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avevale_intelligencerTo see the problem, and to know the solution, are two different things, seldom found in the same place. One may identify a problem readily while having no idea what to do about it; in that case one's only recourse is to call attention to that problem repeatedly and loudly, in the hope of attracting the attention of someone who has the solution at their fingertips but has done nothing because to them it is not apparent that the problem is a problem. The latter are in the harder position; the mouthpiece of a trumpet may only produce an offensive squeaking noise on its own when blown into, but the whole shining apparatus of the rest of the trumpet, lacking that one small piece and the breath shoved through it, can produce nothing at all. An additional complication comes in the form of those who, seeing the problem, immediately manufacture an unworkable and/or abhorrent non-solution out of their own personal prejudices, and go around for ever after busily trumpeting the perceived problem and the non-solution together, till everyone identifies the problem with the non-solution and concludes, quite logically, that since the solution is obviously a non-solution, the problem must be a non-problem.
One may consider in this connection the case of Roj Blake. He correctly identified a problem, and a desperately urgent one, with the society in which he lived, but it is patent from his published acts and utterances that he had not the remotest clue as to a solution, beyond vague pieties about "power in the hands of the honest man." Thus he became to some a nuisance and to others an active threat without ever becoming in any meaningful sense a force for good, and that is his personal tragedy.
More acute, I think, is the case of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a thoroughly repellent individual whom Jan came across in her studies. He inspired a great deal of Hitler's political and racial philosophy, if one can call it that, and seems to have started all the mythic bunkum about the "Aryan race" after learning Sanskrit in order to read ancient Indian epics in the original language. He had only the vaguest ideas about science, despite getting a BSc in Geneva, and of course he loathed the Jews long before he ever actually met any. Not a person on whose utterances one should place the slightest reliance, one might think; if he said it was raining one would go out into the downpour in the certain knowledge that one was not really getting wet at all.
And yet. And yet, and yet, and yet. He wrote this:
"Like a wheel that spins faster and faster, the increasing rush of life drives us continually further apart from each other, continually further from the 'firm ground of nature'; soon it must fling us out into empty nothingness."
Can anyone dispute that this has continued to be a problem since his day, and has practically reached its apogee in ours?
He saw the cause of many of society's spiritual ills as "capitalism, industrialisation, materialism, and urbanisation" (I'm quoting Wikipedia here, not Chamberlain directly); I think this is perfectly true. He was influenced by the conservative critique of the Industrial Revolution, which saw it as "a disaster which forced people to live in dirty, overcrowded cities doing dehumanizing work in factories while society was dominated by a philistine, greedy middle class" (Wikipedia again); I can't argue with a single word of that. The idealised vision of pre-industrial "Merrie England" which accompanies it is probably to a large extent tosh, but there are eye-witness accounts, such as by Chartist speaker David Ross, which suggest that being poor in a weaver's cottage in the country might possibly not have been quite as bad as being poor in an overcrowded, overpriced, unsanitary, collapsing slum in the middle of Manchester. Obviously the ideal state would involve not being poor at all, but we don't seem to have that one in stock at the moment. He warned that if current trends continued, the human condition would degenerate into "a boundless chaos of empty talk and arms foundries"; was he wrong?
He was, of course, utterly wrong in what he saw as the cause of all these problems, and in what he saw as the solution. His trumpet was utterly misconceived, and the notes it produced caused more suffering and death than any other single voice in history. I can quite understand that a world scarred by the consequences of this man's life might recoil in disgust from the idea of giving credence to any single thing he might have said, in case the foulness he espoused might creep in through a crack in one's armour.
But nobody is wholly right or wholly wrong, nobody is wholly good or wholly evil, and to see the problem and to know the solution are two different things. I think.
