EF Schumacher - an uncompleted trajectory towards Romantic Christianity

I was very much affected by EF Schumacher's Small is Beautiful - which I bought a year or two after its publication in 1973 having seen a documentary about it on TV. I have been reviewing Schumacher recently, including the biography by his daughter (Alias Papa) and his final book Guide for the Perplexed published just before he died in 1977. 

Through his life Schumacher described a trajectory from Marxism, through socialism, then a 1960s style Buddhistic 'environmentalism' to become a traditionalist (and Thomistic) Roman Catholic in 1971. 

None of his Roman Catholicism, or even Christianity, was evident to my young self until I read Guide for the Perplexed (GftP); so I was pretty stunned by it. (I had been an atheist since about age six, and was hostile to Christianity.)

I now find Small is Beautiful to be obsolete and obviously wrong in its positive economic prescriptions. But reviewing GftP last week brought back my strongly-mixed response from 1977. 

As so often in my life; I was convinced by Schumacher's 'negative critique' of modern materialism, scientism, the shallowness, meaninglessness and purposeless of life since the industrial revolution. I strongly felt the same way. 

But I was unconvinced then, and still am, by his positive 'solution' in the form of a return to a traditional form of Christianity - one that is rooted in a categorical division of reality into four levels of the in-animate mineral, plant, animal and man (the same scheme as used by Rudolf Steiner). The whole style of Schumacher's positive argument strikes me as 'dead' and uninspiring; too systematic, too bureaucratic, too external. 

Regular readers will know that I see no valid division between living and non-living; and that regard reality as composed of beings, that are alive and conscious - and this includes the 'mineral'. Without a return to some-such 'animism'; Christians condemn themselves to alienation, and (as the neo-pagans recognized) cut-off a vital element of our human nature. 

Also, and this applied even in my youth, I see no valid division between animals and plants.

In more general terms, I would now regard Schumacher's position, at the time of death, as advocating a return to essentially the Greco-Roman-Medieval form of society; or what Steiner calls the Intellectual Soul phase of human consciousness, which is a gradually-transforming halfway between the 'Original Participation' of simple hunter gatherer societies, and the 'modern' (especially since the 1750s) 'Consciousness Soul' phase when the human mind feels cut-off from the rest of reality, and doubts even its own reality.  

Nowadays, I am sure that Man cannot go back to an earlier stage of consciousness: the project of revived traditionalism has been tried many times and failed many times; very few people truly want it; and it is harmful even to try. 

What we can and must do is 'Romantic Christianity' - and I have a strong feeling that Fritz Schumacher would have taken that further step had he lived longer than his 66 years (and with clear mind). This would have completed the implicit trajectory of his development; and I think that - having made the condensed and lucid statement of GftP he would probably have looked at it critically, tried it thoroughly, and (as he had done before) would have gone beyond it. 

More exactly; Schumacher had experienced the 'romanticism' of the 60s-style counter-culture with its 'eastern', Buddhist-Hindu-Sufi type of personally-experienced spirituality (meditation, yoga etc); he had discarded this and found Jesus Christ, again experientially but in a pre-modern-aspiring and communitarian form; and he would have wanted to combine these two deep impulses and convictions in a romantic, intuitive and experiential, Christianity. 

It did not happen - but all the ingredients were present in Schumacher: including a questing, critical and honest intelligence. 

Did Britain (and the West, generally?) miss a Schumacher moment in the mid-1970s?

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This is a totally subjective feeling; but I believe that there was a 'moment' in between the publication of EF Schumacher's Small is Beautiful in 1973, and his Guide for the Perplexed in 1977 - when Britain, and maybe the West, had a sort of 'last chance' to get serious about Life - and sort-out the proper priorities; but chose instead not to get serious - to take the path of distraction and hedonism and shallow, expedient, careerist stupidity.

My recollection is that Small is Beautiful made it very clear that economics specifically, but politics and social aims in general - had to be conducted inside an overarching spiritual and religious framework about what is really important in life - or else, there really was no hope.

Of course not many people read Schumacher's book; but this feeling was in the air at the time - and emerged all over the place in popular culture: comedy, drama, documentaries, non-fiction, music, fashions, and in what people actually did  - I feel that there was a real and general appreciation that we were at a decision point.

But at the same time, there were the usual forces and concerns up-front - all sorts of materialism, careerism, manipulation, seedy dishonesty, snide satire and cynicism - and perhaps most of all there was the sexual revolution; getting more and more confident, more and more self-satisfied; offering more and more gratification (sensual, motivational and especially moral) for less and less work, sacrifice - and all of this on-offer without the need for hard thinking or hard choices.

