Upon rereading--or rather reading around in--The Pound Era, by Hugh Kenner, I realize that I've gotten some important matters wrong. Prufrock was written in 1911, before Preludes, and it is not written in free-verse but in a sort of loosely flowing iambic pentameter. I also failed to make proper use of what I knew but only partly remembered about Eliot's debt to those symbolist poets I referred to, Baudelaird and LaForgue. It is important to get such matters right.
So I was only partly right in what I said about Preludes: that Eliot in this poem is giving the city its own voice. Those symbolist poets had shown Eliot how to disappear as an active feeling, thinking, suffering person or self in the poem; the voice we hear in Prufrock, Preludes and indeed all of Eliot's poetry is almost not the voice of an individual person, with an actual historical life to refer to--or for a critic to discuss as they are doing what critics almost always do: talk about the relationship between a poet's life and his or her poetry, instead of the poetry itself, because it is always so much easier to do the one than the other. Eliot eluded the critics by becoming invisible. But that was not his only reason for doing so.
Eliot was on the cutting edge of an anti-romantic artistic and literary revolution which has now been largely forgotten. He and others wanted to escape from the romantic idea that a poem is about self-expression; that the greater the poet the greater the self, so that to be great poet is to be sort of hero--a hero, as Shelley says, who falls upon the thorns of life and bleeds . . .
James Joyce was part of the anti-romantic avant-garde. Stephen Dedalus is not speaking for Joyce when at the conclusion of Portrait of The Artist As a Young Man, he goes off saying, so very grandly, "I go to forge the conscience of my race in the smithy of my soul."
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Preludes and The Wasteland
The annonymous voice of "Preludes" speaks with god-like compassion, as follows:
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
As I read this poem, the dully animate city itself with its volices and images of passive despair, is the "thing" referred to in these lines.
The images and the compassion are wiped away with a bitter but cynical laugh: what are you getting all teary-eyed about? It's the way of the world, brother: the smart and the tough and the lucky get rich and rightly so; the others end up in furnished rooms contemplating their sordid lives, or gathering fuel in vacant lots.
What might such a poem have been a prelude to? Well, it was followed by "Prufrock"(1915), a dithering and ineffectual esthete, who ends up on the beach wondering who he is and what's it all about. Not a promising subject, you would think. Is this what Eliot thought of the literary culture and his fellow poets in 1915, when a thousand years of European civilization were going up in smoke? But the subject is almost irrelevant: no one had ever written free-verse of such sinuous, stunning intensity before. Who, having read this brilliant monologue by Eliot (and there were more to come), would ever again be satisfied by Browning?
The Wasteland (1920) surprised the hell out of everyone. Nothing in either "Preludes" or "Prufrock" would have led one to expect such a cataclysmic repudiation of modernity. (We now know that Ezra Pound, who had his own gripes about modernity, is responsible for giving the poem its present form, if you could call it that. The war, Pound thought had been fought for nothing, "For a botched civilization... For two gross of broken statues, for a few thousand battered books.")
Eliot's poem is generally thought, mistakenly, to be obscure. At first no doubt many found it so but there is now no way anyone can miss Eliot's point which, interestingly, is the same point that Shakespeare had made four hundred years previously in Troilus and Cressida: no longer nourished by its own moral and spiritual traditions, Western civilization has become a sterile wasteland where nothing new or good can grow, and people die of boredom or expend their energies in frantic but futile efforts to amuse themselves. Joseph de Maistre would have agreed.
And what of the city that the poet had tenderly grieved for in "Preludes"? Here's what the voice of the modern wasteland has to say (echoing Dante's at the gates of Hell):
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his own eyes before his feet.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
As I read this poem, the dully animate city itself with its volices and images of passive despair, is the "thing" referred to in these lines.
The images and the compassion are wiped away with a bitter but cynical laugh: what are you getting all teary-eyed about? It's the way of the world, brother: the smart and the tough and the lucky get rich and rightly so; the others end up in furnished rooms contemplating their sordid lives, or gathering fuel in vacant lots.
