Imagine: Scrapping the Twentieth Century

Some things are beyond salvaging, and the Twentieth Century is one of them. All of it. It would be better just to erase the entire show and pretend it didn’t happen. It is certainly difficult to think of anything worth saving. If the Twentieth Century was a burning house, what would you rush back in to save? Your priceless Jackson Pollock?

There is really not much to be said for it – the Twentieth Century – and the further we pull away from it the more obvious this becomes. As soon as you step back and take a long view, the Twentieth Century appears like a pustular aberration, an impasse during which everything went pear-shaped. Humanity basked in a long normality but then in the Twentieth Century:

Note how the twentieth Century self-identifies as the ‘Century of Change’.   Once you get over the shock, though, it really is a bit underwhelming. Take a long view of architecture, for example. Tell me the Twentieth Century isn’t undistinguished. Show me a notable building you didn’t select for its peculiar departure from all the norms of the architecture before it and little else.

 

A former Australian Prime Minister once opined that the greatest building of the Twentieth Century was the Sydney Opera House:

I’ve been there. It’s a bit shabby, but a better building, in its presence, than I hoped. Although its acoustics are shitful, which – for an opera house – is no small thing. In terms of its purpose, it’s an iconic failure. I’ve been in 15^th C. stone mosques in rural Pakistan with better acoustics. And in terms of design, it’s well ... corny. The architect was sitting by Sydney Harbor one day, looking for inspiration. There were some sail boats. “I know,” he thought, “A building shaped like the sails of yachts!” Architects did a lot of this in the twentieth century, buildings made to look like oversized non-architectural objects. It was widely regarded as very clever.

There’s a great episode of the Brady Bunch where Mike – a ghey architect playing father to a blended family, if you haven’t seen it – is hired by a flamboyant cosmetic heiress to build her new company HQ, but she wants it in the shape of a giant powder-puff. To his credit, Mike just can’t do it. It’s a job for a better architect than him.

Sculpture is worse:

In fact, I am at a total loss to name a single piece of sculpture in the Twentieth Century that is worth saving. Not if you look at it beyond the titillations of its immediate context. It might have raised a giggle and a gasp in the 1970s, but by the 2020s it just looks like a pile of junk.

But what about the polio vaccine? you cry! Well, that’s true. You might rush back into a burning house to save the polio vaccine. I have seen children with polio. In India. You don’t want to get polio.

And, and, and what about space travel? That was pretty spectacular. Would you rush back in to save your autographed photo of Buzz Aldrin in his space suit?

And what about airplanes? Automobiles? Microwave ovens? And this computer? And this internet?

Gee, there was a lot of technological progress in the Twentieth Century, wasn’t there?

 

But what of it? All of that is what Roger Sworder once called “an ecstasy for mugs”, and once you get bored with technological advances you start to reach a more sober assessment of the gains and losses of each innovation. I remember my first computer. Thralldom! These days I’m not so enthralled.

The Twentieth Century was all about thralldom; whole families staring into television screens. Would you rush back in to save your TV? In the 1950s you might have. There was a time when the television seemed a wondrous thing. When I was a boy my mum and dad put us all in the car and we drove into town to seen a colour television. I remember. I was in my pyjamas and a dressing gown and slippers. There was an electric goods store in the main street and they had a colour TV in the window. The only one in a hundred mile radius. No one had ever seen a colour TV. There was a crowd of people standing at the window ooing and aahing. It would be years before they could afford one.

 

So, ok, machines. The Twentieth Century had some machines. But with every advance there was a price to be paid, although it’s hard to see the price when you’re in a state of thralldom. Let’s split the atom! Endless cheap power! But there was a cost, wasn’t there? A hidden cost not included in the promise of endless cheap power. When they sold you endless cheap power did they show you the fine print about Hiroshima?

 

Show me a technology that wasn’t both a blessing and a curse. Do some real accountancy and include all the hidden costs.

 

Every technology devours some people. Television certainly did. I think my grandmother was one of them. When she bought a TV she disappeared into it and stayed there for twenty or more years and wasted away until she died. That Elvis documentary brought her great joy, but all I remember is an old lady glued to a television screen, first a black and white one, then a coloured one. In the end her legs atrophied. Her mind gave out long before that.

