Tag: Authoritarianism

Søren Kierkegaard – The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, like so many other thinkers of their time, saw their century as one engulfed by a crisis of faith. But whereas Nietzsche aimed to destroy the last remnants of a rotting Christianity to build a world where values might be reimagined, Kierkegaard attempted to create a new, fresh, and serious Christianity to take the place of the old and moribund one. In The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air we have three discourses analysing the famous biblical Sermon on the Mount. They fit into Kierkegaard’s larger goal of answering “what it is to be a human being”, especially from a “godly standpoint”, by teaching us a little about silence, obedience, and joy. Where Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous work always aims at making us think, here the goal is almost the opposite – here he wants us to act and change our lives.

I still have not decided yet whether I liked this short book. Kierkegaard places huge demands upon his listeners to act and be true Christians, demands which are unlikely to appeal to anyone who is not devout already. For those wavering, Kierkegaard has very little time. His faith is an all-or-nothing affair. But that does not mean that this work is without interest to the rest of us.

First Discourse: Silence

In the Sermon on the Mount we are called to consider, among other things, the lilies in the field and the birds of the air. From this pair Kierkegaard draws the lessons of The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air. The first discourse looks at the pair as a source of silence and explains why silence is important.

First, however, we are introduced to the character of the poet. The poet represents an inauthentic relationship with nature masquerading as an authentic one. Society, Kierkegaard thinks, is full of people who listen to the Bible and would like to follow its teachings. However, they do not even try to do so because they believe such a life would be impossible. The poet dramatizes the wish to live religiously, thus obscuring the fact that it is actually possible. We must stop listening to poets and start listening to the silence of the animals.

Humans are gifted with speech, but we must learn to keep silence. The reason is that “becoming silent, silent before God, is the beginning of the fear of God”. And fearing God is a good thing – it draws us nearer to Him and His kingdom. The first step to reaching God is to be silent – not to do anything other than cease talking. Our speech is dangerous, it distorts our situation. The lily suffers, but does not speak, whereas a human suffers and talks and makes their suffering all the greater. “In this silence, the many thoughts of wishing and desiring fall silent in the fear of God”. In our silence we perceive God, we remind ourselves of Him and make ourselves small before Him. Poets may talk of silence, but they seek it in order to talk about it. Their search is dishonest, the opposite of what is needful.

Ceasing to think, to speak, is to become like the birds and lilies. They live entirely in the moment, untroubled – and through silence we too can live orientated towards the moment at hand. There is a lot here that reminds me of Kierkegaard’s Repetition, which I looked at earlier. The creatures, unlike us humans, are capable of repetition – they have faith that things will repeat, without needing to worry and distract themselves from the now before them.

Second Discourse: Obedience

Silence leads to the fear of God which leads to His Kingdom – that is the idea of the first discourse. The second takes us further by confronting us with a choice – an either/or. Either God or whatever we want, but not a God who is a half-measure. For Kierkegaard, if we think we can combine God with other interests, other choices, that means that we have a false conception of Him. In fact, if we don’t give God our everything, he continues, that means we hate Him. Wait a minute, you might say, that’s ridiculous. But Kierkegaard says that what God demands is “obedience, unconditional obedience”.

The lily and the bird are teachers of obedience. They do not complain about the circumstances of their birth; instead, they accept everything as God’s will. They then blossom or flourish as best they can, given whatever situation they find themselves in. We humans complain, we despair at our brief time alive – and all this disobedience gets in the way of us becoming who God wants us to be. It also makes us vulnerable to temptation. “Where there is ambivalence, there temptation is” and “where ambivalence is… deep down there is also disobedience”.

Accepting everything our authority tells us on faith, allowing no doubts or disobedience, and trusting that later we will learn the reasons behind these injunctions – how little such suggestions must appeal to a modern reader! If you are a Christian already, Kierkegaard is describing a harsh but honest way of living in a way that pleases God; but if you are not one, then this is just sinister and authoritarian rubbish, the kind of thing we’d expect from our dictators. And if you are on the fence now, in the twenty-first century, Kierkegaard is just going to push you right off into scepticism. But perhaps that’s what he’d want.   

Third Discourse: Joy

After all the business with the silence and the unconditional obedience, how happy we readers are to learn about joy! For after all, in spite of the suffering of the animals, they are actually joyous. In fact, they are “unconditionally joyful, are joy itself”. The best kind of joy for Kierkegaard is a state of being rather than a temporary state. He defines it as when one is “truly to be present to oneself” – that is, when one is silent about the future and past, and instead focused entirely upon one’s own existence within the present. He even says that “Joy is the present time”. The birds and lilies are joyous because they exist in the present.