What might such a poem have been a prelude to? Well, it was followed by "Prufrock"(1915), a dithering and ineffectual esthete, who ends up on the beach wondering who he is and what's it all about. Not a promising subject, you would think. Is this what Eliot thought of the literary culture and his fellow poets in 1915, when a thousand years of European civilization were going up in smoke? But the subject is almost irrelevant: no one had ever written free-verse of such sinuous, stunning intensity before. Who, having read this brilliant monologue by Eliot (and there were more to come), would ever again be satisfied by Browning?
The Wasteland (1920) surprised the hell out of everyone. Nothing in either "Preludes" or "Prufrock" would have led one to expect such a cataclysmic repudiation of modernity. (We now know that Ezra Pound, who had his own gripes about modernity, is responsible for giving the poem its present form, if you could call it that. The war, Pound thought had been fought for nothing, "For a botched civilization... For two gross of broken statues, for a few thousand battered books.")
Eliot's poem is generally thought, mistakenly, to be obscure. At first no doubt many found it so but there is now no way anyone can miss Eliot's point which, interestingly, is the same point that Shakespeare had made four hundred years previously in Troilus and Cressida: no longer nourished by its own moral and spiritual traditions, Western civilization has become a sterile wasteland where nothing new or good can grow, and people die of boredom or expend their energies in frantic but futile efforts to amuse themselves. Joseph de Maistre would have agreed.
And what of the city that the poet had tenderly grieved for in "Preludes"? Here's what the voice of the modern wasteland has to say (echoing Dante's at the gates of Hell):
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his own eyes before his feet.
Friday, March 14, 2008
'Modern', 'Modernist', 'Modernism'--and 'Modernity'
Back in the 20th century, just about any anthology of modern British and American poetry would have included several poems, at least, by T.S. Eliot--whose actual output was remarkably small for an indisputably major poet. "Preludes" would have been among them. Why were these poems modern but not, say, those of Tennyson or Browning or for that matter any other Victorian poet? Why is Matisse modern but not Burne-Jones? Why is Hemingway modern but not Trollop--or Dickens? Or Henry James?
The word 'modern', in those days or decades shortly before or immediately after WW I, conferred upon its literary or artistic or musical (never scientific) objects a certain distinction, an allure, that was and still remains elusive, hard to explain, even controversial. The word clearly meant something more than 'contemporary', but what?
The various revolutions that had been simmering throughout the 19th century all exploded--literally--in the 20th. A lot of artists and writers thought that revolutionary times demanded radical stylistic as well as intellectual changes. All of this is and has always been obvious; the connection between style and content (to put it crudely) is rarely obvious. It's easy to say that Eliot's purposes in "Preludes" require a style that dulls or deadens affect but it is not easy to show how that works--or to justify claims about Eliot's purposes. And when a writer invests his own political or spiritual aspirations in his work--as Eliot notoriously does--literary criticism begins to make severe demands of the critic.
Allow me to hazard a generalization here: 20th century writers and artists who were or became self-consciously modern are modernists; modernism is what you get when modernists are reacting to modernity.
[Thomas Banks remarks: One thought on the tag "Modernist-" it's a desceptively fluid label, to be sure; I was reading Montaigne the other night and he refers to Bocaccio, Froisart and others who preceded him by a couple of hundred years as "Moderns." Ergo, he conceived of himself as being "Postmodern."
To which I reply: 'modern' in the 16th c. generally meant post-medieval. But when Rosalind in As You Like It uses the word, it seems to mean 'modish.']
And what about 'post-modernism'? That's what you call yourself when you longer know or care anything about modernism but suspect that it was a movement dominated by white, conservative, or reactonary males (which is partly true) and you know you don't want to have anything to do with THAT, but you've got to call yourself something that shows you've got a grip on history.
