I believe that at death a human being’s soul is re-absorbed into the supra-personal spiritual presence behind the universe. [This is based on a conversation. He might have written “behind the phenomena”.] I believe that personal human individuality is acquired at the price of being separated from this supra-personal reality. I feel that this price is high, and I am therefore glad that it has to be paid for a limited period only.
Surviving the Future, OUP, 1971
In Lebensfluten, im Tatensturm
Wall’ ich auf und ab,
Webe hin und her!
Geburt und Grab
Bin ewiges Meer,
Ein wechselnd Weben,
Ein glühend Leben,
So schaff’ ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit
Und wirke der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid.
[Footnote: Goethe: Faust, ll. 501-9 [...].]
In the tides of Life, in Action’s storm,
A fluctuant wave,
A shuttle free,
Birth and the Grave,
An eternal sea,
A weaving, flowing
Life, all-glowing,
Thus at Time’s humming loom ’tis my hand prepares
The garment of Life which the Deity wears!Translation by Bayard Taylor. He preserves the number of syllables in each line. Is it possible to like (or perform) Goethe in English?
The work of the Spirit of the Earth, as he weaves and draws his threads on the Loom of Time, is the temporal history of Man as this manifests itself in the geneses and growths and breakdowns and disintegrations of human societies; and in all this welter of life and this tempest of action we can hear the beat of an elemental rhythm whose variations we have learnt to know as Challenge-and-Response and Withdrawal-and-Return and Rout-and-Rally and Apparentation-and-Affiliation and Schism-and-Palingenesia. This elemental rhythm is the alternating beat of Yin and Yang; and in listening to it we have recognized that, though strophe may be answered by antistrophe, victory by defeat, birth by death, creation by destruction, the movement that this rhythm beats out is neither the fluctuation of an indecisive battle nor the cycle of a treadmill. The perpetual turning of a wheel is not a vain repetition if, at each revolution, it is carrying a vehicle that much nearer to its goal; and, if “palingenesia” signifies the birth of something new, and not just the rebirth of something that has lived and died any number of times already, then the Wheel of Existence is not just a devilish device for inflicting an everlasting torment on a damned Ixion. On this showing, the music that the rhythm of Yin and Yang beats out is the song of creation; and we shall not be misled into fancying ourselves mistaken because, as we give ear, we can catch the note of creation alternating with the note of destruction. So far from convicting the song of being a diabolic counterfeit, this doubleness of note is a warrant of authenticity. If we listen well we shall perceive that, when the two notes collide, they produce not a discord but a harmony. Creation would not be creative if it did not swallow up in itself all things in Heaven and Earth, including its own antithesis.
Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford University commencement:
“Death is very likely the single best invention of life.”
A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939
I that in heill was and gladnèss
Am trublit now with great sickness
And feeblit with infirmity:
Timor Mortis conturbat me …
That strong unmerciful tyrand
Takis, on the motheris breast sowkand,
The babe full of benignitie:
Timor Mortis conturbat me …
He spairis no lord for his piscence,
Na clerk for his intelligence;
His awful straik may no man flee:
Timor Mortis conturbat me …
He has done petuously devour
The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour,
The Monk of Bury, and Gower, all three:
Timor Mortis conturbat me …
He has tane Rowll of Aberdene,
And gentill Rowll of Corstophine;
Two better fallowis did no man see:
Timor Mortis conturbat me …
Sen he has all my brothers tane,
He will nocht let me live alane;
Of force I mon his next prey be:
Timor Mortis conturbat me …
From William Dunbar’s Lament for the Makaris, written in Scots c 1505.
Dunbar was associated with the court of James IV, who was killed at Flodden Field in 1513. Makar meant maker, ie poet or bard. The phrase in the refrain comes from a responsory of the Office of the Dead in the third Nocturn of Matins and was often used in late medieval Scottish and English poetry. The two Rowlls are unidentified. There are twenty-five verses, but only these are quoted.
A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939
Men loved unkindness then, but lightless in the quarry
I slept and saw not; tears fell down, I did not mourn;
Sweat ran and blood sprang out and I was never sorry:
Then it was well with me, in days ere I was born.
[Footnote: Housman, A. E.: A Shropshire Lad, xlviii.]
A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939
Patrick Moore may have had unappealing political and social views, but his programmes and books and enthusiasm made an impression on nearly every child in my generation in the UK. (Or do I mean boy?) He was eccentric, like Pluto. He was never Astronomer Royal. Was he trying to look like GK Chesterton? Sky at Night music from Sibelius’s Pelléas et Mélisande.
The change from Life to Death is [...] the supreme peripeteia. “All men are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.” [Footnote: Melville, Herman: Moby Dick, chap. lx.] This total change that deprives Life of Life itself must be of the same magnitude for every creature.
The poor beetle that we tread upon
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies;
[footnote: Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, Act. III, scene i, ll. 79-81.] [...].
A Study of History, Vol X, OUP, 1954
When his first adherent, Bernard of Quintavalle, asked Francis to allow him to join Francis in leading a life of poverty, Francis rejoiced, because he believed that the Christlike way was the right way for human beings to live. But Francis had also espoused humility. He had no thought of criticizing the Papacy, even implicitly, or of starting an anti-Papal movement or of becoming the Minister General of a new religious order. To follow Christ was the aim to which Francis was totally dedicated. However, this might not have saved Francis from sharing the Cathars’ and the Waldensians’ fate, for his espousal of poverty was a practical criticism of the Papacy which was the more damaging for having been inadvertent. Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) and his great-nephew and second successor Cardinal Ugolino (Pope Gregory IX, 1227-41) [and the intervening Pope Honorius III] recognized that Francis’s single-minded imitation of Christ had put the Curia in a quandary. They were painfully aware of the swelling chorus of satirical voices that was assailing the Curia from all quarters of Christendom. They decided to enlist St. Francis instead of blasting him. This decision did credit to their intelligence, though the motive was not disinterested.
St. Francis himself would have been saved acute spiritual agony if he had been martyred at his first encounter with the Curia, instead of living to receive the stigmata and also to see the Franciscan Order take a shape, in Cardinal Ugolino’s and Brother Elias’s hands, that was no longer in tune with Francis’s own conception of the Christlike way of life. However, Francis espoused suffering, both spiritual and physical, as well as poverty and humility, and, if Ugolino and Elias had not cut him to the heart by their worldly-wise interventions, the Franciscan spirit might not have outlived St. Francis himself, whereas it is still alive today, nearly three-quarters of a millennium after the date of his death, constricted, but not stultified, by its institutional container, the Order of Friars Minor.
Institutionalization is the price of durability. This is one of the blemishes of the social facet of human life, but the institutionalization of something that has great spiritual value for posterity is a lesser evil than the total loss of the volatile spiritual treasure. St. Francis did not recognize this hard truth. Ugolino and Elias understood it and took the responsibility for acting in the light of it. They salvaged an alloy of Francis’s treasure at the price of bringing odium on themselves.
