The recognition of complicity is the beginning of innocence.
The recognition of necessity is the beginning of freedom.
The recognition of the direction of fulfillment is the death of the self.
And the death of the self, is the beginning of selfhood.
All else is surrogate of hope and destitution of spirit.
-Robert Penn Warren
Monday, August 31, 2009
discovery of the unconscious
Everything that was naively presumed to be a knowledge of transcendental and divine things, which human beings can never know with certainty, and everything that seemed to be irretrievably lost with the decline of the Middle Ages, rose up again with the discovery of the psyche. This premonition of future discoveries in the psychic sphere expressed itself in the phantasmagoric speculations of philosophers [alchemists], who, until then, had appeared to be the arch-peddlers of sterile verbiage.
-Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis
-Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis
The Man
It is natural that everyone should be curious to ascertain his Mission upon earth. Of course I have thought much about it. As yet I have no inkling of mine, unless it is to drain morasses and convert them - without profit to myself - into the most fertile land. But I think I see what I was not made to do and why perhaps Providence has interposed to change my apparent destiny. I believe that with the help of heaven, if my career had not been so often cut short, I could and would have dissolved this Union. In my day, it has only required The Man to do it. And I have seen so clearly how to do it, that I believe I could have done it, if it had been God's Will. But it was not his Will to destroy it now, at all events, and he has chained me down.
-James Henry Hammond, December 6, 1851
-James Henry Hammond, December 6, 1851
Aurelia Occulta
I am the poison-dripping dragon who is everywhere and can be cheaply had
That upon which I rest, and that which rests upon me will be found within me by those who pursue their investigations in accordance with the rules of the Art.
My water and fire destroy and put together; from my body you may extract the green lion and the red.
But if you do not have exact knowledge of me, you will destroy your five senses with my fire.
From my snout there comes a spreading poison that has brought death to many.
Therefore you should skillfully seperate the coarse from the fine, if you do not wish to suffer utter poverty.
I bestow on you the powers of the male and the female, and also those of heaven and earth.
The mysteries of my art must be handled with courage and greatness of mind if you would conquer me by the power of fire, for already many have come to grief, their riches and labour lost.
I am the egg of nature, known only to the wise, who in piety and modesty bring forth from me the microcosm, which was prepared for mankind by Almighty God, but given only to the few, while the many long for it in vain, that they may do good to the poor with my treasure and not fasten their souls to the perishable gold.
By the philosophers I am named Mercurius, my spouse is the philosophic gold,
I am the old dragon, found everywhere on the globe of the earth,
father and mother,
young and old,
very strong and very weak,
death and resurrection,
visible and invisible,
hard and soft,
I descend into the earth and ascend to the heavens,
I am the highest and the lowest,
the lightest and the heaviest,
often the order of nature is reversed in me, as regards colour, number, weight, and measure,
I contain the light of nature;
I am dark and light;
I come forth from heaven and earth;
I am known and yet do not exist at all.
By virtue of the sun's rays all colours shine in me, and all metals.
I am the carbuncle of the sun, the most noble purified earth, through which you may change copper, iron, tin, and lead into gold.
That upon which I rest, and that which rests upon me will be found within me by those who pursue their investigations in accordance with the rules of the Art.
My water and fire destroy and put together; from my body you may extract the green lion and the red.
But if you do not have exact knowledge of me, you will destroy your five senses with my fire.
From my snout there comes a spreading poison that has brought death to many.
Therefore you should skillfully seperate the coarse from the fine, if you do not wish to suffer utter poverty.
I bestow on you the powers of the male and the female, and also those of heaven and earth.
The mysteries of my art must be handled with courage and greatness of mind if you would conquer me by the power of fire, for already many have come to grief, their riches and labour lost.
I am the egg of nature, known only to the wise, who in piety and modesty bring forth from me the microcosm, which was prepared for mankind by Almighty God, but given only to the few, while the many long for it in vain, that they may do good to the poor with my treasure and not fasten their souls to the perishable gold.
By the philosophers I am named Mercurius, my spouse is the philosophic gold,
I am the old dragon, found everywhere on the globe of the earth,
father and mother,
young and old,
very strong and very weak,
death and resurrection,
visible and invisible,
hard and soft,
I descend into the earth and ascend to the heavens,
I am the highest and the lowest,
the lightest and the heaviest,
often the order of nature is reversed in me, as regards colour, number, weight, and measure,
I contain the light of nature;
I am dark and light;
I come forth from heaven and earth;
I am known and yet do not exist at all.
By virtue of the sun's rays all colours shine in me, and all metals.
I am the carbuncle of the sun, the most noble purified earth, through which you may change copper, iron, tin, and lead into gold.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Age of Aquarius
Faith, quite as much as science with its traditional objectivity, is absolute, which is why faith and knowledge can no more agree than Christians can with another.
Christian doctrine is a highly differentiated symbol that expresses the transcendent psychic - the God image and its properties. This comprises practically everything of importance that can be ascertained about the manifestations of the psyche in the field of inner experience, but it does not include Nature, at least not in any recognizable form. Consequently, at every period of Christianity there have been subsidiary currents or undercurrents that have sought to investigate the empirical aspect of Nature not only from the outside but also from the inside.
...Though we can learn a lot from Indian thought, it can never express the past that is stored up within us. The premise we start with is and remains Christianity, which covers anything from eleven to nineteen centuries of Western life...
The bridge from dogma to the inner experience of the individual is broken down...
when a living organism is cut off from its roots, it loses the connections with the foundations of its existence and must necessarily perish...
The problems which the integration of the unconscious sets for modern doctors and psychologists can only be solved along the lines traced out by history, and the upshot will be a new assimiliation of the traditional myth. This, however, presupposes the continuity of historical development. Naturally the present tendency to destroy all tradition or render it unconscious could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundred years and substitute an interlude of barbarism. Whereever the Marxist utopia prevails, this has already happened...
Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums...
We now have a new symbol in place of the fish, a psychological concept of human wholeness. In as much or in as little as the fish is Christ does the self mean God. It is something that corresponds, an inner experience, an assimilation of Christ into the psychic matrix, a new realization of the divine Son, no longer in theriomorphic form, but expressed in a conceptual or "philosophic" symbol. This compared with the mute and unconscious fish, marks a distinct increase in conscious development.
Carl Jung, AION
Christian doctrine is a highly differentiated symbol that expresses the transcendent psychic - the God image and its properties. This comprises practically everything of importance that can be ascertained about the manifestations of the psyche in the field of inner experience, but it does not include Nature, at least not in any recognizable form. Consequently, at every period of Christianity there have been subsidiary currents or undercurrents that have sought to investigate the empirical aspect of Nature not only from the outside but also from the inside.
...Though we can learn a lot from Indian thought, it can never express the past that is stored up within us. The premise we start with is and remains Christianity, which covers anything from eleven to nineteen centuries of Western life...
The bridge from dogma to the inner experience of the individual is broken down...
when a living organism is cut off from its roots, it loses the connections with the foundations of its existence and must necessarily perish...
The problems which the integration of the unconscious sets for modern doctors and psychologists can only be solved along the lines traced out by history, and the upshot will be a new assimiliation of the traditional myth. This, however, presupposes the continuity of historical development. Naturally the present tendency to destroy all tradition or render it unconscious could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundred years and substitute an interlude of barbarism. Whereever the Marxist utopia prevails, this has already happened...
Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums...
We now have a new symbol in place of the fish, a psychological concept of human wholeness. In as much or in as little as the fish is Christ does the self mean God. It is something that corresponds, an inner experience, an assimilation of Christ into the psychic matrix, a new realization of the divine Son, no longer in theriomorphic form, but expressed in a conceptual or "philosophic" symbol. This compared with the mute and unconscious fish, marks a distinct increase in conscious development.
Carl Jung, AION
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Initiatory Regality
The tradition of initiatory regality ceased to have contacts with historical reality and with the representatives of any European temporal power. It continued to exist only underground, in secret currents such as hermeticism and rosicrucianism, which increasingly withdrew inward as the modern world was taking form - when the organizations that they animated did not themselves undergo a process of involution and inversion. As a myth, medieval civilization left its testament in two legends. According to the first legend, every year on the night of the anniversary of the suppression of the Knights Templar, an armed shadow wearing a red cross on its white mantle allegedly appears in the crypt of the Templars to inquire who wants to free the Holy Sepulcher: "No one," is the reply, "since the temple has been destroyed." According to the 2nd legend, Frederick I still lives with his knights although asleep, in the Kifhauser heights inside a symbolic mountain. He awaits the appointed time when he will descend to the valleys below at the head of his faithful in order to fight the last battle, whose successful outcome will cause the Dry Tree to bloom again and a new age to begin.
-Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 310-11
-Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 310-11
Chivalry
Within a nominally Christian world, chivalry upheld without any substantial alterations an Aryan ethics in the following things:
1) upholding the idea of the hero rather than the saint, and of the conqueror rather than of the martyr
2) regarding faithfulness and honor, rather than caritas and humbleness, as the highest virtues
3) regarding cowardice and dishonor, rather than sin, as the worst possible evil
4) ignoring or hardly putting into practice the evangelical precepts of not opposing evil and not retaliating against offenses, but rather methodically punishing unfairness and evil.
5) excluding from its ranks those who followed the Christian precept "Thou shalt not kill" to the letter.
6) refusing to love one's enemy and instead fighting him and being magnanimous only after defeating him
- Julius Evola - Revolt Against the Modern World, 298-99
1) upholding the idea of the hero rather than the saint, and of the conqueror rather than of the martyr
2) regarding faithfulness and honor, rather than caritas and humbleness, as the highest virtues
3) regarding cowardice and dishonor, rather than sin, as the worst possible evil
4) ignoring or hardly putting into practice the evangelical precepts of not opposing evil and not retaliating against offenses, but rather methodically punishing unfairness and evil.
5) excluding from its ranks those who followed the Christian precept "Thou shalt not kill" to the letter.
6) refusing to love one's enemy and instead fighting him and being magnanimous only after defeating him
- Julius Evola - Revolt Against the Modern World, 298-99
Monday, August 24, 2009
Snake Oil Medicine 5: The Great Arcanum
Eliphas Levi shows it very truly - "a force in Nature," by means of which "a single man who can master it...might throw the world into confusion and transform its face"; for it is the great arcanum of transcendent Magic."
"This ambient and all penetrating fluid, this ray detached from the (Central or 'Spiritual') Sun's splendour...fixed by the weight of the atmosphere (?!) and the power of central attraction...the Astral Light, this electromagnetic ether, this vital and luminous caloric, is represented on ancient monuments by the girdle of Isis which twines around two poles...and in ancient theogonies by the serpent devouring its own tail, emblem of prudence and of Saturn - emblem of infinity, immortality, and Kronos - "Time" - It is the winged dragon of Medea, the double serpent of the caduceus, and the tempter of Genesis; but it is also the brazen snake of Moses encircling the Tau...lastly it is the devil of exoteric dogmatism, and is really the blind force which souls must conquer in order to detach themselves from the chains of the earth - for if they should not, they will be absorbed by the same power which first produced them and will return to the central and eternal fire.
The great arcanum is now discovered by and only for one...
"This ambient and all penetrating fluid, this ray detached from the (Central or 'Spiritual') Sun's splendour...fixed by the weight of the atmosphere (?!) and the power of central attraction...the Astral Light, this electromagnetic ether, this vital and luminous caloric, is represented on ancient monuments by the girdle of Isis which twines around two poles...and in ancient theogonies by the serpent devouring its own tail, emblem of prudence and of Saturn - emblem of infinity, immortality, and Kronos - "Time" - It is the winged dragon of Medea, the double serpent of the caduceus, and the tempter of Genesis; but it is also the brazen snake of Moses encircling the Tau...lastly it is the devil of exoteric dogmatism, and is really the blind force which souls must conquer in order to detach themselves from the chains of the earth - for if they should not, they will be absorbed by the same power which first produced them and will return to the central and eternal fire.
The great arcanum is now discovered by and only for one...
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Snake Oil Medicine 4: Projection of the Astral Body
1) Projection of the astral body is capable of being demonstrated by means of direct experiment. This also demonstrates to us that the living force is independent of matter, and that one Individuality is composed of a physical body and an intelligent Soul - and a vital link, the astral body.
2) Since the phantom can exist and function apart from the physical body, it may also exist after death. That is, IMMORTALITY is a fact which is thus proved scientifically.
The first step consists in acquiring a certain dream control - by observing some incongruity or anachronism; leading to the knowledge or recognition that one is dreaming...
"It felt as though I was rushing to insanity and death; but once the little door had clicked behind me, I enjoyed a mental clarity far superior to that of earthly life. And the fear was gone."
You must concentrate on the pineal gland.
2) Since the phantom can exist and function apart from the physical body, it may also exist after death. That is, IMMORTALITY is a fact which is thus proved scientifically.
The first step consists in acquiring a certain dream control - by observing some incongruity or anachronism; leading to the knowledge or recognition that one is dreaming...
"It felt as though I was rushing to insanity and death; but once the little door had clicked behind me, I enjoyed a mental clarity far superior to that of earthly life. And the fear was gone."
You must concentrate on the pineal gland.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
go the whole hog...
Eldest of my grandsons! Listen and always remember my strict injunction to you: In life never do as others do.
If you go on a spree then go the whole hog including the postage.
If you don't grease the wheels, the cart won't go.
Never poke your stick into a hornet's nest.
There is no offence which with time will not blow over...
--
His influence and authority had not only not declined during his exile, but on the contrary, they had greatly increased...
When an event is impending which arises from forces immeasureably greater than our own, one must submit.
And you know, don't you, that the talks of my dear grandfather always brings out tales of places where he has been...
We must not oppose forces higher than our own - not only must one not oppose them, but even submit and receive all their results with reverence , at the same time praising and glorifying the wonderful and providential works of Our Lord Creator.
I am not glad because of the misadventure but because an unforeseen event issuing from above has occurred, owing to which we shall be able to listen once more to the tales of my dear grandfather.
But I am curious to know whether there dwell three-brained beings on the planets of that solar system and whether higher being bodies are coated in them.
Everything existing in the world falls to the bottom.
And the bottom for any part of the universe is its nearest stability.
And this said 'stability' is the place of the point upon which all the lines of force arriving from all directions converge.
The centers of all the suns and of all the planets of our universe are just such points of stability.
When dropped into space everything tends to fall on one or another sun or planet.
May it therefore be possible to employ this cosmic particularity for the locomotion we need between the spaces of the Universe?
-G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson
If you go on a spree then go the whole hog including the postage.
If you don't grease the wheels, the cart won't go.
Never poke your stick into a hornet's nest.
There is no offence which with time will not blow over...
--
His influence and authority had not only not declined during his exile, but on the contrary, they had greatly increased...
When an event is impending which arises from forces immeasureably greater than our own, one must submit.
And you know, don't you, that the talks of my dear grandfather always brings out tales of places where he has been...
We must not oppose forces higher than our own - not only must one not oppose them, but even submit and receive all their results with reverence , at the same time praising and glorifying the wonderful and providential works of Our Lord Creator.
I am not glad because of the misadventure but because an unforeseen event issuing from above has occurred, owing to which we shall be able to listen once more to the tales of my dear grandfather.
But I am curious to know whether there dwell three-brained beings on the planets of that solar system and whether higher being bodies are coated in them.
Everything existing in the world falls to the bottom.
And the bottom for any part of the universe is its nearest stability.
And this said 'stability' is the place of the point upon which all the lines of force arriving from all directions converge.
The centers of all the suns and of all the planets of our universe are just such points of stability.
When dropped into space everything tends to fall on one or another sun or planet.
May it therefore be possible to employ this cosmic particularity for the locomotion we need between the spaces of the Universe?
-G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson
Thursday, August 20, 2009
The Working of the Avatar
The Avatar draws upon himself the universal suffering, but he is sustained under the stupendous burden by his infinite Bliss and His Infinite sense of humour. The Avatar is the Axis or Pivot of the Universe, the Pin of the grinding-stones of evolution, and so has a responsibility towards everyone and everything. At each moment in time He is able to fulfill singly and together the innumerable aspects of his universal duty because his actions are in no way constrained by time and distance and the here and now of the senses.
