"Life and hope for the world are to be found only in the deeds of love."
"For love of domination we must substitute equality; for love of victory we must substitute justice; for brutality we must substitute intelligence; for competition we must substitute cooperation. We must learn to think of the human race as one family."
- Bertrand Russell
"The human race is at its best when most free."
"It is in the quietude or tranquillity of peace
that mankind finds the best conditions,
for fulfilling its proper task."
- Dante
In the ninth ditch of the Eighth Circle in the Inferno in Dante’s Comedy, we are confronted with the souls of those who broke up the unity of humankind through schism, whether familial, political, civil or religious. Dante proceeds to portray the horrors of discord in its appropriately gruesome colours, evoking the futility and hopelessness of the destructive cycles of human conflict that have been running their course since the beginning of history up to and including Dante's own time. The truth of war is too horrible to even begin to understand, so no wonder people continue to cloak the facts in a bogus religious sentiment and perverted moral purpose. Spare me the fake religion, heroism and glory, Dante exhibits war for the filth and abomination it is. Dante doesn't mince his words. A poet of supreme beauty, he is a master of words when it comes to ugliness and brutality, the foul acts that abuse the gifts that come with life. Dante strips the pretence away and forces us to confront the truth of war in its stark reality, with words that are as grisly as they are true:
Who, even in words not bound by meter,
and having told the tale many times over,
could tell the blood and wounds that I saw now?
Surely every tongue would fail,
for neither thought nor speech
has the capacity to hold so much.
Could all the wounded troops again assemble:
first from Apulia, land laid low by war,
who grieved for their lost blood
shed by the Trojans, then all those
of the long war, whose corpses were despoiled
of piles of rings -- as Livy writes, who does not err --
together with the ones who felt the agony of blows
fighting in the fields against Guiscard,
and those whose bones still lie in heaps
at Ceperano, where each Apulian played it false,
and those near Tagliacozzo,
where old Alardo conquered without force of arms:
and should one show his limb pierced through,
another his, where it has been cut off,
it would be nothing to the ninth pit's filth.
No cask ever gapes so wide for loss
of mid- or side-stave as the soul I saw
cleft from the chin right down to where men fart.
Between the legs the entrails dangled. I saw
the innards and the loathsome sack
that turns what one has swallowed into shit.
While I was caught up in the sight of him,
he looked at me and, with his hands, ripped apart
his chest, saying: 'See how I rend myself,
'see how mangled is Mohammed!
Ahead of me proceeds Alì, in tears,
his face split open from his chin to forelock.
'And all the others whom you see
sowed scandal and schism while they lived,
and that is why they here are hacked asunder.
'A devil's posted there behind us
who dresses us so cruelly,
putting each of this crew again to the sword
'as soon as we have done our doleful round.
For all our wounds have closed
when we appear again before him.
Inf 28: 1-42
These are words of such compelling power that the only comparison I have is ‘The Return of the Dead’ scene in Abel Gance’s J’Accuse (1919), where the dead of the First World War rise from the battlefield and march on the capital cities to point an accusing finger.
Asked whether he considered J'Accuse as a pacifist film, Gance replied: "I'm not interested in politics... But I am against war, because war is futile. Ten or twenty years afterward, one reflects that millions have died and all for nothing. One has found friends among one's old enemies, and enemies among one's friends." (Kevin Brownlow. The Parade's Gone By.... (London: Columbus Books, 1989; first publ. 1968) p. 533.)
Dante’s words, if unheeded, could serve as the epitaph for a human species that developed the intelligence to develop technical powers and instruments of world-changing potential, but not the wisdom and love to use them wisely and creatively. Nietzsche stated that 'Man ought not to know more of a thing than he can creatively live up to.' He was reflecting on the sterility of philological studies, comparing the quality of mind of his most learned colleagues with Goethe's meagre philological equipment, adding that Goethe yet ‘knew enough to wrestle fruitfully with antiquity!' Dante too, in finding where the balance is to be struck between what can do, and what they ought to do, and ought not do, if they are to become what they are.