St. Francis’s Castilian contemporary St. Dominic (Domingo de Guzman, 1170-1221), the founder of the Order of Friars Preachers, had an easier passage. He made the same commitment to poverty; the two saints were both combating greed. But St. Dominic’s spirit could be reconciled to institutionalization more readily than St. Francis’s. The rising cities of Western Christendom were enriched spiritually by Franciscan as well as by Dominican houses, libraries, and lecture-rooms, though, for St. Francis, masonry and books were anathema, because he saw in them perilous impediments to the leading of a Christian life. Brother Elias never forfeited St. Francis’s confidence; yet assuredly St. Francis would have been excruciated if he could have foreseen Brother Elias’s virtuosity as a fund-raiser for building a church at Assisi in St. Francis’s honour. The beauty of the architecture and of Giotto’s paintings would not have reconciled St. Francis to this outrage against the poverty and the humility with which he had been in love.
Giotto di Bondone, Confirmation of the Rule of St Francis by Innocent III, Basilica of St Francis, Assisi
Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous
O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
The source is shown only as Francis Thompson. The poem by the Catholic vagrant and drug addict, The Kingdom of God, in which the lines appear, contains the phrase “many-splendoured thing”.
His most famous poem is The Hound of Heaven. He also wrote a poem about cricket.
Æt 19
A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939
“Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.”___
Yeats.
Charon: “I will tell you, Hermes, what Mankind and human life remind me of. You must, before now, have watched the bubbles rising in the water under the play of a fountain – the froth, I mean, that makes the foam. Well, some of those bubbles are tiny, and these burst at once and vanish, while there are others that last longer and attract their neighbours till they swell to a portentous bulk – only to burst without fail sooner or later in their turn, as every bubble must. Such is human life. The creatures are all inflated – some to a greater and others to a lesser degree – and there are some whose inflation lasts as long as the twinkling of an eye, while others cease to be at the moment of coming into being; but all of them have to burst sooner or later.”
Hermes: “Your simile is as apt as Homer’s simile of the leaves.”
Charon: “Yet, ephemeral though these human beings are, you see, Hermes, how they exert themselves and compete with one another in their struggles for office and honours and possessions – though one day they will have to leave all that behind and come to our place with nothing but one copper in their pockets. Now what do you think? Here we are on an exceeding high mountain. Shan’t I shout to them at the top of my voice and warn them to abstain from useless exertions and to live their lives with Death constantly in mind? I will say to them: ‘You silly fellows, why are you so keen on all that? You had better stop putting yourselves through it. You are not going to live for ever. None of these earthly prizes is everlasting; and nobody, at death, can carry away any of them with him. One day, as sure as fate, the owner will be gone – as naked as he came – and his house and estate and money will pass for ever after to a constant succession of alien possessors.’ Supposing I were to shout this at them, or something like it, and could make myself heard, don’t you think they might stand to benefit enormously and might also become vastly more sensible than they now appear to be?”
Hermes: “I am afraid, Charon, you are suffering under an amiable delusion. I don’t think you realize the condition to which they have been reduced by their ignorance and self-deception. Even with a gimlet you couldn’t now open their ears – they have plugged them and plugged them with wax (as Odysseus treated his companions for fear that they might hear the Sirens singing). They wouldn’t be able to hear you, even if you screamed till you burst. In the world of men Ignorance produces the same effect as Lethe in your Hades. All the same, there are a few of them who have refused to put the wax into their ears; and these few do see life steadily, know it for what it is, and incline towards the truth.”
Charon: “Then shan’t we shout to them, anyway?”
Hermes: “Well, even that would be superfluous. You would only be telling them what they knew already. You can see how pointedly they have drawn away from the rest and how disdainfully they are laughing at what is going on. Obviously they are finding no satisfaction at all in all that, and are planning to make a ‘get-away’ from Life and to seek asylum with you. You know they are not exactly loved by their fellow creatures for showing up their follies.”
[...] [Footnote: Lucian: Charon, 21.]
A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939
In [the modern] post-Christian Odyssey there was more than one passage to be negotiated and more than one kind of ordeal to be faced.
The two spiritual dilemmas, the “straits” Toynbee told us we needed to negotiate in 1952 – he imagines Greek sailors negotiating the straits of Messina and of Gibraltar – can be restated in modern terms, with some realignment of metaphors.
Following in Odysseus’ wake, these Phocaean seafarers would have first to negotiate the straits between Sicily and Italy without approaching either an Italian shore where they would be pounced upon by the monster Scylla or a Sicilian shore where they would be engulfed by the whirlpool Charybdis [...].
[But] if they were to reach the boundless waters of a globe-encompassing Ocean, these voyagers must put to sea again [and] make for the Straits of Gibraltar between the Pillars of Hercules, where this pair of menacing mountains, towering above the African and the European shore and threatening, from either flank, to fall upon any ship audacious enough to run the gauntlet without their leave [...].
In the interpretation of this parable in terms of the Western Civilization’s prospects, the finding of a passage between Scylla and Charybdis signified the negotiation of the Western World’s immediate problem of finding some way of avoiding self-destruction without falling into self-stultification. Mid-way through the twentieth century of the Christian Era the Western Society was in imminent danger of destroying itself by failing to stop making War now that a demonic drive had been put into War by the progress of a Western physical science; and it was in hardly less imminent danger of stultifying itself by seeking asylum from War and Class-Conflict in Circe’s pig-sty. [...]
“Avoiding self-destruction without falling into self-stultification” is the nuclear and ecological strait.
And how can people become richer without losing some of their humanity? Scylla threatens to pounce on you for romanticising poverty. Charybdis wants to suck you into a global Dubai.
In this spiritual ordeal the forbidding Pillars of Hercules were a pair of rival authoritarian and dogmatic faiths, both of which alike were offering to the storm-tossed voyager an everlasting Nirvāna in their stony bosoms and were threatening him with the eternal punishment that had been inflicted on the Flying Dutchman if he were to be so impious and so fool-hardy as to reject their offer and sail on past them out into the blue. From the one shore this ultimatum was being delivered to Western souls by a Christian heresy in which the stone of Communism had been substituted for the bread [footnote: Matt. vii. 9; Luke xi. 11.] of the Gospel, and from the other shore by a Christian Orthodoxy in which the body of Christ, [footnote: 1 Cor. xii. 27; Eph. iv. 12.] who had “come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly”, [footnote: John x. 10.] had been petrified into a pillar of salt [footnote: Gen. xix. 26.] by a backward-looking ecclesiastical tradition. To dare the passage between these two frowning Pillars of Hercules was a venture that might daunt even a mariner whose moral had been fortified by a previous success in making his way safely between Scylla and Charybdis.
The new Pillars of Hercules are, on one side, convinced post-communist atheists and, on the other, religious men of “passionate intensity”.