 

Cars too. I had friends who were devoured by cars. I mean, I grew up in Australia. Cars? The technology took over their lives. They became obsessed with it. Genuinely obsessed. Obsession is a pathology. (Just ask your shrink. You’ve probably got one.) The Twentieth Century was obsessive/compulsive to the core. Planetary autism. Rather than being dazzled by horsepower, buzzers and buttons, I’m more concerned about technology vis-à-vis human beings, and in the twentieth Century all I see is the Wizard of Oz, a shrunken creature in a big machine:

 

Years ago one of my neighbours was a shrunken creature in a big machine. He was a little bald guy with a sqeaky voice and dog shit for brains. He was a retired school principal. He bought a farm and big machines. I remember talking to him in the paddock one day. He was propped up in a seat atop a HUGE tractor. It was a lovely sunny day. I was struck by the might of the machine and the pathetically diminished being lost in its glamour of power. Glamour. There’s a word useful for seeing through the Twentieth Century.

 

Technology, that is, is a smokescreen. What it hides is societal, political, cultural, artistic and spiritual – existential - decay.

 

But what about all this longevity? Well, that’s Achilles’ problem, isn’t it? You can have a short meaningful life, or a long one as a consumer-slug doing your bit to rape the earth in pursuit of new flavors and cheap thrills. If you’re over 55 you should be taking statins.In the Twentieth Century the human race went from one billion people to six, but without the slightest improvement in the specimens.

 

I’m not buying the old line: “Imagine a world without anaesthetics.” Opium wasn’t invented in the Twentieth Century. God invented opium. Opium is an argument for the existence of God.

 

It’s the smug triumphalism of it all that is really irksome. If you remove the machines from the equation, what have you got? There was democracy and human rights and equality. There was the Beatles. Would you rush back into a burning house to save your vinyl copy of John’s Lennon’s Imagine, that great anthem of the age? Lennon puts the whole edifice all in one song.

If you think John & Yoko were deep, you’re a Twentieth Century Man. That’s one of the most startling things about backpacking around Asia, by the way. Wherever you go you’ll find people singing Imagine. It’s a karaoke evergreen. Enormously popular. I’d hazard a wager that it’s the singlemost popular song in the whole of South East Asia, the Philippines and the entirety of the Indonesian archipelago.

I just prefer – all things considered – Nineteenth Century man. Or Fourteenth Century man, or Ancient man. I can handle almost any century, except the Twentieth. The Twenty-First isn’t looking too good, but that remains to be seen.

 

At least now stale things have started to look stale and different perspectives open up. It’s like you had a mad fling with a strange woman in a bad motel and it’s only as you’re driving away alone, looking in the rear view mirror, that you come to appreciate just how fucked up the whole thing was.

* * *

The particular interest of these pages, though, is the Twentieth Century as a post-colonial nightmare. If you’ve ever been in some Third-world, corrupt, crowded, polluted, concocted polity on their Independence Day you’ll know what I mean. But you won’t be allowed to say it.

 

I had this awakening in Darjeeling. I discovered that the British had strict conservation policies for tea-growers in them hills. It was after the British left that the landscape was trashed. But then – more important perhaps – there was the second part of the awakening: you’re NOT allowed to say so. Which tells you it is a sham.

 

By the Twentieth Century I really mean the Twentieth Century Mindset. We should dispense with that altogether. I don’t care to replace it with a Bronze Age Mindset, or a Stone Age Mindset, to be frank, but the Twentieth Century Mindset has got to go.

 

This is why I am very inclined to read old books and look at old paintings, and generally give Twentieth Century books and paintings a miss. This Internet thing gives you the ability to plough into any century you want. Why would you bother with the Twentieth? It is wholesome, these days, to be looking for something else.

 

Roger Sworder’s view of the internet was apocalyptic. “It’s Judgment Day,” he’d say. We all thought we were going to be judged on Judgment Day. This was wrong. Rather, the entire contents of the entire history of the human race in all its splendor is laid out before us, digitally, without the slightest hierarchy of values. A parody of the Akashic Record. What do you choose, without any further guidance? A PDF of Boethius or a video doc on the sex life of Michel Foucault? You’re saved or damned accordingly. I saw the best minds of my generation spend 72 hours a week playing Warcraft III.

