Face Facts: listen to Kipling

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

1919

Rudyard Kipling

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AS I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place.
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Heading said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four—
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began —
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire—

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Kipling; suffer not the Old King

The Old Issue

by Rudyard Kipling
October 9th, 1899


“Here is nothing new nor aught unproven,” say the Trumpets,
“Many feet have worn it and the road is old indeed.
“It is the King—the King we schooled aforetime !”
(Trumpets in the marshes—in the eyot at Runnymede!)

“Here is neither haste, nor hate, nor anger,” peal the Trumpets,
“Pardon for his penitence or pity for his fall.
“It is the King!”—inexorable Trumpets—
(Trumpets round the scaffold at the dawning by Whitehall!)
. . . . .

“He hath veiled the Crown and hid the Sceptre,” warn the Trumpets,
“He hath changed the fashion of the lies that cloak his will.
“Hard die the Kings—ah hard—dooms hard!” declare the Trumpets,
Trumpets at the gang-plank where the brawling troop-decks fill!

Ancient and Unteachable, abide—abide the Trumpets!
Once again the Trumpets, for the shuddering ground-swell brings
Clamour over ocean of the harsh, pursuing Trumpets—
Trumpets of the Vanguard that have sworn no truce with Kings!

All we have of freedom, all we use or know—
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.

Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw—
Leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the Law.

Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey-goose wing
Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, slowly from the King.

Till our fathers 'stablished, after bloody years,
How our King is one with us, first among his peers.

So they bought us freedom—not at little cost
Wherefore must we watch the King, lest our gain be lost,

Over all things certain, this is sure indeed,
Suffer not the old King: for we know the breed.

Give no ear to bondsmen bidding us endure.
Whining “He is weak and far”; crying “Time shall cure.”,

(Time himself is witness, till the battle joins,
Deeper strikes the rottenness in the people's loins.)

Give no heed to bondsmen masking war with peace.
Suffer not the old King here or overseas.

They that beg us barter—wait his yielding mood—
Pledge the years we hold in trust—pawn our brother's blood—

Howso' great their clamour, whatsoe'er their claim,
Suffer not the old King under any name!

Here is naught unproven—here is naught to learn.
It is written what shall fall if the King return.

He shall mark our goings, question whence we came,
Set his guards about us, as in Freedom's name.

He shall take a tribute, toll of all our ware;
He shall change our gold for arms—arms we may not bear.

He shall break his judges if they cross his word;
He shall rule above the Law calling on the Lord.

He shall peep and mutter; and the night shall bring
Watchers 'neath our window, lest we mock the King—

Hate and all division; hosts of hurrying spies;
Money poured in secret, carrion breeding flies.

Strangers of his counsel, hirelings of his pay,
These shall deal our Justice: sell—deny—delay.

We shall drink dishonour, we shall eat abuse
For the Land we look to—for the Tongue we use.

We shall take our station, dirt beneath his feet,
While his hired captains jeer us in the street.

Cruel in the shadow, crafty in the sun,
Far beyond his borders shall his teachings run.

Sloven, sullen, savage, secret, uncontrolled,
Laying on a new land evil of the old—

Long-forgotten bondage, dwarfing heart and brain—
All our fathers died to loose he shall bind again.

Here is naught at venture, random nor untrue—
Swings the wheel full-circle, brims the cup anew.

Here is naught unproven, here is nothing hid:
Step for step and word for word—so the old Kings did!

Step by step, and word by word: who is ruled may read.
Suffer not the old Kings: for we know the breed—

All the right they promise—all the wrong they bring.
Stewards of the Judgment, suffer not this King!

Animal Rights kills one more innocent

This poor girl ought to make SHAC, ALF and their ilk think twice. What do you think happens when we sell our children nihilistic propaganda, and refuse to tell them how our lives are not criminal but part of the greatest civilisation in human history? Look at the enormous teen suicide rate and tell me I lie.