The word 'modern', in those days or decades shortly before or immediately after WW I, conferred upon its literary or artistic or musical (never scientific) objects a certain distinction, an allure, that was and still remains elusive, hard to explain, even controversial. The word clearly meant something more than 'contemporary', but what?
The various revolutions that had been simmering throughout the 19th century all exploded--literally--in the 20th. A lot of artists and writers thought that revolutionary times demanded radical stylistic as well as intellectual changes. All of this is and has always been obvious; the connection between style and content (to put it crudely) is rarely obvious. It's easy to say that Eliot's purposes in "Preludes" require a style that dulls or deadens affect but it is not easy to show how that works--or to justify claims about Eliot's purposes. And when a writer invests his own political or spiritual aspirations in his work--as Eliot notoriously does--literary criticism begins to make severe demands of the critic.
Allow me to hazard a generalization here: 20th century writers and artists who were or became self-consciously modern are modernists; modernism is what you get when modernists are reacting to modernity.
[Thomas Banks remarks: One thought on the tag "Modernist-" it's a desceptively fluid label, to be sure; I was reading Montaigne the other night and he refers to Bocaccio, Froisart and others who preceded him by a couple of hundred years as "Moderns." Ergo, he conceived of himself as being "Postmodern."
To which I reply: 'modern' in the 16th c. generally meant post-medieval. But when Rosalind in As You Like It uses the word, it seems to mean 'modish.']
And what about 'post-modernism'? That's what you call yourself when you longer know or care anything about modernism but suspect that it was a movement dominated by white, conservative, or reactonary males (which is partly true) and you know you don't want to have anything to do with THAT, but you've got to call yourself something that shows you've got a grip on history.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Savage Torpor
Wordsworth's remarks about the effects of city-life are, so far as I know (a phrase I find myself using more and more frequently), unprecedented. I'm pretty sure that no one before him had ever claimed that "savage torpor" is a characteristic malaise of cities. As times goes on, however, and the pace of technological and economic innovation picks up, the modern city becomes increasingly problematical--especially it would seem for literary intellectuals. The brilliantly modernistic innovations of T.S. Eliot's poem, The Wasteland may obscure the fact that the intellectual and literary tradition of which it is a part was more than a 100 years old when it was written. No one before Eliot, though, had managed to capture in poetry the sound, sense and tone of 'savage torpor' before Eliot pulled it off in one of his earliest poems, Preludes. Here is how it begins:
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
And showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And so on. You get the idea, perhaps. Should you care to read the rest of the poem (it is not very long), you can easily find it in, say, The Norton Anthology
Lao Qiao said...
Thanks, Piers, for introducing me to Eliot's "Preludes." which does indeed describe a world of savage torpor, a beautiful expression. My own experience of the city, however, is not one of "dingy shades" or "broken blinds and chimney pots" and certainly not of "ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots." Instead of "savage torpor" I feel a world of distant cooperation, of sympathetic discourtesy, of casual creativity.
I reply: Compare "Preludes" (musical, like Chopin's) to Ww's "Westminster Bridge" sonnet:
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
(In other words, the city is most beautiful when the city is being least like a city.) Eliot's poem systematically dulls itself down, deadening all affect (a technique he learned from Baudelaire and Laforgue but that's another story.) That's what I meant by applying Ww's term "torpor" to it. Ww tells us how to feel about the city in his poem; Eliot lets the city in all its poor, dull, torpid, speechless misery speak for itself--at least in the first of these preludes. (This a kind of poetry that did not exist in 1800 and which I doubt that Ww or any other poet of his time could have imagined.) As the city wakes up, he speaks to it or for it in a very indirect way. That 'you' could be and does refer to any inhabitant of those "furnished rooms." "He" could be any more conscious sufferer. When finally the poet speaks (possibly) for himself, he is answered instantly by a voice (possibly his own) much more hardened and innured to poverty who laughs and says that poverty is so much a part of the structure of reality, so universal, that even the worlds revolve like old women gathering fuel in vacant lots.