 

I’d explain Twentieth Century Mindset further but I shouldn’t get started about the whole ‘One World’ trope. You know, that whole twaddle about how the astronaut’s view from orbit had at last united humanity in a single vision and soon we will all live in harmony in a technological paradise under a One World government. I actually did a subject in this at school. Got an A. I was raised on this stuff. The teacher was Mr Gunther. A young bloke. He was passionate. I reckon he could sing John Lennon’s Imagine. He taught Environmental Studies – part of the Geography stream – and it was new and exciting, and a flash new epoch was dawning, inexorably, if only we could defeat the evil dinosaurs of the Establishment standing in the way.

 

You know the patter. You were probably raised on this stuff too. So by now you’ll know what I mean by underwhelming. 

 

I’m really not a fan of space, either. Outer space. That will put you outside the Twentieth Century mindset as quick as lightning. You realize that anything even reasonably resembling a human being cannot, physically or mentally, survive in outer space? It’s not an option. The gnostic space-lust of the Twentieth Century is a self-corrosive transhumanist wetdream. Not into it. But that turns you into an ex-pat in Costa Rica. What do you do if the great enthusiasms of the age strike you as unbounded folly?

* * *

Students would sometimes get stuck into Sworder for being “negative.” To be fair, Sworder’s view of the Twentieth Century could be bleak. He figured undergrads fresh out of High School could do with a big dose of it. “You’re so pessimistic, Roger!” students would complain. “Modernity’s not that bad! What about antibiotics?!” He would retort: “I’m not pessimistic. I’m optimistic. Unlike you, I believe we can do a whole lot better than this.” That is the most dangerous of all thought crimes.

 

He taught me that there is a Platonic Mindset. There are Mindsets not attached to a particular era, you see. The Platonic Mindset is not the same as the Ancient Athens Mindset. You can have a Mindset that transcends eras altogether. And indeed, it’s not good to be stuck in your own era, except by all the accidents of birth. TS Eliot said felicitous words about this. But he was a Twentieth Century Man. Or was he? Do you make exceptions for Twentieth Century entities born in the Nineteenth? Would you rush back into a burning house to save your copy of Four Quartets & Other Poems?

 

The premise of this current blog, in any case, is that you can be out of phase. So, given that, I concede that there might be souls incarnated in the Wasteland of the Twentieth Century who don’t belong there and who might be considered worthy despite the misfortune of their birth. But then, being born in that century myself I’m sort of bound to hold such a view, aren’t I? Sovereign is the exception, or the other way around.

 

As someone nefarious noted recently, we used to call the Overtone Window Plato’s Cave. There are many things you can do. Go to your bookshelves. How many works do you have written before 1900, or let’s say, the First World War? When was the last time you decided to read Keats instead of Bukowski? Any books written after 1918 go to the compost bin. Worm food. Most likely the printing and binding was crap anyway. How many well-made books do you have?

 

What a marvel it is, though, you might say, that in the Twentieth Century – for the first time in history – our beloved everyman has a copy of the classics in his hot little hand, even if in a tatty paperback. The factory worker can read Herodotus on his lunch break. Radio promised Shakespeare for the masses. It didn’t turn out that way. Not at all. Not in the least. Radio was the first wave of mass trivia. My secondhand bookstore trades in the ruins of those Twentieth Century Education-for-the-masses publishing enterprises. None of them amounted to much. As a pedagogical crusade, it was a huge failure.

 

I don’t think I even need talk here about wars and Nazis and genocides and Mao and Stalin and Hilary Clinton and the whole dans macabre. Leaders? Mr Lee was a clever chap. The cosmic-scale failure of the century in this department is defined by a vulgar vegetarian lance corporal with a silly mustache, but he was hardly the only pretender. I was brought up to believe Hitler only had one testicle. But they all had only one testicle. There was not a philosopher-king among them.

 

This is to say nothing of religion and spirituality. This was about as good as the sculpture. Some fundamental things slipped in the Twentieth Century, did they not? This was the first century in the entire history of the human race when people stopped praying. There's the true divide between traditional and modern man.