Each war, each conflict, each taking of one side against another, is always justified in one way or another, whether for high principle or pointless necessity, it makes no difference, throw in the word 'sacrifice', divorced from any ethical context that gives the word its meaning, the result is the same: an endless cycle of destruction and an exercise in apologetics and self-justification. This is what I like about Dante - he doesn't shirk responsibility and exposes the self-serving justifications as the deceits they are. He makes for uncomfortable reading. Dante presents the debacle in its entire historical sweep to present war as the soul-denying conveyor belt it is, all the generations swept by in turn, each fighting for what they consider to be – or what is presented to them at the time and in retrospect – a just cause. In the sweep of history, each and every cause blurs in the single spectacle of a lost humanity swallowed up in cruelty and carnage. Dante has only to describe war as the butchery and slaughter it is, the cemetery of human hopes, the perversion of dreams and desires, and strip through the high moral principle in which war is cloaked on earth to meet out just punishment to those who spread discord and thereby divide humanity from within to make a Hell out of Earth. Of course, the lesson calls upon us to break the destructive cycles of reprisal and counter-reprisal in the here-and-now, and thus avoid the punishment we inflict upon ourselves as a result of putting partisan loyalties and allegiances before our common humanity united under the one God.
The facts of human schism and war are such as to induce feelings of hopelessness and despair at the human condition. The images of war are compelling evidence of the persistence of man’s inhumanity to fellow humans. The grief that Dante feels surveying the spectacle of human history is overwhelming and fosters a sense of defeat. The weight of evidence is against those who thirst for justice, meaning and fulfilment. To linger too long in the human history of war and conflict is to succumb to despair.
There is an old book called Letters from Mesopotamia, which I found available for free on the Guttenberg site a few years ago. It is a collection of letters from 1915-6, during the first world war, sent home by a young soldier by the name of Robert Palmer. In the entry from August 4 1915 he writes:
‘It is dreadful to think that we've all been denying our Christianity for a whole year and are likely to go on doing so for another. How our Lord's heart must bleed for us! It appals me to think of it.’
Robert Palmer was killed in the battle of Um el Hannah, June 21, 1916, aged 27 years. He paid the ultimate price for that denial of the moral law within. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ the gospel says and that means what it says, without exception for race, colour, creed, nationality etc. This is a categorical imperative which enjoins us to respect all others as ends. If we act in accordance with Kant’s formulae of ends and universal law, and act in such a way that we conceive our actions to be of universal significance, i.e. we want all others to act in the same way, then we would obey the command ‘thou shalt not kill’ on the assumption that others will also obey that command. If all had done that in the trenches, then I dare say that the God that men on both sides prayed to might well have turned up. The problem is that the soldiers divided either side of the trenches presumed that the others would not obey the universal command. They thus denied their Christianity, they denied the moral law within, and resumed the fight that was contrary to what is right. It should come as no surprise that their God did not show up to save them. It's much preferable to live up to our creative abilities, much healthier and much saner to listen to the moral law within, and to live by it, whatever the death-dealing delusions and imperatives of prevailing institutions and ideologies of time and place say. But how easy is to to hear that inner voice within institutions and systems and cultures that induce its suppression and denial? Even people who know better feel compelled to deny that voice. A dangerous road indeed. I can't help but recall here the words spoken by Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons - first people will deny they have a conscience, in time they will have no conscience. I pity the people whose statesmen tread your path. How does it happen? Read Max Weber on a world of instrumental rationality and organisational imperatives that proceed 'without regard to persons.' We live under Weber's shadow (the title of an excellent book by Keith Breen).
I'm currently in touch with the people at MMU in charge of the "Calling Blighty" project:
‘The Calling Blighty series of 12 minute films, made in 1944-46, shows servicemen (and a very few women) in the Far East recording a message to be seen by their wives and families in local cinemas back home. – a sort of one way Skype of their day, these are remarkable and moving documents.’
How strange to see this page:
‘Can you tell us more about this person or the Calling Blighty films? If so, please get in touch.’
‘Name: Unknown Unknown (Please do get in touch if you know this person)’
Next to an image of my grandfather are the words ‘unknown unknown unknown unknown …’ referring to first and second names, rank and other details.