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
And showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And so on. You get the idea, perhaps. Should you care to read the rest of the poem (it is not very long), you can easily find it in, say, The Norton Anthology
Lao Qiao said...
Thanks, Piers, for introducing me to Eliot's "Preludes." which does indeed describe a world of savage torpor, a beautiful expression. My own experience of the city, however, is not one of "dingy shades" or "broken blinds and chimney pots" and certainly not of "ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots." Instead of "savage torpor" I feel a world of distant cooperation, of sympathetic discourtesy, of casual creativity.
I reply: Compare "Preludes" (musical, like Chopin's) to Ww's "Westminster Bridge" sonnet:
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
(In other words, the city is most beautiful when the city is being least like a city.) Eliot's poem systematically dulls itself down, deadening all affect (a technique he learned from Baudelaire and Laforgue but that's another story.) That's what I meant by applying Ww's term "torpor" to it. Ww tells us how to feel about the city in his poem; Eliot lets the city in all its poor, dull, torpid, speechless misery speak for itself--at least in the first of these preludes. (This a kind of poetry that did not exist in 1800 and which I doubt that Ww or any other poet of his time could have imagined.) As the city wakes up, he speaks to it or for it in a very indirect way. That 'you' could be and does refer to any inhabitant of those "furnished rooms." "He" could be any more conscious sufferer. When finally the poet speaks (possibly) for himself, he is answered instantly by a voice (possibly his own) much more hardened and innured to poverty who laughs and says that poverty is so much a part of the structure of reality, so universal, that even the worlds revolve like old women gathering fuel in vacant lots.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
'Wild' Nature and The Human Mind
The words "wild" and "rank" work together in Burke's phrase, "growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind," to create an idea of the mind as a force of nature, spontaneously generating all manner of life-forms in wild, lush, rough, coarse and indiscriminate profusion. The past is not a garden but a jungle. A statesman, as he amply demonstrates, must also be a historian hacking a path through the tangled mass of historical records and conflicting stories, in order to find a usable path from the past to the present.
Burke was not the only thinker at the end of the 18th century who was thinking new thoughts about the powers of the human mind. There was Kant for instance, who,"shocked out of his dogmatic slumbers" by Hume's reduction of Reason to reasoning, turned the mind into the only creative force in the universe: whatever order we find in it could only have been created by our own minds.
Kant I leave to the philosophers, with the observation that the motives that drove Kant to write the Critique of Pure Reason are relevant to the way we understand that extraordinarily difficult book--just as Burke's motives are relevant to the way we understand his metaphor for the workings of the human mind; both writers have a polemical purpose.
Consider now the following quotations. First, some lines from Wordsworth's poem, "Tintern Abbey" (1798):
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Second, some lines from Wordsworth's "Preface" to the second edition (1800) of his Lyrical Ballads:
For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulents; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavor to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication intelligence hourly gratifies.
There's nothing wild or rank about nature for Wordsworth. I remember being impressed by the absence of mosquitos when I visited Wordsworthland (the Lake Country) many years ago. Not only are there no mosquitos in Wordsworth's poems, there are no varmints or predators. Nature, as we can see in the lines I've quoted from "Tintern Abbey," is a pantheistic spiritual presence that is always with him; it is the benign deity that eases the burden of this "unintelligible world" when from time to time he is forced to live in the cites that he hates; it is the muse that makes it possible for him as a poet to do for others what that deity does for him: reverse the numbing, coarsening effects of city-life and popular culture. This makes Wordsworth the first modern poet. No other poet before him, so far as I know, had thought of his mission in these terms.
By the way, Wordsworth was--at first-- very unthusiastic about the Revolution in France; The Terror, and Burke's Reflections changed his mind.