While engaged in any particular action on the gross plane , he is simultaneously working on all the inner planes. Unlike the actions of ordinary man, the Avatar's every action on the gross plane brings about numberless and far-reaching results on the different planes of consciusness. His working on the inner planes is effortless and continues of itself, but because of the very nature of grossness His work on the gross plane entails great exertion.
As a rule each action of an ordinary person is motivated by a solitary aim serving a solitary purpose; it can hit only one target at a time and bring about one specific result. But with the Avatar, He being the center of each one, any single action of His on the Gross plane brings about a network of diverse results for people and objects everywhere.
The Avatar's action on the gross plane is like the throwing of a main switch in an electric powerhouse which immediately and simultaneously releases an immense force through many circuits, putting into action various branches of service such as factories and fans, trains and trolleys and lighting for cities and villages.
An ordinary physical action of the Avatar releases immense forces in the inner planes and so becomes the starting point for a chain of working, the repercussions and overtones of which are manifest at all levels and are universal in range and effect.
Everything in the universe is, and from the beginning has been, a materialization of the divine Original Whim working out irrevocably without default, deflection or defeat. It is the unfolding upon the screen of consciusness of the film of creation, sequence after sequence according to the pattern that issued from the Original Whim. However, when God as God-Man plays the role of Audience he can alter or erase at his avataric whim any thing or happening which was destined from the Original Whim. But the very arising of the avataric whim was inherent in the Original Whim.
The Sufis distinguish between Qaza or destined occurrences, and Qadar or happenings which are impulsive or 'accidental'. The Avatar's or Qutub's actions are impulsive and arise from their infinite compassion; and the functioning of this whim relieves and gives beauty and charm to what would otherwise be a rigid determinism.
The Qutub's actions bring about modifications in the previously determined divine plan, but they are limited in extent. But the Avatar's interventions bring about modifications on a universal scale. For instance, supposing that it was divinely ordained for a war to occur in 1950. It must take place at the appointed time, and the train of events which follows will punctually meet the present time-table. However, if the Avatar is in the world at the time He might, in his exercise of Qadar, ward off the catastrophe by some particular action on the gross plane. And so in the relentless working out of the laws of Nature there can enter the inexplicable divine caprice, spelling out peace instead of war in the diary of man.
Kabir has said:
O Kabir! The lines of fate are never effaced by Rama; He is all-powerful and can undo destiny, but He never does so for He has given full thought to what he has planned.
The Avatar does not as a rule interfere with the working out of human destinies. He will do so only in times of grave necessity - when he deems it absolutely necessary from his all-encompassing point of view. For a single alteration in the planned and imprinted pattern in which each line and dot is interdependent, means a shaking up and a re-linking of an unending chain of possibilities and events. The least divergence from the pre-drawn line of Fate not only requires infinite adjustments within the immediate orbit of the individual concerned, but involves in its interminable repercussions all those connected by the bond of past sanskaras.
The avataric whim is also part of the divine Destiny. Qaza provides for the absolute necessity of the Avatar's 'chance' intervention, and the very unpredictability of this intervention is predicted in Qaza - for his infinite compassion, because of which His intervention occurs, may not be denied.
In the working out of the Avataric whim there is not the least element of chance. The aim of the whim's action is perfect and its result is precise.
An ordinary person's whim, when expressed, may have consdquences quite outside itself, as illustrated by the following story. A drunken man was passing by a wood-apple tree and had a whim to taste one of its fruits. Asa rule a drunkard has a distaste for sour or tart things because they nullify the effects of drink, so this man's wanting a wood-apple was purely a whim, independent of thought or real desire. He picked up a stone and threw it at the tree. The stone missed any of the apples, killed a bird, scared away many others and fell on the head of a traveller resting beneath the tree. Thus the haphazard expression of the drunkard's whim not only failed to accomplish the whim but brought about results completely outside of it. The whim was merely an unrelated fancy, and the action stemming from it had no connection with its object.
- Meher Baba
While engaged in any particular action on the gross plane , he is simultaneously working on all the inner planes. Unlike the actions of ordinary man, the Avatar's every action on the gross plane brings about numberless and far-reaching results on the different planes of consciusness. His working on the inner planes is effortless and continues of itself, but because of the very nature of grossness His work on the gross plane entails great exertion.
As a rule each action of an ordinary person is motivated by a solitary aim serving a solitary purpose; it can hit only one target at a time and bring about one specific result. But with the Avatar, He being the center of each one, any single action of His on the Gross plane brings about a network of diverse results for people and objects everywhere.
The Avatar's action on the gross plane is like the throwing of a main switch in an electric powerhouse which immediately and simultaneously releases an immense force through many circuits, putting into action various branches of service such as factories and fans, trains and trolleys and lighting for cities and villages.
An ordinary physical action of the Avatar releases immense forces in the inner planes and so becomes the starting point for a chain of working, the repercussions and overtones of which are manifest at all levels and are universal in range and effect.
Everything in the universe is, and from the beginning has been, a materialization of the divine Original Whim working out irrevocably without default, deflection or defeat. It is the unfolding upon the screen of consciusness of the film of creation, sequence after sequence according to the pattern that issued from the Original Whim. However, when God as God-Man plays the role of Audience he can alter or erase at his avataric whim any thing or happening which was destined from the Original Whim. But the very arising of the avataric whim was inherent in the Original Whim.
The Sufis distinguish between Qaza or destined occurrences, and Qadar or happenings which are impulsive or 'accidental'. The Avatar's or Qutub's actions are impulsive and arise from their infinite compassion; and the functioning of this whim relieves and gives beauty and charm to what would otherwise be a rigid determinism.
The Qutub's actions bring about modifications in the previously determined divine plan, but they are limited in extent. But the Avatar's interventions bring about modifications on a universal scale. For instance, supposing that it was divinely ordained for a war to occur in 1950. It must take place at the appointed time, and the train of events which follows will punctually meet the present time-table. However, if the Avatar is in the world at the time He might, in his exercise of Qadar, ward off the catastrophe by some particular action on the gross plane. And so in the relentless working out of the laws of Nature there can enter the inexplicable divine caprice, spelling out peace instead of war in the diary of man.
Kabir has said:
O Kabir! The lines of fate are never effaced by Rama; He is all-powerful and can undo destiny, but He never does so for He has given full thought to what he has planned.
The Avatar does not as a rule interfere with the working out of human destinies. He will do so only in times of grave necessity - when he deems it absolutely necessary from his all-encompassing point of view. For a single alteration in the planned and imprinted pattern in which each line and dot is interdependent, means a shaking up and a re-linking of an unending chain of possibilities and events. The least divergence from the pre-drawn line of Fate not only requires infinite adjustments within the immediate orbit of the individual concerned, but involves in its interminable repercussions all those connected by the bond of past sanskaras.
The avataric whim is also part of the divine Destiny. Qaza provides for the absolute necessity of the Avatar's 'chance' intervention, and the very unpredictability of this intervention is predicted in Qaza - for his infinite compassion, because of which His intervention occurs, may not be denied.
In the working out of the Avataric whim there is not the least element of chance. The aim of the whim's action is perfect and its result is precise.
An ordinary person's whim, when expressed, may have consdquences quite outside itself, as illustrated by the following story. A drunken man was passing by a wood-apple tree and had a whim to taste one of its fruits. Asa rule a drunkard has a distaste for sour or tart things because they nullify the effects of drink, so this man's wanting a wood-apple was purely a whim, independent of thought or real desire. He picked up a stone and threw it at the tree. The stone missed any of the apples, killed a bird, scared away many others and fell on the head of a traveller resting beneath the tree. Thus the haphazard expression of the drunkard's whim not only failed to accomplish the whim but brought about results completely outside of it. The whim was merely an unrelated fancy, and the action stemming from it had no connection with its object.
- Meher Baba
Monday, August 17, 2009
go courageously into some nook
from Chapt IX...
39. Either all things proceed from one intelligent source and come together as in one body, and the part ought not to find fault with what is done for the benefit of the whole; or there are only atoms, and nothing else but mixture and dispersion. Why then are you disturbed? Say to the ruling faculty, "Are you dead, corrupted, playing the hypocrite? Are you a mere beast, chewing a cud?"
40. Either the gods have no power or they have power. If they have no power, why do you pray to them? But if they have power, why do you not pray for deliverance from the fear or the desire or the pain, which a thing causes, rather than pray that any of these things should or should not happen? For certainly if they can help at all, they can help to this end. But perhaps you will say that the gods have placed all that in my own power. Well, then, is it not better to use what is in your power like a free man than to desire in a slavish and abject way what is not in your power? And who has told you that the gods do not aid us even in the things which are in our power? Begin then to pray for such things, and you will see. One man prays to be able to lie with a certain woman; rather should he pray to be freed of desire for here. Another prays to be rid of his enemy; he should pray against wanting to be rid of him. Instead of praying that you may not lose your little one, pray for release from fear. Turn your prayers this way, and see what comes.
X.
1. Will you then, my soul, never be good and simple, all one and naked, clearer to sight than the body which encompasses you? Will you never enjoy an affectionate and contented disposition? Will you never be full and without a want of any kind, longing for nothing more, either animate or inanimate, for the enjoyment of pleasures? Nor yet desiring time wherein you shall have longer enjoyment, or place, or pleasant climate, or society of men with whom you may live in harmony? But will you be satisfied with your present condition, and pleased with all about you, and will you convince yourself that you have everything and that it comes from the gods, that everything is well for you, and will be well whatever shall please them, and whatever they shall give you for the perfect living being, the good and just and beautiful, which generates and holds together all things, and contains and embraces all things which are dissolved for the production of other like things? Will you never be such that you shall so dwell in community with gods and men as neither to find fault with them at all, nor to be condemned by them?
2. Observe what your nature requires, so far as you are governed by nature only: then do it and accept it, if your nature shall not be made worse for it. And next you must observe what your nature requires as far as you are a living being, and this you may do, unless it involves injury to your nature as a rational being. But the rational being is consequently also a social being. Follow these rules then, and trouble yourself about nothing else.
3. Everything which happens either happens in such a way that you are formed by nature to bear it or not to bear it. If what happens to you is within your strength to bear, bear it without complaining; if it is beyond your strength, do not complain, for it will perish after it has destroyed you. Remember, however, that you are formed by nature to bear everything which your own opinion can make endurable and tolerable, by thinking that it is either your interest or your duty to do so.
4. Whether the universe is a concourse of atoms or nature´s law, let this be first established, that I am a part of the whole which is governed by nature; next, I am intimately related to the parts which are of the same kind with myself. For remembering this, inasmuch as I am a part, I shall be discontented with none of the things which are assigned to me out of the whole; for nothing is injurious to the part, if it is for the advantage of the whole. For the whole contains nothing which is not for its own good; and all natures indeed have this common principle, but the nature of the universe has this principle besides, that it cannot be compelled even by any external cause to generate anything harmful to itself. By remembering then that I am a part of such a whole, I shall be content with everything that happens. And inasmuch as I am in a manner intimately related to the parts which are the same kind with myself, I shall turn all my efforts to the common interest, and avert them from the contrary. Now if these things are done so, life must flow on happily, just as you may observe that the life of a citizen is happy if he continues a course of action which is advantageous to his fellow citizens, and is content with whatever the state may assign to him.
7. The parts of the whole which are comprehended in the universe must of necessity perish, that is, they must undergo change. But if this is both an evil and a necessity to the parts, the whole could not escape deterioration, seeing the parts are subject to change and prone to perish in various ways. Did nature herself design to do evil to the things which are parts of herself, and to make them subject to evil and of necesity fall into evil, or have such things happened without her knowing it? Bot these suppositions are indeed incredible. But if a man should even drop the term "nature" as an efficient power, and should speak of these changes as natural, even then it would be ridiculous to affirm at the same time that the parts of the whole are naturally subject to change, and at the same time to be surprised or vexed as if something were happening contrary to nature, particularly such as the dissolution of things into the original elements. For there is either a dispersion of the elements out of which everything has been compounded, or a change from the solid to the earthy and from the spiritual to the aerial, so that these parts are taken back into the universal reason, whether this at certain periods is consumed by fire or renewed by eternal changes. And do not imagine that the solid and the spiritual part belong to you from the time of your begetting. For it received its increase only yesterday and the day before, so to speak, from the food you eat and the air you breathe. This then that has received changes from without is not that which your mother brought forth. But even admitting that you are intimately bound up with that, by your individuality, this does not affect the argument.
8. When you have assumed these attributes - good, modest, true, rational, equable, magnanimous - take care that you do not change them; and if you should lose them, quickly return to them. And remember that the term "rational" was intended to signify a discriminating attention to every separate thing and freedom from negligence; and that equanimity is the voluntary acceptance of the things which are assigned to you by the common nature; and that magnanimity is the elevation of the intelligent part above the pleasurable or painful sensations of the flesh, and above fame, and death, and all such trilas. If then you keep true to these attributes, wihtout desiring that others should recognize that you have them, you will be another person and will enter on another life. For to continue to be such as you had hitherto been, and to be torn in pieces and defiled in such a life, is the character of a very stupid man, one overfond of his life, and like those half-devoured fighters with wild beasts, who though covered with wounds and gore, still entreat to be kept to the following day, to be flung once more to the same claws and bites. Therefore, fix yourself firmly in the possession of these few attributes, and if you are able to stand fast, stand fast as if you were transported to the Happy Isles. But if you find yourself falling, and cannot maintain your hold, go courageously into some nook where you can still hold on, or even depart at once from life, not in passion, but with simplicity and freedom and modesty, after doing this one thing, at least, bravely - to leave it thus. In order, however, to aid the remembrance of these attributes, it will greatly help you, if you remember the gods, and that they do not wish to be flattered, but wish all reasonable beings to be made like themselves, and be as the fig tree doing the work of a fig tree, the dog a dog´s, and a man a man´s work.
11. Acquire the contemplative way of seeing how all things change into one another, and constantly attend to it, and exercise yourself about this part of philosophy. Nothing is so apt to produce magnanimity. Such a man has put off the body, and as he sees that at any moment he must go away from among men and leave everything here, he gives himself entirely up to just actions, and in everything else that happens he resigns himself to the universal nature. But as to what any man shall say or think about him or do against him, he never even thinks of it, being himself contented with these two things, with acting justly in what he now does, and being satisfied with what is now assigned to him; and he lays aside all distracting and busy pursuits, and desires nothing else than to run the straight course and by so doing follow God.
...
32. Let it not be in any man´s power to say truly of you that you are not simple and good; let it be a lie if anyone shall think anything of this kind about you; this is wholly in your power. For who shall hinder you from being good and simple? You have only to decide to live no longer, if you cannot be such a man. For in that case, it does not stand with reason that you should live.
-Marcus Aurelius
39. Either all things proceed from one intelligent source and come together as in one body, and the part ought not to find fault with what is done for the benefit of the whole; or there are only atoms, and nothing else but mixture and dispersion. Why then are you disturbed? Say to the ruling faculty, "Are you dead, corrupted, playing the hypocrite? Are you a mere beast, chewing a cud?"
40. Either the gods have no power or they have power. If they have no power, why do you pray to them? But if they have power, why do you not pray for deliverance from the fear or the desire or the pain, which a thing causes, rather than pray that any of these things should or should not happen? For certainly if they can help at all, they can help to this end. But perhaps you will say that the gods have placed all that in my own power. Well, then, is it not better to use what is in your power like a free man than to desire in a slavish and abject way what is not in your power? And who has told you that the gods do not aid us even in the things which are in our power? Begin then to pray for such things, and you will see. One man prays to be able to lie with a certain woman; rather should he pray to be freed of desire for here. Another prays to be rid of his enemy; he should pray against wanting to be rid of him. Instead of praying that you may not lose your little one, pray for release from fear. Turn your prayers this way, and see what comes.
X.
1. Will you then, my soul, never be good and simple, all one and naked, clearer to sight than the body which encompasses you? Will you never enjoy an affectionate and contented disposition? Will you never be full and without a want of any kind, longing for nothing more, either animate or inanimate, for the enjoyment of pleasures? Nor yet desiring time wherein you shall have longer enjoyment, or place, or pleasant climate, or society of men with whom you may live in harmony? But will you be satisfied with your present condition, and pleased with all about you, and will you convince yourself that you have everything and that it comes from the gods, that everything is well for you, and will be well whatever shall please them, and whatever they shall give you for the perfect living being, the good and just and beautiful, which generates and holds together all things, and contains and embraces all things which are dissolved for the production of other like things? Will you never be such that you shall so dwell in community with gods and men as neither to find fault with them at all, nor to be condemned by them?