Why did it go so wrong? People en masse (and without much in the way of serious dissent) chose (and it was their free choice, their responsibility) the short-termist, the easy, the selfish, the trivial; and most of all they rejected the spiritual, the religious and in the end the Christian - so by the time that Schumacher published his final (Christian, Roman Catholic) statement in Guide for the Perplexed, it already seemed to have missed the boat, to be too late - and to be a quixotic, futile gesture.

Britain had decided; and apparently the rest of the rest made exactly the same decision; and after that point it got harder and harder to make the right decision - but, to be candid, by that time there were not many people who were really bothered anyway.

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Note added: 

The final words of Small is Beautiful read: "Everywhere people ask: 'What can I actually do'? The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind."

His biography makes it clear that Schumacher failed to practice what he preached - and did not set his own house in order - in fact did not really even try to do this with any seriousness and got caught up in media, celebrity and (of course...) the sexual revolution; and this failure was no doubt crucial in the scheme of things.

Schumacher's daughter Barbara summarized her Father's work: "At the centre of his message was the point that unless it is recognized that there exists something higher than man which gives a point to man's actions, then there can be not future worth contemplating."

What was this 'something higher"? It was generally known as Buddhist Economics, but Schumacher stated that it could 'equally' be known as Christian economics - but he quipped that if he had called it that, then 'nobody would have read it'. 

I find this a telling comment. He is almost certainly correct - Westerners could enjoy the notion of Buddhist economics, because it was unreal to them and seemed to make no demands. So probably it was already too late even by the mid-seventies. And, by waiting for six years before revealing that it was really, so far as Schumacher personally was concerned, Christian economics - perhaps he missed the moment and left it too late?

But either way, I still believe that there was a 'moment of clarity' - when there was a balanced choice between repentance (on relatively 'easy terms'!) and continuing the path to cultural alienation, despair, dishonesty and suicide. 

For each individual, it was perhaps a matter of hoping that 'somebody else' would take the lead on this; would set their own house in order, and behave accordingly... but 'somebody else' never did - or at least not enough 'somebody else's'.

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" If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" - the vacuum after the Death of God

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That phrase attributed to Voltaire " If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" recognized that God served an indispensable function in the public sphere - and when Nietzsche stated, noticed and advocated that God was now dead - the reality of that death has turned-out to be primarily in the realms of discourse (rather than in the privacy of the individual mind, where God may still, often, be acknowledged).

The other famous phrase of relevance here is attributed to Dostoevsky and states that: Without God everything is permitted. This captures on the one hand the horror of a world in which evil is openly advocated and enforced under the label of Good; and on the other hand the demonic delight, and intoxication, at the endless new possibilities for transgression and destruction that this allows.

But discussion of this whole area of the post-God world has collapsed over the past forty-some years since I came to adult consciousness. When I read that old socialist atheist Bernard Shaw, I found a man who brooded on the absolute need for a 'new religion' to replace Christianity - and this was a theme of his writings for more than half a century: he even tried to launch this religion of Creative Evolution via some of his most successful plays.

So, despite his being a major figure in promoting the evils of Leftism, Shaw was not so much of a fool as to suppose that Man could live without religion.

But we are! - I mean that is the implicit conclusion of a million items per day of propaganda from the mass media, the education system, government officials and corporations. Their message is loud and clear: that God is Dead - and we do not need to reinvent him.

Shaw knew that men must have religion... or else! So did Fritz (Small is Beautiful) Schumacher - whose early works were based on the advocacy of Buddhist Economics, and whose last book was an argument for traditional Thomistic Catholicism.

When I read Robert Graves, I found another author who, like Shaw, was viscerally hostile to Christianity - but promoting his own version of Neo-Paganism (which turned out to be extraordinarily influential is establishing that new religion). Graves was a very strange man with innumerable odd ideas, but he was not such a fool as to imagine that Man could live without religion.

Anyway, here we are! In a world which has no religion, and has lost that understanding shared by Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Shaw, Schumacher, Graves... and indeed everybody who had thought about the subject for more than five minutes: that Man must have a religion.

Is this a paradox - that Man does not have what he must have? If so, the paradox is there for all to see, in the gross incoherence, negativity and destructiveness of modern public discourse.

The answer is that "everybody who had thought about the subject for more than five minutes" knows that Man must have a religion - because we live in a world where nobody from the major leaders of public opinion, the 'intellectuals', from the Politicians to the People - including both the Mandarins and the Masses ever has thought about the subject for five minutes.

