Geoffrey Ashe is one of my favourite authors, and Camelot and the Vision of Albion (1971) is (for me) his best book. Strongly recommended.
I have been re-reading it - slowly and with much provoked thought - for the past couple of weeks; and pondering its core ideas, concerning the powerful conviction of a "golden age", specifically for Britain ("Albion") - how this is exemplified by the Arthurian "matter of Britain" through its many developments.
William Blake's writings, especially his long prophetic poem "Jerusalem", are given especially close attention.
More broadly, the book is about the idea of a golden era that is lost ("Camelot"), remains as a visionary memory, yet may be recovered; including an heroic leader (such as Arthur) who has died, yet may return...
Ashe considers how such visionary ideals have been recurrent through many places and times; how they have shaped, and continue to shape, the human imagination - and have inspired human action: individual and societal.
The book is typical of the best of late 1960s, early 1970s psychological and social reflection (which is, at a higher general level than anything since) - which means that the treatment of Christianity is largely "comparative" and in terms of its effects - rather than assuming (some form of) Christianity to be Truth about Reality, and exploring the consequences of that assumption.
(...This despite that Ashe was himself an active and devout Roman Catholic - he never states this in his major works, and I did not know about it until after his death.)
When it comes to the basic idea that there once was a Golden Age, and we that we ought to be working restore its essence in the future - I assent only partly: only about fifty percent!
Clearly an idea as frequent and near-universal as the past Golden Age must be based in something real; and my assumption is that this is some combination of our memories of early childhood, with some kind of yearning for the simple hunter-gatherer life that used to be universal for Men.
But how "golden" are such lives? I think the point is that the human consciousness of the golden age is best understood as being much more natural and spontaneous and present-minded; and much less self-aware than adults and modern Men.
Therefore, the golden age cannot be restored when Men have modern adult consciousness; and it cannot be restored in the context of any settled, civilized, organized society or civilization - because such lives require planning, specialization, organization... and many other things that alienate us and subjugate us.
More deeply, there are the twin realities of evil and entropy.
Firstly: what about evil, and entropy (i.e. disease, degeneration and death) in the Golden Age?
My understanding is that awareness of these was diminished by the lesser development of consciousness among children and early tribal people. Therefore, evil and entropy were always present - but not conceptualized, mostly ignored, easily forgotten.
So (by my understanding) the Golden Age did not solve the perennial problems of mortal life on earth - it just found these problems much easier than we do Not to think about.
This is why there can be no future Golden Age, because we now are aware of these problems - to the extent that many people's lives are made fearful and miserable by thinking about them - even when they are not actually being experienced.
Those who believe in the possibility of a future golden age must therefore posit some qualitative change in Men - the future golden Men must (if that age is to be golden) not be motivated by evil, they must not be susceptible to disease and degeneration, they must not be troubled by death and loss.
...Which means that such Men will not be like us, they will no be us; and it's no solution to the problems of entropy and evil in the human condition to posit a golden age for "other people" and "somewhere else" in which there is neither entropy nor evil - it's a non-sequitur.
If everything needs to be changed, then that is a replacement, not a solution.
More deeply still; the ideal of a future golden age does not, and cannot say how - even in theory - evil could be eliminated, when it is found in all beings including ourselves; and how entropy could be eliminated when it seems universal.
My conclusion is that the golden age for us, for our-selves, can lie only in another state and place of being, not in this world.
For me; that would be Heaven, and it lies outwith this mortal world.
In sum; the yearning for a restored Golden Age is understandable, significantly reality-based, and we can learn much from it; but ultimately it is impossible.
6 comments:
You make a good point about a past golden age being a source of encouragement and inspiration. I agree that if a golden age means an earthly paradise, then Earth being as it is and human beings being as they are, we should not look towards a future golden age on Earth.
Though in terms of better and worse eras, there have been various kinds of golden ages in different times and places. For instance, from the Christianization of the British Isles until the Norman conquest was a type of golden age in terms of the number of saints produced.
Another thing is that in the present time a Golden Age is often viewed in terms of material prosperity, while a true golden age (in the restricted sense of a good era, not a veritable Eden) has to be golden in terms of the spiritual considerations such as virtue as well.