But it is more complicated than that. After all, how could the creatures both “bear so infinitely deep a sorrow” while remaining happy? Because – and here Kierkegaard says something that sounds impressive, if nothing else – they cast all their care and sorrow upon God. With the help of faith, they offload all of their cares onto God, which empties them of their worries, and leaves only joy remaining. And even if there is only a little joy there, the absence of sorrow means that this joy will seem huge. Anyone can be happy, so long as they have no sorrow – that is the message. And from the creatures we can learn how to hurl or sorrows onto God – we can learn “dexterity”.

Conclusions

We have no excuses for not being proper, Christian Christians, in Kierkegaard’s view. Even in the midst of society one can still be a proper Christian, because birds group together, yet they still show unconditional obedience, are joyous, and are silent – and people are basically birds. If we too show unconditional obedience, unconditional joy, and silence our spirits, then we can abide in God – we can temporarily take part in the eternity which is God’s time. What a rousing conclusion, ay, readers?

As for me, I am not convinced. Or rather, I think that Kierkegaard’s description of a truly Christian way of living in The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air is both fascinating and repulsive at the same time. He smashes any suggestion that anything other than a life lived entirely for God can be a godly life, and for most of us wavering moderns this is a commitment far greater than what we are capable of.

At the same time, we can take away things from this piece. The value of silence is universal, and so too is the value of orientating ourselves towards the present. But as for the middle section, the authoritarianism and recommendation of political and social quietism are more curiosities, than things I hope we may actually want to learn from.

If you want more authoritarianism, you can read my comments on some essays by Thomas Carlyle. If you want more Kierkegaard, here’s my piece on Repetition. 

Thomas Carlyle, Prophet or Petty Pamphleteer?

There are, it seems, two ways of coming to Thomas Carlyle. The first, and tamest, is through the likes of Borges, who praised Carlyle’s experimental novel Sartor Resartus as a model to be emulated. The second route is far less innocent. Carlyle is perhaps the best known these days for his “fascism”. Carlyle’s dates obviously don’t have anything to do with fascism – he was born in 1795 and died in 1881. However, the man’s politics have aged extraordinarily badly. We may overlook or even, unthinkingly, admire his theory of Great Men, at least from a distance, but as soon as his authoritarianism comes out in his writing it only gets louder and louder, and less and less reasonable or coherent.

I have spent a few weeks with the Penguin edition of Carlyle’s Selected Writings, and in this post I suppose my goal is simply to suggest why there might be a reason to read this side of Carlyle, however reprehensible it may be.

Why read him?

One way to read Carlyle is less as a thinker so much as a character. Carlyle was a Scot. His parents wanted him to be a preacher but he ended up losing his faith. Nevertheless, there’s a strong prophetic tone to his writing that is impossible to avoid. Carlyle is completely incapable of writing in clear English. Not prophecy, but “vaticination”, not a standard sentence but all sorts of inversion. There are plenty of allusions, lists, and terrible images. From the back of my book – “Roar with all your throats, of cartilage and metal… for it is the hour!”

One gets the sense that Carlyle was rather disappointed to be born after the French Revolution, the subject of his major historical work. He has a certain relish for chaos that is distinctly Romantic. And indeed, it’s best to think of Carlyle as a Romantic, one born to late and who lived too long. His fearful view of technology, his praise of the individual and their genius, his loathing for the conforming masses, are all in their essence Romantic. In particular, Carlyle takes a lot from the German Romantics, and was a huge fan of Goethe (seemingly without noticing that Goethe renounced Romanticism later in his life). And these German Romantics were, it must be said, politically suspect. Aside from their support of Revolution, the sheer anti-rationality of the likes of Novalis has left a painful legacy in the intellectual history of the world.

Out of the Romantics grew Carlyle’s views of Great Men. In “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History” Carlyle laid out his view of Great Men as those who take the “dry dead fuel” of “common languid Times” and exploit it to achieve great things. Their conviction is at the heart of their strength. Except, wait a moment, haven’t we by this point in human history noticed that conviction often is little indication of goodness? Stalin, of course, had his convictions, as did Hitler. Generally I disapprove of bringing in these two, because they are classic examples which end up stifling arguments. But in Carlyle’s case the comparison really is appropriate. When he writes that the average man is nothing more than a “dumb creature” saying in “inarticulate prayers: “Guide me, govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot guide myself!”” we see a man who has so little respect for the average human being as to approve of any authority capable of guiding them, without ever questioning their true nature.