Five minutes counts as an impossibly long attention span nowadays. Nobody thinks about anything for five minutes without 'working', or doing, or engaging with the mass media. This was a revelation when I became a medical scientist - to find out that famous researchers had never thought about their subject for five consecutive minutes - and indeed stubbornly refused to do so.

(I became a theoretical biologist simply by thinking about the implications of my empirical research for a little while - although, of course, most theoretical biologists never think either, because they are too busy reading other people's papers and doing hard sums.)

So this is the situation. A few generations ago everybody - including atheists and anti-Christians - knew explicitly (and discussed endlessly) that Man cannot live without religion; now everybody 'knows' implicitly (but never discusses) that Man can, should and does live without religion - and indeed nothing else makes any sense to them!

Thus incoherent nonsense caused by not-thinking, has been take-out of Men's heads and put onto display in the world for all to see... but nobody sees it!

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Why is New Age spirituality (and Green economics) *always* Leftist?

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Before I was a Christian, I was very interested by New Age type spirituality - myths, neo-shamanism, neo-paganism and the like. But I was also on 'the right' politically - or so I supposed - being a sort of conservative/ libertarian.

I was recurrently amazed that everybody in the New Age movement was on the Left, often very far on the Left - and even mildly Right-ish people (such as Republicans or Conservative) were extremely unusual.

But New Age ideas, if they were taken seriously, often seemed to imply, if not a Right wing political world, then at least certainly not the mainstream Left wing politics of our era.

Yet the New Age writers and gurus were mad keen on the actuality of modern mainstream Left wing politics - and would on the one hand sometimes endorse the specific political leadership of the West, when they were members of Leftist parties - but certainly would never endorse any Right wing political figures - would express utter disgust about them.

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However, going back just a few decades, some of the originators of New Age spirituality has been 'of the Right'. For example, Joseph Campbell (the mythologist) was a Republican. And Fritz (Small is Beautiful) Schumacher ended his life as a strongly Thomistic, distributist Roman Catholic - with a radically reactionary vision of the good society.

The New Age legacy of these men (and others) was almost uniformly Leftist - The Joseph Campbell Society and the Schumacher Society/ College both exuding the absolutely characteristic behaviours and concerns of the modern Left, and excluding and Right wing ideas.

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Going back further than a few decades, there was a strongly National Socialist element in New Age ideas - with neo-Paganism a significant part of the early Nazi movement on the one hand, and the ideas of CG Jung (the major New age theorist) on the other.

And back in the mid-1980s, Andrew Dobson wrote an interesting book called Green Economics in which he (rather boldly and honestly) suggested that if Green ideas were taken seriously, Fascist organization was one of the logical directions they could take. And this would, I think, apply to New Age spirituality as well.

IF they were taken seriously.

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The simple reason for the Leftism of New Age (and the Green movement) is that the ideas are not taken seriously, the beliefs are very weakly held - therefore, New Age ideas do not provide people with a fundamental motivation for their lives - and this can be observed empirically by the fact that the actual behavior of New Agers conforms to the dominant Leftist ideology even where this contradict New Age ideals (which is, actually, in most places).

In sum, New Agers are fundamentally Leftist and only superficially dedicated to New Age spirituality. 

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New Agers (and Green politics in general) is uniformly Leftist for the simple reason it is motivationally weak; therefore, adherents believe in Leftism more powerfully and deeply than they believe in New Age; therefore, whenever there is a conflict, Leftism wins - and wins easily, with barely any sense of a conflict.

New Age is merely a set of superficial therapeutic lifestyle ideas and entertainments and diversions - the movement is spiritually just too weak to do any serious work in the modern world.

And that is why it is Leftist. The writers, performers, artists, gurus of the New Age are Leftists first and firmly; and spiritual only when and where it fits in with Leftism.

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Note: Exactly the same argument applied to Liberal Christianity. The reason why Liberals are all Leftists is because their Christianity is so weak - they do not feel sufficiently motivated by their supposed Christian beliefs - in fact their 'Christianity' is far too weak ever to win against the Leftism which is their true primary motivation.
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Mormon economics

A fascinating post on a subject I didn't know very much about:

http://www.millennialstar.org/nearly-every-lds-prophet-has-spoken-out-against-statism/#more-19641

What is interesting is the idea of an economic system which is subordinated to Christianity, and in accordance with Christian principle - which is how things should be in a well-ordered society.

The other example of Christian economics, which I know much better, is Distributism in relation to Roman Catholicism - this was a system devised by Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton, made popular again in the 1970s by EF Schumacher (from whom I discovered it), and which still has its modern advocates - such as Joseph Pearce.