Well, this is my granddad Joseph Critchley, Burma Star, and I remember him very well indeed. He is not unknown, not now and not then, and I’m now in touch with the people working on this project at MMU filling in the details. But it shows just how easily flesh and blood individuals with names and personalities and relations, belonging to others and known to their communities, can be swept up in and swept aside by vast impersonal mechanisms and processes that, in the words of Max Weber, proceed ‘without regard to persons.’ And that is the question that interests me, how ‘ordinary’ men and women who are no more enemies of the complete strangers they are organised to fight than we are today can end up embroiled in mass total war organised from above. How is that, when it comes to planning and organising for the long-range common good, for peaceful and productive social purposes, we are met with obstruction and inertia, but when it comes to destruction and violence and death, the most ‘libertarian’ of states ditch personal liberty and put the whole of society on a war footing?
The NWFA is part of Library Services Special Collections at Manchester Metropolitan University.
On a canteen-style film set in Bombay, servicemen from St Helens take turns to send personal messages back to their loved ones at home. After the individual messages have been delivered, the soldiers all gather round the mess room piano to sing ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and wave and cheer at the camera.’
My grandfather is the first man up, winning the bottles of beer at darts, and delivering the first message, and mentioning my dad Brian, my uncle Kevin and my auntie Joan. Cut to 9-00 for the piano sing-a-long, there’s my granddad right in the middle, the one staring at the camera, with all the quips. That pretty much sums him up. A bold, abrasive, cocky character – and yet so easily swept aside as an ‘unknown’ by the impersonalising and abstracting forces we have allowed to rule our lives with an almost irresistible force. It is time to reclaim that force as our own social power and organise it according to a social and moral purpose within communities of practice. How sad that people find their craving for meaning satisfied in the forced communities of war, for want of true community and belonging and identity.
My granddad was not unknown and is not unknown, but could easily just become another number within the vast institutional and impersonal processes which have stolen our agency from us, and to which we too often transfer the responsibility for ‘making history.’
I am currently in discussion with the people in charge of the “Message Home” project, North West Film Archive, at Manchester Metropolitan University, a place where I spent seven very hard-working and immensely productive and fulfilling years. I’m being asked for details, rank etc. He was a sergeant. I remember seeing his medals back in the seventies, and presume they are still somewhere or other. I don’t care for wars, flags, uniforms, empires, abstract idols and false collectivities, none of it is worth a life. I’m more interested in analysing these things as surrogates for the real meaning and belonging we crave, and in breaking these cycles of reprisal and counter-reprisal with identities and belongings that satisfy the cosmic longing for meaning. I loathe the way that love and solidarity are hijacked and exploited, perverted and distorted as they are pressed into the service of contrary ends. Derek Sayer writes well here:
“The ultimate measure of the awesome power, and the fundamental violence, of unfettered abstraction is to be found in the millions upon millions of nameless corpses which this most vicious of centuries has left as its memorial, human sacrifices to one or another of Weber's renascent modern gods. War itself is not new, modernity's contribution is to have waged it, with characteristic efficiency, under the sign of various totalizing abstractions which name and claim the lives of all.”
Derek Sayer Capitalism and Modernity 1987: 154/5
And I’m more interested in the nature and quality of those lives, the personalities, the things that make history a lived experience. We can put names to numbers, and humanize those caught up in the maelstrom that was the twentieth century. We are still caught up in it. People who know me know what I think of war, nationalism, imperialism – an utter abomination. But, rather than seeking to check it by appeals to reason alone, I relate it to deeper psychological and institutional processes, because it is only in the depths that we have a chance of uprooting this malign force - by providing genuine communities and identities, by forging the bonds of commonality and universality in social relationships so that people owe allegiance to each other, not to false idols and abstract collectivities, by sustaining practices that satisfy the cosmic longing for meaning - by living in such a way as to call the soul back to the world.
In 1982, in the New York Times, Nobel Peace Prize winner Alva Myrdal attempted to draw public attention to the dehumanizing effects of the Cold War: ‘Our civilization in the process not only of being militarized, but also being brutalized.’ Lewis Mumford, now an old man, took a clipping of the article, and in handwriting showing his age, scrawled across the top: ‘Note: I said this 3 weeks after the first atom bomb was used and spent the next five years in full advertisement and articles; trying to awaken my lethargic contemporaries.’ He had said, and done, precisely this, and a whole lot more. The cutting is preserved in the Mumford archives. Mumford’s consistent criticism of militarization and brutalization can be found throughout his prolific writings on the mechanization of life, against which Mumford consistently opposed the positive vision of an organic holism. I am currently researching for a book on Mumford. The man’s time has come – the world needs to heed his message.