Burke was not the only thinker at the end of the 18th century who was thinking new thoughts about the powers of the human mind. There was Kant for instance, who,"shocked out of his dogmatic slumbers" by Hume's reduction of Reason to reasoning, turned the mind into the only creative force in the universe: whatever order we find in it could only have been created by our own minds.
Kant I leave to the philosophers, with the observation that the motives that drove Kant to write the Critique of Pure Reason are relevant to the way we understand that extraordinarily difficult book--just as Burke's motives are relevant to the way we understand his metaphor for the workings of the human mind; both writers have a polemical purpose.
Consider now the following quotations. First, some lines from Wordsworth's poem, "Tintern Abbey" (1798):
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Second, some lines from Wordsworth's "Preface" to the second edition (1800) of his Lyrical Ballads:
For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulents; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavor to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication intelligence hourly gratifies.
There's nothing wild or rank about nature for Wordsworth. I remember being impressed by the absence of mosquitos when I visited Wordsworthland (the Lake Country) many years ago. Not only are there no mosquitos in Wordsworth's poems, there are no varmints or predators. Nature, as we can see in the lines I've quoted from "Tintern Abbey," is a pantheistic spiritual presence that is always with him; it is the benign deity that eases the burden of this "unintelligible world" when from time to time he is forced to live in the cites that he hates; it is the muse that makes it possible for him as a poet to do for others what that deity does for him: reverse the numbing, coarsening effects of city-life and popular culture. This makes Wordsworth the first modern poet. No other poet before him, so far as I know, had thought of his mission in these terms.
By the way, Wordsworth was--at first-- very unthusiastic about the Revolution in France; The Terror, and Burke's Reflections changed his mind.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
"Growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind"
This wonderful phrase takes us straight to the heart of Burke's political morality.
If you'll go back to that long quotation from Burke, in my last posting, you'll see what he's talking about: the vast array of monastic institutions, with real estate and clergy, that France had inherited from the so-called middle-ages. By the late 18th century, these institutions, along with the feudal social structures and politics that supported them, oh yes and religious beliefs too, had become, shall we say, 'obsolete'-- a word that could only have come into use with modernity. The Revolution was, in large part, a rebellion against the ancient feudal world with its hierarchies, ranks, privileges, beliefs--the whole thing to be swept away, root and branch, including Christianity and the Church. No half-measures. So, at one fell swoop, the revolutionaries confiscated all the Church real estate and sold it on the open market, the proceeds going to pay off the national debt AND provide backing for the new national (paper) currency call the "Assignat." This was, of course, a hare-brained scheme and as Burke predicted, created pure financial chaos.
O.k. What Burke was objecting to was not, simply, the economic stupidity of this 'reform' nor (like Maistre)) did he object on religious grounds; Burke's objection are more like those of an ecologist today who is forced to watch, appalled, as the vast botanical and zoological resources of the Amazon river basin (for instance) are squandered to make room for soy-beans and beef-cattle. Human institutions are human inventions,"the rank productive force of the human mind,"
growing naturally in rank profusion in the soil of human cultures. The grow, they evolve 'organically,' like plants or mushrooms, fertilized by history. Designed for one purpose, they take on others. Or they become obsolete. But there they are, a resource or 'power', to be used by intelligent, imaginative statesmanship. There are all sorts of useful purposes that the monastic institutions of France could have been put to. Once destroyed, these things can never be recreated. What a waste.
Burke is a conservative but in a way that preserves or conserves the connection, often lost, between conservatism and conservation. The question is, to bring this down to the politics of today, two hundred years later, what does it mean to be a conservative now, in the U.S. of A.? Or anywhere else, for that matter.