When I was in my twenties, most of my contemporaries professed “agnosticism” when asked about religion. They lacked “all conviction”. Today, their nominally if that Christian equivalents in the UK – partly because of the recent example of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, partly because encouraged by Dawkinses and Goldacres – are confident enough to profess outright atheism.
Plus ultra!
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
Flashes of religious light [...].
A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
The interviews with New York musicians recorded by William Malloch in the ’60s which appeared on the fourth LP side of Bernstein’s CBS recording of Mahler 6.
Gustav Mahler was music director of the Metropolitan Opera 1908-10 and principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic 1909-11. He rode the subway. The interviews are mainly with Philharmonic players.
In the third clip we hear Anna (not Alma), the second of his two children. The older daughter, Maria, died in 1907 of scarlet fever. Anna caught it with her and survived. Mahler had composed Kindertotenlieder, setting Rückert, between 1901 and 1904. Many of his thirteen siblings had died in childhood. Rückert had written 428 poems (which seems rather a lot) under this title in response to the deaths of two of his children, a daughter and a son, also from scarlet fever.
Mahler’s New York debut: January 1 1908 with a cut version of Tristan und Isolde. Last Met appearance: March 5 1910, The Queen of Spades. In Austria: summers of 1908, 1909 and 1910. Last New York appearance: Carnegie Hall, February 21 1911.
___
Bruno Walter, who knew Mahler from their Hamburg days, in a 1950 US radio broadcast (YouTube):
“I recognised in him, young as I was, not only a musical genius, but an ethical power, an educator, a leader of men. [...] His deepest love and his vision went beyond the earthly sphere. He had the soul of a mystic, and I believe his work will last not only because of its tremendous musical importance, but also because it contains a message from those higher spheres for which his soul longed [and] of which a vision was given to him.”
Old post.
Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.
[Footnote: Watts, Isaac [...].]
We are in Glenn Gould territory at the beginning of the clip below. I don’t think Gould played William Croft, and I don’t know who is playing here, but Croft is a seriously underrated composer. His St Anne is one of the great tunes.
Isaac Watts’s text, O God, Our Help in Ages Past, paraphrasing Psalm 90, was later set to it. The result is a great hymn. It could only be Protestant. It is often sung on Remembrance Day.
Croft was organist at St Anne’s Church in Soho. Watts and Croft were of the same generation, born in the 1670s. Handel used St Anne in one of his own anthems. Bach may have borrowed it in a fugue.
St Anne, in Christian and Islamic tradition, was the mother of the Virgin Mary.
After the piano, Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. Then a further recording by an unnamed organist.
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
[The] epiphany of the ruler of a universal state as the one shepherd whose oecumenical monarchy makes one fold for all Mankind [footnote: John x. 16.] appeals to one of the Human Soul’s deepest longings, as, in Dostoyevski’s fable, the Grand Inquisitor reminds a subversive Christ.
In The Grand Inquisitor, a parable in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan imagines Christ returning to Earth and meeting a leader of the Spanish Inquisition in Seville.
“Thou mightest have taken … the sword of Caesar. Why didst Thou reject that last gift? Hadst Thou accepted that last counsel of the mighty spirit, Thou wouldst have accomplished all that Man seeks on Earth – that is, someone to worship, someone to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heap; for the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men. Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union. The great conquerors – Timurs and Chingis Khans – whirled like hurricanes over the face of the Earth, striving to subdue its people, and they too were but the unconscious expression of the same craving for universal unity. Hadst Thou taken the World and Caesar’s purple, Thou wouldst have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands?” [Footnote: Dostoyevski, F.: The Brothers Karamazov, Part II, Book V, chap. 5: “The Grand Inquisitor”.]
The translator is not stated, but is Constance Garnett, as one would expect.
Dostoyevsky had encountered the figure of the Grand Inquisitor in Schiller’s Don Carlos.
The Spanish Inquisition lasted from 1480 to 1834. List of Grand Inquisitors.
Postscript: El Greco and Modernism, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf runs until August 12.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
At the end of Somerset Maugham’s last play, Sheppey (Wyndham’s Theatre, September 14 1933, with Ralph Richardson), Sheppey dies and says to Death (text in The Collected Plays, Heinemann, 1952 edition):
“I wish now I’d gone down to the Isle of Sheppey when the doctor advised it. You wouldn’t ’ave thought of looking for me there.”
Death’s reply:
“There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him to-night in Samarra.”
In the encounter between a dawning philosophy and a traditional paganism there had been no problem of reconciling Heart and Head because there had been no common ground on which the two organs could have come into collision. The pith of Primitive Religion is not belief but action, and the test of conformity is not assent to a theological creed but participation in ritual performances. For the vast majority of the faithful, the correct and alert execution of their ritual duties is the alpha and omega of Religion; primitive religious practice is an end in itself, and it does not occur to the practitioners to look, beyond the rites which they perform, for a truth which these rites convey. The truth is that the rites have no meaning beyond the practical effect which their correct execution is believed to have upon the human performers’ social and physical environment. The so-called “aetiological myths”, which purport to explain a traditional practice’s historical origin, are not taken as statements concerning matter[s] of fact that can be labelled “true” or “false”; they are taken in the spirit in which, in a more sophisticated state of society, a child takes a fairy-story or a grown-up person takes poetry. Accordingly, when, in this primitive religious setting, philosophers arise who do set out to make a chart of Man’s environment in intellectual terms to which the labels “true” and “false” apply, no collision occurs so long as the philosopher continues to carry out his hereditary religious duties – and there can be nothing in his philosophy to inhibit him from doing this, because there is nothing in the traditional rites that could be incompatible with any philosophy.
Awkward situations do, no doubt, occasionally arise, as when, in a ritually conservative Athens, the intellectually adventurous Ionian philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (vivebat 500-428 B.C.) got into trouble for having made public his opinion that the heavenly bodies were not living gods but inanimate material objects. A more celebrated case was the prosecution, conviction, and judicial murder of Socrates by his Athenian fellow countrymen in 399 B.C. on three charges, [footnote: Plato: Apologia Socratis, 24 B.] of which the second was that Socrates did not pay due worship to the gods who were the official objects of worship at Athens, and the third was that he paid worship to other divinities who were strange gods. Yet it may be doubted whether legal proceedings involving Anaxagoras would have been taken, some twenty years after the Clazomenian philosopher had ceased to reside in Athens, if these had not served the current political purpose of “smearing” Pericles; and it may equally be doubted whether Socrates would have suffered the death-penalty that Anaxagoras escaped if Socrates’ attitude towards religion had been all that his enemies had had against him. Socrates was – and remained to the last – a scrupulous performer of his ritual duties; and, on the religious counts, Aristophanes’ malicious caricature of him in The Clouds might have remained the limit of the penalty exacted from him, if he had not also been under fire in 399 B.C. on another count – the political charge of “corrupting the young” – which, significantly, figured first in the indictment. Socrates was the victim, not so much of conservative Athenian religious fanaticism, as of democratic Athenian resentment over the final defeat of Athens in the long-drawn-out Atheno-Peloponnesian war and democratic Athenian vindictiveness towards a fascist-minded Athenian minority who had seized the opportunity opened to them by the discrediting of the democratic régime through military defeat in order to overthrow the democratic constitution. Socrates’ past personal association with Critias, the moving spirit among “the Thirty Tyrants”, was the offence that the restored democratic régime could neither forget nor forgive. It was Politics, not Religion, that cost Socrates his life.