If one thing separates an Albion Islander from its 'diasporian product' it is this attitude to deep Albion. It did not survive transportation and comes across as a totally alien concern. Are indigenous Albion Islanders particularly blessed/cursed to fret about golden ages?
@to - One of Geoffrey Ashe's main examples of influential "golden age" thinking is Ghandi wrt Indian independence. But the specific element's of Ghandi's revolutionary spiritual nationalism, were derived from his time in England - the basic idea came from an article by GK Chesterton, while he learned about Hinduism in the Theosophical Society in London etc.
I think Ashe's thesis is that the golden age idea is found in many cultures and times, but that the Arthur myth's persistence and breadth of appeal does suggest some particular British role in things.
I bought the book years ago as it had the chapter on Chesterton (and of course it is listed as M204 in my bibliography). I believe that while there has never been a golden age to be experienced by all people of a nation, we get glimpses of the golden age always, and it is due to certain people and the effect they have on society. Today is a golden age with respect to the availability of learning about next to everything; indeed, people are drowning in information and don't manage to sort out the good things. But they are there. The availability of recorded music is amazing; the availability of movies that have been restored and digitized, the availability of the museums of the world, of libraries, of geographical wondering; we just have to appreciate it. As a small kid, at the age of 3, I discovered the Donald Duck comic book adventures written and drawn by Carl Barks, made in the US, and largely unknown in England, and became a lifelong admirer. Barks is the Shakespeare and Dickens equivalent of comic books (and the antithesis to the superhero mythological trash production of the US), and I wanted to find everything he had made, which led to the publication of articles and indices during my student years and early working life, and to the efforts in the 80s of collecting everything he had made and get it published in the US (in black and white, a wondrous effort), and in the 90s when the Norwegian publisher asked me about what they had not published already, and while they poo-poo-ed me with regard to translating the collected works of 6000+ pages into a Norwegian Collected Works in uniform binding, when I argued with them in the early 90s, it in fact happened fifteen years later. I experienced the golden age of comic books and it may never return, just as the golden age of Baroque music will never return, but the availability of it is enormous as compared to when it happened and one can play it at home. Material prosperity may make people numb towards anything else and they may throw away their lives on fake news and wrong goals, on a career and material possessions, but positive ideas have a tendency to be born again after seemingly having been erased out. In our corrupted society, there are still golden threads to be found among the trash, just like Tolkien being re-discovered by new generations of fans whom in general had been misled by the society's evil push for the occupation with trash. The culture of trash is simply not fulfilling, and while the Western culture seems to be doomed, the golden reminiscence seem to outlive it. Some people live with the trash as it is currently happening, but just think about the trash culture of the 50s and 60s and how little relevant it is today, for instance Kerouac and Burroughs. Chesterton was right about nationalism and his ideas are finding a growing readership all over the world. That is not to say that good ideas will not be fought against. The thing is, when an institution as for instance the church, is corrupted, it falls together, it becomes irrelevant, it loses whatever hold it has in people after a while. I fully agree with your views on the afterlife, and in my youth I suddenly found that when you get to Heaven, you will find that you had already begun to live there while on Earth.
I understand that you reject a 'cyclic' interpretation to the cosmos, but to me it makes perfect sense. The beginning of the cycle is the golden age, where humans are semi-etheric and observe metaphysical reality with clarity, then as degeneration gradually sets in humans become denser, more material, and more atomized... until we reach a 'tipping' point and the cycle resets. But I agree that 'longing for a golden age' is a bit silly as there will be no physical continuation between contemporary humans and the 'new' humans who emerge.
@Geir - What you say about Availability is true (up until recently, when it began to reverse); and it was articulated in the middle 1990s, when it led to considerable optimism.
And yet it has not yielded net social benefits - not even in education, scholarship or science; because probably motivations are too weak and the conceptual interpretations of "information" are corrupt.
@Michael - Cyclical theories worked pretty well through the agrarian age - but since the industrial revolution, cycles have been increasingly overwhelmed by unprecedented linear changes.
I also believe that there have been (indeed this is primary) changes in human consciousness; so that Men are different now (have different attitudes, motivations and behaviours etc) from ever before in human history.
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