I find it recurrently very striking that although I may admire, study, reflect upon individual persons (my "mentors"*) - my strongly positive feelings about such people almost-never extend beyond that specific person; almost-never includes even their close associates, disciples, heirs... and almost-never include the religion, ideology or (generically) the "system" that the admired individuals propagate.
(Negative harm and evil can indeed be encouraged and propagated, as we see all around us; but this does not seem to apply to the positive and Good.)
In one sense this is obvious and to be expected - and yet it is not what most people, including myself, tend to assume.
On the contrary, we assume that there is something transmissible about positive goodness and greatness: that the idea of a Great and Good Man will tend to promote greatness, that the associates, disciples, followers, heirs of a GG Man will share - or at least significantly-encourage - the same positive greatness.
Again and again I find that The Great and Good Man's positive-greatness may be real and strong; and yet the people associated are either mediocre and ineffectual; or else overall malign and negative in their nature and tendency.
Furthermore, and something harder to grasp: The GG Man's own account of what is necessary and desirable for Goodness and positive change is also wrong!
The Great and Good Man's religion/ ideology/ System of understanding and explanation, his System for working to generate positive change - also shares this quality of being - in actual practice - ineffectual and useless at best; but often and with apparent ease readily made into a mechanism for the pursuit of evil.
The people who are supposed to continue the work of the GG Man do not do so: they either degenerate into a relatively harmless but ultimately useless-for-Good pastime/ hobby/ club/ lifestyle choice...
Or else they become actually negative and harmful in their intent and outcomes; a vehicle for the pursuit (whether directly, or by lending support) of evil ends.
Examples of the futility and/or malignity of Systems associated with those I regard as my mentors and Great and Positive persons abound, indeed it is exceptions that are hard to find.
Most significantly, I have come to believe that this is true even of that greatest of men: Jesus Christ.
With the single exception of the author of the Fourth Gospel; I do not find the same greatness in any of those who were associated with Jesus, or who propagated what they believed to be The System that Jesus seemed to be recommending/ commanding.
And I find the usual mixture of ineffectuality and tool-for-net-malignity in The Systems attributed to Jesus, and allegedly associated with Jesus.
What does this mean?
The conclusion would seem to be that Institution and System are intrinsically useless at best, but actually net-harmful in practice.
Perhaps we can only get benefit by direct inner-contact with the spirit of the Great and Good Man himself - because we ourselves are unlikely to do good by attempting to propagate this Greatness.
When it comes to the good and the positive in this life; maybe we can actually do little more than point at a Great and Good Man, with a personal recommendation; and maybe also give an account of our own experience of such contact?
*Some of these recent mentors who are writers, who have had a positive impact (as I judge), and who I have often blogged about are ST Coleridge, Rudolf Steiner, Dion Fortune, JRR Tolkien, Owen Barfield, William Arkle, Gareth Knight. Several of these taught a System - and all of these came to seem wrong and net-harmful. They had associates, followers, disciples etc - and unless the individuals were independently Great and Good themselves; such persons have always proved disappointing, exerted a net-negative influence, and often (I judge) were/are of bad intent.
wrt Tolkien and Barfield - see the comment by AnteB, and my reply. It should be noted that a GG Man may have other GGMs in his circle - but their greatness is, essentially, independently achieved rather than derivative. For instance, and contrary to what he himself asserted and probably believed; Barfield's greatness was essentially independent from that of Steiner. GGMs are not reliable witnesses when it comes to their own special qualities.
6 comments:
"The people who are supposed to continue the work of the GG Man do not do so: they either degenerate into a relatively harmless but ultimately useless-for-Good pastime/ hobby/ club/ lifestyle choice...
"Or else they become actually negative and harmful in their intent and outcomes; a vehicle for the pursuit (whether directly, or by lending support) of evil ends. "
I haven't found this to be the case personally. For instance, when it comes to my great mentor G.K. Chesterton...a certain section of his fandom have indeed been borne with the current of fashionable left-wing ideas, and now attach his name to much that I'm sure he would have detested. However, many others are living out his legacy in a very real way, for instance, the Chesterton Schools Network have created a movement of schools that seem to be genuinely outside the woke umbrella, and do seem to instantiate his ideals.
What you said about the great man unable to explain his greatness makes me think of modernist poets like T.S. Eliot. I think his actual poetry was frequently magnificent, first-class, sublime. His poetic theory was (in my view) terrible and even odious.