Where the issue was not confused, as it was in Socrates’ case, by political animus, Philosophy and Primitive Religion encountered one another without colliding. The death of Socrates was an exception to a rule of which the life of Confucius was a classical example. Confucius reconciled a conservative reverence for the traditional rites of primitive Sinic religion with a new moral philosophy of his own making by presenting his personal ideas as the meaning which the rites had been intended to convey. Fortunately for himself, Confucius found no Sinic Critias to be his political pupil in his own lifetime; and – thanks to this failure, which was the great disappointment of his life – he died peacefully in his bed. Confucius’s attitude and experience were characteristic of the normal relations between Philosophy and Primitive Religion; but a new situation arose when the higher religions came on the scene.
The higher religions did, indeed, sweep up and carry along with them a heavy freight of traditional rites that happened to be current in the religious milieux in which the new faiths made their first appearance; but this religious flotsam was not, of course, their essence. The distinctive new feature of the higher religions was that they based their claim to allegiance, and their test of conformity, on personal revelations received by their prophets; [footnote: This was true in some degree in practice even if not in theory of the “Indistic” higher religions as well as the “Judaistic”. Ipse dixit came to be a criterion of truth, not only for the followers of Jesus and Muhammad, but also for the followers of Siddhārtha Gautama and of the philosophic prophets of a post-Buddhaic Hinduism.] and these deliveries of the prophets were presented, like the propositions of the philosophers, as statements of fact, to be labelled either “true” or “false”. Therewith, Truth became a disputed mental territory; for thenceforward there were two independent authorities – on the one hand prophetic Revelation and on the other hand philosophical or scientific Reason – each of which claimed sovereign jurisdiction over the Intellect’s whole field of action; and, when once the hypothesis that the spheres of Revelation and Reason were even partially coincident had been accepted – and both parties did accept this as axiomatic – it became impossible for Reason and Revelation to live and let live on the auspicious precedent of the amicable symbiosis of Reason and Ritual. “There is a peculiar agony in the paradox that Truth has two forms, each of them indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other.” [Footnote: Gosse, E.: Father and Son, chap. 5.] In this new and excruciating situation, there were only two alternative possibilities. Either the two rival exponents of a supposedly one and indivisible Truth must convert their rivalry into a partnership by agreeing that their expositions were mutually consistent, or, finding themselves unable to agree, they must decide the ownership of an apparently unpartitionable disputed territory in an ordeal by battle that would have to be fought out until one or other party had been driven right off the field.
The Hellenic world and China have been the only two places where advanced philosophy has preceded “higher religion” (if we regard the Vedic origins of Hinduism as belonging to that category).
Where did the conflict occur in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions? Is there even a serious gulf between philosophical/scientific and religious thought in the Indian tradition? In Hinduism, revelation is implied in the terms Apaurusheyatva and Śruti. Can one speak of revelation in Buddhism?
Anaxagoras, young crater near the lunar north pole
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The pleasantly modest MP Birla Planetarium in Kolkata
India has nineteen planetaria (if you insist on that plural), China three. What does that tell us, if anything? Both countries have long traditions of astronomy: China, India.
India’s are in Allahabad, Bangalore, Bhubaneswar, Calicut, Chennai, Coimbatore, Gorakhpur, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Nagpur, New Delhi (two), Patna, Thiruvananthapuram, Tiruchirappalli.
China’s are in Beijing, Hong Kong, Macau, so in the whole of China “proper” there is only one, at least according to Wikipedia. (This blog has few readers in China, many in India.)
Bangladesh has one, in Dhaka. Pakistan two, in Karachi and Lahore. Sri Lanka, where Arthur C Clarke lived, one, in Colombo. Japan thirty-one. Korea apparently none. Africa three, but only one between Alexandria and Johannesburg: in Accra. Italy, Spain, Poland, Mexico many. The UK many, but in 2006 the London Planetarium (opened 1958, its high dome unlike any other I can think of) was closed and the space linked to Madame Tussauds. Shows about celebrities and others replaced astronomical projections.
This was five years after the removal of elephants from London Zoo. Scenes of ’60s childhood memories. Battersea Funfair closed in 1974.
A new planetarium opened in Greenwich in 2007.
Modern planetariums used to depend on technology developed by Zeiss in Jena, but many are now digital. The first public Zeiss cosmic projection was at the Deutsches Museum in Munich on October 21 1923.
Planetarium in Berlin, 1939, Deutsches Bundesarchiv (did the lower part of the design give the idea for extraterrestrial insect invaders in the ’50s, the upper the idea for Daleks in the ’60s?)
Huxley arguing, in 1893 and ’94, against Social Darwinism.
“Cosmic Nature is no school of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of Ethical Nature. … Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process, the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best. … The ethical process is in opposition to the principle of the cosmic process, and tends to the suppression of the qualities best fitted for success in that struggle. … What would become of the garden if the gardener treated all the weeds and slugs and birds and trespassers as he would like to be treated, if he were in their place? … The practice of that which is ethically best what we call goodness or virtue involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint. … It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence. … Man, as a ‘political animal’, … is compelled to be perpetually on guard against the cosmic forces, whose ends are not his ends, without and within himself. … The ethical progress of Society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it. … The history of Civilisation details the steps by which men have succeeded in building up an artificial world within the Cosmos. … In virtue of his intelligence, the dwarf bends the titan to his will. … That which lies before the Human Race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to the State of Nature, the State of Art of an organised polity, in which, and by which, Man may develop a worthy civilisation, capable of maintaining and constantly improving itself, until the evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon its downward course that the cosmic process resumes its sway and, once more, the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet.”
[Footnote: Huxley, T. H.: Evolution and Ethics, the Romanes Lecture, 1893, and Prolegomena, 1894, reprinted in Huxley, T. H. and J.: Evolution and Ethics, 1893-1943 (London, 1947, Pilot Press), pp. 78, 81, 51, 52, 81-82, 59, 82, 83, 83, 60.]
Surely, aside from the now-obvious evils of Social Darwinism, this is the right idea to have of civilisation. We know most of the physical universe is a howling emptiness and a tedious place to be. We know part of it is red in tooth and claw. We’re doing our own thing.