Mumford understood the Cold War in the context of the historic rise of the Megamachine, within which, the United States and the Soviet Union shared a common commitment to power politics and technological gigantism. In the crucible of the Second World War, the new world of abstract, overscale, impersonal power was forged, a world which came to encompass each and all. The nature of that world is perfectly expressed in the letter that Michael Fraenkel wrote to Victor Serge of 21 March 1945:
‘When you cross the Mexican border into the United States, the one fact that impinges itself upon your consciousness more forcibly than any other is the fact of the American world-change; you feel you are in the presence of something that exercises a terrific world effect. It is the effect not so much of people as of things, the power of things, of the weight, mass, dimension of things. You feel that it is something that is shaping the destiny of the world, setting, if you like, the tone of the world, from all corners of the earth, is responding to it, responding to it mightily, overwhelmingly. You think at this point of Russia, of the mighty power it stands for, and at once Russia’s power merges in your mind with America’s power: the power of things rather than men, things rather than ideas or sentiments; the power of numbers, statistics, etc. Russia meets America in the anonymity of men and the emergence of the statistical thing. Russia and America meet in setting the world tone. Between the United States and Russia, the shape of the world for the next one hundred or two hundred years is being fixed.’
It is one thing to continue to recognize the true and the good in these conditions, and another to affirm them against the wrong and the bad. It takes something of an altogether different order to act – and presume the ability to act – in favour of the true and the good, and to live in accordance with those values, within autonomy-denying, soul-destroying, dehumanising structures and systems of power that proceed, in Max Weber’s telling phrase, ‘without regard to persons.’
That’s the world we live in. It is the world we have been living in - and waging war in - for a long while now. That's the world in which any transcendent ethical standard has to be applied, not merely as an applied ethics, where the emphasis falls on application, but as an ethics involving norms, truths and values which are independent of practice.
How to preserve ethical agency in such a world? 'The most conspicuous, scientific and technological achievements of our age - nuclear bombs, rockets, computers - are all direct products of war,' Mumford argued, 'and serve military and political ends that would shrivel under rational examination and candid moral appraisal.' The problem is, however, that human beings are not free-floating moral agents, in that they do not and cannot stand outside of their social, institutional and relational context. Such rational examination and moral appraisal that takes place takes place not in abstraction, from a vantage point outside of society, but in time and place. That doesn't make rational examination and moral appraisal impossible, merely ... difficult for individuals who live in relation to others in society. Mumford quoted Krishna to an audience of Harvard students in 1941: ‘The only thing that a human being can settle is whether he should fight .. the issues of our life, the issues of our fighting are not within our own hands.’ It is easier to be swept along in the maelstrom. I'm not sure I agree that the issues of our fighting are not within our own hands, such a view would imply a quasi-Calvinist assertion of free-will within an overarching fatalism, whether theological, environmental or social. The issues are at bottom issues of an unmastered human practice, human social forces which, within certain social relations, have escaped human control and comprehension. The problem, then, is the lack of collective means and mechanisms by which to mediate human social practice, with the result that uncoordinated, incremental human actions generate an abstract collective force that diminishes responsibility and free-will, diminishing agency in face of external structure. Which is to emphasize the extent to which the tyranny and violence of abstraction – and those institutional and organisation forces that serve as its instruments – is concerned to break the human spirit. The problem with ‘realpolitik’ is not that it is real or political, but that it isn’t realistic enough and isn’t political at all in the true sense of the word. Politics, in the ancient sense, concerns public life as a dimension of the creative self-realization of human beings as social beings. The word politics derives from the Greek polites, meaning those interested in public affairs. The antonym, meaning those interested only in private affairs, is idiotes. With public life, and the bonds of commonality and universality, dissolved into an atomised realm, the universal antagonism of each against all in a competitive market society, we have lost the sense of shared endeavour and meaning. We do not live in a democracy, we live in an idiocracy. And instead of a genuine communal feeling, we get the ersatz communities of fake and accidental identities, engineering and organised from above. It takes no great political ‘realism’ to solve the problems of social living by force and violence. That’s the kind of politics that dominates in the modern world. But only an idiot would mistake that recourse to force for real politics and government. Such force has human abjection as its primary goal, reducing and ultimately destroying the human personality, making it passive in face of impersonal institutional and systemic processes. We live in a necropolis, governed by capital as ‘dead labour’, the abstract central state as ‘dead sovereignty’, fuelled by ‘dead matter’, the ancient wastes which Nature in its eternal wisdom has concealed beneath its skin.