2. Observe what your nature requires, so far as you are governed by nature only: then do it and accept it, if your nature shall not be made worse for it. And next you must observe what your nature requires as far as you are a living being, and this you may do, unless it involves injury to your nature as a rational being. But the rational being is consequently also a social being. Follow these rules then, and trouble yourself about nothing else.
3. Everything which happens either happens in such a way that you are formed by nature to bear it or not to bear it. If what happens to you is within your strength to bear, bear it without complaining; if it is beyond your strength, do not complain, for it will perish after it has destroyed you. Remember, however, that you are formed by nature to bear everything which your own opinion can make endurable and tolerable, by thinking that it is either your interest or your duty to do so.
4. Whether the universe is a concourse of atoms or nature´s law, let this be first established, that I am a part of the whole which is governed by nature; next, I am intimately related to the parts which are of the same kind with myself. For remembering this, inasmuch as I am a part, I shall be discontented with none of the things which are assigned to me out of the whole; for nothing is injurious to the part, if it is for the advantage of the whole. For the whole contains nothing which is not for its own good; and all natures indeed have this common principle, but the nature of the universe has this principle besides, that it cannot be compelled even by any external cause to generate anything harmful to itself. By remembering then that I am a part of such a whole, I shall be content with everything that happens. And inasmuch as I am in a manner intimately related to the parts which are the same kind with myself, I shall turn all my efforts to the common interest, and avert them from the contrary. Now if these things are done so, life must flow on happily, just as you may observe that the life of a citizen is happy if he continues a course of action which is advantageous to his fellow citizens, and is content with whatever the state may assign to him.
7. The parts of the whole which are comprehended in the universe must of necessity perish, that is, they must undergo change. But if this is both an evil and a necessity to the parts, the whole could not escape deterioration, seeing the parts are subject to change and prone to perish in various ways. Did nature herself design to do evil to the things which are parts of herself, and to make them subject to evil and of necesity fall into evil, or have such things happened without her knowing it? Bot these suppositions are indeed incredible. But if a man should even drop the term "nature" as an efficient power, and should speak of these changes as natural, even then it would be ridiculous to affirm at the same time that the parts of the whole are naturally subject to change, and at the same time to be surprised or vexed as if something were happening contrary to nature, particularly such as the dissolution of things into the original elements. For there is either a dispersion of the elements out of which everything has been compounded, or a change from the solid to the earthy and from the spiritual to the aerial, so that these parts are taken back into the universal reason, whether this at certain periods is consumed by fire or renewed by eternal changes. And do not imagine that the solid and the spiritual part belong to you from the time of your begetting. For it received its increase only yesterday and the day before, so to speak, from the food you eat and the air you breathe. This then that has received changes from without is not that which your mother brought forth. But even admitting that you are intimately bound up with that, by your individuality, this does not affect the argument.
8. When you have assumed these attributes - good, modest, true, rational, equable, magnanimous - take care that you do not change them; and if you should lose them, quickly return to them. And remember that the term "rational" was intended to signify a discriminating attention to every separate thing and freedom from negligence; and that equanimity is the voluntary acceptance of the things which are assigned to you by the common nature; and that magnanimity is the elevation of the intelligent part above the pleasurable or painful sensations of the flesh, and above fame, and death, and all such trilas. If then you keep true to these attributes, wihtout desiring that others should recognize that you have them, you will be another person and will enter on another life. For to continue to be such as you had hitherto been, and to be torn in pieces and defiled in such a life, is the character of a very stupid man, one overfond of his life, and like those half-devoured fighters with wild beasts, who though covered with wounds and gore, still entreat to be kept to the following day, to be flung once more to the same claws and bites. Therefore, fix yourself firmly in the possession of these few attributes, and if you are able to stand fast, stand fast as if you were transported to the Happy Isles. But if you find yourself falling, and cannot maintain your hold, go courageously into some nook where you can still hold on, or even depart at once from life, not in passion, but with simplicity and freedom and modesty, after doing this one thing, at least, bravely - to leave it thus. In order, however, to aid the remembrance of these attributes, it will greatly help you, if you remember the gods, and that they do not wish to be flattered, but wish all reasonable beings to be made like themselves, and be as the fig tree doing the work of a fig tree, the dog a dog´s, and a man a man´s work.
11. Acquire the contemplative way of seeing how all things change into one another, and constantly attend to it, and exercise yourself about this part of philosophy. Nothing is so apt to produce magnanimity. Such a man has put off the body, and as he sees that at any moment he must go away from among men and leave everything here, he gives himself entirely up to just actions, and in everything else that happens he resigns himself to the universal nature. But as to what any man shall say or think about him or do against him, he never even thinks of it, being himself contented with these two things, with acting justly in what he now does, and being satisfied with what is now assigned to him; and he lays aside all distracting and busy pursuits, and desires nothing else than to run the straight course and by so doing follow God.
...
32. Let it not be in any man´s power to say truly of you that you are not simple and good; let it be a lie if anyone shall think anything of this kind about you; this is wholly in your power. For who shall hinder you from being good and simple? You have only to decide to live no longer, if you cannot be such a man. For in that case, it does not stand with reason that you should live.
-Marcus Aurelius
Attack on Leviathan VIII: The Shape of Things and Men
Regarding H.G. Wells and the War of the Worlds...
"If this is neither a dream book nor a Sybylline history, then it is a theory of world revolution. Plainly the thesis is that history must now continue to be a string of accidents with an increasingly disastrous trend, until a comprehensive faith in the modernized World-State, socialistic, cosmopolitan, and creative, takes hold of the human imagination. When the existing governments and ruling theories of life, the decaying religions and the decaying political forms of today, have sufficiently lost prestige through failure and catastrophe, then and only then will worldwide reconstruction be possible. And it must needs be the work, first of all, of an aggressive order of religiously devoted men and women who will try out and establish and impose a new pattern of living upon the race."
Such statements indicate the danger of growing old without ever growing up.
For, while announcing his devotion to science, Mr. Wells does not care to argue that a horoscope itself can be scientific, nor does he call his work science. He invokes, instead, an old magic and an old art. He combines fiction and history, mixing them so that the innocent reader will hardly know where history leaves off and fiction begins. What he wants to do is to borrow the great prestige of history, whose view is ever retrospective, for his fiction, the social purpose of which looks toward the future.
Fiction persuades where logic fails, since the human mind, though modern enough in some ways, has its old contrary habit of accepting the truth of art and rejecting the truths of science. This is an odd role in which to find the advocate of a scientifically controlled world-order.
I suppose that no other period in human history can rival the Renaissance for the sharpening of historical self-consciousness. No other time has been so determined to compile and interpret historical facts, and yet this has happened during a time when science has seemed to make discoveries that destroy the virtue of historical study.
The poor man (H.G. Wells) cannot conceive of a fact as simply being in the living harmony of things and men. For him it is not a fact until it has been "retrospected"; that is, until it has been preserved in the formaldehyde pickle of a card index and has thus been made into a specimen.
In the Wellsian future no moment will have a meaning until it has been seized, recorded, tabulated.
For Mr. Wells, Progress is the dogmatic certainty that is sufficient to motivate all human actions, and Technology is the instrument by which Progress is to be made effective. Progress is his God, and Technology is his Messiah. With respect to these deities he is pure fundamentalist, as yet untouched by the new skepticism and agnosticism that have drawn many younger intellects away from science.
The novelty of Mr. Well's ideas is therefore only superficial. His terminology is current, that is all.
But his greatest mistake is in confusing must-be with ought-to-be.
Van Wyck Brooks held it possible to argue that the "intellectualist" or Wellsian view is too glib and easy. Let Wells only be compared with the artists, who, since they look at all human motives, give a more complete interpretation and the shallowness of his views is readily evident. Artists are likely "to throw into relief the deep, obscure conviction of the 'plain man' - commonly, the good man - that to make life conform with ideas is in some way to deprive the world of just those elements which create character and to strike at an ideal forged through immemorial suffering and effort.
Why should the human species survive, if it cannot survive nobly?
In countries where they have lost the primal consciousness of unity with the earth-spirit they either have no mythology and cosmogony and thought is materialistic, or else theye go to the Greek or Jew for spiritual culture. So, distant lands are made sacred, but not the air they breathe, not the earth under foot. A culture so created rarely has deep roots, for it is derivative.
Ideals for which men are not ready to die soon perish...
Brehan - "I do not advocate philosophical indifference for I believe we can be fighters in the spirit and use immortal powers...I believe spiritual ideals, except for those who can maintain them through all conflict, are lost if we defend them by material means. There are other ways by which right can find its appropriate might"
...But how may spiritual powers, unaided by material weapons, ever win victories, they ask.
Then Brehan reveals that he is one of a small company of men scattered through the world, who by long self-discipline have learned the ancient wisdom of how "feeling and imagination radiate their influence to the boundaries of the world soul as stars shed their light through space." With the Christs and Buddhas the deed is done when the thought is born - and by "single gentleness" they do more than armies. To the architect's objections that men do not dwell in imaginary homes, Brehan answers that the physical or outer powers are enriched and not impoverished by the exercise of spiritual force.
POET - All that is substance in us aspires to the ancestral beauty
MEN OF THE WORLD STATE - All that is power in us desires to become invincible men of the World State
We can imagine natures so balanced that they may be said to be more complete symbols of the Self-existent or Solitary of the Heavens in whom all qualities inhere...
If the individual neglects "spiritual powers" he will never tread the "true path" with consistent success. All men must guard against a partial exercise of their humanity...
-Donald Davidson
"If this is neither a dream book nor a Sybylline history, then it is a theory of world revolution. Plainly the thesis is that history must now continue to be a string of accidents with an increasingly disastrous trend, until a comprehensive faith in the modernized World-State, socialistic, cosmopolitan, and creative, takes hold of the human imagination. When the existing governments and ruling theories of life, the decaying religions and the decaying political forms of today, have sufficiently lost prestige through failure and catastrophe, then and only then will worldwide reconstruction be possible. And it must needs be the work, first of all, of an aggressive order of religiously devoted men and women who will try out and establish and impose a new pattern of living upon the race."
Such statements indicate the danger of growing old without ever growing up.
For, while announcing his devotion to science, Mr. Wells does not care to argue that a horoscope itself can be scientific, nor does he call his work science. He invokes, instead, an old magic and an old art. He combines fiction and history, mixing them so that the innocent reader will hardly know where history leaves off and fiction begins. What he wants to do is to borrow the great prestige of history, whose view is ever retrospective, for his fiction, the social purpose of which looks toward the future.
Fiction persuades where logic fails, since the human mind, though modern enough in some ways, has its old contrary habit of accepting the truth of art and rejecting the truths of science. This is an odd role in which to find the advocate of a scientifically controlled world-order.
I suppose that no other period in human history can rival the Renaissance for the sharpening of historical self-consciousness. No other time has been so determined to compile and interpret historical facts, and yet this has happened during a time when science has seemed to make discoveries that destroy the virtue of historical study.
The poor man (H.G. Wells) cannot conceive of a fact as simply being in the living harmony of things and men. For him it is not a fact until it has been "retrospected"; that is, until it has been preserved in the formaldehyde pickle of a card index and has thus been made into a specimen.
In the Wellsian future no moment will have a meaning until it has been seized, recorded, tabulated.
For Mr. Wells, Progress is the dogmatic certainty that is sufficient to motivate all human actions, and Technology is the instrument by which Progress is to be made effective. Progress is his God, and Technology is his Messiah. With respect to these deities he is pure fundamentalist, as yet untouched by the new skepticism and agnosticism that have drawn many younger intellects away from science.
The novelty of Mr. Well's ideas is therefore only superficial. His terminology is current, that is all.
But his greatest mistake is in confusing must-be with ought-to-be.
Van Wyck Brooks held it possible to argue that the "intellectualist" or Wellsian view is too glib and easy. Let Wells only be compared with the artists, who, since they look at all human motives, give a more complete interpretation and the shallowness of his views is readily evident. Artists are likely "to throw into relief the deep, obscure conviction of the 'plain man' - commonly, the good man - that to make life conform with ideas is in some way to deprive the world of just those elements which create character and to strike at an ideal forged through immemorial suffering and effort.
Why should the human species survive, if it cannot survive nobly?
In countries where they have lost the primal consciousness of unity with the earth-spirit they either have no mythology and cosmogony and thought is materialistic, or else theye go to the Greek or Jew for spiritual culture. So, distant lands are made sacred, but not the air they breathe, not the earth under foot. A culture so created rarely has deep roots, for it is derivative.
Ideals for which men are not ready to die soon perish...
Brehan - "I do not advocate philosophical indifference for I believe we can be fighters in the spirit and use immortal powers...I believe spiritual ideals, except for those who can maintain them through all conflict, are lost if we defend them by material means. There are other ways by which right can find its appropriate might"
...But how may spiritual powers, unaided by material weapons, ever win victories, they ask.
Then Brehan reveals that he is one of a small company of men scattered through the world, who by long self-discipline have learned the ancient wisdom of how "feeling and imagination radiate their influence to the boundaries of the world soul as stars shed their light through space." With the Christs and Buddhas the deed is done when the thought is born - and by "single gentleness" they do more than armies. To the architect's objections that men do not dwell in imaginary homes, Brehan answers that the physical or outer powers are enriched and not impoverished by the exercise of spiritual force.
POET - All that is substance in us aspires to the ancestral beauty
MEN OF THE WORLD STATE - All that is power in us desires to become invincible men of the World State
We can imagine natures so balanced that they may be said to be more complete symbols of the Self-existent or Solitary of the Heavens in whom all qualities inhere...
If the individual neglects "spiritual powers" he will never tread the "true path" with consistent success. All men must guard against a partial exercise of their humanity...
-Donald Davidson
Attack on Leviathan VII: the Southern Poet and his Tradition
The South had a heroic past; it was rich with legend and fierce with feeling; there was no particular reason why Southerners then beginning to write should not make the fullest possible use of the material at hand. Out of the Southern tradition there ought to grow an exciting, possibly a really great Southern poetry which would be a considerable ornament to American letters...
It is time to state Miss Monroe's proposition again, though in slightly different terms. After all, it is a fair question to ask why Southern poets, as artists with a very special local heritage, cannot write like Southerners, rather than like "advanced" Parisians or Greenwich villagers; and why they cannot, among other things, write about the indubitably Southern themes, even the Southern legends, places, heroes, though that alone, of course, will not make them Southern poets, or in fact, poets of any sort.
Yet this, it seems, is precisely what many of them cannot do, or cannot without falling into grievous error. A young poet "emerging" in the South today is in danger of following one of two courses, both of which are bad:
1) In one case he will utterly divorce himself fromo all sense of locality and at once begin to write clever but trifling imitations of decadent poetasters in New York, London, and Paris.
2) But if he is safely illiterate and so manages to escape the infection of our times, he may then write "Southern" poetry containing very proper local references: and this is sure to be as empty as the other was clever.
One tendency gives us modernists of every type - people who begin by grandly renouncing their birthright and by contributing to worldly messiah magazines...The other tendency begets local laureates: cheerful infants who commit monstrosities such as state songs on the model of Katherine Lee Bates' "America the Beautiful."
It almost amounts to this: that a poet cannot be "Southern" without behaving like a fool; and if he tries not to be a fool, he will not be recognizably "Southern."
This extends to modern writers of fiction - "Yankee" novels extol the virtues of the downtrodden black man and the vices of the depraved white men in the South. I should be the last to decry the excellence that the better of these writers display. but it is evident that the attitudes underlying their work are too often borrowed from the progressive North and do not belong to the conservative South.
Yet they should not be blamed too harshly. In America - or at least in the progressive America which has been most vocal in recent years - every man who starts out to be an artist is subjected to a subtle but powerful pressure to emancipate himself from his native surroundings...he must get out and grab what he can from the set of rapidly shifting formulae spawned from the disorder of a delocalized, vaguely cosmopolitan society, masquerading rather noisily as a civilization.