Jack Straw tells it how it is

Bravo for Jack. I can't say I've ever cared for the man; he always seemed too weak for truth. Now he stirs up a national debate on full-face veils. When a little gerbil like Straw speaks out on this we should take note. A few interesting points. It has been suggested he is doing it to road-test a tougher government line. This cannot be right as the Cabinet have courageously failed to join him on the barricades. It has more plausibly been suggested that this is his first salvo in a campaign for deputy leader, having noticed how well John Reid is playing in the country. Well, maybe some truth in this. Still, he has long been requesting women in his constituency surgery to remove their veils. This is a persisting, sincere concern of Jack's. That, combined with the time it has taken to speak publicly in the matter, tells us volumes. Jack is worried by this not as a national figure, but in his capacity as MP of a northern constituency: he feels alienated from the area he represents. At the same time, he has not spoken out about his worries because he knows that he needed the Muslim vote to get elected and he feared the reaction to raising the issue. He may feel the prospective leadership race and a shift of national mood has given him a chance to speak, but the two key truths here are a local MP disturbed by his own constituency, and unable to speak out for fear of his job and the extreme, potentially violent response.

John Howard tells it how it is

What a speech. Now why can't Cameron do that?

Truth about DDT: ban killed 50 million

This quote, from Andrew Kenny's article in The Spectator last year records the reaction of an environmentalist when told that banning DDT in Africa would kill millions:

I have heard not one word of pity or regret from any green organisation about the vast loss of human life caused by the ban on DDT. On the contrary, they seem to regard it as a glorious triumph. The likely reason was spelled out with chilling clarity by Charles Wurster of the Environmental Defence Fund in the USA in 1971 when it was pointed out to him that DDT saved the lives of poor people in poor countries. Hc said: 'So what? People are the main cause of our problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them and this is as good a way as anything.'

The spirit of that tells you all you need to know about the green movement's priorities. He must be delighted to think that fifty million people have died from the DDT ban. We made our own countries safe first, then banned it before the poor of Africa and Asia could benefit. How's that for social justice. Read Kenny's full article here.

But for those who really believed it was dangerous on the basis of Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' and a truthy feeling in the pit of their stomachs when they heard about dying sea-birds-- I hope you feel ashamed to read this. Even the UN can't ignore the truth that DDT is safe, effective and a life-saver on a grand scale any longer. And their press release admitting it is here. The precautionary principle can kill.

Types of truth

When we give up on truth, what do we replace it with? Well, one possibility is 'truthiness', which seems to be ahead of the pack right now. That is to say, what must the case is determined by what ought to be the case, with that'ought' determined by reference to one's feelings at any particular moment. This is simply to retreat from rationality, logic, careful observation and the rules of evidence in favour of gut intuition and Romantic authenticity. It cannot carry us far, because it will run into the brute facts of the world sooner rather than later. 'That two and two make four/ And never five nor three/ The heart of man has long been sore/ And long is like to be.' The problem is that its self-satisfied inwardness may take a very long time to appreciate the difference between the world as it is and the world as it must be, by which time it may be dangerously late.

But there are other forms of 'truth-substitute' as well. One is the post-modern notion that there is no truth at all. This goes down well in the universities and Michael Frayn's new book seems to pick up on a similar worldview. Yet make no mistake: this relativism is actually nihilism. If nothing is true, there is ultimately no right or wrong, no natural law and no scientific law either. Yet professors always seem happy to travel on the aeroplanes built by the western-hegemonic-mindset-exclusionary-of-other-forms-of-knowing to the conferences where they denounce its achievements as delusions. You don't want to choose this option: it requires a very sophisticated double-thinker to carry it off.

Some people think there is a middle position between truth and outright nihilism, which might be called 'taste imperialism', in which the traditional remit of taste makes considerable incursions in to the realm usually ascribed to judgement. That is to say, we used to imagine that Homer and Michelangelo and Shakespeare could be considered as objectively great. The truth of their aesthetic superiority was evident, could be demonstrated through rational argument and was therefore a matter of judgement not of taste-- true and false, not strawberry or chocolate ice cream. And taste imperialism also reaches out into areas of sexual conduct, personal behaviour and social norms: what is classed under 'lifestyle' these days. There are two immediate problems here. One is that it is not clear how you stop the slide to nihilism. If we are saying that there are truths, but, conveniently, just not where our judgement has always placed them, to what can we refer? If our judgement is suspect here, where is it not? Some fall back on science, and say, "you must prove scientifically that this makes a difference". Fine. That argument worked twenty years ago, but not now. The evidence is in, especially on the importance of marriage for bringing up a child. People just rely on ignoring the evidence in favour of the truthy version they are wedded to. So they skip from the decline to nihilism by declining into truthiness. The second problem is the vision of man behind taste imperialism. This holds that our nature is truly plural, open to many forms of fulfilment and there could never be one true human answer. Again, the science on this is pretty conclusive now, and it finds that this is not true. We are more alike than not. In any case, it is not clear that just because two options can in some sense both be 'made to work', there is therefore no difference between them. One can still be better than the other. When there is a spectrum of success, those who are interested in the truth are interested in what works best.