 

The question becomes: where do you go once the Wizard of Oz has been exposed? Wake up in Kansas? Take out a gym subscription? You could follow Solon to Egypt to see the bigger picture. That’s what I’m inclined to do. Remember the yuga. Cycles of flood and fire. Plato sets his Ideal Polity – his whole treatment of political constitutions - in that vast setting. That’s a feature of the Platonic Mindset. There is always the quest for the clear, objective, long, long, sunny view beyond the claustrophobic limitations of the Cave.

 

The Twentieth Century, by and large, was a mistake. We just have to accept it, put it aside, and get back to work. It was a century of ephemera. It is time to reengage with older currents of thought and things and modes of lasting value. Reacquire a different intellectual frame. You have to be rigorous about it though. Don't negotiate with cancer. You need a heritage, a platform, for the times and tasks ahead. You are very unlikely to find one in the Twentieth Century. Skip it. 

Harper McAlpine Black

 

 

Brief note on philosopher-kings

 

One of the keys to Plato’s Republic is to note that it is primarily a work concerning the interior organisation of man (a psychology and anthropology) and only by extension, or parallel, about the polity. Socrates sets out to find “justice” (dike) – a proper order - in a man, and at one point proposes that it might be easier to find this by expanding the inquiry to a city of men, the state. The entire work is built on this inner/outer, microcosm/macrocosm parallel and should be read in that light. It is a naïve reading to suppose that the descriptions of various political constitutions are some sort of programme. In context, most importantly, they are metaphors for inner states and human types. 

 

It is hard to say where Plato himself stands in it all, although we can say this: the man=city parallel implies, as a first principle of Platonic political philosophy, that governance ought to conform to human nature, that there ought to be a tight correspondence between the inner organisation of man (Plato assumes that there is one, a reality, that is, by nature) and his outer social organisation. The purpose of the outer is to allow the inner to flourish and be the best of what it can be, which is justice (fittedness). We can argue over what this human nature that a polity should reflect is and is not, and debate what social constructions (or misconstructions) we mistake as ‘natural’ and so on, but a core tenet of Platonic political philosophy is that there is a bedrock nature – human beings are not just sludge that you can successfully mold into any shape you want – and that good government is measured by the extent to which it accords with that bedrock reality. 

 

To be clear, Plato regards that bedrock reality to not only be man’s animal nature and appetites, but to consist of man’s higher faculties as well. Plato offers an expanded view of human nature, insisting (against merely natural or utilitarian views) that man is both a physical and metaphysical being. It is the fullness of man and the totality of human potential that suffers under bad political constitutions and flourishes under good ones.

 

Regarding the so-called philosopher-kings that rule over the best of polities, they correspond to the highest faculty inherent in human nature – that part of us that loves wisdom above all things. Do you want to be ruled by people who are themselves ruled by base and mean appetites? In any case, Plato seeks objective government, where the best course of action isn’t obscured by vested interests and where the rulers are beyond corruption. Plato is so concerned about nepotism that the philosopher-kings are forbidden from knowing who their children are. Moreover, these philosopher-kings are so in love with wisdom that they don’t want to be rulers. They don’t seek power as tyrants and dictators do. They exercise power rarely and reluctantly. (Would you rather sit around contemplating Beauty, or go to policy meetings?) For Plato, politics is civil war. His philosopher-kings are a device to bring civil war to an end.

 

But, you say, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The problem of power is a central theme of the Republic too. We encounter the modern suspicion that power is all there is. Power, as Chairman Mao said, comes from the barrel of a gun. On one reading of the Republic, Plato seeks the best possible solution to that aspect of the human predicament, at root. The Republic is best considered a thought experiment on this problem. Does anyone have any better ideas?

 

While we are on the topic, I want to say here that I doubt the entire story of Plato trying to teach philosophy to the tyrant of Syracuse. I take a skeptical view of all aspects of the received biography of Plato, including the autobiographical letters, especially where they are in tension or open conflict with the evidence of the dialogues. There is not the slightest notion in the dialogues that Plato supposed you can take a miserable reprobate like Dionysius of Sicily and magically convert him into a philosopher-king by teaching him some arithmetic and geometry. Yes, Socrates instructs a slave boy in squares and angles at one point to show that nous is innate, but he doesn’t turn him into Archimedes. Plato did not believe you can turn a tyrant into a philosopher-king. In Plato, tyranny is not a path or prelude to ideal government. The tyrant has a wretched soul - 729 times more wretched than a wise man, in fact.