Here are the numbers that should concentrate minds and have us go in search of the moral voice within.
Such numbers speak of the routinization and mechanization of war under the Megamachine. Numbers on this scale are never accidental and have nothing to do with human nature. It takes psychological and organisational preparation to wage war on this scale. When Picasso saw the Palaeolithic art in the caves at Lascaux he remarked ‘We have invented nothing. We have made no progress in culture, although we have invented organized war on a massive scale’.
I shall quote from something I wrote a few years ago:
Well over 100 million human beings were killed in the twentieth century, and the world remains caught in the maelstrom unleashed by the ‘Great War’ of 1914-18. War on this scale is not accidental but requires technical, institutional and psychological preparation. War, violence and death have been normalised, but at a distance. In terms of per head figures, violent death is decreasing. It is in the abstracting systems of politics and economics that violence is increasing. The impersonal world is outstripping the personal world in the scale of its destruction. This demonstrates the violence and tyranny of abstraction. Numbers on this scale are reached only if war – that Orwellian politics which makes murder respectable – is pursued as a conscious end and systematic purpose. With all of their mass of means and scientific rationality, modern rational humanity has invented nothing but organised war on a mass scale. The modern world is characterized by technology, war and death. The scale of man-made death is the central moral as well as material fact of our time." (Philosophizing through the Eye of the Mind).
I'd just qualify the reference to 'technology' - technology is an easy scapegoat. Technology is an extension of us, as benign and as beautiful as we are, or as greedy, stupid and violent - it depends on our relations to each other and to the world.
Simone Weil states the politics of this tyranny and violence of abstraction in terms of the destruction of citizenship and, ultimately, of the soul:
‘With guns, aeroplanes, bombs, you can spread death, terror, oppression, but not life and liberty. With gas masks, air-raid shelters and air-raid warnings, you can create wretched masses of panic-stricken human beings, ready to succumb to the most senseless forms of terror and to welcome with gratitude the most humiliating forms of tyranny, but not citizens.’
As the 'Return of the Dead' scene in Gance’s J’Accuse urges – Reveillez-vous! Wake up, arise from the dead and march on the capitals, take the public realm as your own citizen space, and start to shape public purposes in accordance with the principles of life, peace, harmony and fulfilment.
What should be emphasized is human life as a search for an end which satisfies the profound human longing for meaning and which expresses the human need for roots, something more than simply an identity, but the need for a ‘home’ which embodies the sense of worth, the sense of belonging, the wealth of connections with others, a true home, a home that is ‘ours’ and one which is so worthy defending that we have no craving to take the homes of others. To be at peace is to live at home with one another.
"If these men must die, would it not be better to die in their own country fighting for the freedom of their class, and for the abolition of war, than to go forth to strange countries and die slaughtering and slaughtered by their brothers that tyrants and profiteers might live?”
James Connolly, 15 August 1914
Had we answered that question rightly, and in sufficient numbers, in 1914, then we would not have been come to deny our consciences on a mass scale; we would have been spared the horrors of the First World War, and the maelstrom that opened up in its aftermath.
As for my granddad, for all that he was a proud member of the Burma Star, he wasn't a soldier at all. He appreciated the camaraderie. We are social beings, we need others in order to be ourselves. It's a sad comment on the rationalistic desolidarisation that characterizes capitalist modernity, atomizing societies, and dividing humanity by the ersatz communities of class and national state, that this social need for belonging and meaning is satisfied most of all in the death and destruction of war. My granddad was a bricklayer to the end, a good one too, a builder, and someone who was better employed on constructive projects.
For years, I pondered the question as to why, with just a channel separating Britain from Hitler and Nazism, British soldiers were sent thousands of miles away to defend an Empire that was illegitimate and should not have existed in the first place, in support of a ruling class that had palpably demonstrated that it was fit to rule nothing, and which had spent the previous decades active in the suppression of democratic civil and labour forces at home.