EDIT: also, of course, we have here the classic and topical problem about the man and his work, about how far moral judgments should constrain us. Are Bill Cosby's comedies still funny if we know what he did? Can we admit to reading H P Lovecraft knowing his opinions on race? Can someone who is wrong about something be acknowledged to be right about something else, or does having hatred in one's heart invalidate every word one utters on any subject? Is it acceptable to be proud that we put men on the moon knowing that we had help in doing so from scientists who formerly worked for the Nazis? Should we use medicines in whose creation animal experimentation was involved? May we read the works of writers who eat meat?
Everyone must find their own answers for themselves. For me, if a bad man says something that I can see to be true, I will not say it is false because he is a bad man...but that does not mean I will trust him implicitly on anything else.
One may consider in this connection the case of Roj Blake. He correctly identified a problem, and a desperately urgent one, with the society in which he lived, but it is patent from his published acts and utterances that he had not the remotest clue as to a solution, beyond vague pieties about "power in the hands of the honest man." Thus he became to some a nuisance and to others an active threat without ever becoming in any meaningful sense a force for good, and that is his personal tragedy.
More acute, I think, is the case of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a thoroughly repellent individual whom Jan came across in her studies. He inspired a great deal of Hitler's political and racial philosophy, if one can call it that, and seems to have started all the mythic bunkum about the "Aryan race" after learning Sanskrit in order to read ancient Indian epics in the original language. He had only the vaguest ideas about science, despite getting a BSc in Geneva, and of course he loathed the Jews long before he ever actually met any. Not a person on whose utterances one should place the slightest reliance, one might think; if he said it was raining one would go out into the downpour in the certain knowledge that one was not really getting wet at all.
And yet. And yet, and yet, and yet. He wrote this:
"Like a wheel that spins faster and faster, the increasing rush of life drives us continually further apart from each other, continually further from the 'firm ground of nature'; soon it must fling us out into empty nothingness."
Can anyone dispute that this has continued to be a problem since his day, and has practically reached its apogee in ours?
He saw the cause of many of society's spiritual ills as "capitalism, industrialisation, materialism, and urbanisation" (I'm quoting Wikipedia here, not Chamberlain directly); I think this is perfectly true. He was influenced by the conservative critique of the Industrial Revolution, which saw it as "a disaster which forced people to live in dirty, overcrowded cities doing dehumanizing work in factories while society was dominated by a philistine, greedy middle class" (Wikipedia again); I can't argue with a single word of that. The idealised vision of pre-industrial "Merrie England" which accompanies it is probably to a large extent tosh, but there are eye-witness accounts, such as by Chartist speaker David Ross, which suggest that being poor in a weaver's cottage in the country might possibly not have been quite as bad as being poor in an overcrowded, overpriced, unsanitary, collapsing slum in the middle of Manchester. Obviously the ideal state would involve not being poor at all, but we don't seem to have that one in stock at the moment. He warned that if current trends continued, the human condition would degenerate into "a boundless chaos of empty talk and arms foundries"; was he wrong?
He was, of course, utterly wrong in what he saw as the cause of all these problems, and in what he saw as the solution. His trumpet was utterly misconceived, and the notes it produced caused more suffering and death than any other single voice in history. I can quite understand that a world scarred by the consequences of this man's life might recoil in disgust from the idea of giving credence to any single thing he might have said, in case the foulness he espoused might creep in through a crack in one's armour.
But nobody is wholly right or wholly wrong, nobody is wholly good or wholly evil, and to see the problem and to know the solution are two different things. I think.
EDIT: also, of course, we have here the classic and topical problem about the man and his work, about how far moral judgments should constrain us. Are Bill Cosby's comedies still funny if we know what he did? Can we admit to reading H P Lovecraft knowing his opinions on race? Can someone who is wrong about something be acknowledged to be right about something else, or does having hatred in one's heart invalidate every word one utters on any subject? Is it acceptable to be proud that we put men on the moon knowing that we had help in doing so from scientists who formerly worked for the Nazis? Should we use medicines in whose creation animal experimentation was involved? May we read the works of writers who eat meat?
Everyone must find their own answers for themselves. For me, if a bad man says something that I can see to be true, I will not say it is false because he is a bad man...but that does not mean I will trust him implicitly on anything else.