I doubt the whole story. It seems post hoc to me. The Seventh Letter is bogus anyway. The misguided do-gooder story is exactly the sort of drivel that people made up about philosophers and it was then carried on and padded out by subsequent dim-wits across the centuries. It probably began as a joke. Ironic, no? We severely underestimate the number of jokers, liars and dim-wits in our chains of textual and cultural transmission. I don’t believe for a minute that Plato thought he could train philosopher-kings, or even that philosopher-kings were possible, perhaps not even  ever, and certainly not in Plato’s age which, on the evidence of the dialogues, he thought as remote from the rule of philosopher-kings as it was possible to be. The whole story is built on the naïve reading, or misreading, of the Republic as a practical programme for political action. My reasoning is simple: The Republic is plainly not that, only dim-wits read it like that, therefore I think the story is rubbish and attributable to dim-wits.

 

And let’s get a more mature grip on things than the cheap reductionism that says that Plato thought of politics as civil war because of what he saw his uncles get up to and then the abuses of the Athenian democracy. Sure. Sure. But if there was one thinker who transcended his age it was Plato. Give him some credit.


The same goes with tiresome gags about how Plato made philosophers into kings because he was a self-serving philosopher himself much as plumbers might think plumbers should rule the world.

* * *

Here though I am slightly sympathetic to the fact that the entire idea of the philosopher-kings does invite unmeasured ridicule and has received much of what it deserved over the centuries. Plato sees the humor too, I'm sure. He knows it's ridiculous. "Let's put Socrates in charge." Lol. Like in the Parable of the Ship in the Republic where the layabout star-gazer is the only one onboard who knows where they're going. It offends all common sense, but that's where the thought experiment goes.

A Few Thoughts on Mohammadanism For Forlorn Libertarians

 

I found a libertarian paradise, but you’re not going to like it. Things turn up where you least expect them. You shouldn’t be surprised, though. The habit of reading premodern books is a rich enterprise and exposes much unexpected terrain.


My own habit is to delve into so-called orientalist books, European accounts of the East, and sometimes vice versa, during the Golden Years of Empire. This maligned literature has much to recommend it to every contrarian. This is the literature Edward Said says you no longer need to read.

 

Amongst it are works by that fascinating and anachronistic group, upper-class converts to Mohammadanism, well-to-does who, as the saying went, “turned Turk.” They are very different to our contemporary Turk turners. These days, converts (or ‘reverts’ as they like to be called) come from a different socioeconomic strata altogether, and are an untidy bunch by comparison. In Victorian times the exotic creed of the Ottomans (speaking of Empires) had a different cache. Let’s not forget Carlyle, too. There was a Mohammadan!

 

Another one was Mohammad Marmaduke Pickthall. Famously, he rendered the Koran into English and defended the appropriation before the hostile jurists in Cairo in fluent classical Arabic sweating bullets. An educator, he championed the education of boys for the Nizam of Hyderabad.

 

He came to the faith and lifted his forefinger for Allah after a libertarian vision. It is recorded in his early travel writings. One sunny day in the Levant, strolling through hinterlands, he chanced upon a world that struck him as a veritable paradigm of freedom. He wanted to sign up straightaway but respectfully waited till his mother died, lest his heathenism disappoint her.

 

The world he describes is, I want to say, nomocratic. That’s the thing about Mohammadanism. It’s not a political creed. It’s a legal system. Like Judaism. In fact, it’s a continuation of, or abrogation of, Jewish Law, the ultimate Jewish heresy, except for Christianity (which abolishes Jewish Law and, by default, accedes to Roman Law, but that’s another story.) On the ground, Mohammadanism is a legal system. Which is to say it’s upside down.

 

It’s upside down to libertarians because they think that laws are bad. (Laws restrict. Restriction bad.) The less laws the better. I actually like one of those Pythagorean city-states down on the toe of Italy that had a few laws written on stone and they prevailed forever and a day. You could propose new ones, or changes to the old ones, and everybody would vote on it. But if the proposal was rejected, you died. A solid, if inflexible, legal minimalism.