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
Since I mentioned him in the last post, here is Hinterhäuser playing Scelsi’s eighth piano suite. They both come from the same corner of Liguria. The suite is called Bot-Ba, which I think means Tibet. This is the first of three clips.
That figure is all too reminiscent of a cripple on an Indian pavement, but is obviously a dancer, presumably Tibetan. A kind of Tibetan breakdancer, judging from the still, but I suspect rather slower.
The famously unphotographed Scelsi turns out to have had quite a few photographs taken of him.
His music is something like Scriabin meets Nono or Feldman, but there is no point in trying to classify it. It is surely not the total break with European tradition that it is sometimes made out to be. Some works may be, but I can hear Liszt and Ravel here. So strong is that pull that some modernist and other purists must have been tempted to call it edelkitsch. Or am I carrying too much aural baggage? Scelsi’s intention was to create a bridge to a transcendent reality and to help us to lose baggage. This is from the beginning of what is called his second period.
In the sight of the Subconscious, the Reason is a heartless pedant who has purchased a miraculous but superfluous command over Nature at the sinful price of betraying the Soul by allowing her primordial vision of God to fade into the light of common day. [Footnote: Wordsworth: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.] “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet”; [footnote: Ps. viii. 6.] yet what an insignificant fragment of God’s creation it is that the Reason manages to catch in the clumsy crab-claws of its categories within the wavering framework of Space-Time! “There are more things in Heaven and Earth,” exclaims the Subconscious to the Reason, “than are dreamt of in your philosophy”; [footnote: Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act I, scene v, l. 162.] and she thanks and praises God for having given to her lowly self the mission of defending what the Reason has abandoned.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
“I did not really understand what I meant by Liberty, until I heard it called by the new name of Human Dignity.”
___
GK Chesterton, Autobiography (1936).
Sainthood is indispensable for the maintenance of societies [...] because even the minimum of unselfishness and determination and courage and vision that is required for making social life possible on Earth far exceeds the range of the natural altruism of a social animal.
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land,
[footnote: Blake, William: Jerusalem.] is a resolution that can be taken only by a soul that, through eyes enlightened by communion with God, sees This World consecrated and illumined by God’s indwelling presence.
In self-help terms: if you aim lower, you will fail altogether.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
A living creature is a bit of the universe which has set itself up as a [...] separate counter-universe. It tries to make the rest of the universe serve the creature’s purposes and centre on the creature. That is what egocentricity means. [...]
All the great philosophies and religions have been concerned, first and foremost, with the overcoming of egocentricity.
Surviving the Future, OUP, 1971
Chesterton.
The Admonitions of a Prophet, written on a papyrus of the Twelfth Dynasty, recalled the First Intermediate Period of Egyptian history when “the land” turned “round as doth a potter’s wheel” (translated in A Erman, The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, Methuen, 1927).
The dizzy motion of the Egyptiac potter’s wheel, which stands for the acme of disorder in the eyes of an Egyptiac poet whose imagination animates the clay that is helplessly spinning on this wheel’s whirling surface, is at the same time an example, on the mathematical plane of existence, of an orderly cyclic motion, while on the teleological plane it is an obedient instrument for impressing upon the clay the spiritual order that is represented by the potter’s will.
Said one among them: “Surely not in vain
My substance from the common clay was ta’en
And to this figure moulded, to be broke
Or trampled back to shapeless earth again?”
[Footnote: Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubāʿīyāt of ʿUmar Khayyām, Quatrain lxxxiv.]
In a similar way the disorderly motion of a rudderless ship, which stands in Plato’s eyes for the chaos of a Universe abandoned by God [a footnote refers us to an earlier reference to Plato’s Politicus], can be recognized, by a mind endowed with the necessary knowledge of dynamics and physics, as a perfect illustration of the orderly behaviour of waves and currents in the media of wind and water. [Footnote: It may be added that, in the Politicus, the simile of the ship adrift is one of only two elements that make up, between them, the picture which Plato is painting in the colours of myth. The state in which the Universe drifts at the mercy of Chance alternates, in an endlessly recurrent cycle, with a contrary state in which it is steered by the hand of God according to Plan.] When the Human Soul adrift thus apprehends that the force which is baffling it is not simply a negation of the Soul’s own will or caprice but is a thing in itself – albeit something that the Soul is failing to grasp or control – then the countenance of the unknown invincible goddess changes from a subjective aspect under which she is known as Chance to an objective aspect under which she is known as Necessity – but this without any corresponding change in the essence of this inhuman power’s nature.
A Study of History, Vol V, OUP, 1939
The loveliest passage of Chesterton.
“Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the middle of one’s back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us. We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.
“Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder by which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress should be something else besides a continual parricide; therefore I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea. I have found that every man is disposed to call the green leaf of the tree a little less green than it is, and the snow of Christmas a little less white than it is; therefore I have imagined that the main business of a man, however humble, is defence.”
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GK Chesterton, The Defendant (1901).
Since [the] peace-before-birth is a mirror of the peace-after-death from which it is barely separated in time by the brief convulsion of life, the living Englishman may keep up his courage by thinking of the dead Roman.
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.
[Footnote: Housman, A. E., A Shropshire Lad, xxxi.]
Uricon comes from the Brythonic (Celtic) Uriconon, a hill-fort near Shrewsbury on the hill known as The Wrekin. Viroconium Cornoviorum was an important Roman settlement. Viroconium may be a Latinisation of Uriconon. Cornoviorum means “of the (Celtic) Cornovii”. The site is now the village of Wroxeter.
The Cornovii may have migrated to Cornwall in the fifth century and given that area its name, but the matter is unclear.
Wilfred Owen’s Uriconium, An Ode is a meditation on the same theme. One assumes that the site was being excavated at the turn of the century.
A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939
With the great gale we journey
That breathes from gardens thinned,
Borne in the drift of blossoms
Whose petals throng the wind;
Buoyed on the heaven-heard whisper
Of dancing leaflets whirled
From all the woods that autumn
Bereaves in all the World.
And midst the fluttering legion
Of all that ever died
I follow, and before us
Goes the delightful guide,
With lips that brim with laughter
But never once respond,
And feet that fly on feathers,
And serpent-circled wand.
[Footnote: Housman, A. E.: A Shropshire Lad, xlii.]
If one is really going to walk over the edge of a precipice, is it not best to let oneself be led over it in this agreeable way by Hermes Psychopompus?
A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939
“The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers’ song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.”___
Yeats, from Byzantium.
Paradise Lost, when I discovered it and devoured it in three days before I was eight years old, instilled into my mind, without my understanding it, my first idea of a theodicy.
A Study of History, Vol X, OUP, 1954
[The] Christian belief in the brotherhood of Man was a corollary of a Christian discovery – or revelation – of the fatherhood of God, for which the First Epistle General of John was the locus classicus.
“Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God. … And this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.” [Footnote: 1 John iii. 1 and iv. 21.]