So, Carlyle was a fool. That’s no reason to read him, for there have been plenty of fools in history. But I think as a character, he’s interesting. The introduction to my copy is heavy with irony – a particular favourite line is “nothing is more remarkable in Carlyle than the way in which he simply stopped thinking.” But once we get beyond such humour, there’s a sense of sadness in Carlyle’s gradual collapse into authoritarianism. Friends and admirers, even philosophical opponents such as J. S. Mill, turned their backs on him as he grew more and more extreme. Conservatives rejected him for his distrust of the landowners and new money, while those on the side of progress had no time for him at all, even though much of what he said – the criticism of his world – was in line with their own ideas.

Ah, it is not easy, this apologetics business! Carlyle’s works speak for themselves, and not altogether to his credit. The gradual turning inwards of their creator, his isolation, his sense of being outside of time and in a hostile, incorrect world – these are more interesting in a novel’s main character, than in a writer of tracts who had real influence. Carlyle is not without his similarities to Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, which I looked at last week. But still we should read him, I think, and not just because we should always try to engage with ideas we do not call our own. For one, he was incredibly influential in his day, and he has a rather unique style (I shan’t call it good). But most importantly, his criticisms are powerful, however inadequate are his solutions.

Through a look at the essays “Signs of the Times” and “Chartism” I’ll try to demonstrate Carlyle’s worth as a thinker as well as a character.

Thomas Carlyle, in all his glory. What is there in those eyes?

Signs of the Times

“Signs of the Times”, written in 1829, begins by criticising of the world Carlyle was living in. It is a world of prophecy, rather than living in the moment. Nations and thinkers were all in an apocalyptic frame of mind – whether the Utilitarians in Britain under Bentham or the Millenarians who predicted the return of Christ to earth and its somewhat rapid end thereafter. Carlyle’s main problem with all this constant prophesying is that it’s a symptom of an unhealthy age – an “Age of Machinery”. And not just in the simple sense, of spinning jennies and railway engines and steam – things every British schoolchild, even me, manages to learn about. No, if it were only that, perhaps Carlyle would not have to complain, though he does have sympathy for the weavers who lose their jobs to “iron fingers”, or the sailors who are replaced by steam’s “vaporous wings”.

Instead, the “Age of Machinery” is really about what we might nowadays call systems. It is an age of “adapting means to ends” which at first leads to great advances in wellbeing, as machines come into mass use. But then we start becoming so goal-orientated that people become means in themselves, rather than ends. “The internal and spiritual” side of us is overtaken by this thinking. We lose our spontaneity, our sense of individuality. The Romanticism is visible in Carlyle’s idea that instead of a genius weaver, we now only have talented machine users. Skill, which can be made to a pattern, replaces whatever lies deeply inside of us.

Our institutions, whether the church or the arts or the sciences, are all affected by this way of thinking. Christianity, Carlyle enjoys reminding us, spread because of the force of its “Idea” and the passion of missionaries. It did not spread because everyone was organising meetings or giving our pamphlets. In sum, his enemy is a materialism, a belief in science far greater than even the previous century had had. But it is also a hugely destructive belief, for we end up turning our backs on and denying all that “cannot be investigated and understood mechanically”. The spiritual side of human beings is denied in favour a simple happiness – the sort that lets itself be measured.

However appealing this is on the surface, I have a great deal of hesitation about it. It seems to me that there are two ways of looking at human value. One says that the goal of any theory should be the happiness of the many, while the other looks only at the peak of human achievement, vaguely defined. The former is utilitarian, while the latter is Carlylean (or Nietzschean). The danger is that in pursuing personal human achievement, we achieve general human degradation. Nietzsche’s solution, and I suspect Carlyle’s, is simply not to care about the masses. But it’s not a view which I myself much enjoy, even as I agree with Carlyle that any theory that deflates the spiritual side of humanity is pretty awful too.

This essay is interesting, of course, because the problems have not gone away. In our own age we are under the thumb of great systems, with nary a thought given to our spiritual, internal workings. Indeed, much of what Carlyle says seems in line with contemporary thought about capitalism’s effects on the individual. And when Carlyle speaks of the power of passion, of the Idea, to break through the stultifying frames of these systems, it’s a view that appeals. Carlyle’s piece ends with a muted optimism, a sense that out of this conflict between old and new a better world will be born. Alas, it’s taking a long time to come.