But this leads neatly to by far the most popular truth-theory today. This is truth by accretion, or multi-faceted truth. It might also be called polytheism, or paganism, for at its heart is the idea that we get closer to truth (or 'the whole truth') by seeing it from many different angles or by compiling many different approaches to it, and this seems to bear a very close relation to pagan ideas of the gods. It is because people want to believe this truth-theory that they believe that all lifestyles must work. If there are many ways to truth, some can't be better than others. Again the trouble is that it just ain't so. What does it mean to say there are many ways of looking at the truth when the truth is E=MCC? This is the most popular, and also the least convincing alternative to truth on the market. Why would people accept what makes no sense? Well, I suspect because they do not trust themselves. If there is real truth, if the traditional zones of judgement in art and life do apply and there are 'best' ways or even sole-valid ways to act, what will stop them from imposing them on everyone? The answer is of course freedom. Freedom, which from the deepest roots of the Judaeo-Christian tradition has meant the right to be wrong (and to bear the consequences). But those who run from truth run from this religious tradition also and find that they have run from the very rule they need. The right to be wrong. Today we prefer to say 'everybody is right', which is a lie, and leads either to the despair and cynical passivity of nihilism or the deluded condition of truthiness in which we drift ever further from a clear vision of how things are. I agree with their fear: truth is fearsome. But truth is wedded to liberty and together they give birth to our civilisation.

Peace, or freedom?

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin

And they will get neither. The cancellation of Idomeneo in Berlin because of a scene featuring Mohammed's severed head is a sign of the times. Mohammed's head is displayed alongside that of Jesus and Buddha, but no one's about to kill nuns and torch cities over that. Self-censorship in the performance of one of the three greatest composers in human history, and in his anniversary year.

Not that anyone should be surprised. Last year in London, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine was censored over the scene in which the Koran is burned. And the Pope is still being lectured over quoting a derisive statement on the nature of Islam.

When people say the Pope shouldn't have given his lecture in Regensburg, they are making a choice. They want peace instead of freedom. This is the stance (understandable enough) of anything for a quiet life. Most people, after all, want only the peace to get on with their own life. Quietists have to ask themselves first, is there anything worth fighting for? To make peace your priority is to decide on a policy of pre-emptive surrender before any threat.

For those who value western philosophy, art and literature, the need for peace means sacrificing works by central figures. As well as Mozart and Marlowe, Dante puts Mohammed in the eighth circle of his Inferno, so the Divine Comedy must go. Along with it will go illustrations by William Blake, Gustave Dore, Sandro Botticelli, Rodin and Dali. If you doubt it, consider that a cartoon referencing the infernal scene without even depicting it was censored this year and even the supposedly fanatical Opus Dei wouldn't defend the artist.

Or how about philosophy. Here is David Hume, in 'Of The Standard of Taste', one of his most important essays.

"The admirers and followers of the ALCORAN [Koran] insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed throughout that wild and absurd performance. But it is to be supposed, that the ARABIC words, which correspond to the ENGLISH, equity, justice, temperance, meekness, charity, were such as, from the constant use of that tongue, must always be taken in good sense: and it would have argued the greatest ignorance, not of morals, but of language, to have mentioned them with any epithets, besides those of applause and approbation. But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals, let us attend to his narration, and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficiaal or hurtful to the true believers."

That's certainly not going to last long in future collections. And the croissant will be tossed out after it, having been created to celebrate the lifting of the Siege of Vienna in 1683 and being a deliberate insult to Islam's holy symbol, the crescent.

People imply in their arguments that this is a sensitive time and we should respect that, as if things were likely to change and we could all go back to eating pork and drinking beer whenever we liked. But why should they? Why should they when this is acknowledged as a generational struggle and when Islam is on the increase in Europe? Why should those who stir up violence give up on it when they see the success such violence -- or even the threat of it in the producer's mind -- will achieve? We will go on living with our compromises and telling ourselves we have avoided trouble and try to forget the things we are no longer allowed to want.

We have to face the awkward truth that Islam and Christendom were enemies for centuries and that the Christian heritage, which is to say western civilisation, contains plenty of reminders of that fact. It also has ideas at its heart like freedom of expression and religion. But these days, you cannot keep the treasures of your civilisation, or your liberty without a fight. People need to think very carefully before they choose. Or they will be buried in this cemetery.