What does this society, loudly proclaiming its devotion to culture and the good life, have to teach the artist? To judge from the evidence, it teaches contempt, suspicion, disillusionment; it has no positive standards to offer, other than a maudlin apostrophe to Beauty, and no loyalties to anything nearer at hand than a somewhat tenuous world-soul...as exemplified here:
"It is nobler to doubt than to believe, for to doubt is often to take sides with fact against oneself" - Everett Dean Martin
Whatever it may mean for the scientist, this pronouncement offers a lamentable prospect for the poet, who must believe or perish. It is no wonder that our artists believe nothing; or by a natural reaction, they turn in and believe too much, trying vainly to rebuild a personal mythology of some kind as a substitute for the tradition that the worshippers of doubt have destroyed.
Having once got hold of an idea, even though it be not quite a perfect idea, the South does not hasten to discard it, but keeps holding on. The South has never been able to understand how the North, in its astonishing quest for perfection, can junk an entire system of ideas almost overnight, and start on another one which is no better than the first.
The South ought to have an artistic tradition to fit its social and historical background. One ought to be able to say of it, as AE said of Ireland, that it is a good field for the arts, especially for poetry, simply because, in contrast to progressive America, it has long been defeated and poor and behind the times; or, furthermore, because it offers its people belief rather than doubt, conviction rather than skepticism, loyalty rather than distrust. These ought to be something virile and positive in its art, as an art linked by devotion to a concrete place rather than animated by a loose enthusiasm for a "national" culture which has no organic unity behind it.
I should hardly join with those determined Rebels who defend Southern literature at any cost against the aspersions of Yankee critics.
Poe and Lanier vs Emerson and Whitman
Yet on the whole one might well say with John Crowe Ransom that the arts of the South in times past took another direction than poetry. They were the eighteenth-century arts of dress, conversation, manners: or, I might add, of architecture, handicraft, oratory, anecdote...There is no reason to think that these arts did not express a Southern tradition rather intimately and without any fumbling or debate. Indeed, the problem of the relation of the Southern artist to his tradition did not then arise in its modern form.
Now, however, it has arisen, and the issues it raises are acute. If the South is destined, as so many people are saying, to be "articulate" on a scale never before realized, it would be a strange trick of fate for writers to find themselves, at such a moment, inhibited from a free expression of the Southern Tradition, unable to speak for the South as a living historic entity which is separate from America though bound to it, and still abiding to a marked degree by the tenets of a civilization so thoroughly un-American (in the modern sense) that it is in one breath romantically admired and in the next breath harshly deplored by the much interested North.
the so-called Southern liberal group, who have of late grown much in power, sided by Northern philanthropy and by agitation in Northern journals, have bent every energy to persuade the South to make over its civilization on the progressive Northern plan, largely through the combined agencies of a sweeping industrialization and a large scale "liberalized" scheme of public education. The effect of this program has undoubtedly been to dislocate many Southern writers from a proper relation to their own people and their own tradition.
The progressive leaders, in short, are asking the Southern writer to pay a terrible price for his modernity...Theirs will be the dilemma of the modern artist who in one act must both deny himself and express himself.
There is no remedy, short of the rise to power of a body of Southern writers, economists, politicians, and clergy who will fight to a finish the new order of carpetbaggers and scalawags - or else assimilate them. But even this remedy has much peril for the arts, which do not profit much by contentiousness. It is certain, however, that the well-wishers for the South cannot with one gesture "uplift" the South into the blessings of modern civilization, and with another demand of Southern writers that they exhibit in their works the virtues of a way of life that they have just been urged to repudiate. Yet if there is hope - and I think that there is much hope, in view of the extraordinary confusion into which industrial civilization has got itself - the poets are likely to go further than other writers toward realizing the ideal of a free expression of the Southern character in literature. For the poets are unpopular, the poets are never promoted, they escape the commercial taint that hangs over novelists and playwrights. Let them, then, write what they will, depending on their own integrity for a guide, and if they live like the Miller of Dee, envying nobody and with nobody envying them, they need not fear that their integrity will be impugned or spoiled.
- Donald Davidson
It is time to state Miss Monroe's proposition again, though in slightly different terms. After all, it is a fair question to ask why Southern poets, as artists with a very special local heritage, cannot write like Southerners, rather than like "advanced" Parisians or Greenwich villagers; and why they cannot, among other things, write about the indubitably Southern themes, even the Southern legends, places, heroes, though that alone, of course, will not make them Southern poets, or in fact, poets of any sort.
Yet this, it seems, is precisely what many of them cannot do, or cannot without falling into grievous error. A young poet "emerging" in the South today is in danger of following one of two courses, both of which are bad:
1) In one case he will utterly divorce himself fromo all sense of locality and at once begin to write clever but trifling imitations of decadent poetasters in New York, London, and Paris.
2) But if he is safely illiterate and so manages to escape the infection of our times, he may then write "Southern" poetry containing very proper local references: and this is sure to be as empty as the other was clever.
One tendency gives us modernists of every type - people who begin by grandly renouncing their birthright and by contributing to worldly messiah magazines...The other tendency begets local laureates: cheerful infants who commit monstrosities such as state songs on the model of Katherine Lee Bates' "America the Beautiful."
It almost amounts to this: that a poet cannot be "Southern" without behaving like a fool; and if he tries not to be a fool, he will not be recognizably "Southern."
This extends to modern writers of fiction - "Yankee" novels extol the virtues of the downtrodden black man and the vices of the depraved white men in the South. I should be the last to decry the excellence that the better of these writers display. but it is evident that the attitudes underlying their work are too often borrowed from the progressive North and do not belong to the conservative South.
Yet they should not be blamed too harshly. In America - or at least in the progressive America which has been most vocal in recent years - every man who starts out to be an artist is subjected to a subtle but powerful pressure to emancipate himself from his native surroundings...he must get out and grab what he can from the set of rapidly shifting formulae spawned from the disorder of a delocalized, vaguely cosmopolitan society, masquerading rather noisily as a civilization.
What does this society, loudly proclaiming its devotion to culture and the good life, have to teach the artist? To judge from the evidence, it teaches contempt, suspicion, disillusionment; it has no positive standards to offer, other than a maudlin apostrophe to Beauty, and no loyalties to anything nearer at hand than a somewhat tenuous world-soul...as exemplified here:
"It is nobler to doubt than to believe, for to doubt is often to take sides with fact against oneself" - Everett Dean Martin
Whatever it may mean for the scientist, this pronouncement offers a lamentable prospect for the poet, who must believe or perish. It is no wonder that our artists believe nothing; or by a natural reaction, they turn in and believe too much, trying vainly to rebuild a personal mythology of some kind as a substitute for the tradition that the worshippers of doubt have destroyed.
Having once got hold of an idea, even though it be not quite a perfect idea, the South does not hasten to discard it, but keeps holding on. The South has never been able to understand how the North, in its astonishing quest for perfection, can junk an entire system of ideas almost overnight, and start on another one which is no better than the first.
The South ought to have an artistic tradition to fit its social and historical background. One ought to be able to say of it, as AE said of Ireland, that it is a good field for the arts, especially for poetry, simply because, in contrast to progressive America, it has long been defeated and poor and behind the times; or, furthermore, because it offers its people belief rather than doubt, conviction rather than skepticism, loyalty rather than distrust. These ought to be something virile and positive in its art, as an art linked by devotion to a concrete place rather than animated by a loose enthusiasm for a "national" culture which has no organic unity behind it.
I should hardly join with those determined Rebels who defend Southern literature at any cost against the aspersions of Yankee critics.
Poe and Lanier vs Emerson and Whitman
Yet on the whole one might well say with John Crowe Ransom that the arts of the South in times past took another direction than poetry. They were the eighteenth-century arts of dress, conversation, manners: or, I might add, of architecture, handicraft, oratory, anecdote...There is no reason to think that these arts did not express a Southern tradition rather intimately and without any fumbling or debate. Indeed, the problem of the relation of the Southern artist to his tradition did not then arise in its modern form.
Now, however, it has arisen, and the issues it raises are acute. If the South is destined, as so many people are saying, to be "articulate" on a scale never before realized, it would be a strange trick of fate for writers to find themselves, at such a moment, inhibited from a free expression of the Southern Tradition, unable to speak for the South as a living historic entity which is separate from America though bound to it, and still abiding to a marked degree by the tenets of a civilization so thoroughly un-American (in the modern sense) that it is in one breath romantically admired and in the next breath harshly deplored by the much interested North.
the so-called Southern liberal group, who have of late grown much in power, sided by Northern philanthropy and by agitation in Northern journals, have bent every energy to persuade the South to make over its civilization on the progressive Northern plan, largely through the combined agencies of a sweeping industrialization and a large scale "liberalized" scheme of public education. The effect of this program has undoubtedly been to dislocate many Southern writers from a proper relation to their own people and their own tradition.
The progressive leaders, in short, are asking the Southern writer to pay a terrible price for his modernity...Theirs will be the dilemma of the modern artist who in one act must both deny himself and express himself.
There is no remedy, short of the rise to power of a body of Southern writers, economists, politicians, and clergy who will fight to a finish the new order of carpetbaggers and scalawags - or else assimilate them. But even this remedy has much peril for the arts, which do not profit much by contentiousness. It is certain, however, that the well-wishers for the South cannot with one gesture "uplift" the South into the blessings of modern civilization, and with another demand of Southern writers that they exhibit in their works the virtues of a way of life that they have just been urged to repudiate. Yet if there is hope - and I think that there is much hope, in view of the extraordinary confusion into which industrial civilization has got itself - the poets are likely to go further than other writers toward realizing the ideal of a free expression of the Southern character in literature. For the poets are unpopular, the poets are never promoted, they escape the commercial taint that hangs over novelists and playwrights. Let them, then, write what they will, depending on their own integrity for a guide, and if they live like the Miller of Dee, envying nobody and with nobody envying them, they need not fear that their integrity will be impugned or spoiled.
- Donald Davidson
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
The Southern Tradition at Bay 3: Metaphysical Dream Foundation
If asked whether the South has any genuine claim to be considered aristocratic, I would say yes, and this is it. The South has kept something of the attitude of the soldier: aware of the battle, he has only contempt for the tender, querulous, agitated creature of modern artifice, sighing for the comforts he is "entitled to," and protesting that the world cannot really be like this. I am sure that Lee, so reserved in expression, so wise in thought, had this in mind when he called self-denial the greatest lesson to be learned. If part of our happiness comes through transformation of the outward world, another part comes through the pruning of desire, and we return to the original proposition that civilization is a matter of inner conditioning and adaptation.
As piety respects the mystery of nature, so ethics, the restraining sentiment which we carry into the world of our fellow beings, respects the reality of personality. It is well if our code of ethics has a religious origin, so that its power to impress derives from some myth or some noble parable. Its purpose, in any case, is to lead everyone to a relatively selfless point of view, and to make him realize the plurality of personalities in the world. Above all, it must insist upon the rightness of right and keep in abeyance the crude standard of what will pay.
The South has maintained an astonishing resistance to the insidious doctrine of relativism and empiricism.
Personality can develop only in a humane environment, and nowhere in America has this distillation of life flourished as in the South. Its love of heroes, its affection for eccentric leaders, its interest in personal anecdote, in the colorful and the dramatic, discounted elsewher as charming weaknesses, are signs that it reveres the spiritual part of man. It has instinctively disliked, though it has by now partially succumbed to, the dehumanizing influence of governments and factories. Individualism and personality are making a stand - perhaps a Custer's last stand in the South.
Civilization is measured by its power to create and enforce distinctions. Consequently there must be some source of discrimination, from which we bring ideas of order to bear on a fortuitous world. Knowledge and virtue constitute this source, and these two things, it must be said to the vexation of the sentimental optimists, are in their nature aristocracies. Participation in them is open to all: this much of the doctrine; but the participation will never occur in equal manner or degree, so that however we allow men to start in the world, we may be sure that as long as standards of quality exist, there will be a sorting out. Indeed, we are entitled to say categorically that unless such standards are operative, civilization does not exist, or that it has fallen into decay. That no man was ever born free and no two men have ever been equal, is a more sensible saying than its contrary. To the extent that the South has preserved social structure and avoided the creation of masses, it has maintained the only kind of world in which values can long survive.
A society in the true sense must have exclusive minorities of the wise and good who will bear responsibility and enjoy prestige. Otherwise, it will be leaderless, or its leadership will rest on forces of darkness; for there is little difference between the tribal chieftain who wins his place by brute force and the demagogue of the mass state who wins his by appeal to mass appetite. The man of a civilized tradition, therefore, will find nothing strange in the idea of hierarchy. Out of the natural reverence for intellect and virtue there arises an impulse to segregation, which broadly results in coarser natures, that is, those of duller mental and moral sensibility, being lodged at the bottom and those of more refined at the top.
The notion that all ideas of rank are inimical to liberty is found only among those who have not analyzed the relationship between freedom and organization. It is the process of leveling which distorts reality and leaves us with a situation that is, literally, impossible to conceive. The most assured way to undermine civilization is to surrender to criteria of uniformity and objectivity, losing sight of the fact that the objective cannot be prescriptive and failing to make these distinctions which have their basis in human ambition.
True, it requires a degree of tough-mindedness to accept the fact of civilization, just as it requires sternness to execute moral laws, for both are discriminatory; and many forces which would destroy it have been abetted by men of good will, and have come creeping in among us, appealing to blind appetite, to special interest, and capitalizing on a partial awareness of what is at stake.
They [southerners] could not understand how anyone, looking at the face of society and cherishing values, which must always appear tyrranous in the divisions they enforce among men, could preach equality and ridicule the veneration of age and eminence.
They who seek to evade this dilemma by declaring that ability alone should count, a natural plea in our age of specialization, one often disingenuous, for they narrow down "ability" to mean some special skill, aptitude, or ingenuity at an isolated task. But in the political community ability must take account of the whole man: his special competence plus his personality and his moral disposition, even his history. It is well that people are not ranked for measureable efficiency as engines are for horsepower, but rather for the total idea we have of them. Thus again we face the topic of the whole man and the evil of reducing him to an abstraction to insure his political qualification.
Southern political theory was a rationale of society: the Northern theory it was designed to confute was largely a set of aspirations unrealizable even logically. It was a political romanticism...Every old and settled society comes to terms with the physical world and the psychic world, and it forms a judgment that efforts to change either beyond a certain point will cost more than they will yield. The South was in the position of Europe or even Asia; it felt that it had discovered some necessary limitations of existence; the North felt that the South was compounding with ancient evils...The North had Tom Paine and his postulates assuming the virtuous inclinations of man; the South had Burke and his doctrine of human fallibility and of the organic nature of society.
A culture defines itself by crystallizing around what I should call "unsentimental sentiments." These are feelings which determine a common attitude toward large phases of experience; they impel us, on critical occasions of life, to sense more than we would sense and do more than we would do if we were only economic man. There is no demonstrable connection between them and our physical survival; and therefore from the standpoint of materialism or nihilism they are excessive in the same way as any sentimental display. They originate in our world view, in our ultimate vision of what is proper for men as higher beings; and they are kept from being sentimental in fact by a metaphysic or a theology which assigns them a function through imagination.
The propriety of any given sentiment will rest on our profoundest view of life: our attitude toward the dead, toward traditional institutions, toward the symbols of community life - all come from a metaphysical dream of the world which we have created, or have been taught. It is the loss of this view, and the determination of matters in a narrow context of material interest - let us recall the horror with which the direct, practical judgments of a successful moneymaker are greeted in a family of inherited refinement.
Southerners apply the term "Yankee" as the Greeks did "barbarian". The kinship of ideas cannot be overlooked. The Greeks knew that the barbarian could not participate in his luminous world of myth and actuality. The sentiments of a culture may indeed be "delicate arabesques of convention," the appreciation of which demands a state of grace. Their value will lie in their non-utility, in their remoteness, from practical concerns, which keeps us from immersion in the material world. So the Southerners who belonged to the tradition thought they saw in the levelling spirit of the North, in its criteria of utility, in its plebeian distrust of forms, in its spirit of irreverence - and all of these must be mentioned with apologies to Northern people whom they do not characterize - a kind of barbarian destructiveness, not willed perhaps, but certain in its effect.
The destruction of sentiment leaves us not animals, who have their own nobility, but ruined men. Considerable importance must therefore be attached to the Southern fondness for pleasing illusions.
The South has a deep suspicion of all theory, perhaps of intellect. It has always been on the side of blood and soil, of instinct, of vitalism. Something in its climate, in its social life predisposes it to feel that "gray is all theory, and green is life's golden tree."