In the next volume:
Henri Bergson, in Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion, [footnote: Paris 1932, Alcan] taught me that the ideal of the brotherhood of Mankind presupposes a belief in the fatherhood of God.
Marxist socialism: A page torn from a book
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
A Study of History, Vol X, OUP, 1954
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
[Footnote: Wordsworth, William: Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.]
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
The clip I put up a year ago no longer works. Here are Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic again. I think it’s a different version. It says with Harold Gomberg, but he was an oboist. William Vacchiano may still be the trumpeter.
Charles Ives. Composed in 1906. Revised 1934.
“Until now, the idea has been that life on Earth must be composed of at least the six elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus – no example had ever been found that violates this golden rule of biochemistry.”
Presumably, life not caring what its chemical constituents are is good news for religion. Story.
If we appraise the Law of Nature by the standard of the Law of Love, and see through Love’s eyes everything that
Nature has made, behold, it is very bad. [Footnote: Gen. i. 31.]
Ay, look: high Heaven and Earth ail from the prime foundation;
All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain.
[Footnote: Housman, A. E.: A Shropshire Lad, xlviii [...].]
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
This I Believe was a five-minute CBS radio programme hosted by Edward R Murrow from 1951 to ’55 in which people read short essays about their personal beliefs.
Some of the talks are now being rebroadcast on NPR on the Bob Edwards Show, with new remarks, before and after, by Dan Gediman and Jay Allison. There’s a podcast. Toynbee can be heard here. I don’t know the date of the original broadcast.
The pleasant-voiced Gediman gets Toynbee partly wrong in the June 18 podcast: I am not sure that breaking down disciplinary barriers between historians – between military history, political history, religious history, art history – was the “essence” of Toynbee, though it was part of his task. But there’s an attractive, and very unEnglish, note of respect in this discussion, and a recognition of something disarmingly down to earth in the essay. No lessons of history, only remarks about the messiness of being human. I Agree with a Pagan seems to have been the original title.
In 2005 Gediman and Allison had revived This I Believe as a slot on various NPR programmes, with new essays from Yo-Yo Ma, Bill Gates and others, and unknown people. There were books, containing old and new material (Toynbee in one of them), and CDs (he may be on one of them). The series ended in 2009. The impetus was not Christian. Neither was that of the original run. Steven Spielberg was a sponsor.
A Canadian version of the programme has been running on CBC Radio One since 2007.
Toynbee’s personal philosophy was cautious and tentative, something that those who disagreed with his historical conclusions or chose to believe that he was setting himself up as a “prophet” often forgot.
“I believe there may be some things that some people may know for certain, but I also believe that these knowable things aren’t what matters most to any human being. A good mathematician may know the truth about numbers, and a good engineer may know how to make physical forces serve his purposes. But the engineer and the mathematician are human beings first – so for them, as well as for me, what matters most is not one’s knowledge and skill, but one’s relations with other people. We don’t all have to be engineers or mathematicians, but we do all have to deal with other people. And these relations of ours with each other, which are the really important things in life, are also the really difficult things, because it is here that the question of right and wrong comes in.
“I believe we have no certain knowledge of what is right and wrong and even if we had, I believe we should find it just as hard as ever to do something that we knew for certain to be right in the teeth of our personal interests and inclinations. Actually, we have to make the best judgment we can about what is right and then we have to bet on it by trying to make ourselves act on it, without being sure about it.
“Since we can never be sure, we have to try to be charitable and open to persuasion that we may, after all, have been in the wrong, and at the same time we have to be resolute and energetic in what we do in order to be effective. It is difficult enough to combine effectiveness with humility and charity in trying to do what’s right, but it is still more difficult to try to do right at all, because this means fighting oneself.
“Trying to do right does mean fighting oneself, because, by nature, each of us feels and behaves as if he were the centre and the purpose of the universe. But I do feel sure that I am not that, and that, in behaving as if I were, I am going wrong. So one has to fight oneself all the time, and this means that suffering is not only inevitable, but is an indispensable part of a lifelong education, if only one can learn how to profit by it. I believe that everything worth winning does have its price in suffering, and I know, of course, where this belief of mine comes from. It comes from the accident of my having been born in a country where the local religion has been Christianity.
“Another belief that I owe to Christianity is a conviction that love is what gives life its meaning and purpose, and that suffering is profitable when it is met in the course of following love’s lead. But I can’t honestly call myself a believing Christian in the traditional sense. To imagine that one’s own church, civilization, nation, or family is the chosen people is, I believe, as wrong as it would be for me to imagine that I myself am God. I agree with Symmachus, the pagan philosopher who put the case for toleration to a victorious Christian church, and I’ll end by quoting his words: ‘The universe is too great a mystery for there to be only one single approach to it.’”
Text slightly edited from NPR online transcript, not from a book source.
A follower of Symmachus (other references to Symmachus)
An imperfection that is transparent in universal states is, of course, characteristic of all states of all kinds in all circumstances, as is pointed out by a Modern Western Christian philosopher in the following passage:
“What men call peace is never anything but a space between two wars: a precarious equilibrium that lasts as long as mutual fear prevents dissension from declaring itself. This parody of true peace, this armed fear, which there is no need to denounce to our contemporaries, may very well support a kind of order, but never can it bring Mankind tranquillity. Not until the social order becomes the spontaneous expression of an interior peace in men’s hearts shall we have tranquillity; were all men’s minds in accord with themselves, all wills interiorly unified by love of the supreme good, then they would know the absence of internal dissension, unity, order from within, a peace, finally, made of the tranquillity born of this order: pax est tranquillitas ordinis. But, if each will were in accord with itself, all wills would be in mutual accord, each would find peace in willing what the others will. Then also we should have a true society, based on union in love of one and the same end” (Gilson, E.: The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, English translation (London 1936, Sheed & Ward), p. 399).
This has been the point of religious education. “Peace is the tranquility of order” is from St Augustine, City of God, Book XIX, ch 13.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)
Playlist for symphony extracted by Hindemith from his post-Second World War opera Die Harmonie der Welt. Berlin Philharmonic under Hindemith, March 1954. Title taken from Kepler’s Harmonices mundi.
The opera has historical (at both planes) confrères in Pfitzner’s Palestrina (link to this blog) and Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler. Perhaps you can go further, to Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, to Krenek’s Karl V, to Henze’s cantata Novae de infinito laudes after Bruno.
Tony Judt, who has ALS, on Fresh Air, with Terry Gross. NPR, March 29.
I have heard or read one or two recent interviews with him. This is in some ways the most cheerful, from a man with no time left for anything but the truth.
“All I ever wanted to do in life professionally [and] occupationally was teach history and read and write it. There are times when I’ve thought, ‘My God, you’re a dull man, Judt. When you were 13, you wanted the same thing, and now you’re 62 and you still want it.’ And the upside of that is that I get as angry at bad history writing, or the abuse of history for political purposes, as I ever did.”
