POETRY AND THE MORAL SENSE OF PLACE
The impact of global heating is now visible to the senses. In the name of progress, humankind has committed sacrilege, falling far short of the divine demand to live up to God's Creation. In our own time, humankind has destroyed wooded plains and valleys, polluted the seas and the rivers, poisoned the land and the air, damaged the hydrogeological and atmospheric systems, built on green spaces, and inflicted uncontrolled forms of urbanisation and industrialisation upon the land. To use an image employed by the peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy, ('Paradise', XXII, 151), humankind has through ‘foul usury’ humiliated the Creation, that flower-bed that is our God given dwelling. For Dante, "despising Nature and her goodness" is a violence against God. (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans, by Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series LXXX, and Inferno, canto XI, lines 46-48 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).There is nothing in the Bible which entitles human beings to exterminate or destroy or hold in contempt anything on Earth, quite the contrary. We may use the gifts of nature but have no right to ruin or waste them. We have the right to use what we need but have no right to do any more than that. The Bible forbids usury and condemns great accumulations of property. As Dante argues, ‘the usurer condemns Nature ... for he puts his hope elsewhere." (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canto XI, lines 109-11.) By taking more than we are entitled to, we are destroying our place within Creation and, as a result, are destroying our own Being.
Dante shows us the way out, giving us an ideal to pursue and the means to pursue it.
That mountain, at whose side Cassino rests,
Was on its height frequented by a race
Deceived and ill dispos'd: and I it was,
Who thither carried first the name of Him,
Who brought the soul-subliming truth to man.
And such a speeding grace shone over me,
That from their impious worship I reclaim'd
The dwellers round about, who with the world
Were in delusion lost.
The Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate made the claim in The Song of the Earth that poetry could save the world. He may well be right. For Margherita Muller, the achievement of “sustainability” could be tested through garden-making practices that incorporate poetry’ (Margherita Muller Under what stars to plough the earth? The aesthetics and ethics of three Scottish gardens (2012), (available at http://independent.academia.edu). She notes: ‘Poetry, in particular, often uses the ‘garden’ as a metaphor for life, government, and the earth itself, which is the ‘home’ of humanity.’ It’s part of the search for common ground, not just claiming the physical land but investing it with a history and a meaning. It’s what I call a moral sense of place, something which is integral to Being.
Margherita Muller writes that ‘the nostalgic view of a ‘lost’ common land and Karl Marx’s ideas of ‘expropriation’ need not remain part of mythology, and there is no knowing in which form the Earth may become ‘repossessed’. (2012).
I would highlight John Steinbeck’s conception of ‘ownership’ in The Grapes of Wrath here:
“Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land.. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours - being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.”
And that’s what defines a moral sense of place, what makes matter moral and morality matter. Margherita Muller refers to the miners of Carfin in Lanarkshire, who were able ‘to create a garden out of a barren piece of land, a communal effort, a land platform of hope’, an activity that gave the men ‘a high sense of purpose.’ ‘The miners became able to carve out of the earth something else other than coal: their own space, a place where to live by their own moral values, practise their religion, and be at home with like-minded immigrants.’
In Immanence, Transcendence and Essence, I discuss William Blake’s expansive understanding of Art as an imaginative mode of life which accesses ultimate reality. Blake’s Jerusalem is thus presented as the building of a moral place presided over by the arts and the imagination.
In his Defence of Poetry, Shelley argued that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". Here’s hoping. There are no finer lines to portray a complex, interlinked and multilayered society united by the devotion to the common good than those written by Dante as he describes the order of Paradise in The Divine Comedy. Here, Dante portrays a society which achieves harmony by assigning all stations and valuing all activities according to the common end. The parts derive their significance and their character from the place they occupy within the whole, articulating such a unity of purpose in their interimbrication that they form seamlessly within the whole. Against the democracy of subjective opinion and the narcissism of particular interest, Dante articulates a democracy of place and function in which Being is attained through the realisation of a common purpose.
The devotion to the principle of the common end enables diversity to flourish and realise harmony within an overarching unity. The whole is infused with purpose as a standard for determining the relations and functions of the parts and as a scale of moral values evaluating the character and significance of these parts within the whole. Such a conception restores economic activity its proper place as the means of the good life, not the end.
The crisis of capitalist modernity is not simply, as have thought, private ownership of the means of production and the maldistribution of the social product, nor the fettering of the productive forces below technically feasible levels. Capital as an alienated system of production is based upon the inversion of means and ends, object and subject, with the result that economics has come to acquire a position of overriding significance in relation to other human concerns, a determining position which no single concern has the right to claim, least of all the provision of the material means of existence.