Society is a product of organic growth.
And today, when the South pleads to be allowed "to work out its own problems in its own way," it more often than not has no plans for working them out. Its "way" is not to work them out, but to let some mechanism of adjustment achieve a balance. It is this which has clashed with the North's impulse to toil, "to help the world go around," to have a national accounting of everything. Undoubtedly, it has relation to the attitude of piety, which would respect the "course of things" and frowns on a busy human interference with what nature seems to have planned or providence ordained.
Despite sins which are as scarlet, the South has remained a Christian country in that it has persisted in describing the relationship of man to the universe in religious symbols...
-Richard Weaver
As piety respects the mystery of nature, so ethics, the restraining sentiment which we carry into the world of our fellow beings, respects the reality of personality. It is well if our code of ethics has a religious origin, so that its power to impress derives from some myth or some noble parable. Its purpose, in any case, is to lead everyone to a relatively selfless point of view, and to make him realize the plurality of personalities in the world. Above all, it must insist upon the rightness of right and keep in abeyance the crude standard of what will pay.
The South has maintained an astonishing resistance to the insidious doctrine of relativism and empiricism.
Personality can develop only in a humane environment, and nowhere in America has this distillation of life flourished as in the South. Its love of heroes, its affection for eccentric leaders, its interest in personal anecdote, in the colorful and the dramatic, discounted elsewher as charming weaknesses, are signs that it reveres the spiritual part of man. It has instinctively disliked, though it has by now partially succumbed to, the dehumanizing influence of governments and factories. Individualism and personality are making a stand - perhaps a Custer's last stand in the South.
Civilization is measured by its power to create and enforce distinctions. Consequently there must be some source of discrimination, from which we bring ideas of order to bear on a fortuitous world. Knowledge and virtue constitute this source, and these two things, it must be said to the vexation of the sentimental optimists, are in their nature aristocracies. Participation in them is open to all: this much of the doctrine; but the participation will never occur in equal manner or degree, so that however we allow men to start in the world, we may be sure that as long as standards of quality exist, there will be a sorting out. Indeed, we are entitled to say categorically that unless such standards are operative, civilization does not exist, or that it has fallen into decay. That no man was ever born free and no two men have ever been equal, is a more sensible saying than its contrary. To the extent that the South has preserved social structure and avoided the creation of masses, it has maintained the only kind of world in which values can long survive.
A society in the true sense must have exclusive minorities of the wise and good who will bear responsibility and enjoy prestige. Otherwise, it will be leaderless, or its leadership will rest on forces of darkness; for there is little difference between the tribal chieftain who wins his place by brute force and the demagogue of the mass state who wins his by appeal to mass appetite. The man of a civilized tradition, therefore, will find nothing strange in the idea of hierarchy. Out of the natural reverence for intellect and virtue there arises an impulse to segregation, which broadly results in coarser natures, that is, those of duller mental and moral sensibility, being lodged at the bottom and those of more refined at the top.
The notion that all ideas of rank are inimical to liberty is found only among those who have not analyzed the relationship between freedom and organization. It is the process of leveling which distorts reality and leaves us with a situation that is, literally, impossible to conceive. The most assured way to undermine civilization is to surrender to criteria of uniformity and objectivity, losing sight of the fact that the objective cannot be prescriptive and failing to make these distinctions which have their basis in human ambition.
True, it requires a degree of tough-mindedness to accept the fact of civilization, just as it requires sternness to execute moral laws, for both are discriminatory; and many forces which would destroy it have been abetted by men of good will, and have come creeping in among us, appealing to blind appetite, to special interest, and capitalizing on a partial awareness of what is at stake.
They [southerners] could not understand how anyone, looking at the face of society and cherishing values, which must always appear tyrranous in the divisions they enforce among men, could preach equality and ridicule the veneration of age and eminence.
They who seek to evade this dilemma by declaring that ability alone should count, a natural plea in our age of specialization, one often disingenuous, for they narrow down "ability" to mean some special skill, aptitude, or ingenuity at an isolated task. But in the political community ability must take account of the whole man: his special competence plus his personality and his moral disposition, even his history. It is well that people are not ranked for measureable efficiency as engines are for horsepower, but rather for the total idea we have of them. Thus again we face the topic of the whole man and the evil of reducing him to an abstraction to insure his political qualification.
Southern political theory was a rationale of society: the Northern theory it was designed to confute was largely a set of aspirations unrealizable even logically. It was a political romanticism...Every old and settled society comes to terms with the physical world and the psychic world, and it forms a judgment that efforts to change either beyond a certain point will cost more than they will yield. The South was in the position of Europe or even Asia; it felt that it had discovered some necessary limitations of existence; the North felt that the South was compounding with ancient evils...The North had Tom Paine and his postulates assuming the virtuous inclinations of man; the South had Burke and his doctrine of human fallibility and of the organic nature of society.
A culture defines itself by crystallizing around what I should call "unsentimental sentiments." These are feelings which determine a common attitude toward large phases of experience; they impel us, on critical occasions of life, to sense more than we would sense and do more than we would do if we were only economic man. There is no demonstrable connection between them and our physical survival; and therefore from the standpoint of materialism or nihilism they are excessive in the same way as any sentimental display. They originate in our world view, in our ultimate vision of what is proper for men as higher beings; and they are kept from being sentimental in fact by a metaphysic or a theology which assigns them a function through imagination.
The propriety of any given sentiment will rest on our profoundest view of life: our attitude toward the dead, toward traditional institutions, toward the symbols of community life - all come from a metaphysical dream of the world which we have created, or have been taught. It is the loss of this view, and the determination of matters in a narrow context of material interest - let us recall the horror with which the direct, practical judgments of a successful moneymaker are greeted in a family of inherited refinement.
Southerners apply the term "Yankee" as the Greeks did "barbarian". The kinship of ideas cannot be overlooked. The Greeks knew that the barbarian could not participate in his luminous world of myth and actuality. The sentiments of a culture may indeed be "delicate arabesques of convention," the appreciation of which demands a state of grace. Their value will lie in their non-utility, in their remoteness, from practical concerns, which keeps us from immersion in the material world. So the Southerners who belonged to the tradition thought they saw in the levelling spirit of the North, in its criteria of utility, in its plebeian distrust of forms, in its spirit of irreverence - and all of these must be mentioned with apologies to Northern people whom they do not characterize - a kind of barbarian destructiveness, not willed perhaps, but certain in its effect.
The destruction of sentiment leaves us not animals, who have their own nobility, but ruined men. Considerable importance must therefore be attached to the Southern fondness for pleasing illusions.
The South has a deep suspicion of all theory, perhaps of intellect. It has always been on the side of blood and soil, of instinct, of vitalism. Something in its climate, in its social life predisposes it to feel that "gray is all theory, and green is life's golden tree."
Society is a product of organic growth.
And today, when the South pleads to be allowed "to work out its own problems in its own way," it more often than not has no plans for working them out. Its "way" is not to work them out, but to let some mechanism of adjustment achieve a balance. It is this which has clashed with the North's impulse to toil, "to help the world go around," to have a national accounting of everything. Undoubtedly, it has relation to the attitude of piety, which would respect the "course of things" and frowns on a busy human interference with what nature seems to have planned or providence ordained.
Despite sins which are as scarlet, the South has remained a Christian country in that it has persisted in describing the relationship of man to the universe in religious symbols...
-Richard Weaver
Monday, August 10, 2009
The Southern Tradition at Bay 2: First element of Spirituality
I expect to speak of the South therefore as a minority within the nation, whose claim to attention lies not in its success in impressing its ideals upon the nation or the world, but in something I shall insist is higher - an ethical claim which can be described only in terms of the 'mandate of civilization.' In its battle for survival the South has lost ground, but it has kept from extinction some things whose value is emphasized by the disintegration of the modern world.
This work concerns itself with a tradition, which means a recognizable pattern of belief and behavior transmitted from one generation to the next.
To say that Southerners have differed in point of view from Yankees does not speak for every single Southerner, but it does express a substantial truth.
If asked to tell why in these days Southern history is entitled to thoughtful consideration, I should list first of all the fact that the South, alone among the sections, has persisted in regarding science as a false messiah. This by itself indicates that the Southern tradition has a center of resistance to the most powerful force of corruption in our age.
We have been led to believe that man's chief task is the conquest of nature, including of course space and time. Mere advances in mechanical power, and especially in superior mobility, have been greeted as steps in an automatic progress...
It is easy, while occupied with technics and under the influence of robot-like labor, to forget that the most difficult task is to train and govern men for their own good.
We must see first of all that the kingdom of civilization is within. We must confess that the highest sources of value in life are the ethical and aesthetic conceptions with which our imagination invests the world. We must admit that man is to be judged by the quality of his actions rather than by the extent of his dominion. Civilization is a discipline, an achievement in self-culture and self-control, and the only civilizing agent is a spirit manifesting itself through reason, imagination, and religious inspiration, and giving a sort of mintage to acts which would otherwise be without meaning.
A civilized tradition implies a center, from which control is exerted, and it is through this control that we give quality to actions. Civilized man carries a sense of restraint into his behavior both toward nature and his fellow beings. The first of these is piety; the second ethics.
The attitude of science has become impious to the fullest degree...But nature is not an opponent, as ancient systems of belief could have instructed us, it is the matrix of our being...Piety is a realization that beyond a certain point victories over nature are pyrrhic. The thought is implicit in the legend of Prometheus, and I have no doubt that the deep suspicion with which medieval theologians viewed early explorations of the physical world was intuition. They sensed, apparently, the peril in these conquests, a hubris leading to vainglory, egotism, impatience, a feeling that man can dispense with all restraints. Every legend of man's fall is a caution against presuming to know everything, and an indirect exhortation to piety; and the disappearance of belief in original sin has done more than anything else to prepare the way for sophistical theories of human nature and society. Man has lost piety toward nature in proportion as he has left her and shut himself up in cities with rationalism for his philosophy.
[The modern world demonstrates] a "spoiled child" psychology - they have lived so long in an artificial environment that they have lost a sense of the difficulty of things.
The acceptance of nature, with an awareness of the persistence of tragedy, is the first element of spirituality, and a first lesson for the poor bewildered modern who, amid the wreckage of systems, confesses an inability to understand the world.
-Richard Weaver
This work concerns itself with a tradition, which means a recognizable pattern of belief and behavior transmitted from one generation to the next.
To say that Southerners have differed in point of view from Yankees does not speak for every single Southerner, but it does express a substantial truth.
If asked to tell why in these days Southern history is entitled to thoughtful consideration, I should list first of all the fact that the South, alone among the sections, has persisted in regarding science as a false messiah. This by itself indicates that the Southern tradition has a center of resistance to the most powerful force of corruption in our age.
We have been led to believe that man's chief task is the conquest of nature, including of course space and time. Mere advances in mechanical power, and especially in superior mobility, have been greeted as steps in an automatic progress...
It is easy, while occupied with technics and under the influence of robot-like labor, to forget that the most difficult task is to train and govern men for their own good.
We must see first of all that the kingdom of civilization is within. We must confess that the highest sources of value in life are the ethical and aesthetic conceptions with which our imagination invests the world. We must admit that man is to be judged by the quality of his actions rather than by the extent of his dominion. Civilization is a discipline, an achievement in self-culture and self-control, and the only civilizing agent is a spirit manifesting itself through reason, imagination, and religious inspiration, and giving a sort of mintage to acts which would otherwise be without meaning.
A civilized tradition implies a center, from which control is exerted, and it is through this control that we give quality to actions. Civilized man carries a sense of restraint into his behavior both toward nature and his fellow beings. The first of these is piety; the second ethics.
The attitude of science has become impious to the fullest degree...But nature is not an opponent, as ancient systems of belief could have instructed us, it is the matrix of our being...Piety is a realization that beyond a certain point victories over nature are pyrrhic. The thought is implicit in the legend of Prometheus, and I have no doubt that the deep suspicion with which medieval theologians viewed early explorations of the physical world was intuition. They sensed, apparently, the peril in these conquests, a hubris leading to vainglory, egotism, impatience, a feeling that man can dispense with all restraints. Every legend of man's fall is a caution against presuming to know everything, and an indirect exhortation to piety; and the disappearance of belief in original sin has done more than anything else to prepare the way for sophistical theories of human nature and society. Man has lost piety toward nature in proportion as he has left her and shut himself up in cities with rationalism for his philosophy.
[The modern world demonstrates] a "spoiled child" psychology - they have lived so long in an artificial environment that they have lost a sense of the difficulty of things.
The acceptance of nature, with an awareness of the persistence of tragedy, is the first element of spirituality, and a first lesson for the poor bewildered modern who, amid the wreckage of systems, confesses an inability to understand the world.
-Richard Weaver
The Southern Tradition at Bay 1: Introductory concepts
As Richard Weaver observed time and again, the essential South has remained, even after one hundred years of bitter experience, still too satisfied with narrowly defensive strategies. Its problem is and ever has been locating and enlisting its natural allies by exposing the gnostic posture of its enemies and by discovering the non-promethean character and roots of its own position.
His "aiming point" is indeed the South, but the "target," just over the hump, is the modern regime, both North and South, that has emerged in the mid-twentieth century and brought the Republic of the United States of America into its time of troubles.
"virtues needed to amass wealth are not the virtues needed to defend it"...Belief in tragedy is essentially un-American...If we are in for a time of darkness and trouble, the Southern philosophy, because it is not based on optimism, will have better power to console than the national dogmas.
Weaver was particularly taken with the idea that "an unorthodox defense of orthodoxy" was feasible.
He was suddenly troubled by his realization that "many traditional positions in our world had suffered not so much because of inherent defect as because of the stupidity, ineptness, and intellectual sloth of those who are presumed to have their defense in charge.
The study and appreciation of a lost cause has some effect of turning history into philosophy. In sufficient number of cases to make us humble, we discover good points in the cause which time has erased, just as one often learns more from the slain hero of a tragedy than from some brassy Fortinbras who comes in at the end to announce the victory and proclaim the future disposition of affairs.
Instead of the tortured, egocentric question "Who am I?" he could proceed to the larger, more philosophical question "Who are we?", "What are we doing?", "What ought we to do?"
...a devoted and vigorous study of some past experience of disaster - the fall of Rome, the overthrow of Napoleon, the destruction of the Old South - "will compel any honest seeker to see that the lines of social and political force are far more secret than the modern world has any mind to recognize; and that if it does not lead him to some kind of faith, it will lead him away from the easy constructions of those who do not wish to understand, beyond grasping what can be seized for a practical purpose.
That is it! Richard Weaver's book leads away from "easy constructions" and toward faith. It is not about the events of Civil War, Reconstruction, and the long aftermath of Populism, farm and labor trouble, the new industrialism. "Things reveal themselves passing away," Weaver writes, quoting Yeats. He is intent to discover what the postbellum Southerners, defeated, all but ruined, yet not really convinced, may consciously or unconsciously reveal about the great American experiment, from Jamestown and Plymouth to date.
"though failing, hardly expiring"
The South is the last non-materialist civilization in the Western world.
The South is in the curious position of having been right without realizing the grounds of its rightness. I am conscious that this reverses the common judgment, but it may yet appear that the North, by its ready embrace of science and rationalism, impoverished itself, and that the South, by clinging more or less unashamedly to the primitive way of life prepared itself for the longer run. But the South failed "to study its position until it arrived at metaphysical foundations." This book, with much of Weaver's subsequent writing, is a large step toward supplying foundations.
His "aiming point" is indeed the South, but the "target," just over the hump, is the modern regime, both North and South, that has emerged in the mid-twentieth century and brought the Republic of the United States of America into its time of troubles.
"virtues needed to amass wealth are not the virtues needed to defend it"...Belief in tragedy is essentially un-American...If we are in for a time of darkness and trouble, the Southern philosophy, because it is not based on optimism, will have better power to console than the national dogmas.
Weaver was particularly taken with the idea that "an unorthodox defense of orthodoxy" was feasible.
He was suddenly troubled by his realization that "many traditional positions in our world had suffered not so much because of inherent defect as because of the stupidity, ineptness, and intellectual sloth of those who are presumed to have their defense in charge.
The study and appreciation of a lost cause has some effect of turning history into philosophy. In sufficient number of cases to make us humble, we discover good points in the cause which time has erased, just as one often learns more from the slain hero of a tragedy than from some brassy Fortinbras who comes in at the end to announce the victory and proclaim the future disposition of affairs.