The NPR page links to the first of his current series of articles in The New York Review of Books and an extract from his new book, Ill Fares the Land, a letter to young people on both sides of the Atlantic. He could have chosen a better title, and his publisher a better cover, given his aim. In part, it is a call to the left to discover a very new voice. He is not religious, or certainly not in a way most people would recognise. From the book:
“Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today.”
“It’s about not forgetting the past. About having the courage to look at the present and see its faults without walking away in disgust or skepticism. … I do think we’re on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don’t know how to talk about it.”
Here we get a sense of what Toynbee would have sounded like at Davos, had he participated between 1971 and ’74. Morton’s Bibliography (1980) has this entry under “tape recordings”:
“Arnold Toynbee, history, and the hippies. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1969. 43 mins 44 secs. ‘… conversation with Raghavan Iyer, John Seeley, and Scott Buchanan, about the unlearned lessons of history, the futility of patriotism, and his admiration for the hippies …’” Her dots.
The tapes are online here (tape 1) and here (tape 2). Skip the bit about making it your ringtone (or make it your ringtone) and click download.
Morton has the year wrong. It was 1967. Buchanan died in 1968. Toynbee tells us in the conversation that he is 78. And he did not visit the US in 1969. He had planned to visit New York for his eightieth birthday, but a coronary in March prevented the trip. The 1967 visit, when he was based at Stanford, was his last. I don’t have its exact dates. McNeill says that he returned to England in June. According to the Donald C Davidson Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which has the Center’s archive, he was in Santa Barbara on May 1. The correspondence with Columba Cary-Elwes supports that date.
It was not technically the summer, but the hippies of the summer of love had begun streaming into the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The Monterey Pop Festival (Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Otis Redding, The Byrds, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin) took place in June. The song San Francisco, written by John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas and sung by Scott McKenzie, was written to promote it and released on May 13, 43 years ago today.
This post refers to some currents in mid-century American liberal thought, touches on an idea which we have met in this blog before, that of federal “world government” (this was also the age of many actual experimental federations, such as the United Arab Republic), and traces a Chicago-Santa Barbara connection.
The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions was a liberal-leaning Santa Barbara think tank and an offshoot of the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Republic, a fund for the protection of civil rights and liberties. It had been founded in 1959 by Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins was an educational philosopher and had been President, then Chancellor, of the University of Chicago.
The Associate Supreme Court Justice William O Douglas was the Chairman of its Board of Directors for a time. Stringfellow Barr from 1959 to ’69, Frederick Mayer, Linus Pauling from 1963 to ’67, James A Pike from 1966 to ’69, Robert Kurt Woetzel and Harvey Wheeler were among its fellows. Mortimer Adler, Joan Baez, Alan Cranston, César Chávez Estrada, Milton Friedman, Aldous Huxley, Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, Upton Sinclair took part in its deliberations.
Hutchins reorganized the Center in 1969. Harry S Ashmore was President from 1969 to ’74. Many associates departed. The new fellows included Alexander Comfort, later of The Joy of Sex, Bertrand de Jouvenel and Paul R Ehrlich.
Hutchins died in Santa Barbara in 1977. The Center declined in influence and found it difficult to raise funds. It became affiliated with the University of California at Santa Barbara, which sold its real estate. It absorbed the Fund for the Republic in 1979. In its later years, its greatest source of support was Chester Carlson, the inventor of the Xerox process. It closed in 1987.
In May 1967, the month of the discussion with Toynbee, the Center was behind a conference in Geneva called Pacem in Terris, after the encyclical of Pope John XXIII, whose purpose was to try to open paths for peace negotiations with North Vietnam. It was a sequel to an event it had held in New York in 1965 at which Toynbee had participated.
In August 1967 it hosted a conference of radical student leaders (in Santa Barbara?): Cop Out, Opt Out, or Knock Out. “In this discussion, college students debate the notion of effecting political change through mass campaigns of non-cooperation or outright disruption aimed at crippling society, but when pressed are unable to articulate their vision of the more just and humane society to follow should they succeed. Featuring Ewart F. Brown, Michael Goldfield, Hallock Hoffman, Robert M. Hutchins, and Frederick Richman.” (Description of tape of the proceedings held at Department of Special Collections, Donald C Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara. Audio will be available soon. The Library website’s audio of the 1967 Toynbee discussion is faulty: the links above are to a different site hosting this material.)
Between 1964 and ’74 one of the Center’s fellows, Rexford G Tugwell, drafted a new United States Constitution (published as The Emerging Constitution, New York, Harper & Row, 1974). He thought a revised constitution essential for economic planning. Planning would become a new branch of federal government, alongside the Regulatory and Electoral branches.
He had participated in a Committee to Frame a World Constitution from 1945 to ’48. Two senior members of the University of Chicago’s Humanities faculty, Richard McKeon and Giuseppe Borgese, had proposed to the Chancellor, Hutchins, that the University sponsor a study group to do in reality what Hutchins had advocated in theory: write a constitution for world government. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, global planning was the only way to prevent a nuclear apocalypse. The University of Chicago, wrote McKeon and Borgese, “has played a decisive role in ushering in the atomic age, whose birthplace and date might well be put in Stagg Field, December 2, 1942. … There is no manifest destiny, but there is more than a symbolic value in the suggestion that the intellectual courage that split the atom should be called on, on this very campus, to unite the world.” (Quoted in John W Boyer, Drafting Salvation, University of Chicago Magazine, December 1995, at http://magazine.uchicago.edu. Other material I quote on this is also from there.)
Hutchins convened a Committee. Borgese became secretary of the group and the main writer of the final draft. McKeon had disagreements on some basic issues, which would diminish his role. Other members were Robert Redfield, then dean of Social Sciences at UC; Mortimer Adler (mentioned above), who had advocated world government in his book How to Think about War and Peace; Tugwell; the Law School Dean Wilbur Katz; a Harvard trio: William Hocking, James Landis and Charles H McIlwain; the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (who later withdrew); and Beardsley Ruml, a former dean at Chicago and by 1945 the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. The group convened its first closed meeting in the fall of 1945. At best, Hutchins hoped, “the world at large will have ample occasion to learn from our successes and failures, and to teach us and others. … We do not think [the constitution] will be adopted; we dare to hope that it will not be ignored.”
Elisabeth Mann-Borgese, the wife of Giuseppe and daughter of Thomas Mann and a research associate on the Committee, described the group’s inner workings for the University of Chicago Magazine in March 1949:
“The room where the Committee assembled approximately once a month (Cuban Room at the Shoreland Hotel in Chicago, Harvard Club or Roosevelt Hotel in New York) was small, bare, and concentrating. On the horseshoe table were placed, before 9 a.m., besides the usual ingredients such as note paper, pencils, and water glasses, some mimeographed research documents which were prepared by members and research associates in the intervals between meetings. The Committee worked usually two eight-hour days, interrupted or half-interrupted only by cocktails and luncheons together at one o’clock. When the members adjourned at 5 p.m., research associates would gather the papers and documents, often heavily annotated, sometimes with ornate doodling whose authorship it was teasing to identify.”
