appeal, and then to deal with both in careful argument might be better.
But best of all, at least for me -- and here's my second minor objection -- rather than try to defeat something that, over the millenia, re-emerges again & again, and so is likely to have something at its base, I prefer to enter into dialogue with it, whenever possible. At least from my standpoint, I can take wisdom from it, though to a different end.
Satre talks about the courage this takes, living without certainty. This has a very different, but perhaps related presentation in Paul Tillich's Courage to Be. And it can be seen, in one view of its fundamental insight, as differently and, from my mind, better interpreted by St. Paul, in I Corinthians 13, "For now we see as through a glass dimly..." and "then we will understand", implying, of course, that we don't understand now. Luther, I think, implied as much with his famous, "Sin boldly".
There is a limit to what we can discover and understand. What do we do at that limit? We can use a sure faith indistinguishable (in my view) from certainty, an imperfect and doubting faith, an egotistical Sic uolo, or a tragic and courageous courage or decide to be.
In my mind, and not only in the 20th c., the first and third have been equally dangerous. Though, I suspect on further thinking, I'd find in history -- my own and the world's -- dangers in all positions. And that gets me back to loving mercy and walking humbly with my God.
It is a sadness that I have such little time for reading in lj. Your views are a good reason for my sadness. With my imperfect and doubting faith, I wish you & all you hold dear well.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 09:43 pm (UTC)