 

Mohammadan law is inflexible too, but rather than minimalistic, it is absolutely pervasive. There are laws about how to clean your teeth in Mohammadanism, namely exactly the way Mohammad cleaned his teeth. There are laws based on his favorite sexual positions. It’s not quite monolithic, though. There is a spectrum of interpretation, to be sure, but there’s always the expectation that every aspect of human behavior needs legislation. Everything. Needless to say, there are no Taliban libertarians.

 

But the Taliban are a new phenomenon, a new political phenomenon, as are all Mohammadan modern states. Here the intrusive apparatus of the modern state imposes the law (Sharia) from the top down. In Saudi Arabia the religious police will give you a thrashing if they catch you resting on your left elbow rather than your right.

 

This is nothing like what Marmaduke Pickthall found during his oriental adventures. Rather he describes rural and semi-rural communities deeply embedded in a fabric of religious law and local ancestral custom such that there was no need for police or even judges: if an offense was committed, elders would form a court to sort it out. Conservative, no doubt, but stable, and ordered without any overbearing external authority. Your father might give you a slap if you introduce one of those modern Western toothbrushes instead of cleaning your teeth with a chewed stick the way the Razool did it, but at least there weren’t any policemen or a state planning to put surveillance cameras in your bathroom.

 

Not that there was a lack of authority, though. And this is where Neoreaction steps in and schools the libertarians in the matter of power. In this case, the power in question is the biggest power there is. Allah Almighty. And amongst gods – if one may dare say such a thing – he is the mightiest of all. There’s simply no other conception of divinity to match it. This is a god you can’t argue with. So His law is uncontested and incontestable.

 

But, for the most part, He doesn’t enlist policeman. A good 90% of Sharia is, in fact, an entirely private matter, between the Musselman and his Creator, whereby Allah enforces His law by the tried-and-true method of stick and carrot, Hellfire and Virgins. And there’s always the over-riding caveat that man was created weak as piss and Allah knows it and has promised to take all the design limitations into account. His Mercy outweighs His Wrath. (There’s a lot of weighing in Mohammadanism. Traders. Shopkeepers.)

 

This rarefied, all-powerful, transcendent Being – root of all Being – presides over the police-less villages of Ottoman Levant. What sort of liberty do you want? A minimum of laws, or a minimum of enforcement? Anybody wearing the prefix anarcho- will say both, but what if it’s one or the other? What if you drive past a speed limit sign – 60 mph – but you know there are no traffic cops? They retired all traffic cops long ago. No one is going to enforce it. What if speed limits were just recommended?

 

But then, what if it was God Almighty, who recommended it, and said if you disobey it and you die in a crash don’t expect any sympathy from Him! No virgins for you! He didn’t put up speed signs for His own amusement, you know. Only an idiot would ignore them. And, over time, anyway, a rich code of customs and traditions of courtesy – hand signals, gesticulations, horns, flashing lights etc.  - developed among drivers such that miscreant drivers were shamed behind the wheel. Don’t you know God’s limit?

 

In a Mohammadan nomocracy, God sets all limits. I say law is pervasive – and that’s a Mercy because man is as forgetful as a maggot – and yet, in principio, in the beginning all things were permitted. God only sets limits to constrain man from the self-harming proclivities of a free-willed creature. (This is the curly bit of Mohammadan theology – free-will and predestination – and the bit that the arch Dark Prince of quasi-Mohammadans Calvin lifted into a usurious context.)

 

All the same, what we have is a sedate semi-pastorale, a fabric, a rug, a weave, of immutable religious law, along with all the necessary adaptations to the local temperament. Alcohol’s a big one for Mohammadans. Ask the Turks. Or try to buy a drink in Riyahd. It can be done, of course. My Arab friends really like good Scotch. Some jurists say an occasional glass of ginger beer isn’t going to hurt. The Koran only talks about wine; it doesn’t say anything about fermented fennel liquor. There are always ways. If there was a local tipple with ancestral connotations, it was likely to survive the imposition of Sharia, in the long run.

 

I can’t resist recounting that story of the Italian diplomat who turned Turk back in the day. He lived in Istanbul. When an old friend from Italy visited one time he was surprised to be offered a glass of fine wine. “But I thought Mohammadans don’t drink,” he said. To which the disgraced diplomat replied, “I’m just as good a Mahommadan as I was a Catholic.”