People often get confused by analysing these Christian economic systems using Right/ Left secular economic comparisons - which leave out the essential and primary religious superstructure.

But Christian and secular economics are as different as chalk and cheese, because the aim is different: Christian economics is ultimately aimed at assisting (or at least not harming) the salvation of the people, and all proximate economic aims should ideally be in harmony with this. 

James Hillman 1926-2011 - a colossal waste of my time

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I didn't hear until a couple of weeks ago that James Hillman had died last year. He was probably the major intellectual 'heir' to CG Jung in terms of writing both on myth, and on psychological therapy in relation to modern man and the modern condition; and a few years back (before I became a Christian) I spent an inordinate amount of time reading him (as my bookshelves testify).

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I came across Hillman in the late 1980s from an excellent little article in the Resurgence magazine (of the Schumacher Society) - which I tore out and still have somewhere. It was about work as a writer being like that of a farmer; and there is always something to do on the farm - even if not the actual composition. I tell students something like thsi about large projects - writing a dissertation, project or thesis for example.

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I went back to Hillman after reading Daniel C Noel's Soul of Shamanism which was a great favourite during my neo-pagan/ New Age period.

Hillman was regarded in this circles as the intellectual and scholarly heavyweight - so I set about trying to understand him.

This was difficult; since the easily understood work - interviews and popular books - was very obviously incoherent; while the scholarly work was very difficult to understand (and dull). I thought I must be missing something crucial.

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After some years of grappling, I realized that the scholarly works were, in fact, saying exactly the same thing as the interviews and pop books - but that the deficiencies were more effectively concealed.

The moment I noticed this (actually it took longer than a moment) was in an extended interview when the  conversation revealed that - whatever his intellectual productions might imply - for Hillman, and for the whole New Age/ Myth/ Growth movement, all the vast and wide-ranging explorations are predicated on the wrongness and harmfulness of Christianity - and that, come what may, Leftism is the bottom line

The one and only place that Hillman came off the fence and spoke in clear and unambiguous sentences was politics, and mainstream party politics at that.he was a Democrat, a Liberal, a Leftist first - and everything else was up for discussion.

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So, although (like many writers in this area) Hillman has much to say that is acute in diagnostic terms; in prescriptive terms he is not just useless, but worse than useless - actively harmful in that his writings are wrong where they are not incoherent, and have a tendency to waste a great deal of the reader's time and energy - which in itself tends to seduce the reader into falsehood, despair and destruction.

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Jacob Bronowski interview - the utopia of work?

This is a fascinating interview from 1973 with Jacob ´Ascent of Man´ Bronowski, who was at the time and for many years afterwards a great hero of mine. I watched and rewatched Ascent of Man many times, read and re-read his books many times -- indeed in about 1997 I even contacted his daughter offering to write a proper biography (she rebuffed me and said there was already somebody on the job; although a biography still has not appeared).

Bronowski was a man with great qualities as is, I think, apparent here - also a man of rather significant limitations as is also apparent. But the interview itself is remarkable. This is prime Saturday evening TV with Britain´s best known ´chat show´host ever, and the pace and depth of the discussion is remarkable. Partly this was how things used to be, partly it was due to the way that Bronowski, by strength of character and natural authority, was able to impose his own agenda on mere ´entertainment´.

It can also be seen how the scope of public discourse has been shut-down since - in relation to the discussion of race and intelligence (and bearing in mind, as is obvious enough, that Bronowski was a man of the left - close to being a pacifist and a communist or communist sympathizer like the great scientists JD Bernal and JBS Haldane, both of whom he mentions).

What you get from this is some real Old Left philosophy, based on atheism and an ingrained radicalism such that history is seen as a prolonged conflict between progressive enlightened forces, and theocratic dogma. For instance Bronowski wrote an influential book about the poet William Blake, which paints him in highly political terms and essentially ignores Blake´s blatantly obvious and in-your-face incandescent, visionary, mystical, heretical Christianity´.

For whatever reason, in the discussion of artistic bohemianism and how it contrasts with his image as a scinetist, Bronowski doesn´t mention his time on Mallorca in the 1930s living as a young poet with Robert Graves and Laura Riding, and with a mistress Eirlys Roberts (who later founded The Consumer Association) -- a life of fairly extreme bohemianism by the standards of that time. A touch of the whitewash there, perhaps?

But most telling is the near-final remark on his idea of utopia. Bronowski amplifies his point that he deeply believes that people want to work rather than be idle but are thwarted by the lack of meaningful work - so his utopia is a world where everybody has a satisfying job which he or she is good-at. This absurdity is a view which I shared as a teenager (under the influence of people from Bronowski´s generation) but by the time I was twenty had had thoroughly purged out of me by a crushing avalanche of counter examples from personal experience.

