Further Thoughts

When I was at school we had a grade 12 course called Civilisation based the BBC documentary series of western European art history presented by Kenneth Clarke. The whole series was infected with Kenneth Clarke's enthusiasm for his work and each episode had an artistic hero. That was until the last episode where he saw the horrors of the fall out from the first and second world wars. He then quoted a couple of lines from the WB Yeates poem The Second Coming.


TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It would be easy to fall into Yeates' pessimism, and looking back to the seventy or so years ago that he wrote this it is easy to see where his ideas were coming from with an inevitable confrontation between the Nazi fascists and the Stalinist state socialists. Both absolutist utopians and both seeking to create the worst dystopia imaginable..

At the moment, there is a bit of a feeling that matters are not dissimilar to the 1930s. We are in an economic crisis and the governments of the day do not seem able to find a pragmatic solution. There is more and more unfocussed extremist violence around. In one part of the world a nihilistic interpretation of the Koran makes it legitimate to fly packed passenger air planes into buildings while in other parts of the world it is OK to blow up innocent civilians with unmanned drone air planes in the name of seeking out and neutralizing terrorists.

Closer to home, politicians make the argument that the inhabitants of Greece must embrace massive cuts to their living standards so that errors committed by their government can be prevented from causing banks in other parts of Europe from going bankrupt. People are then horrified when these Greeks complain about having their wages cut to a third of what they originally were. And still, no leader is able to suggest a solution.

Modern politicians do not possess sufficient historical perspective and so are doomed to perpetuate the mistakes of their predecessors. This is in part because they are tied into too rigid a party structure and admitting that something they have previously backed is a mistake is not something they are prepared to do. Mainstream media (and new media) exacerbate this by criticising any politician who admits that they were in error as being weak and indecisive.

Independent politician cannot of course change the way they are portrayed by the media but they can seek to help redress the balance when it comes to assessing policies in a historical light. By not being tied to a party dogma, they can bring a more measured assessment to ideas and policies that can benefit society as a whole.