Before I read the whole the post I thought about the Inklings and how there might be something in the spiritual atmosphere that raised the men who participated. But then Tolkien, Barfield and CS Lewis were great men on their own and before the Inklings so its probably the other way around.
I was also thinking about Alexander the Great. His father was an impressive king and Alexander had several very able generals who founded dynasties that would live on in centuries. I do not know if any of the greatness of Philip or Alexander were transmitted but it is curious that several larger-than-life figures would come together in one point in history in such a mannner.
Though neither examples mentioned are about systems or religions so your point still stands I suppose.
@Mal - I think we would disagree about the legacy of GKC, because I regard his best (and great) work as coming from before his conversion to Roman Catholicism; after which I find him more formulaic. And it is the later work that seems to have been taken up by later generations - exactly because it is systematic. The many and unexpected flashes of inspiration that light-up his early essays (especially - I find these his best work) obviously cannot be copied.
@AnteB - "But then Tolkien, Barfield and CS Lewis were great men on their own and before the Inklings so its probably the other way around."
Exactly! I'm glad you made that connection - I probably should have done so in the original post.
wrt Alexander and Philip; I would distinguish greatness from goodness. Neither were good Men (so far as I can judge) indeed Alexander seems to have been a monster: a truly great general (like that more recent monster Napoleon) - but an evil-motivated person.
It seems increasingly clear - but not unexpected! - that Good and evil are fundamentally of different kinds, such that what is possible for evil is not usually possible for Good - e.g. that evil can be propagated in a way that Good cannot.
I regard past instances that *seem* like the propagation of Good to be a product of the (passive, unconscious, automatic) mutuality of group-consciousness (i.e. the Great Goodness of one of a group may have some degree of leavening effect, when diluted and averaged among the mutual-group-mind in which he participated - albeit quantitatively, and indeed qualitatively, distinguishable from the Goodness of the originating Great Man).
Rather than the active, conscious, chosen Good on the part of individual persons - which is the only Good possible to Modern Men nowadays.
Yes we talk about 'the great and the good' but they never or very rarely manifest in the same person.
I remember you mentioned that, of the Western countries, science and religiosity both peaked in the USA.
Can we call such paired phenomena 'opponent processes'? The term comes from biology and may well be the wrong phrase. What I mean is that the great scientists could not have got that way without contact with a family or culture influenced by the most sincerely and deeply religious people, but they themselves could not *be* such people.
Another example would be male and female whose mutual influence amplifies each other's positive traits but these cannot both reach the same intensity in a single individual.
Why should this be? Does it perhaps have something to do with what William Wildblood wrote recently about sacredness and how what is not hidden becomes familiar and can eventually lose its aura of sacredness, if I've got that right.
The ultimate hidden altar would seem to be the human heart. People can pick up and benefit from its radiance but they cannot observe it directly. This would explain the power of saints and 'the good'. But 'the great' are a different matter because greatness is gauged directly from accomplishment and therefore it cannot be sacred.
Others may be inspired by the great to reach levels of greatness themselves. Best not to meet their heroes though else the spell could be broken.
@Ron - Another subject from that of the post, really.
But, yours is a somewhat mixed-up account of what I think wrt science and Christianity! (Check out Not Even Trying - I don't think I have changed my opinions much on that subject since I wrote it).
I believe that goodness and greatness are compatible; and indeed synergistic in terms of positive cultural development.
Science peaked, in terms of major breakthroughs (geniuses), in the generations *before* the USA became the world leader in science post WWII. By the 1950s, most of the greatest geniuses in science, literature, music etc were already a thing of the past - although there were still some (*relatively* minor examples) for a few more decades - however, many of these were ignored, or their work was distorted/ inverted.
But the USA abandoned Christianity (and lost that habitual mindset) a bit later than Europe, and so maintained a lead in science for about 30 years after it started to decline sharply in the UK and Western Europe.
However, compared with the UK, US science began to be corrupted (mostly by money/ careerism) a bit earlier than the UK.
" 'the great and the good' but they never or very rarely manifest in the same person"
Yes, this was rare; but the co-occurrence was what we term creative genius; which IMO drove the expansion to dominance of Western Civilization. And the loss of this co-occurrence (and the cultural suppression of such individuals) is a big factor in the decline of The West.
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