Instead of the tortured, egocentric question "Who am I?" he could proceed to the larger, more philosophical question "Who are we?", "What are we doing?", "What ought we to do?"
...a devoted and vigorous study of some past experience of disaster - the fall of Rome, the overthrow of Napoleon, the destruction of the Old South - "will compel any honest seeker to see that the lines of social and political force are far more secret than the modern world has any mind to recognize; and that if it does not lead him to some kind of faith, it will lead him away from the easy constructions of those who do not wish to understand, beyond grasping what can be seized for a practical purpose.
That is it! Richard Weaver's book leads away from "easy constructions" and toward faith. It is not about the events of Civil War, Reconstruction, and the long aftermath of Populism, farm and labor trouble, the new industrialism. "Things reveal themselves passing away," Weaver writes, quoting Yeats. He is intent to discover what the postbellum Southerners, defeated, all but ruined, yet not really convinced, may consciously or unconsciously reveal about the great American experiment, from Jamestown and Plymouth to date.
"though failing, hardly expiring"
The South is the last non-materialist civilization in the Western world.
The South is in the curious position of having been right without realizing the grounds of its rightness. I am conscious that this reverses the common judgment, but it may yet appear that the North, by its ready embrace of science and rationalism, impoverished itself, and that the South, by clinging more or less unashamedly to the primitive way of life prepared itself for the longer run. But the South failed "to study its position until it arrived at metaphysical foundations." This book, with much of Weaver's subsequent writing, is a large step toward supplying foundations.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Attack on Leviathan VI: the cost of going modern
They [Agrarians] held that since the long prevailing contrary principles had worked out badly, especially for the South, it was time to reassert the old principles, or at least consider on what terms they might be reasserted. The upshot was that they recommended agrarianism as containing both the principles and the program in which Southerners would do well to be interested.
But upon entering the public forum they found that even to utter the phrase "agrarian tradition," was, in the opinion of many educated Southerners, heresy of the most absurd and violent kind.
The Northern press, with all of the Southern press that takes its cue from New York, have unanimously agreed that the South is guilty of numerous crimes against progress.
Since the days when abolitionism first began to be militant, the South has repeatedly served as a stalking home for a bagging game that in the last analysis had little to do with pious rewards and humanitarian reforms. Whenever the Northeast has felt a threat against its power or has wished to gain new power, the familiar story of the Southern "outrage" has flooded the press or appeared in the halls of Congress. The outcry against the "slaveocracy" paved the way for high tariffs...
So likewise in 1920 and later, when the major problem before the American people was how to adjust an overexpanded industrial machine to postwar conditions, it was again the Southern "outrage" that kept the public amused while the way was being greased for Hoover prosperity and the great debacle of 1929.
The technique is automatic. I do not agree that it represents some deliberate, highly wrought conspiracy against the South, but rather that it is the nature of an urban, industrialized society to behave thus towards whatever stands in its path, and to feel quite self-righteous in so doing.
Not only does it serve to discredit Southern opinion and prevent it from making headway in the nation, but it also indoctrinates the South, under present conditions, with a feeling of its own inferiority and so divides the South against itself. One is tempted to call it an item of salesmanship or a step in the process of "selling" the South devices that will make it feel less inferior...
The "high standard" of living has brought him into the indusrial system of buying continually a series of articles that must be continually replaced. The result of this process in the South has been a wholesale exportation of Southern cash, and, more devastatingly, of physical resources - and all without adequate compensation. It has meant depletion of resources, debt, and parasitism more vast than the South has ever experienced.
The cost of going modern for the South meant a sudden expansion of the functions of state and local governments throughout the South, and the correspondingly sudden and enormous increase of public expenditure thereby made necessary...for the South the improvements meant large borrowings and vast increases in taxation.
burden falls upon the farmer who tried to go heavily into cash crops.
He has had little success, and that little has been gained at the expense of his land and of his old independence.
The advance of industry and the simultaneous expansion of governmental functions have brought a painful increase in agricultural disability, a rapid exhaustion of Southern soil, a ravaging of Southern timber, and, most alarming of all, an increase in tenancy and a decrease in farm ownership.
Industries often came upon a promise of tax exemption. From Ben Tillman to Theodore Bilbo to Huey Long the story is the same. The moment when they are suddenly discovered - by the metropolitan press - to be wicked demagogues and dictators is generally the moment when they begin to rouse the people and to dictate the tax bills of big business...
a strategic problem: how to arrive at Southern policies that will be well founded historically and at the same time applicable to the existing situation.
The Southerner is always pleading a sectional case before a court that insists upon ruling sectional issues irrelevant. In this dilemma Harper and Dew were driven into a defense of slavery, and Calhoun into an attack upon majority rule and advocacy of secession.
In 1850 the logic of the Northern argument was: Southern notions about democracy and the Constitution are invalid because the Southerner is an inhumane slave-holder and belongs to an arrogant "slaveocracy," and he is speaking as a Southerner only, while we of the North are speaking as Americans and have the nation's good in mind.
In 1937 the argument runs: there is no merit in a Southern approach to regional or national affairs, because the South is a backward region, addicted to lynching, illiteracy, demagogues, and hookworm.
And so, if the Southerner voices a preference for a different brand of education from what is being offered, he is assailed as an enemy of education. If he questions the economy and usefulness of a certain road-building program on the ground that it serves the through-truck-and-tourist-traffic but does not help the farmer, then he is asked whether he proposes to return to ox-carts. If he points out that the Constitution gurantees freedom of worship and by no means charges the government with fostering pseudo-religion disguised as science, the he is called a fundamentalist from the Bible Belt. If he questions the wisdom of introducing large mass production units into an agricultural area, he is accused of wanting to do away with machinery. He must, in short, deal with arguments that continually beg the question. How shall the Southerner escape from this dilemma? How can he meet criticism, improve Southern tradition, and still be true to the South?
We must clear away the false issues, the confused and misleading terms. To do this it is necessary, for a time at least, to get away from expedients and back to principles.
And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government, or information to the people. This last is the most certain, and the most legitimate engine of government...They [the people] are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty...This reliance cannot deceive us, as long as we remain virtuous; and I think we shall be so, as long as agriculture is our principal object, which will be the case, while there remain vacant lands in any part of America. When we get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there.
Southern history is the key to American history and to the puzzle of the contemporary South as well.
Jefferson's vision included a shrewd assessment of the differences between the conditions under which American liberty could flourish and the European conditions which were destined to permit liberalism into utilitarianism and laissez-faire.
Most important of all, America was comfortably distant from the exploitative commercialism, founded on manufacture and high finance, that was well under way in Great Britain.
John Taylor defined the danger of giving perpetual legal privileges to corporations. In a democracy there was peril even in the notion of inviolability of contract when it applied to corporate personalities.
In the name of the Union, a war was waged where the ultimate effect was to strike down obstacles to the development of a consolidated industrial empire, and through the 14th amendment, to set at nought Taylor's old suspicion of charters and to give the Northeast a great exploitative weapon.
-Donald Davidson
But upon entering the public forum they found that even to utter the phrase "agrarian tradition," was, in the opinion of many educated Southerners, heresy of the most absurd and violent kind.
The Northern press, with all of the Southern press that takes its cue from New York, have unanimously agreed that the South is guilty of numerous crimes against progress.
Since the days when abolitionism first began to be militant, the South has repeatedly served as a stalking home for a bagging game that in the last analysis had little to do with pious rewards and humanitarian reforms. Whenever the Northeast has felt a threat against its power or has wished to gain new power, the familiar story of the Southern "outrage" has flooded the press or appeared in the halls of Congress. The outcry against the "slaveocracy" paved the way for high tariffs...
So likewise in 1920 and later, when the major problem before the American people was how to adjust an overexpanded industrial machine to postwar conditions, it was again the Southern "outrage" that kept the public amused while the way was being greased for Hoover prosperity and the great debacle of 1929.
The technique is automatic. I do not agree that it represents some deliberate, highly wrought conspiracy against the South, but rather that it is the nature of an urban, industrialized society to behave thus towards whatever stands in its path, and to feel quite self-righteous in so doing.
Not only does it serve to discredit Southern opinion and prevent it from making headway in the nation, but it also indoctrinates the South, under present conditions, with a feeling of its own inferiority and so divides the South against itself. One is tempted to call it an item of salesmanship or a step in the process of "selling" the South devices that will make it feel less inferior...
The "high standard" of living has brought him into the indusrial system of buying continually a series of articles that must be continually replaced. The result of this process in the South has been a wholesale exportation of Southern cash, and, more devastatingly, of physical resources - and all without adequate compensation. It has meant depletion of resources, debt, and parasitism more vast than the South has ever experienced.
The cost of going modern for the South meant a sudden expansion of the functions of state and local governments throughout the South, and the correspondingly sudden and enormous increase of public expenditure thereby made necessary...for the South the improvements meant large borrowings and vast increases in taxation.
burden falls upon the farmer who tried to go heavily into cash crops.
He has had little success, and that little has been gained at the expense of his land and of his old independence.
The advance of industry and the simultaneous expansion of governmental functions have brought a painful increase in agricultural disability, a rapid exhaustion of Southern soil, a ravaging of Southern timber, and, most alarming of all, an increase in tenancy and a decrease in farm ownership.
Industries often came upon a promise of tax exemption. From Ben Tillman to Theodore Bilbo to Huey Long the story is the same. The moment when they are suddenly discovered - by the metropolitan press - to be wicked demagogues and dictators is generally the moment when they begin to rouse the people and to dictate the tax bills of big business...
a strategic problem: how to arrive at Southern policies that will be well founded historically and at the same time applicable to the existing situation.
The Southerner is always pleading a sectional case before a court that insists upon ruling sectional issues irrelevant. In this dilemma Harper and Dew were driven into a defense of slavery, and Calhoun into an attack upon majority rule and advocacy of secession.
In 1850 the logic of the Northern argument was: Southern notions about democracy and the Constitution are invalid because the Southerner is an inhumane slave-holder and belongs to an arrogant "slaveocracy," and he is speaking as a Southerner only, while we of the North are speaking as Americans and have the nation's good in mind.
In 1937 the argument runs: there is no merit in a Southern approach to regional or national affairs, because the South is a backward region, addicted to lynching, illiteracy, demagogues, and hookworm.
And so, if the Southerner voices a preference for a different brand of education from what is being offered, he is assailed as an enemy of education. If he questions the economy and usefulness of a certain road-building program on the ground that it serves the through-truck-and-tourist-traffic but does not help the farmer, then he is asked whether he proposes to return to ox-carts. If he points out that the Constitution gurantees freedom of worship and by no means charges the government with fostering pseudo-religion disguised as science, the he is called a fundamentalist from the Bible Belt. If he questions the wisdom of introducing large mass production units into an agricultural area, he is accused of wanting to do away with machinery. He must, in short, deal with arguments that continually beg the question. How shall the Southerner escape from this dilemma? How can he meet criticism, improve Southern tradition, and still be true to the South?
We must clear away the false issues, the confused and misleading terms. To do this it is necessary, for a time at least, to get away from expedients and back to principles.
And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government, or information to the people. This last is the most certain, and the most legitimate engine of government...They [the people] are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty...This reliance cannot deceive us, as long as we remain virtuous; and I think we shall be so, as long as agriculture is our principal object, which will be the case, while there remain vacant lands in any part of America. When we get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there.
Southern history is the key to American history and to the puzzle of the contemporary South as well.
Jefferson's vision included a shrewd assessment of the differences between the conditions under which American liberty could flourish and the European conditions which were destined to permit liberalism into utilitarianism and laissez-faire.
Most important of all, America was comfortably distant from the exploitative commercialism, founded on manufacture and high finance, that was well under way in Great Britain.
John Taylor defined the danger of giving perpetual legal privileges to corporations. In a democracy there was peril even in the notion of inviolability of contract when it applied to corporate personalities.
In the name of the Union, a war was waged where the ultimate effect was to strike down obstacles to the development of a consolidated industrial empire, and through the 14th amendment, to set at nought Taylor's old suspicion of charters and to give the Northeast a great exploitative weapon.
-Donald Davidson
Attack on Leviathan V: The Sociological Proteus
...They [young Southerners] had been fully exposed to all the loose precepts of modernism and were inclined to accept without question its fashionable notions. As a matter of course they believed that culture comes out of books; that wealth is the road to success and is to be achieved only by industrial expansion; that religion is a silly fable, or at best a loose rationalization of Christianity in terms of sociology; that progress is real and depends on science; that beauty is better than morality; that politics is unimportant; that education really educates.
Everybody, it seemed, was shouting about the backwardness of the South. The bustle of the rising Southern cities and the disadvantaged condition of the farmer confirmed them in disrespect for the old agrarian culture.
The liberals can serve this South if their intelligence achieves a natural association with the sources of feeling which, however blindly and confusedly, have kept alive in the South a sense of civilization, its own and not another's, which the decay of industrial capitalism makes it timely to encourage. The Southern liberals, in short, may escape their dilemma by becoming more Southern...
Sociology is a popular method of truthseeking today. And yet one would think it an unfavorable time for sociologizing. The fundamentals of sociology have much to do with the study of primitive and stable forms of society. Our society is changing so rapidly that one can hardly find in it the moment of repose when just observations can be made. The sociological truthseeker is like the man in the old Greek fable who comes to ask questions of Proteus. He must know what grip to use, and must hold on firmly through all manner of transformations. Then at last he may come upon some Protean wisdom, ancient as the sea...
The South is an overwhelmingly, invincibly agrarian area, caught helplessly between its own dimly understood and still living past and the demands of an assertive, recklessly exploitable nation that, under Northeastern leadership, has committed itself rather deeply to an urban, industrial vision of the future...
But the story of Southern deficiency means something more than "waste and lack of technology." Not even the finest technology, not the most earnest conservation can save a region from ruinous exploitation at the hands of a political-economic imperialism such as the South has had to face...
It would be interesting to know how much of every Northeastern dollar expended in the South or for Southern produce flows back eventually into the Northeast; and how much of every Southern dollar goes NE without ever returning to the Southern purse...
The South's position, relative to other regions, is one of colonial degradation.
They damn the South for not repairing its deficiencies; and by way of a tonic they offer another swig of the patent medicine that has been costly without being curative. They do not know, or do not care to know, that the debtor South, already ravaged by its creditors, cannot, out of its limited substance, pay for modern improvements and at the same time maintain its creditors in luxury...
Once they recognized the historical and theoretical significance of the region and of the power of the folk-regional society in "modern culture," it was inevitable that their studies would bring them face to face with the South's historic difficulty...By a devious, perhaps an unnecessarily arduous, route they have arrived upon the ground where John C. Calhoun began to do some hard thinking about a century ago...
The South, because of its regional differentiations, some of which are certainly valuable, is at a disadvantage, and so long as political and economic power dwells where it long has dwelt, it will continue to be at a disadvantage...
Regional differentiations are among the principal causes...of disadvantage. But if you are an abstract nationalist, or, as folks long ago used to say, a leveller, you are certain to miss the point. If you look at New York and then look at Georgia, and see that the former is more or less orderly and shipshape after a modern manner, and that the latter is disorderly and shabby, after a strange mixture of modern and ancient manners, you will never be able to conclude, unless you are a regionalist, that the disorderliness of Georgia is anything but a quaint or an annoying exhibition of depravity...
Southern states rated lowest in all those indices - such as schools and libraries - which connoted "civilization"; and highest in those - such as homicides and malaria which connoted "barbarism."
Nobody added up the figures and asked whether the remarkable surplus of libraries in the Northeast could possibly have anything to do with the lack of them in the Southeast - Nobody wondered whether a certain kind of valid cultural preference might be tied up with the economic unbalance: the kind of preference that would make a Georgia cracker want to spend an extra quarter on ammunition to shoot squirrels rather than on a copy of The New Yorker...
The regional grip is the right one, and the only right one, for the sociological Proteus. Held in that that grip, Proteus ceases to bewilder and begins to say what is to be done in this or that agitated corner. And then one can also think, or begin to think, about that unholy mess of regions which is the world...
Mr. Odum is certain that the Southern culture, far from being "decadent," is in reality to be called "immature." It has enormous vitality, even in those attitudes which sociologists call survivals: its ways of humor, its stubborn bantering threats to outsiders," and various "defense mechanisms."