I like the way that Tolkien expresses the ambivalence of families at war. He contrasted the natural flying of the martins in the way they skim insects on the water with the organised, calculating work and effort that goes into flying airplanes to bomb the land from the sky: 'the heavens are full of war and riot' (Letter # 64). He expressed his disquiet to his son Christopher, who had, with his other son Michael, joined The Royal Air Force during the Second World War:
‘It would not be easy for me to express to you the measure of my loathing for the Third Service [The Royal Air Force] which can be nonetheless, and is for me, combined with admiration, gratitude, and above all pity for the young men caught in it. But it is the aeroplane of war that is the real villain. And nothing can really amend my grief that you, my best beloved, (Christopher Tolkien) have any connexion with it.’
Letter # 100
In the same letter, he goes on to describe airplanes as ‘Nazgul-birds.’ That statement expresses Tolkien’s revulsion for war and the mechanical means of violence. In expressing that same admiration, gratitude and pity, we should also ask what kind of institutional, psychological and socio-relational failings lie behind our collective forces taking alien form and coming to enforce sacrifices of such inhuman, destructive, and insane proportions.
As to the view we take of all those caught up in the events that make up the history of the world, we should bear in mind that there are no ‘free’ agents in the historical process, there are no moral actions unconstrained by the identities, interests, relations of agents bound by time and place. Right and wrong, good and bad, are easy to state in the abstract, but can never be lived there. Morality is not a moralism which separates moral actions from social or political actions. Morality in the true sense is not academic, concerning rules and calculations and consequences, but is an ethos, a practice, a way of life in which ethics and politics/social life are intertwined. In contrast with moralism and the way it abstracts men and women from their social surroundings to assert an ideal standard against time and place, morality embeds men and women in their social surroundings, situates them historically in time and place, without thereby making moral judgements merely relative. There is a moral ambiguity in all of this situated ethical practice – the moral questions of right and wrong, good and bad are existential ones. If there are transcendent standards – I say there are – then these can only be known, lived and chosen in context. And this is never clear-cut in practice. Morality, then, entails an understanding the nature and quality of human behaviour as richly and sensitively as is possible, recognizing, along with the emphasis on freedom through reason, all its irrational darkness, with an almost – almost – infinite capacity for cruelty and violence when the worst aspects of human nature are incited by destructive cycles and patterns of behaviour. Human beings are social beings, and live in relation to others. That doesn’t make ethical standard relative and customary. The need for moral decision remains, in accordance with standards outside the exigencies of time and place. But that decision always takes place in time and place. It is, of course, easier to transfer responsibility to some external agent, a government, a nation, a god, or some anonymous history or power, ‘progress,’ ‘economic growth.’ But that is mere moral evasion, a wilful irresponsibility. People cannot shed responsibility for their actions in this way. But actions are never free and unconstrained. And right and wrong, good and bad, are never so clear-cut in lived experience. Read Dante. As stern as his morality is, there is moral ambiguity in the key episodes in the Comedy. It makes for uncomfortable reading.
Significant, effective and meaningful action in the face of seemingly overwhelming abstract and impersonal power, whilst managing to survive, socially and physically, remains as potent a problem for the people of today as it ever was, maybe even moreso in face of the looming environmental crisis. I’d just say this: we are not the first generation to be challenged and tested by ‘circumstances.’ History is an optical illusion, in that it gives the impression that the events recorded in the books could only have taken the form they did, and that the issues that men and women fought over, and the way that they came to be resolved, possess a certain inevitability and stability. That’s nonsense, of course, and is not how those events were made. As for our chances in face of climate crisis:
Reason often has told man he was defeated: why should the prisoner, the slave, the corrupted and the deformed and the ailing all go on with so few exceptions to their dismal end?
Mumford 1952: 30-31
Do you look at the facts on climate change and conclude that we are defeated? What do you think men and women in the past, facing seemingly impossible odds, have thought? And what do you think they proceeded to do, nevertheless? It’s not the first time the future looked hopeless, but people carried on, whether they volunteered or were ordered and organised from above, and kept on smiling through as they gave their best. Even if those smiles needed ... a certain encouragement ... is that too much to ask of us, a generation that has been gifted more material wealth and comfort and technological power than any previous generation? Those involved in making that history thought, spoke and acted in conditions of uncertainty, but demonstrated faith and courage and, probably most of all, the ever-insurgent spirit of life, in stepping forward to act in affirmation of the radical indeterminacy of the future. If the scale of the problem confronting us is large, so too are the tools at our disposal. The people in this video, and the families to whom they addressed their messages back home, offer a remarkable example of the human spirit surviving under the worst of circumstances. And that’s the enduring lesson for us, as we face whatever it is the future will bring.