 

You see, anarcho-libertarians and the like should all rest easy – nature does win in the end. Laws can only ever shape it. As it is, Mohammadanism makes lots of concessions to nature. Four wives. And what about the Shi’ites and the wholesome institution of short-term marriage as a concession to nature? The Mohammadan instinct is to bring everything, even promiscuity, under the merciful guidance of Al-Rabb, the Lord.

 

Also al-Malik. The King. The King of Kings. Nerds for monarchy pay attention. Herein is a different model of Kingship. Strictly speaking, earthly kings – exercising or claiming real sovereignty that is – are haram. All those post-colonial so-called “kings” in the Mohammadan world are an historical abberration. Allah doesn’t much like kings. He doesn’t like kings in much the same way He doesn’t like other gods. Sovereignty belongs to Him. All others are pretenders. (You can tell those loathsome Wahhabi characters, the Sauds, are pretenders, can’t you? It’s pretty obvious. You might have noticed that Mohammadans don’t do kingship very well. This is why.)

 

So, what we have in this nomocracy, is a fabric of custom, lore and Law on the ground, governed by a vastly transcendent Abrahamic version of Plato’s One-and-the-Good way, way, way up in the stratosphere. Imagine a village, a community, a patchwork, if you will, governed by an absolute monarch located in a satellite in geo-stationary orbit 600 miles overhead. He governs, primarily, by the Noble Lie of Hellfire and Virgins, and yet for effective power there must be something, some agent, between the earth and the sky. Otherwise we’re in a nominalist power vacuum and everything sinks to the bleak equality of the desert. That’s the real problem with Mohammadanism. Not nomocracy, but nominalism. If you put Sovereignty way up there in the sky, you end up with a flat earth.

 

Did I mention Calvin? Neoreaction points the finger at Calvin. And rightly so. But the rot really begins with Mohammadanism. Or rather, by the infiltration of Mohammadanism into Christendom where it becomes pernicious. First among the aristocracy. (They couldn’t resist all those shiny sweet-smelling goods from the East. See what Petrarch has to say about it.) Then the Church. What is Protestantism but a Christianity rejigged in the Mohammadan mode? If you turn the Christian God into Allah don’t be surprised that the Church – an edifice of intercession – starts to dissolve.

 

Yes, nominalism and nomocracy share an etymology. But Allah is not a dill. He knows that you can’t govern effectively from up in a satellite, not without a deputy, some necessary human agent. Slave and Caliph is the Mohammodan polarity. It works pretty much like power exchange in BDSM. Allah is Master. You are slave. Obey. That’s one device in this nomocracy – slave mentality. Nietzche gets all this wrong. Orwell gets it right but for entirely the wrong reason: Slavery is freedom. The free Mohammadan can, in the end, declare himself slave to Allah above and to no man, and defy all human pretense. Allahu akbar!

 

This is actually what Luther did. Another quasi-Mohammadan dressed up as a neo-primitive Christian. I could go on about this Mohammadan-Protestant connection. It’s very important. You see, it is no accident that Pickthall – like others Turk turners of those times – was first of all a Unitarian. That whole Unitarian Trinity-skeptical theme in Protestanism, the Quakerism, etc., is rife among the proto-progressives of the Early Modern age and it is coming into Christendom on camels! Some serious thinking needs to be done on this. It’s no accident that the Hammer and Sickle is a modification of the Mohammadan crescent and star. You see, dissenting Christians feared that the God-forsaken Mohammadans were better Christians than the Christians: there’s the real roots of the progressive genealogy.

 

Queen Victoria investing the Ottoman Sultan, Adul Aziz (Slave of the Almighty), with the Order of the Garter.

But it’s benign in the Mohammadan context. Because there’s a Caliph. Or in this case the Sultan. These happy folk in Pickthall’s vision had photographs of their Sultan on their lounge room walls, but they’d never actually met him, or even anyone who knew him, but he was appointed by God Above, and he was a good man. They were happy that he lived 500 miles away. They paid him some sheep and goats in the springtime and in return he made sure hostile armies didn’t upset the status quo. Very wisely, he had no interest in policing how they cleaned their teeth.