If you'll go back to that long quotation from Burke, in my last posting, you'll see what he's talking about: the vast array of monastic institutions, with real estate and clergy, that France had inherited from the so-called middle-ages. By the late 18th century, these institutions, along with the feudal social structures and politics that supported them, oh yes and religious beliefs too, had become, shall we say, 'obsolete'-- a word that could only have come into use with modernity. The Revolution was, in large part, a rebellion against the ancient feudal world with its hierarchies, ranks, privileges, beliefs--the whole thing to be swept away, root and branch, including Christianity and the Church. No half-measures. So, at one fell swoop, the revolutionaries confiscated all the Church real estate and sold it on the open market, the proceeds going to pay off the national debt AND provide backing for the new national (paper) currency call the "Assignat." This was, of course, a hare-brained scheme and as Burke predicted, created pure financial chaos.
O.k. What Burke was objecting to was not, simply, the economic stupidity of this 'reform' nor (like Maistre)) did he object on religious grounds; Burke's objection are more like those of an ecologist today who is forced to watch, appalled, as the vast botanical and zoological resources of the Amazon river basin (for instance) are squandered to make room for soy-beans and beef-cattle. Human institutions are human inventions,"the rank productive force of the human mind,"
growing naturally in rank profusion in the soil of human cultures. The grow, they evolve 'organically,' like plants or mushrooms, fertilized by history. Designed for one purpose, they take on others. Or they become obsolete. But there they are, a resource or 'power', to be used by intelligent, imaginative statesmanship. There are all sorts of useful purposes that the monastic institutions of France could have been put to. Once destroyed, these things can never be recreated. What a waste.
Burke is a conservative but in a way that preserves or conserves the connection, often lost, between conservatism and conservation. The question is, to bring this down to the politics of today, two hundred years later, what does it mean to be a conservative now, in the U.S. of A.? Or anywhere else, for that matter.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Conservation or Conservatism?
Napoleon coined the word 'ideology' and he did so contemptuously. A philosophical theory becomes an ideology when it is used to justify a grab for power. Napoleon didn't need an ideology because he had the guns and he happened to be at the right place at the right time (timing is everything): "a whiff of grape-shot" was all it took (as Edmund Burke had predicted) to end the Revolution and make the ideologues shut up.
'Ideology' is another word, like 'reactionary' and the paired opposites 'left' and 'right', that we owe to the French Revolution.
The 20th century was an ideological century and we have the scars to prove it.
Whenever Burke is referred to nowadays, which is not often, it is as a 'classic conservative' which is about right, I guess, but not very helpful. Burke is a classic in the same way that great museums are classical institutions: they select and preserve the most perfect objects of each particular type or class. Unfortunately, the qualities that make Burke a classic make him a little tough to read: the 'thickness' of his knowledge of history, government and political institutions, tends to complicate his style in a way that is similar though not exactly comparable to the complications we notice in the style of Henry James.
Burke understood that government and the rule of law are human inventions that have evolved (in a Darwinian sort of way) over many centuries to meet changing human needs. Religion, for instance, is one of those needs. Though Burke himself is or at least presents himself as a religious man, his understanding of the way the Church of England functions, politically (in a broad sense of that word), is entirely secular. Thus, it is not for theological but practical reasons that he criticizes the revolutionary government in France for destroying the institutions and the clergy of the Catholic church. The following will give you a pretty good idea of the nature and flavor of Burke's conservatism:
There are moments in the fortune of states when particular men are called upon to make improvements by great mental exertion....A politician , to do great things looks for a power, what our workmen call a purchase [i.e., a place where it is possible to apply leverage]; and if he finds that power in politics as in mechanics he cannot be at a loss to apply it. In the monastic institutions [of France], in my opinion, was found a great power for the mechanism of politic benevolence. There were revenues with a public direction; there were men wholly set apart and dedicated to public purposes, without any other than public ties and public principles; men without the possibility of converting the estate of the community into a private fortune. Men denied to self-interests, whose avarice is for some community; men to whom personal poverty is honor, and implicit obedience stands in the place of freedom. The winds blow as they list. These institutions are the products of [religious] enthusiasm; they are the instruments of wisdom. Wisdom cannot create materials; they are the gifts of nature or of chance; her pride is in the use. The perennial existence of bodies corporate and their fortunes, are things particularly suited to a man who has long views; who meditates designs that require time in fashioning; and which propose duration when they are accomplished. He is not deserving to high rank, or even to be mentioned in the order of great statesmen, who, have obtained the command and direction of such a power as existed in the wealth, the discipline, and the habits of such corporations, as those which you [the French] have rashly destroyed, cannot find any way of converting it to the great and lasting benefit of his country.... To destroy any power, growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind, is almost tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material. It would be like the attempt to destroy (if it were in our competence to destroy...the power of steam, or of electricity, or of magnetism....