I’m not sure that this leads to a tragic view of the self. Against the quote from Krishna above, I'd refer to the ‘living hope’ that Dante offers us in place of despair, the possibility of a happy ending. I am sure that it invites us to engage in an act of imaginative compassion when examining such issues, appreciating the moral ambiguity. That is what I see in Tolkien’s words to his sons who had entered a war which Tolkien abhorred. And it is that moral ambiguity I see also running throughout Dante, who places his characters in situations that are never anything less than difficult. In affirming a transcendent moral standard, as Dante most certainly does – war is wrong – he shows a deep and compassionate understanding of the complexities of human behaviour. Here, I shall appeal to the Quaker conscience of Walt Whitman:
‘Pale, silent, stern, what could I say to that long accrued retribution?
Could I wish humanity different?
Could I wish the people made of wood and Stone?
Or that there be no justice in destiny or time?’
It is easy to become moralistic on this question, taking big moral stands in the abstract. That is not how history proceeds. History is a lived experience which puts 'ordinary' men and women in context, having to take responsibility in making moral decisions, or evade those decisions by transferring responsibility to some anonymous force or power. I am interested in the processes, forces and pressures that induce denial on the part of human agents. And I am interested in building. My granddad as the bricklayer, not the soldier. Let’s get to building and turn away from destroying:
‘Every person, in the course of his life, must build—starting with the natural territory of his own self—a work, an opus, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. He makes his own soul throughout all his earthly days; and at the same time he collaborates in another work, in another opus, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time it narrowly determines, the perspectives of his individual achievement: the completing of the world.’
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu
If war no longer occupied men's thoughts and energies, we would, within a generation, put an end to all serious poverty throughout the world. Bertrand Russell, The Future of Mankind
Dante affirmed that humankind flourishes when it is most free, but that freedom was not an arbitrary or libertarian one, but one lived in recognition of socio-relational and moral restraints as internally mediated restraints. If his call for the universal emperor can be criticized for being insufficiently alert to the potentials of tyranny contained in such singular rule, he did at the same time emphasize the moral, legal and institutional conditions which ensured that universal government, law and authority did indeed serve the common good that embraced each and all. In the title of Ruth Mary Fox's book, Dante Lights the Way (1958). Dante points us in the direction of the Greater Love that lights the path to peace and invites the heart to follow. Dante pointed the way to the unification of humanity under the one rule of legitimate law, authority and government, a world of harmony and cooperation, diverse voices singing as one. He lamented the needless pain and suffering as a result of war, discord and violence, and proposed set forth an idealistic vision of unity in which difference became a source of order and fulfilment rather than discord. It is not generally known that Dante's De Monarchia was one of the two chief documents used in drawing up the constitution of the United Nation. (Fox, Ruth Mary. Dante Lights the Way, The Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee, 1958: xiii,). In the words of Dr G. A. Borgese, Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, delivered at the Milwaukee State Teachers College, May 24 1949: ‘The two basic sources I used in the drafting of The Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution were the American Constitution and Dante’s political treatise, De Monarchia. At the time, Borgese was secretary of the Committee to Frame a World Constitution.
It's a view not at all far from that of Bertrand Russell, who wrote: "War can only be abolished by the establishment of a world government."
War crimes are the actions of powers whose arrogance leads them to believe that they are above the law. Might, they argue, is right. The world needs to establish and apply certain criteria in considering inhuman actions by great powers. These should not be the criteria convenient to the victor, as at Nuremberg, but those which enable private citizens to make compelling judgments on the injustices committed by any great power.