The issue is not really bringing the South "up" to modern standards, but of making modern standards worth accepting by the South.
"I am not undertaking to answer the charge that I am ignorant. It is true. I am an ignorant man. I have had no college education. But the thing that takes me far in politics is that I do not have to color what comes into my mind and into my heart. I say it unvarnished. I say it without veneer. I have not the learning to do otherwise, and therefore my ignorance is often not detected. I know the hearts of the people because I have not colored my own. I know when I am right in my own conscience. I do not talk one way in the cloakroom and another way out here. I do not talk one way back there in the hills of Louisiania and another way here in the Senate. I have one language. Ignorant as it is, it is the universal language within the sphere in which I operate. Its simplicity gains pardon for my lack of letters and education." - Henry Clay
The problem:
1) securing united action in the South
2) securing something like national awareness of the Southern dilemma
How can the South be awakened to such action?
How can the nation be made to understand that blood transfusion must now replace the blood sucking of the last seventy years?
Only one force has ever drawn the Southern states together for a vast concerted effort, and that is the lusty force of strong sectional feeling.
Without realizing what he is doing, the average Southerner in practice separates his private folkways from his public opinions and actions. For himself as an individual he is responsible; for what goes on in the greater world he is not responsible. After long years of subjection he has learned to take social programs as he takes the weather. They generally come from far away, he is not responsible for them, he will do nothing about them until it becomes necessary to vote down a child labor amendment or check a racial equality movement. He is oriental in his tolerance of social movements originating elsewhere, until they begin to intrude upon his English-Scotch notion of private and clan responsibility...
The South must either play sectional politics, or it must still be a dependent, hoping to receive a bounty on terms that will not be too disagreeable or humiliating...In a like dilemma, Calhoun reluctantly proposed Southern Independence.
Everybody, it seemed, was shouting about the backwardness of the South. The bustle of the rising Southern cities and the disadvantaged condition of the farmer confirmed them in disrespect for the old agrarian culture.
The liberals can serve this South if their intelligence achieves a natural association with the sources of feeling which, however blindly and confusedly, have kept alive in the South a sense of civilization, its own and not another's, which the decay of industrial capitalism makes it timely to encourage. The Southern liberals, in short, may escape their dilemma by becoming more Southern...
Sociology is a popular method of truthseeking today. And yet one would think it an unfavorable time for sociologizing. The fundamentals of sociology have much to do with the study of primitive and stable forms of society. Our society is changing so rapidly that one can hardly find in it the moment of repose when just observations can be made. The sociological truthseeker is like the man in the old Greek fable who comes to ask questions of Proteus. He must know what grip to use, and must hold on firmly through all manner of transformations. Then at last he may come upon some Protean wisdom, ancient as the sea...
The South is an overwhelmingly, invincibly agrarian area, caught helplessly between its own dimly understood and still living past and the demands of an assertive, recklessly exploitable nation that, under Northeastern leadership, has committed itself rather deeply to an urban, industrial vision of the future...
But the story of Southern deficiency means something more than "waste and lack of technology." Not even the finest technology, not the most earnest conservation can save a region from ruinous exploitation at the hands of a political-economic imperialism such as the South has had to face...
It would be interesting to know how much of every Northeastern dollar expended in the South or for Southern produce flows back eventually into the Northeast; and how much of every Southern dollar goes NE without ever returning to the Southern purse...
The South's position, relative to other regions, is one of colonial degradation.
They damn the South for not repairing its deficiencies; and by way of a tonic they offer another swig of the patent medicine that has been costly without being curative. They do not know, or do not care to know, that the debtor South, already ravaged by its creditors, cannot, out of its limited substance, pay for modern improvements and at the same time maintain its creditors in luxury...
Once they recognized the historical and theoretical significance of the region and of the power of the folk-regional society in "modern culture," it was inevitable that their studies would bring them face to face with the South's historic difficulty...By a devious, perhaps an unnecessarily arduous, route they have arrived upon the ground where John C. Calhoun began to do some hard thinking about a century ago...
The South, because of its regional differentiations, some of which are certainly valuable, is at a disadvantage, and so long as political and economic power dwells where it long has dwelt, it will continue to be at a disadvantage...
Regional differentiations are among the principal causes...of disadvantage. But if you are an abstract nationalist, or, as folks long ago used to say, a leveller, you are certain to miss the point. If you look at New York and then look at Georgia, and see that the former is more or less orderly and shipshape after a modern manner, and that the latter is disorderly and shabby, after a strange mixture of modern and ancient manners, you will never be able to conclude, unless you are a regionalist, that the disorderliness of Georgia is anything but a quaint or an annoying exhibition of depravity...
Southern states rated lowest in all those indices - such as schools and libraries - which connoted "civilization"; and highest in those - such as homicides and malaria which connoted "barbarism."
Nobody added up the figures and asked whether the remarkable surplus of libraries in the Northeast could possibly have anything to do with the lack of them in the Southeast - Nobody wondered whether a certain kind of valid cultural preference might be tied up with the economic unbalance: the kind of preference that would make a Georgia cracker want to spend an extra quarter on ammunition to shoot squirrels rather than on a copy of The New Yorker...
The regional grip is the right one, and the only right one, for the sociological Proteus. Held in that that grip, Proteus ceases to bewilder and begins to say what is to be done in this or that agitated corner. And then one can also think, or begin to think, about that unholy mess of regions which is the world...
Mr. Odum is certain that the Southern culture, far from being "decadent," is in reality to be called "immature." It has enormous vitality, even in those attitudes which sociologists call survivals: its ways of humor, its stubborn bantering threats to outsiders," and various "defense mechanisms."
The issue is not really bringing the South "up" to modern standards, but of making modern standards worth accepting by the South.
"I am not undertaking to answer the charge that I am ignorant. It is true. I am an ignorant man. I have had no college education. But the thing that takes me far in politics is that I do not have to color what comes into my mind and into my heart. I say it unvarnished. I say it without veneer. I have not the learning to do otherwise, and therefore my ignorance is often not detected. I know the hearts of the people because I have not colored my own. I know when I am right in my own conscience. I do not talk one way in the cloakroom and another way out here. I do not talk one way back there in the hills of Louisiania and another way here in the Senate. I have one language. Ignorant as it is, it is the universal language within the sphere in which I operate. Its simplicity gains pardon for my lack of letters and education." - Henry Clay
The problem:
1) securing united action in the South
2) securing something like national awareness of the Southern dilemma
How can the South be awakened to such action?
How can the nation be made to understand that blood transfusion must now replace the blood sucking of the last seventy years?
Only one force has ever drawn the Southern states together for a vast concerted effort, and that is the lusty force of strong sectional feeling.
Without realizing what he is doing, the average Southerner in practice separates his private folkways from his public opinions and actions. For himself as an individual he is responsible; for what goes on in the greater world he is not responsible. After long years of subjection he has learned to take social programs as he takes the weather. They generally come from far away, he is not responsible for them, he will do nothing about them until it becomes necessary to vote down a child labor amendment or check a racial equality movement. He is oriental in his tolerance of social movements originating elsewhere, until they begin to intrude upon his English-Scotch notion of private and clan responsibility...
The South must either play sectional politics, or it must still be a dependent, hoping to receive a bounty on terms that will not be too disagreeable or humiliating...In a like dilemma, Calhoun reluctantly proposed Southern Independence.
Snake Oil Medicine 3: Tracers
Thelucian is an optical media wizard who is composed of light rays. His story is difficult to track because he himself is so elusive and mercurial. He falls into the new category of persons known as tracers who were recognized since the explosion of multiple worlds, a generation after the digital revolution. The explosion marked the opening of the Electromagnetic Frontier. The emf , up until that time, was believed to be something between a nebulous energy field, a spectrum of light, and the rumored hallucination of lunatics, mystics, and dreamers. No one had any idea that it was the source of all energy and motion, that light was really the core substance of imagination, and that every brain had an access plug-in enabling cosmic travel, with no wires attached.
These strange persons who appeared during this breakthrough are referred to as Tracers. In another age, they were called genii, demons, or angels. The unique characteristic of the Tracer is, strangely enough, the fundamental question of their actual existence. They inhabit a sort of middle plane between fact and fiction. They are usually glimpsed during strange broadcast interruptions on televisions and computers or as light traces when traveling along the emf. It is important to understand that cyberspace is not the emf, it is merely the best approximate reflection.
Initially, the only way tracers emerge from behind a screen interface is when they appear in dreams of people who have been “tracing” the legend of their actions. Here the tracing becomes more complicated. Somehow the tracer is able to capture the light of a dream and incorporate the material into his actual person. They can actually capture a person’s dream sequence just like a moviemaker films the world. The tracer films the dream world. They are at the cutting edge of a new discipline known as machinima. This process enables them to slightly manifest in the actual world of the dreamer who dreamed him. Their natures vary from the mischievous to the benevolent to the absolutely wicked.
Thelucian is mischievous. He is part magician, alchemist, scientist, and filmmaker. He has been reported in the dreams of millions of humans. In another age he was known as Hermes or Mercury, Greek and Roman names for the god of communication and travel. He is always the close companion of philosopher kings, artists, and wise men.
It seems that the more popular the tracer becomes the more substantial is his body. It is rumored that Thelucian is now able to actually reside on earth somewhere, though as a hermit living at a very high altitude and far away from the world of horrors. He has the uncanny ability to transport between multiple dimensions at high speeds and he has begun teaching some of his most daring dreamers this arcane art. Thelucian accomplishes his dreamwork through a lens that connects to a camera built into the left side of his brain. The lens is interchangeable. He carries with him dozens of these all in different shades, which translate the light that enters through the camera into various types of emotional digital information which can then be processed for travel along the emf.
He is a guide but a very hard one to trust. Sometimes he leads a dreamer into vastly chaotic realms and with no notice will disappear, failing to give proper instructions on how to disentangle oneself from the labyrinth. It is believed that this is his “weeding out” process by which he discovers who the most daring explorers are. These are the dreamers who can realize possibilities even in the bleakest of circumstance. He likes those the best.
Snake Oil Medicine 2: New Age Liquid Dispenser
Aquarius is a self-conscious nuclear robot. It is rumored that he is the invention of the optical media wizard, Thelucian. He is a physical manifestation of the ancient symbol of the zodiac, Aquarius, whose influence now rules this age. Aquarius is built out of the concept that consciousness can be distilled into highly volatile liquids, which can then be changed into various forms of energy. His work centers around absorbing information that he receives from the Electromagnetic Frontier (emf). He then refines that information into a life-sustaining elixir that circulates through his entire body eventually to be dispensed through an output hose at the end of his left arm. He can use this dispenser in a positive or negative manner by energizing those around him or disintegrating them with various acids, poisons, lasers or distilled bullets.
His body is constructed from a number of spheres at key joints, vital organs, or intersections. It is in these various reservoirs that the information fluids circulate. Aquarius has the ability to divert the flow of information into various particular channels resulting in strange and unforeseen mixtures and results. At the end of his right arm is a master key contraption that operates from a digital code breaking mechanism in his brain, capable of unlocking any door in the entire multiverse. These keys can also be plugged into his own joints unleashing the chambers and valves in his system and mixing the fluids.
His character is a reflection of the zodiac symbol Aquarius. He is eager to learn, though a bit inclined towards daydreaming. He is a robot full of ideas who loves to catalogue philosophical data. His special task and destiny is to bring the necessary moisture back to desert regions once lush that have been bereft of life through human negligence or violent conflict. He can only do this by absorbing as much information as he can and then returning it to interact with the world in an ideal manner. He is also a vigilante warrior who is capable of fending for himself and others in need.
One of his big problems is decision-making. Because he sees so clearly through to the essence behind all information, he sees the validity of every possibility and is thus torn in every direction. In the end, his decisions depend upon the various levels and types of information he has within him or is receiving at the moment. This is why he is dangerous. He is too sensitive. It is believed, however that he is really kept in check by some sort of remote control or by a programming code that has limited his sphere of action.
He is currently working within Uncle Sam’s Amusement Park, a gigantic corporate circus environment that stretches across what once was the United States of America. Uncle Sam’s Amusement Park is a labyrinth of intricate rides, virtual enviroments, and museums of antiquated marvels of nature and civilization for the young at heart. This Amusement Park has become a way of life for the entire continent. For the most part, all of the events are tightly controlled but there are rumors that offending parties are intentionally put in the way of danger.
At this point in the story, Aquarius quietly vends liquid potions from a booth just outside of the French Quarter in old New Orleans. Most of his customers are weary tourists who are making their way through vistas looking for a glimpse of the old South.
He is biding his time. The fulfillment of an ancient prophecy is at hand….
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Attack on Leviathan IV - Regionalism and Nationalism in American Literature
They enjoy a strategic advantage in that they have the means of conveying the impression that they themselves stand for what is forward-looking and alive; and they are content that the soft word regional should come to represent what the opposite party stood for: something, they would like to think, harmless and insignificant enough.
What are the conditions under which American literature can achieve its full maturity?
Regionalism is a name for a condition under which the national American literature exists as a literature: that is, its constant tendency to decentralize rather than to centralize; or to correct overcentralization by conscious decentralization. Or it describes the conditions and attitudes under which it is possible for literature to be a normal artistic outgrowth of the life of a region.
Good regional literature needs only the immediate, organic sense of life in which a fine artist works.
No other great literature has ever enjoyed the prospect open to us, of an almost indefinite enrichment from provincial sources that are not, in the usual sense of the word, provincial at all, for our provinces are more like nations than provinces. To use the opportunity well, we have need of a kind of Federal principle in our national criticism; and we ought to be suspicious of any contrary principle which would lay upon us the obligation to imitate the decadent stages of the kind of national literature we have never had.
The domestic problem is, not how shall we achieve a unity that may be spurious and deceptive, but how shall we secure the artistic and cultural equilibrium that will give free play to our divine regional geniuses.
They urge the provinces to adopt the intellectual sophistication of the Eastern metropolis, but among themselves they bewail the poverty of the modern temper, which in its sophistication has left them nothing to enjoy...
The danger is, however, that the regionalist, in attempting through folklore to express the genius of place, will be content merely to dwell among the artifacts he has dug up, and will thus narrow his expression almost to documentary limits.
Regionalists should be warned against retiring into folklore as into an ivory tower...only one feature of a regional literature.
And the modernist critics are right in their claim that modern issues cannot be evaded. The writer of a given region cannot shut himself away under the name, regionalist, but he must, from his region, confront the total and moving world.
Regionalism is not an end in itself, not a literary affectation, not an aesthetic credo, but a condition of literary realization. The function of a region is to endow the American artist with character and purpose. He is born of a region. He will deny its parenthood to his own hurt. Without its background he is a homeless exile in the wilderness of modern life. That self which he is, if not ignobly impugned, will readily be a modern self; and what he creates, if he can resist the perversion of our time, will be both the expression of the region and himself, no matter what the subject or what the style. It is the office of the nation to conserve and cherish this free effort, and surely never by precept or example to delude us into thinking that a novel about a ploughboy is only a regional curiosity, but a novel about a bellboy, a national masterpiece.
-Donald Davidson
What are the conditions under which American literature can achieve its full maturity?
Regionalism is a name for a condition under which the national American literature exists as a literature: that is, its constant tendency to decentralize rather than to centralize; or to correct overcentralization by conscious decentralization. Or it describes the conditions and attitudes under which it is possible for literature to be a normal artistic outgrowth of the life of a region.
Good regional literature needs only the immediate, organic sense of life in which a fine artist works.
No other great literature has ever enjoyed the prospect open to us, of an almost indefinite enrichment from provincial sources that are not, in the usual sense of the word, provincial at all, for our provinces are more like nations than provinces. To use the opportunity well, we have need of a kind of Federal principle in our national criticism; and we ought to be suspicious of any contrary principle which would lay upon us the obligation to imitate the decadent stages of the kind of national literature we have never had.
The domestic problem is, not how shall we achieve a unity that may be spurious and deceptive, but how shall we secure the artistic and cultural equilibrium that will give free play to our divine regional geniuses.
They urge the provinces to adopt the intellectual sophistication of the Eastern metropolis, but among themselves they bewail the poverty of the modern temper, which in its sophistication has left them nothing to enjoy...