I continued to hold modified versions of this view for quite a while longer but was forced to abandon it when I realized that I was actually talking about myself and a tiny minority of others who are creatively motivated - and in fact hardly anybody is self-motivated, even under ideal conditions. Nearly everybody would prefer not to work. At the very least, most people need a strong social ethos of work to ´want´to do it, nearly everyone does work for rewards or to avoid punishments; and not for intrinsic satisfactions.

But the idea that such would be any kind of utopia is quite extraordinary now! - yet in 1973 was not unusual (as evidenced by the round of applause from the audience) and indeed the ecology (EF Schumacher) and self-sufficiency (John Seymour) movements added a considerable boost to this idea from around the time of this interview and for several years (Andre Gorz was another proponent). I mean the idea that the main political imperative ought to be the provision of Good Work. I think the idea came from the early socialists, reformers, and builders of model communities - perhaps especially William Morris.

I think this view was possible because that generation had been brought-up religiously, so their aethism carried a strong residue of belief in transcendental goods such as beauty, virtue, and honesty - values which Bronowski mentions specifically. And indeed he did indeed adhere to them and defend them strongly; furthermore he developed an integrated philosophy of life based around transcendentals which he expressed powerfully in his books and The Ascent of Man.

The trouble was, the next generation of cradle atheists abandoned all transcendental goods, and became selfish, short-termist and expedient in their actions. They knew about the transcendentals - in theory they approved of them - but lacking any deity could see no reason why they should adhere to them when it was inconvenient or risky. Thus we get the current world of lying careerist bureaucrats and lying public relations pundits which has swallowed-up professional science and the arts (and everything else large scale) until almost nothing remains.

They (we) became unprincipled cowards and slackers - and why not?... When God is dead and was never alive, religion a manipulative lie or a pathetic delusion, and fanatical religiousness (in practice, specifically Christianity) is seen the primary source of all evil through history and continuing (as Bronowski, and his like, taught us most thoroughly).

Anyway - I recommend this interview as containing a great deal of good material, and also revealing the seeds of error and pride which have led to such a pathetic collapse of art, science, politics and all serious human endeavour - in a way which would certainly have appalled Bronowski; although he would most likely have misdiagnosed its cause.

Socio-Political, Jungian, Romantic Christian - Three ways of regarding JRRT Tolkien's work

Looking back over the past fifty years I have been reading Tolkien; I can perceive that my attitude to the books (especially The Lord of the Rings) falls into three broad phases. 

Socio-Political

When I began reading, in my middle teens, I regarded LotR as, pretty much, a blueprint for how we ought to live in a socio-political sense. My attitude was that the lesson of the book was that we ought to deindustrialize substantially, and return to an agrarian society, divided into mostly self-sufficient units (i.e. a kind of feudalism), based upon a much simpler level of technology. 

Thus, my interest in Tolkien led to an interest in pre-modern history - Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Medieval. And also an interest in the 'self-sufficiency' and 'intermediate technology' movements, 'ecology', and the politics of William Cobbett, HD Thoreau, William Morris, RH Tawney, the 'distributism' of Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton, and EF Schumacher of 'Small is Beautiful' fame.  

In essence; I saw the spirit of Tolkien located in a type of society; and I hoped to live by this spirit via living in what I understood to be a Tolkienian society. I therefore read the books almost as if they were a manual or blueprint for how we ought to live. 

Jungian

In younger adult life, I lost faith in both the power and goodness of politics - and realized that its direction was against the agrarian. I realized that Men were not passive products of social systems - and I developed the broadly-Jungian idea that 'the psyche' was the primary reality. 

I saw the psyche as a third realm in-between the subjectivity of the everyday and mundane mind on the one hand, and the objectivity of the material world (including society and politics) on the other hand. 

My broad conclusion was that the 'lessons' of Tolkien ought to be developed in terms of living in accordance with the collective unconscious - which I saw as an objective realm of archetypal and mythic realities that was shared by all Men. 

In sum; I saw Tolkien as the greatest modern exemplification of this mythic world; and reading him as a way of discovering and strengthening the mythic in my own life; with the goal of living an integrated life - feeling part of society and guided by the wisdom of myth. 

Romantic Christian

In middle age I became a Christian, and then more and more of a 'Romantic' Christian - under the influence of Mormon theology; and writers such as Blake, Coleridge, Steiner, Barfield and Arkle. 