Like the miser who is so absorbed in the processes of making money that he goes to his grave without spending any of it so as to enjoy the fruits of his labours, those in thrall to the accumulative dynamics of capitalist economics are so preoccupied with the means of acquiring material wealth that they neglect the real wealth that life offers. That obsession with economic means blinds us to the realisation of ends that makes life worth while.
English Lord Chancellor and Catholic martyr and saint Thomas More wrote pertinently of those who, although having one foot in the grave, continue to pursue material gain, even though it profits them nothing.
I remember me of a thief once cast at Newgate, that cut a purse at the bar, when he should be hanged on the morrow. And when he was asked why he did so, knowing that he should die so shortly, the desperate wretch said that it did his heart good, to be lord of that purse one night yet. And in good faith, methinketh, as much as we wonder at him, yet see we many that do much like, of whom we nothing wonder at all. (Thomas More Four Last Things).
We are still doing it. Time has been called on industrial progress. It’s leading to ecological catastrophe. And yet we carry on in the grip of an obsession with economic growth. We continue to act contrariwise to what our reason and morality, our two greatest gifts, tell us.
‘The unexamined life is not worth living’ argued Plato. More’s wise words show us how far we have strayed from Plato’s call to the examined life. Material gain has become the purpose of life and of living, not human being. We have been living the unexamined life under the compulsion of monetary gain. And not even the prospect of runaway climate change bringing the end of civilisation as we know has been sufficient to waken people into the contemplation of life. Instead, there is a feverish grab to control more resources, extract more value from nature, plunder more of the Earth’s resources. An endless pursuit of something for nothing.
We have transferred the existential significance that belongs properly to human being and living to ‘things’ and their systemic imperatives. We live an unexamined life. Marx referred to religion as the soul of soulless conditions. The soul has been crushed out of our existence, the machine world proceeds ‘without regard for persons’ (Max Weber). And many adjust to those conditions. As Marx argued, even the lion gets used to the bars on his cage.
For poetry to save us, we need to have poetry in our souls. And to have poetry in your soul, you need to have a soul to begin with. And here we are in trouble. Jung wrote of Modern Man in Search of a Soul (2001). If we are to save ourselves from the economic and environmental catastrophes that threaten the world then we need to embed our technics within an imaginative therapy and process aiming at the decolonisation of the soul. The approach I’m developing seeks to transform our perception of ourselves, our culture and our surroundings. We need what I would call a visionary materialism. (Of which I write in Immanence, Transcendence and Essence).
The capital system is based not only on the expropriation of things, objects, but embraces subjectivities. Based on its accumulative dynamic, the capital system amounts to the colonisation of natural resources, of human labour and, most importantly, of perceptions and imaginations. Weber referred to 'the disenchantment of the world' (Entzauberung der Welt). This was a conscious borrowing from the poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, who wrote of die Entgotterung der Nature, the dis-godding of nature (Herman, 1981: 57).
So the approach I take marshals the full range of human intellect and imagination – philosophy, politics, economics, ecology, history, art, literature, science and religion - in order to develop the innovative means to challenge and subvert the instrumental powers that have deprived nature of its living significance and human beings of their souls.
All things are interconnected. Philosophy leads to art, art leads to religion, religion leads to psychology, psychology leads to mythology, mythology leads to literature, literature leads to poetry, poetry leads to music, music leads to mathematics, mathematics leads to biology, biology leads to physics, physics leads to metaphysics, metaphysics leads to philosophy, philosophy leads to art and round we go again.
I draw upon the full range of cognitive, psychic and imaginative modes in order to develop a moral architectonics of place grounded in the unity of social and environmental justice. Here is a real liberation theology which overcomes the dis-godding inflicted by the processes of capitalist modernity, rediscovering the sense of the sacred in nature, and achieves human emancipation as a complete naturalisation.
So the key to challenging alien power and the systemic imperatives and constraints upon which power’s abuse thrives is unchaining our imaginations and freeing our intellects. Isn’t this what a great poet does?
William Blake loathed the preachings of the priests and Churches who could see only evil in the flesh and who were obsessed with a moral discipline based on the credo 'thou shalt not' rather than a happiness which was focused upon human potentialities. Their repressive orientation created, sanctioned and policed a world of psychic misery:
I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man, In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear. (Blake, London)
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern. (Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
That psychic misery made the satanic mills possible. The mechanisation of the mind came before the mechanisation of the world. Blake wants us to see through the shadows on the wall and leave Plato’s cave behind us.
For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life; Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil'd. Fires enwrap the earthly globe, yet Man is not consum'd. (Blake, America, 1.59.)
The soul of sweet delight
By the time he wrote America in 1793, Blake was thinking of a revolution that transcended politics and its concerns over the control of material power and which instead released human beings from the chains of false morality, false values, false philosophy. Mental liberation changing perceptions of reality. The fourfold vision beyond the mechanistic materialism of science and economics.