A “Preliminary Draft” was published in 1948 and was translated into forty languages. Mann-Borgese: the document “drew inspiration from the U.S., Swiss, Russian, Spanish, Weimar, Swedish, Chinese constitutions. … There is Christianity and there is Hinduism; there is free enterprise and there is socialism and economic planning. There is democracy and aristocracy. The inspiration behind it all may be defined as Social Humanism.” It was the best-known, but not the only, post-1945 draft of a world constitution.
Alan Cranston, mentioned earlier, was another supporter of the idea of world government. In 1945 he was present at a conference in Dublin, New Hampshire convened by the retired Supreme Court Justice Owen J Roberts and the former New Hampshire Governor Robert P Bass which proposed the transformation of the UN General Assembly into a world legislature with “limited but definite and adequate power for the prevention of war”. Many participants, including Cranston, went on to become leaders in the United World Federalists, which is a member of the World Federalist Movement. Cranston successfully pushed for his state’s legislature to pass the 1949 World Federalist California Resolution, which called on Congress to amend the Constitution to allow US participation in a federal world government.
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Buchanan joined the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in 1957, Iyer in 1964, Seeley c 1966, becoming its Dean. Buchanan died in Santa Barbara in 1968, Iyer in 1995, Seeley perhaps there in 2007. Iyer was also the founder, in 1976, and President, of the Institute of World Culture. This survives in a Victorian house on Chapala Street. (His son Pico Iyer has set some fiction in Santa Barbara.) Yehudi Menuhin, who may have visited the Center and who, among his citizenships, considered himself a Californian, established an Assembly of Cultures of Europe, which met at the European Parliament in 1997, and would have liked an assembly of world cultures. Did this Assembly survive him?
One thinks of the “world musics” of various more or less west-coast composers: Henry Cowell, John Cage, Lou Harrison. Here is a very rare performance, by the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, of Cowell’s Madras symphony (no 13) of 1956-58, which had its first performance in Madras.
The Center must have found it easy to attract people: Santa Barbara was an idyllic place in 1967. It still is, but Menuhin wrote in his 1977 autobiography Unfinished Journey: “The California of the 1970s is but a poor plundered ruin of my childhood paradise.”
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Toynbee makes some remarks, apparently to staff members. The background is the anti-Vietnam War movement and the draft. He is conscious of being a dissident on American foreign policy while being a guest in the country. But though a foreigner, he does not believe that in the present state of the world anyone is a foreigner to anyone any longer. The survival of Man is in doubt: the discussion is also taking place in the shadow of the Cold War.
McNeill, his biographer, tells us that the American Friends Service Committee, which was funding part of his American visit, decided to withdraw its sponsorship before he arrived. The Committee was affiliated to the Quakers, so it seems unlikely that their change of mind was connected with his views on Vietnam. McNeill implies that the difficulty concerned financial arrangements.
Then the tapes are introduced by one of the Center’s directors, Hallock Hoffman. Hoffman says incorrectly that this is Toynbee’s first visit to the US for several years: he had been there in 1965. After this come further extracts from Toynbee’s remarks.
He expresses sympathy with the young, torn between traditional loyalty to country and their private consciences. How can dissent be effective in a large democracy? How can voices be heard? Dissent and disloyalty, conscience and conformity. He would place the human conscience above country. What is our chief god, our paramount loyalty, as citizens? Conscience or the idol of the national state? Hierarchies of loyalties are particularly understandable within a federal system. He hopes for a future world federal government, but thinks that it will, and must, come about not from a constitutional convention, but in an untidy way. The conscience of Robert E Lee.
The informal conversation with the three senior fellows, Iyer, Seeley (the one with the guttural r’s) and Buchanan, follows, perhaps in the presence of the staff members.
Lessons from history. The apocalyptic present. Buchanan asks whether Toynbee remembers Borgese (above). He says that he does, but is sceptical about blueprints. Problems need to be addressed one by one. Iyer on martyrs and heroes. Gandhi. The hippies. St Francis. Toynbee says that the hippies have made the first and necessary act of repudiation, as St Francis did when he stripped and threw his rich clothes at his father, one of the first successful businessmen we know of by name in the western world. Would they go on to build something positive?
Buchanan asks whether there are any parallels between the monastic or mendicant orders and what is going on today. Toynbee suggests that the Diggers – the Haight-Ashbury “community anarchists” of 1966-68 – might turn into a mendicant order. It is pointed out that they were one already. (We think of them as givers, distributors of free food to the hippies, but that required them to be mendicants first.) Would new intellectual movements emerge, Iyer asks, that put the Prakrit of the hippies into the Sanskrit of the academies? The Buddha. Toynbee on taking establishments by surprise. Dark horses win. Martyrs again. Seeley: the conscience seems to remain reliable even after the traditional beliefs which used to underpin it have been removed. Toynbee says that he is a “religious-minded agnostic”.
Disenchantment is the key to the British dropouts: Toynbee compares a more violent, working-class British drug culture with the gentler one of the hippies. Iyer on fear of the end of humanity and faith in Man and on Toynbee’s achievement.
We recognise some of the historical examples Toynbee uses – of the English revolutionary war, the escape of James II, St Francis as dropout (A hippy gesture) – from Surviving the Future, his dialogues with Kei Wakaizumi of Kyoto Sangyo University, OUP, 1971. There is never anything like the richness of allusion that we get in the Study in his spoken words. Nor do we feel he can have been a great broadcaster, though he did a fair amount of radio broadcasting. The mannerisms get in the way, and we are reminded of EWF Tomlin’s observation in his Toynbee anthology (OUP, 1978):
In contrast to his smooth, measured prose [if it is that] (with its occasional artificiality of phrase, owing to his absorption in the classics), his everyday speech tended to be jerky and uneven [...].
At the end of the tapes Hallock Hoffman says that a fuller account of the discussion can be found in The Center magazine, volume 1, no 1. The magazine was published (at what intervals?) between 1967 and 1987. The printed summary is not mentioned by Morton.
The material on the Center at Google Books (if you want to go to that badly-organised place) gives an idea of the range of its activities and its importance in its years of fame. I have not consulted Harry S Ashmore, Unreasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins, Boston, Little Brown & Co, 1989.
Santa Barbara from the Santa Ynez range, Wikimedia Commons
Jimi Hendrix Experience concert, Earl Warren Showgrounds, Santa Barbara, August 19 1967
EWF Tomlin, editor, Arnold Toynbee, A Selection from His Works, with an Introduction by Tomlin, OUP, 1978, posthumous