Thus, from about 2009, I began increasingly to read and experience Tolkien in a different way. This new era began with my immersion in JRRT's posthumously-published and unfinished novel: The Notion Club Papers. The NCPs contains a good deal of Tolkien autobiography, and was intended as a framework and bridge between the modern world and the world of the 'legendarium' (ie. the Silmarillion annals, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings). 

The Notion Club Papers blog then began to record a new practice of reading Tolkien, and some of the other Inklings, as what used to be termed 'devotional literature' - in the same spirit that past generations might have read Milton's Paradise Lost or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. 

So, this is where I am now: in my third era of Tolkien. 

How stupid is modern egalitarianism? So stupid it *must* be evil.

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I used to be a keen socialist, from age about 13-18 - and as a teen I read fairly widely in the British tradition: William Morris (very much liked him), The Fabians (GB Shaw, Wells etc), Tawney (Christian socialism) and modern people like Schumacher, Anthony Crosland, modern Fabian Essays, the New Statesman every week...

(I was never a Marxist, however.)

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Socialism is of course egalitarian, that is it is focused on equality - and most of the early socialists wanted equality of opportunity - an essentially equal chance for everybody, but naturally leading to unequal economic outcomes.

(The recognized the obvious truth that strictly equal opportunites lead to unequal outcomes.)

They focused on levelling-up of economic conditions, and on education: compulsory education for all, more schools and colleges, more scholarships for the poor, better schools all round etc.

George Bernard Shaw regarded this as insufficient, and argued for economic equality - specifically equal salaries for all - he regarded this as sufficient to address the problems of inequality - but of course he allowed for many other differences.

Essentially Shaw wanted to settle the economic problem (and socialism was based on an economic analysis) - and allow people to get-on with more important matters.

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But none of these early socialists argued that people were equal.

None argued that that individuals and groups were the same.

They did not argue same-ness because it obviously was not true - to argue to would have been simply insane, nobody would have taken them seriously at all.

And because people were not the same, therefore their outcomes in a system of equality would naturally be different. Therefore if (like GB Shaw) you wanted equal outcomes you had to impose them coercively - precisely because people were not the same, and if you did not coercively-impose equal outcomes you would not get them.

They realized that as soon as you stopped actively-imposing equal outcomes, then outcomes would again become unequal.

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Yet nowadays same-ness of all people and groups is precisely the default of Leftism - and the assertion that because all people and groups are the same, then and difference in outcomes must have been coercively imposed.

Now, this modern doctrine of the same-ness of people and groups is not just a stupid and indefensible error - because it is not the kind of thing that somebody can be wrong about, it is not the kind of thing that could possibly be the result of a mistake.

None of the early socialists believed it, perhaps nobody believed it until the mid-twentieth century - and it was not believed then as the result of any kind of discovery!

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So, the modern near-universal belief in the same-ness of people is not, therefore, any kind of stupidity, nor is it due to any kind of un-informedness.

And, although this belief is obviously insane - it is not plausible to imagine that belief in the same-ness of people was caused by actual clinical mental illness affecting the intellectual elite en masse...

No, no - what a belief in the same-ness of people is, is evil; pure evil.

(Evil is the destruction of Good - and Good is truth, beauty and virtue - in unity.)

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Belief in the same-ness of people is an ideology which allows un-bounded destruction of human society - at every level - and without limit or restraint - and continuing until there is nothing left that can continue the process of destruction.

This is not the kind of thing that happens by accident, or as a consequence of well-meaning people blundering in their analysis and actions - it is done by people in service to pure evil.

The people themselves may or may not be evil or nasty people - just as Maoist Commisars, Gulag guards and Gestapo may or may not have been evil or nasty people.

But those who believe in the same-enss of humans serve evil - they are on the side of evil - and this is a straightforward objective fact: anyone who believes-in, argues for, or enforces policy based-on the same-ness of people and groups is serving evil.

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Tolkien's influence on my life

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I read the Hobbit when I was, I think, 13 years old; and it was a few months before I moved on to read LotR.

The delay was because I liked the Hobbit so much that I wanted more of the same, especially, more of Bilbo - and I didn't like the idea that he would only be a character at the beginning.

Anyway, when I eventually read LotR I was completely smitten. For the rest of my school days I would re-read and re-read and also looked at everything else by or about Tolkien available to me at the time.

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As I recall, I did not re-read Tolkien so much in my twenties and early thirties - and the return was triggered by Tom Shippey's Road to Middle Earth.

This era of neglect now seems to me a dark time in my life.

My young adult neglect of Tolkien seems like evidence of corruption and decline (certainly not of maturity!).