Lao Giao's comment on the word 'ideology' is relevant here: I'm not sure what Napoleon was up to when he coined the word "ideology," but political philosophers who took power would have to include the Founding Fathers, whose success antedated Napoleon's conquests. Madison's Constitution was a beautiful ideological work that has served us well for more than two centuries. Any takers?
'Ideology' is another word, like 'reactionary' and the paired opposites 'left' and 'right', that we owe to the French Revolution.
The 20th century was an ideological century and we have the scars to prove it.
Whenever Burke is referred to nowadays, which is not often, it is as a 'classic conservative' which is about right, I guess, but not very helpful. Burke is a classic in the same way that great museums are classical institutions: they select and preserve the most perfect objects of each particular type or class. Unfortunately, the qualities that make Burke a classic make him a little tough to read: the 'thickness' of his knowledge of history, government and political institutions, tends to complicate his style in a way that is similar though not exactly comparable to the complications we notice in the style of Henry James.
Burke understood that government and the rule of law are human inventions that have evolved (in a Darwinian sort of way) over many centuries to meet changing human needs. Religion, for instance, is one of those needs. Though Burke himself is or at least presents himself as a religious man, his understanding of the way the Church of England functions, politically (in a broad sense of that word), is entirely secular. Thus, it is not for theological but practical reasons that he criticizes the revolutionary government in France for destroying the institutions and the clergy of the Catholic church. The following will give you a pretty good idea of the nature and flavor of Burke's conservatism:
There are moments in the fortune of states when particular men are called upon to make improvements by great mental exertion....A politician , to do great things looks for a power, what our workmen call a purchase [i.e., a place where it is possible to apply leverage]; and if he finds that power in politics as in mechanics he cannot be at a loss to apply it. In the monastic institutions [of France], in my opinion, was found a great power for the mechanism of politic benevolence. There were revenues with a public direction; there were men wholly set apart and dedicated to public purposes, without any other than public ties and public principles; men without the possibility of converting the estate of the community into a private fortune. Men denied to self-interests, whose avarice is for some community; men to whom personal poverty is honor, and implicit obedience stands in the place of freedom. The winds blow as they list. These institutions are the products of [religious] enthusiasm; they are the instruments of wisdom. Wisdom cannot create materials; they are the gifts of nature or of chance; her pride is in the use. The perennial existence of bodies corporate and their fortunes, are things particularly suited to a man who has long views; who meditates designs that require time in fashioning; and which propose duration when they are accomplished. He is not deserving to high rank, or even to be mentioned in the order of great statesmen, who, have obtained the command and direction of such a power as existed in the wealth, the discipline, and the habits of such corporations, as those which you [the French] have rashly destroyed, cannot find any way of converting it to the great and lasting benefit of his country.... To destroy any power, growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind, is almost tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material. It would be like the attempt to destroy (if it were in our competence to destroy...the power of steam, or of electricity, or of magnetism....
Lao Giao's comment on the word 'ideology' is relevant here: I'm not sure what Napoleon was up to when he coined the word "ideology," but political philosophers who took power would have to include the Founding Fathers, whose success antedated Napoleon's conquests. Madison's Constitution was a beautiful ideological work that has served us well for more than two centuries. Any takers?
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