The danger is, however, that the regionalist, in attempting through folklore to express the genius of place, will be content merely to dwell among the artifacts he has dug up, and will thus narrow his expression almost to documentary limits.
Regionalists should be warned against retiring into folklore as into an ivory tower...only one feature of a regional literature.
And the modernist critics are right in their claim that modern issues cannot be evaded. The writer of a given region cannot shut himself away under the name, regionalist, but he must, from his region, confront the total and moving world.
Regionalism is not an end in itself, not a literary affectation, not an aesthetic credo, but a condition of literary realization. The function of a region is to endow the American artist with character and purpose. He is born of a region. He will deny its parenthood to his own hurt. Without its background he is a homeless exile in the wilderness of modern life. That self which he is, if not ignobly impugned, will readily be a modern self; and what he creates, if he can resist the perversion of our time, will be both the expression of the region and himself, no matter what the subject or what the style. It is the office of the nation to conserve and cherish this free effort, and surely never by precept or example to delude us into thinking that a novel about a ploughboy is only a regional curiosity, but a novel about a bellboy, a national masterpiece.
-Donald Davidson
ORATOR
Power, stripped of all its associations, is energy. In human terms, the discipline which purports to study power and its circulation, is Politics. The phenomenon of conflict, debate, rhetoric, compromise, and war all fall under the sphere of Politics. Politics signifies the dynamic permutation of human energy. The greatest dilemma that has ever faced societies is the enlightened distribution of power through an effective organism and/or government. Throughout history, there have been many different experiments and models. Some have succeeded better than others. Often, timely advice was ignored and an appeal to force was made. Many men, winners and losers, wise and foolish, have deposited the record of their thoughts, theories, speeches etc within huge dusty tomes. For all practical purposes, they are lost to the audiovisual generations on the horizon. ORATOR is an attempt to resurrect the commentary on Politics throughout the ages. Players will try to prevent power from becoming Absolute and in doing so will learn about the intricate mechanisms that have undergirded civilized societies and the men that made them possible.
At the center of the political process is the ORATOR, the man who speaks to and for his people. He may be part statesman, part professor, part entrepreneur, part demagogue, part guru. Above all, he is a mediator. His mediation is fundamental and primary to the game. Attitudes about this relationship are also important. Players adopt an avatar and proceed to a variety of environments to engage with their opponents over proposed subjects for debate. They may study, in private, by watching the speaker deliver a speech or a portion of significant political philosophy. When debating, they will be able to sort through a database or index of ideas representative of the orator they are playing. They may use his words or their own but are warned against making contradictory arguments. The goal is to become the Philosopher-King, the enlightened ruler.
There is an element of puppetry involved with ORATOR. The Avatar/Orator is a mask with a voice and a certain sense of things. Theoretically, the puppets would have certain bodily postures that were unique to that person. Their words, unless reciting a certain speech or philosophic discourse would be fed through a keyboard or even a microphone.
There is also the background. For instance, one could meet in the old US Senate Chamber, the Roman Forum, or the British Parliamentary Chamber.
ORATOR is a virtual forum where the focus is on the interplay of ideas. This is a war of ideas. Games present us with an artificial laboratory. They contain elements that are immersive and magnetic. The potential for drawing people into the sweep of a particular moment in human history or in presenting clearly, abstract concepts that have been personified, offers an artistic amplification hitherto untouched by even the most sublime formats to date.
At the center of the political process is the ORATOR, the man who speaks to and for his people. He may be part statesman, part professor, part entrepreneur, part demagogue, part guru. Above all, he is a mediator. His mediation is fundamental and primary to the game. Attitudes about this relationship are also important. Players adopt an avatar and proceed to a variety of environments to engage with their opponents over proposed subjects for debate. They may study, in private, by watching the speaker deliver a speech or a portion of significant political philosophy. When debating, they will be able to sort through a database or index of ideas representative of the orator they are playing. They may use his words or their own but are warned against making contradictory arguments. The goal is to become the Philosopher-King, the enlightened ruler.
There is an element of puppetry involved with ORATOR. The Avatar/Orator is a mask with a voice and a certain sense of things. Theoretically, the puppets would have certain bodily postures that were unique to that person. Their words, unless reciting a certain speech or philosophic discourse would be fed through a keyboard or even a microphone.
There is also the background. For instance, one could meet in the old US Senate Chamber, the Roman Forum, or the British Parliamentary Chamber.
ORATOR is a virtual forum where the focus is on the interplay of ideas. This is a war of ideas. Games present us with an artificial laboratory. They contain elements that are immersive and magnetic. The potential for drawing people into the sweep of a particular moment in human history or in presenting clearly, abstract concepts that have been personified, offers an artistic amplification hitherto untouched by even the most sublime formats to date.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Attack on Leviathan III - American Heroes
The machinery of the heroic legend is all there, for poets and orators to use, but our approach to it is often hesitating and embarrassed; or else, in the old way of Americans, we hide our lack of self-confidence in bluster, and are entirely too positive.
Men have never found it easy to agree within the rational plane, and Americans will never be at peace with their heroes if they have the additional perplexity of being forced to choose between ideas and emotions, with no privilege of combinations allowed.
Heroes without glory / God without thunder - the debunking biography assures us that the noble severity of George Washington's countenance ought to be attributed to his discomfort in wearing false teeth.
Evidently Mr. Hendrick is a devout believer in the Lincoln myth, which for him is sublimated into a national myth. Involuntarily, quite without realizing what he is doing, he recognizes the power and dignity of the hostile Southern myth, and he would dispose of it by absorbing it and declining to treat it as hostile. In so doing he ceases to write history; he becomes a myth maker. The action is very instructive. For while Mr. Hendrick has earlier as a thorough Modernist in his attitude toward myth, he would exempt his own myth, and be strongly Fundamentalist toward it. It is as if a Mohammedan should argue against the deity of Jesus on the ground that the Virgin Birth is a logically untenable and "antiquarian" idea, and then turn around and accept Jesus if Christians will call him a Moslem.
If now a Southerner- whose mind may also be divided, yet is likely to be less grievously divided than Mr. Hendrick's - should turn this historian's weapons upon him, the argument would run like this. On purely matter-of-fact grounds, what prevents the Lincoln myth from being regarded as also a charming, antiquarian interlude? The Lincoln idea, too, has had to yield to a changed America and may be gone forever. The Union that Lincoln is said to have wanted to reestablish was never really set up. If Lincoln was a supporter, as in a dim way he may have been, of the Jeffersonian notion of a body of free and self-reliant farmers as the bulwark of the nation, then why did he fight the South? Lincoln made war upon his own idea, and the fruit of his victory, represented in sprawling, confused, industrial America, is a more pitiful sight than the desolate Lee plantations, for it is hardly even a noble ruin. However effective it may have been as a war measure, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was an inept bit of civil statesmanship...
By letting himself be used as the idealistic front for the material designs of the North, Lincoln not only ruined the South but quite conceivably ruined the North as well; and if Fascism or Communism ever arrives in America, Lincoln will have been a remote but efficient cause of its appearance...
Then with kindling emotion the Southerner might go on, prompted to declare where his own myth is involved and add that nothing could be more ironic, or perhaps more tragic, than to have Arlington made into a "national shrine," or to have the Lincoln memorial "the object mainly in view" from the porch where Robert E. Lee once stood. And by what sort of an act, too, did Arlington pass into the hands of the Federal government in the first place?
As the Southerner reflects, his indignation is likely to rise to a point where he cannot with any comfort visit the old mansion of Arlington. In no case will he be likely to agree that the beautiful new bridge joins Lee and Lincoln in "spiritual" union. He may possibly consider the near presence of the Lincoln Memorial an affront which must be tolerated but cannot be enjoyed. To the sons of Confederates it is a reminder of tragedy, not an emblem of exaltation...
We have progressed or degenerated from a time when a man could be Father of his country to a time when we are the Babies of the State.
Yet it would not be far from the truth to say that the founding fathers, and Jefferson with them, are becoming more and more figures in a book, understandable enough there, but hardly to be conceived as appearing like a Theseus to aid us against the Persians of some national crisis.
Andrew Jackson represents the Western idea of the American national tradition, which is "to be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell."
The East laughs at the Andrew Jacksons of the West, patronizes or snubs them, and, if they grow powerful, it raises the cry of "demagogue"...The West retaliates by a complete insensitivity to the leadership of the Adams family.
But Sherman will not soon be memorialized in Georgia. The proposal that his route to the sea be indicated by markers was scornfully rejected by the Deep South.
To be an American hero, a man must be a sectional hero; but no true sectional hero can be a true, or complete, national hero.
Theoretically, the only kind of really national hero we can have ought to be a hero who embodies the Federal conception. But that sphere is too abstract for a hero to thrive in it. Heroics there are dangerous to the principle of equilibrium which is vital to the American conception of the nation. The Federal sphere will accommodate the statesman, but not the hero, in the epical and tremendous sense...
On the other hand, the sections, which embody culturally related groups of states and have approximate unity of feeling, are the true home of the particular and definite characteristics out of which arises the grand type, the hero. The sections, and within them the localities, are the true mothers of heroes, and our problem is how to venerate our heroes without disturbing the national equilibrium.
But if the heroes are dead and thus about to enter the realm of myth, we may witness a curious sort of adjustment. The Northerner may attempt to annex the Southern hero, by distilling out of him most of his sectional essence.
The biggest danger is for the sectionalist who denies his own myth and takes up the myth of another section.
It is hard to contemplate with any great respect a surrender of native myth when it has the flavor of being done in bald accordance with self-interest only. If a Southerner who is not of Unionist and Republican antecedents whole-heartedly adopts the Northern myth of Lincoln, he is naturally suspected of having an axe to grind, and generally he does. He is likely to be a "progressive" Southerner, out for all the national improvement of the Northern model that he can secure.
In the field of myth, where regard ceases to be Platonic and becomes really warm, the heroes turn out to be sectional, and their sectional particularity is too recognizable for them to be taken over where they are not understood and do not belong.
On what terms, then, do we have our American heroes? Let the crystal gazer who can peer into the hidden unity of American character give a simple answer if he dare. To those who are not crystal-gazers, a complex and guarded answer seems wise. Let us beware how we nationalize the sectional hero or sectionalize the national hero. If we are to have any national heroes at all, they are best let alone in the entirely secular sphere, where, when admired, they will secure a Platonic admiration suitable to the highly abstract device by which the nation was originally put together. And the sacred sphere, where passionate devotion has a right to reign, not too closely queried by the cold instruments of pure history, is reserved for the sectional heroes in whose images we know our better, our wished for selves. We govern best in the first sphere; but we best build shrines in the second.
-Donald Davidson
Men have never found it easy to agree within the rational plane, and Americans will never be at peace with their heroes if they have the additional perplexity of being forced to choose between ideas and emotions, with no privilege of combinations allowed.
Heroes without glory / God without thunder - the debunking biography assures us that the noble severity of George Washington's countenance ought to be attributed to his discomfort in wearing false teeth.
Evidently Mr. Hendrick is a devout believer in the Lincoln myth, which for him is sublimated into a national myth. Involuntarily, quite without realizing what he is doing, he recognizes the power and dignity of the hostile Southern myth, and he would dispose of it by absorbing it and declining to treat it as hostile. In so doing he ceases to write history; he becomes a myth maker. The action is very instructive. For while Mr. Hendrick has earlier as a thorough Modernist in his attitude toward myth, he would exempt his own myth, and be strongly Fundamentalist toward it. It is as if a Mohammedan should argue against the deity of Jesus on the ground that the Virgin Birth is a logically untenable and "antiquarian" idea, and then turn around and accept Jesus if Christians will call him a Moslem.
If now a Southerner- whose mind may also be divided, yet is likely to be less grievously divided than Mr. Hendrick's - should turn this historian's weapons upon him, the argument would run like this. On purely matter-of-fact grounds, what prevents the Lincoln myth from being regarded as also a charming, antiquarian interlude? The Lincoln idea, too, has had to yield to a changed America and may be gone forever. The Union that Lincoln is said to have wanted to reestablish was never really set up. If Lincoln was a supporter, as in a dim way he may have been, of the Jeffersonian notion of a body of free and self-reliant farmers as the bulwark of the nation, then why did he fight the South? Lincoln made war upon his own idea, and the fruit of his victory, represented in sprawling, confused, industrial America, is a more pitiful sight than the desolate Lee plantations, for it is hardly even a noble ruin. However effective it may have been as a war measure, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was an inept bit of civil statesmanship...
By letting himself be used as the idealistic front for the material designs of the North, Lincoln not only ruined the South but quite conceivably ruined the North as well; and if Fascism or Communism ever arrives in America, Lincoln will have been a remote but efficient cause of its appearance...
Then with kindling emotion the Southerner might go on, prompted to declare where his own myth is involved and add that nothing could be more ironic, or perhaps more tragic, than to have Arlington made into a "national shrine," or to have the Lincoln memorial "the object mainly in view" from the porch where Robert E. Lee once stood. And by what sort of an act, too, did Arlington pass into the hands of the Federal government in the first place?
As the Southerner reflects, his indignation is likely to rise to a point where he cannot with any comfort visit the old mansion of Arlington. In no case will he be likely to agree that the beautiful new bridge joins Lee and Lincoln in "spiritual" union. He may possibly consider the near presence of the Lincoln Memorial an affront which must be tolerated but cannot be enjoyed. To the sons of Confederates it is a reminder of tragedy, not an emblem of exaltation...
We have progressed or degenerated from a time when a man could be Father of his country to a time when we are the Babies of the State.
Yet it would not be far from the truth to say that the founding fathers, and Jefferson with them, are becoming more and more figures in a book, understandable enough there, but hardly to be conceived as appearing like a Theseus to aid us against the Persians of some national crisis.
Andrew Jackson represents the Western idea of the American national tradition, which is "to be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell."
The East laughs at the Andrew Jacksons of the West, patronizes or snubs them, and, if they grow powerful, it raises the cry of "demagogue"...The West retaliates by a complete insensitivity to the leadership of the Adams family.
But Sherman will not soon be memorialized in Georgia. The proposal that his route to the sea be indicated by markers was scornfully rejected by the Deep South.
To be an American hero, a man must be a sectional hero; but no true sectional hero can be a true, or complete, national hero.
Theoretically, the only kind of really national hero we can have ought to be a hero who embodies the Federal conception. But that sphere is too abstract for a hero to thrive in it. Heroics there are dangerous to the principle of equilibrium which is vital to the American conception of the nation. The Federal sphere will accommodate the statesman, but not the hero, in the epical and tremendous sense...
On the other hand, the sections, which embody culturally related groups of states and have approximate unity of feeling, are the true home of the particular and definite characteristics out of which arises the grand type, the hero. The sections, and within them the localities, are the true mothers of heroes, and our problem is how to venerate our heroes without disturbing the national equilibrium.
But if the heroes are dead and thus about to enter the realm of myth, we may witness a curious sort of adjustment. The Northerner may attempt to annex the Southern hero, by distilling out of him most of his sectional essence.
The biggest danger is for the sectionalist who denies his own myth and takes up the myth of another section.
It is hard to contemplate with any great respect a surrender of native myth when it has the flavor of being done in bald accordance with self-interest only. If a Southerner who is not of Unionist and Republican antecedents whole-heartedly adopts the Northern myth of Lincoln, he is naturally suspected of having an axe to grind, and generally he does. He is likely to be a "progressive" Southerner, out for all the national improvement of the Northern model that he can secure.
In the field of myth, where regard ceases to be Platonic and becomes really warm, the heroes turn out to be sectional, and their sectional particularity is too recognizable for them to be taken over where they are not understood and do not belong.
On what terms, then, do we have our American heroes? Let the crystal gazer who can peer into the hidden unity of American character give a simple answer if he dare. To those who are not crystal-gazers, a complex and guarded answer seems wise. Let us beware how we nationalize the sectional hero or sectionalize the national hero. If we are to have any national heroes at all, they are best let alone in the entirely secular sphere, where, when admired, they will secure a Platonic admiration suitable to the highly abstract device by which the nation was originally put together. And the sacred sphere, where passionate devotion has a right to reign, not too closely queried by the cold instruments of pure history, is reserved for the sectional heroes in whose images we know our better, our wished for selves. We govern best in the first sphere; but we best build shrines in the second.
-Donald Davidson
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