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Anyway, reading LotR aged 13 opened-up many worlds for me.

Firstly, the world of grown-up literature - the first authors I read were Bernard Shaw, and Robert Graves - specifically the I Claudius and Claudius the God books; because Tolkien also made me want to read more history.

I also read history proper, and especially the history of Anglo Saxon times, and of farming and country life.

Then I became generally interested in the whole business of rural England - for instance the oral history of Akenfield by Ronald Blythe, the work of George Ewart Evans, and the memoirs of Evesham Vale farmer Fred Archer (I didn't realize Tolkien's brother Hilary was at that time still a fruit grower in Evesham).

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Considerations of life in The Shire meant that I became interested in Self Sufficiency (John Seymour), the Small is Beautiful movement with Fritz Schumacher and the budding 'Ecology' (now 'Green') movement - also William Morris's stories of a medieval socialist utopia (Dream of John Ball, News from Nowhere); and Thoreau's Walden.

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Tolkien's 'medievalism' and use of song led to an interest in Folk Music - which included not just watching and listening, but also participation and a little bit of arranging of unaccompanied song and dance; and then classical music, beginning with Bach and Telemann (because of their use of the recorder! which I regarded for some reason as a Tolkien instrument).

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All these strands came together in an interest in myth, legend and fairy story.

And I read other 'fantasy' writers - some written before and some after Tolkien - but only found something of what I sought in Alan Garner and Lloyd Alexander.

*

Also, I learned a little of Tolkien's professional work, and this (plus good fortune of having a well trained English teacher) led to me reading Chaucer, Gawain and the Green Knight and some other Middle English poetry. This was, in fact, my first interest in poetry - I went from medieval poems to the more modern.

*

There was probably even more in the way of influence. And of course there were other preceding and subsequent interests, not related to Tolkien and often hostile in spirit to the above - for example a love of the 18th century era of England in its architecture and lifestyle, and of PG Wodehouse; and of science.

*

But suffice to say that reading Tolkien age thirteen was the door to self-conscious adulthood for me; and I could not have wished for a better door.

My main regret is that Tolkien did not influence me even more, and throughout my whole life; because, of course, I tried to ignore completely Tolkien's Christianity until I was moving into late middle age - not very many years ago - when at last I recognized that this was the deepest element of all in Tolkien's great works.

So, just about the one area of life in which I did not allow Tolkien to influence me at all was religion; specifically my own complete lack of religion.

*

 

The literary genre of Drama is ephemeral - confirmed

*

Continuing from:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/drama-is-nearly-all-ephemeral.html

*

Last Christmastide I had the experience of discovering that my favourite TV programme ever was no good:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/dont-forget-to-write-favourite-tv.html

This is now becoming a pattern. Last week I bought a DVD of the 6 X 1 hour, 1985 TV drama Edge of Darkness - written by Troy Kennedy Martin, and starring Bob Peck. I have always said that this was at the pinnacle of TV drama, and contained one of the great acting performances with Bob Peck.

*

In re-watching, I knew that I would now be out of sympathy with the eco-thriller premise (back in 1985 I was a member of both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and a Subscriber to the Schumacher Society's Resurgence magazine - and all the rest of it...).

But it was worse than that. Edge of Darkness just wasn't very good. It was incredibly slow, for reasons that seems pretentious rather than dramatically justified; Peck's performance was uneven and unable to convince - and included more than one unconvincing 'breakdown and scream' episode (there were *far* too many of these!); the plot was contrived, full of coincidences and pumped with trivialized murders; the characters were cynical, crude and stereotyped; and the famous climax was terribly disappointing on re-viewing.

My star rating dropped from five (out of five) to just two.

*

My point is that drama relies on topicality to a far greater extent than the other literary arts. A really effective and enjoyable drama can becomealmost un-watchable very quickly - as the topicality subsides - and indeed, a drama with which you do not share the assumptions is very difficult to enjoy in the first place.

I remember watching Look Back in Anger by John Osborne,from 1956, which revolutionized the post-war theatre; had a huge impact. Twenty years later it had become not only dull, but positively embarrassing.

This does not happen with novels! I can re-read novels which I especially enjoyed ten, twenty, forty years ago - and I can always enjoy them now; maybe not quite as much, but I do enjoy them - even children's stories like Enid Blyton or the Jennings books by Anthony Buckeridge. 

*

My conclusion: Drama is different - and usually inferior.

Or, maybe it is too easy to write high impact but ephemeral drama: the 'theatrical' experience casts a spell which persuades us that there is more going-on than really is there.