Chartism

“Chartism” was written ten years after “Signs of the Times” and is an altogether less pleasant essay to read. All the same, again there are some things here that are pretty sensible. It was written during a time of great working-class upheaval in Britain and asks what the solution is to the problem. Although the Chartists – the group in revolt – had a charter (it’s in the name), Carlyle does not trust them to know what they want – “these wild inarticulate souls, struggling there, with inarticulate uproar, like dumb creatures in pain, unable to speak what is in them!” Still, he still less trusts the politicians of the day to know what is wrong.

Carlyle is scathing of Britain’s political elite, and also of the “statisticians”. There is an impressive paragraph when he takes statisticians to task for asking the wrong questions. Impressive because Carlyle lists all of the things that one would need to measure, from social mobility to stability of work, to actually know whether the condition of the working class was good. Simply saying that wages are rising is not enough – that fact alone does not mean that things are getting better. It is a criticism that has lost none of its force. Charitably speaking, there are too many of us unconsciously thinking that a healthy “economy” is the solution to all of the world’s woes, without thinking about such questions as how that wealth is actually distributed or accessed. It’s impressive that Carlyle does not miss this point.

And just as importantly, he sees that an overreliance on statistics is bad in another way, because it devalues life, and reduces us to just a number. Carlyle sees that workers – and human beings – struggle for “just wages” not just in the sense of money, but in terms of dignity too. But just when he seems to be saying something sensible, Carlyle gets started on the Irish. “The time has come when the Irish population must either be improved a little, or else exterminated.” Yeah, I’m not going to defend this rubbish. Nor what Carlyle says about the Irish spreading bad values like a contagion into Britain itself.

Carlyle talks about dignity, and for him it comes down to justice. But where he goes from there is pretty ridiculous. Might is apparently right. Anyone who has governed a place we must believe is a just ruler, because otherwise they would not have been able to continue ruling. England is fine for Ireland because the Irish haven’t overthrown us (they did). Secret police, guards on every street corner, and a military presence have absolutely nothing to do with control – justice is the reason we continue to rule. “Might and right, so frightfully discrepant at first, are ever in the long-run one and the same”. Carlyle, of course, did not live in the twentieth century. His heart, I am sure, never left the eighteenth. But it must be said that if anything, might has very rarely equalled right, and he’s very much mistaken to think that it ever has.

So, anyway, what do we do with the working class, and with England? Though Carlyle complains that the solutions to poverty in Britain (the “Poor Law”) was a simple solution to a complex problem, and a disaster, his own solutions are no more complex. We do not exterminate the Irish – we merely deport them. Mr Carlyle has heard there’s plenty of land over in Canada where we could send them. As for the British, a bit of forced emigration wouldn’t go amiss either, alongside some education. Now, it is the case that we have some political problems in this country too, so we’d better get a “real aristocracy”. No, Carlyle doesn’t want any of that democracy trash. Strong leaders, powerful Ideas! Man, what a great ideologue Carlyle would have made.

Carlyle, clearly, was struggling for people to support him. In chapter eight he invents (!) a fake book, “History of the Teuton Kindred”, which he quotes for several pages, to support his own ideas. Again, if Carlyle were a literary creation, this would be funny – a little postmodern flourish. As it happens, he was a man, and this just suggests a kind of sad isolation. “Chartism” begins so well, with its diagnosis of the times and how they short-change the individual, but it ends so badly. It was rejected by all the journals of the day and Carlyle had to publish it himself.

Conclusion

Alan Shelston, who penned my edition’s introduction, ultimately gives up on trying to defend Carlyle’s politics and just says they the result of “not ideological belief but rather psychological disturbance and intellectual deterioration”. Maybe. Any belief is the result of something, but finding the correct origin doesn’t change the belief itself. Carlyle is a strange writer. Full of good ideas and bad, unlike a poet or fiction writer it’s much harder to overlook the bad in him. As a man of his time, he is fascinating, but as a thinker, he is deeply concerning. I keep coming back to this idea of him as a character in some postmodern adventure. Ultimately, I think that’s the best way to approach him. Carlyle is someone to look at from a distance, to analyse from one’s armchair, but not to emulate, not to love. That, I think, is fair.