Russell, Introduction to Against the Crime of Silence
Buttressed by respect for diversity, the flourishing of all parts of the animate universe within an organic holism, and the establishment of communities of practice and ethics as ethos, the moral and socio-relational infrastructure of the commonwealth of life, this remains the solution to the problems we face on this planet - it is basically the problem of how to live well together, with each other, and with the other beings and bodies of the More-than-Human world that enfolds and sustains us. Dante lights the way:
'O humanity, in how many storms must you be tossed,
how many shipwrecks must you endure,
so long as you turn yourself into a many-headed beast
lusting after a multiplicity of things!
You are ailing in both your intellectual powers, as well as in heart:
you pay no heed to the unshakable principles of your higher intellect,
nor illumine your lower intellect with experience,
nor tune your heart to the sweetness of divine counsel
when it is breathed into you through the trumpet of the Holy Spirit:
'Behold how good and pleasant it is
for brethren to dwell together in unity.'
And that possibility for collaboration and unity is contained in our membership of and participation in the Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes and sustains us all. There is an exchange in the film Interstellar that is worth pondering at length:
"Cooper: You're a scientist, Brand.
Brand: So listen to me when I say that love isn't something that we invented. It's... observable, powerful. It has to mean something.
Cooper: Love has meaning, yes. Social utility, social bonding, child rearing...
Brand: We love people who have died. Where's the social utility in that?
Cooper: None.
Brand: Maybe it means something more - something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. I'm drawn across the universe to someone I haven't seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it. All right Cooper. Yes. The tiniest possibility of seeing Wolf again excites me. That doesn't mean I'm wrong."
Those words have struck a chord with a lot of people, and these words in particular bear repetition: "Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that ..." I say we should. That’s the ‘universal love’ that moves the world, and moves men and women from within; that's the love that is not invented, but invents, as the ‘creating spirit.’ That’s my view, set out at length in other places. I shall simply refer readers to my love of Dante, who affirmed the greater love that moves the sun and the other stars. Here are the lines with which Dante closes The Comedy:
but my desire and will were moved already
—like a wheel revolving uniformly
—by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Dante, Paradiso. 33.143-45
Emphasize that word 'other', emphasize the multiplicity and diversity of the universe, of all the stars together. I emphasize continually Dante's vision of the world as one, in union, diverse voices singing together in harmony, in the sweet symphony of Paradise. I stand by that vision. But what is inspiring about that vision, what enamors Dante, is not the Oneness, but the multiplicity and diversity that the One embraces and unifies. Dante's 'enamoured mind' is set on seeing and knowing and loving that variety of life, that 'otherness' that is brilliantly present in the Comedy's last line - a line that combines the oneness of the Sun with the multiplicity of the stars. And God is the love that moves the sun and the other stars: “l’amor che move ’l sole el’altre stelle.” Dante testifies to his belief in God as the transcendent One, but in this final line of the Comedy, the most beautiful line of 'the world's greatest poem,' Dante combines the One and the Many. The poem ends with the word 'stelle,' 'stars', the universe in its plurality, its many-sided 'otherness', altre, 'otherness' within a transcendent 'oneness.' Dante's oneness as a Greater Love indelibly constituted by multiplicity, difference, and sheer otherness, as expressed in the words “altre stelle”— a diversity that shines all the more brilliantly in light of the oneness of God's Sun. That's the transcendent Love that the folk in Interstellar are groping vaguely towards, the Love that transcends time and space, and which endures all, and embraces all. We can’t prove it, we can’t supply evidence for it, we can’t demonstrate it, we may very well never understand it, not fully – but ‘maybe we should trust that.’
Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son ...
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’,
She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Ancient Sage
It's that moral law within that we need to remember first and foremost, not the ephemeral and accidental allegiances of politics and geography.
There lies before us, if we choose, continued progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death because we can not forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings. Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, nothing lies before you but universal death.
- Bertrand Russell
Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that.
-Bertrand Russell, Autobiography
Those who value the world as themselves may be entrusted to govern the world. Those who love the world as themselves may be entrusted to care for the world.
Lao-zi, Way Power Book (Dao De Jing)
The strategists say, "Do not be the aggressor but the defender. Do not advance an inch, but retreat a foot instead." This is movement without moving, stretching the arm without showing it, confronting enemies with the idea there is no enemy, holding in the hand no weapons. Underestimating the enemy will destroy my treasures. Thus when the battle is joined, it is the kind who will win.
Lao-zi, Way Power Book (Dao De Jing)
Brand: We love people who have died. Where's the social utility in that?