But most drama is ephemeral, very little lasts - and the counter-examples of Shakespeare and Shaw are merely exceptions that prove the rule. 

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Oneness is The System approved spirituality - why?

The possible spiritual paths in The West seem (in practice, if not in principle) to boil down to a choice between Oneness and Romantic Christianity. 

Oneness comes in many guises. It is the standard basis of New Age spirituality. Oneness is also the extracted essence of Westernised Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi mysticism and the like. 

And it is the core of that highbrow, relativised, symbolic, amoral-leftist derivative of mystical and ritual Christianity, popular among intellectual liberal 'Christians' such as Rowan Willams (sometime Archbishop of Canterbury).  

 

Oneness is (as a minority possibility) taught and supported by the Establishment. For instance some major state bureaucracies, educational organisations and private corporations offer Oneness teaching and/or therapy under various titles such as counselling and 'mindfulness'. 

And, at the intellectual and high cultural level; there are variants of the eclectic, syncretic 'perennial philosophy' derived from Theosophy with its anything-but Christianity tendencies - e.g. Prince Charles's Temenos academy or the Schumacher society. 

Positive features on oneness can be found in mainstream Leftist newspapers, on TV, in movies - its practitioners are at least acceptable, and may be accorded official honours and prizes.

 

What are its characteristics? Oneness teaching is against 'the Self'/ Ego, and against 'thinking'. 

It regards all men as One, indeed evrything that is - is One. 

The intention is to lose the thinking self into an apprehension this ultimate One-ness.

(In practice, this state-of-being is intermittent, recreational and therapeutic; and in-between times the Oneness practitioner will typically be well integrated into 'normal life' - which nowadays means The System and all it entails.) 

 

Why does Oneness fit-in-with The Establishment agenda of evil? 

Well, quite simply because the thinking Self - when that Self is our divine nature inherited as sons and daughters of God - is the only thing about us that stands outside of The System. 

The thinking of this divine Self is what we use to discern, judge and evaluate in accordance with God's values. The thinking of this divine self is what motivates us from a source in harmony with God's creation. 

The intention of Romantic Christianity is to locate, become conscious of, use and strengthen this type of intuition, this form of direct knowing.

 

Naturally, The System wants our divine, thinking Self dissolved away into nothingness! 

And is happy to encourage any philosophy which assists in such work!

Tolkien opened the doors

Lord of the Rings was the first grown-up book I read, at the age of 13, and it shaped the whole of my adolescent experience of high culture.

The next heavyweight authors I tackled were George Bernard Shaw and Robert Graves - both recommendations of my father. They represented two sides of my character which developed in parallel - rationalism and romanticism; classicism and medievalism.

At this point and for a few years there was an intoxicating sense of culture opening-out; as if it would become a self-sufficient world for me. 

On the rational side I was bowled over by Bronowski's Ascent of Man on TV and went on to read others of his books, I focused on science in school, and I read modern socialist political theory - joining the Labour Party on my 16th birthday. A typical Fabian technocrat.

On the romantic side I read William Morris's political essays and stories, Fritz Schumacher, and was an adherent of the 'ecology' (now Green) movement. I loved Thoreau's Walden and intended to become Self Sufficient following the guidance of John Seymour. A typical utopian transcendentalist.

In music I loved the classical baroque on the one hand (Telemann before Bach - which must be unusual), and opera on the other hand; the classicism of the treble recorder and the visceral appeal of folk rock (especially Steeleye Span) an unaccompanied group singing. I sang in Gilbert and Sullivan, and a Haydn mass - and played Morris Dances, jigs and reels on the most vulgar instrument of all: piano accordion.

A third side of my character was a particular liking for clever and stylish 'aristocratic' lifestyle as epitomized by 18th century classical architecture (eg. nearby Bath and Bristol), the plays of Sheridan and Goldsmith, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (which I acted in), Three Men in a Boat (which I imagined to be aristocratic - although actually it was lower middle class), PG Wodehouse and Tom Stoppard's plays.

These enthusiasms were enabled by the cultural resources of the local library plus inter-library loans, then later Classics for Pleasure records, the Bristol Central Library (including an extensive free record library with classics and folk), the Old Vic Theatre, and the elegant backdrop of Park Street, Cawardines Coffee Houses, and George's bookshop.

Three to four decades on, and most of this has fallen by the wayside except for Tolkien, Gilbert and Sullivan, Jerome K Jerome, and baroque classical music - the rest is mostly a matter for occasional re-visitation in a pleasantly nostalgic spirit (or to understand my previous mind-set) rather than a living, learning, serious engagement.