 

Modern Mohammadan states are not like this, are they? No. Your gut instinct about them is correct. They are an ambomination. The worst of both worlds. A pervasive religious nomocracy AND an intrusive state increasingly bent on using technology and pseudo-science to micromanage the citizenry. It’s not enough that your family will shame you if you sleep with someone you shouldn’t: the state thinks it’s its business as well and makes it a crime. In its best examples, though, the premodern Mohammadan order, as Pickthall observed, could produce happy outcomes. The Sultan didn’t need to fuck with people’s lives. His job was to protect the borders, keep peace and build a High Culture back in Istanbul. On an every day level people were ruled by the Law in their hearts, by traditional modes of inculturation and by peer pressure, under the austere but remote sovereignty of Allah al-Malik and the military umbrella of His equally remote deputy.

 

Anyway, in all my reading Pickthall’s travel books provide the most tangible and convincing model of a life that seems to answer to certain libertarian pipe dreams. The main point being: nomocracy. You can do without policemen in a well-woven nomocracy, provided you have a Lawmaker no one can corrupt and a Sultan with a big army watching your back. Noting that the Sultan doesn’t have legislative power. He doesn’t make laws. He creates the peace for the Law. Allah makes Law. Locals can adapt it as they will. Locals know best. If they can be good God-fearing Musselmen and still drink arak, fine. That is, lots of subsidiarity.

 

As I have argued elsewhere, the Saidean narrative is bunk. The Orientalists were, with few exceptions, the first generation of Europeans to even bother to try to reach an understanding of the Mohammadan devils. It was a luxury they could afford. Finally – thanks to the corrections of the Reformation – the world had been set aright and Christendom (although no longer recognizable as such) was no longer an embarrassing backwater compared to a more advanced and prosperous “Islamicate” world, to use the newly sanitized, secularized Whig word you might have noticed coming out of Universities of recent times. Columbus thought he was sailing to India. Why? To get around the Mohammadans. It’s a crucial factor in every step towards the modern world. More broadly, when Mohammad declares himself the last prophet, he is at the same time declaring himself the first modern man.


Harper McAlpine Black

I Ching Score Card

After a thousand consultations, over five and a bit years, here is the state of play with my gradings of oracles from the I Ching. The Book of Changes has a reputation for uncannily accurate advice, displays of acute synchronicity. I have been in the habit of assessing the relevance, or otherwise, of the text in response to specific real-life consultations. The results of my assessment are as follows:

CATEGORY ONE

Explicit, astounding relevance. 49 cases in 1000.

These are cases where the text is astoundingly explicit and relevant. My paradigm case was when I was young. At the time I was accepting car transport from a young woman but not interested in her advances. Consulted, the I Ching said: “You should not travel in the carriage with the maiden under false pretenses.” The I Ching can do this. Astoundingly apposite, direct, explicit. No symbolism. When this happens I count this as a category one oracle.

CATEGORY TWO

Extreme relevance, but less explicit. 106 cases in 1000.

In a category two oracle the text is remarkably relevant, but without as much explicit character of category one. In the paradigm case the oracle might be instead: “You shouldn’t use people to assist with your journey.” Direct relevance, but without reference to the maiden and the carriage.

 
CATEGORY THREE

Relevant advice. Less specific than category two. More general. 251 cases in 1000. Here there is only the moral lesson. “It is not wise to disappoint someone for your own convenience.”

CATEGORY FOUR

Generally relevant. 361 cases in 1000. The largest category. These are texts of general but not startling relevance. With some effort they can be made to fit the inquiry. “The inferior man accepts gifts that turn to rust.”

 
CATEGORY FIVE

Not very relevant. 145 cases in 1000. It is hard to see the relevance of the oracle in these cases. Possibly some obscure symbolism I can’t see. “The road east is also the way of the eagle.”

CATEGORY SIX

Irrelevant. Not relevant at all. Off the mark. 88 cases in 1000. Confounding. ‘Your favorite uncle will sell many pigs.’

 

There is assuredly a subjective judgment involved when allotting them to a category, and there are many borderline cases, but these results give a good picture of my experience with the I Ching, as an oracle. Make of it what you will.

 

Note: I used several different methods of creating a hexagram at various times over the period, but only methods with the same probabilities as the yarrow stalk method. Never coins.

I did use of 7-fold scale and a 10-fold scale for short periods before settling on the six categories. I adapted this small batch to the 6-fold scale to include them in the figures.

Owl of Athene: Big Eyes of the Little Owl

The following notes are edited down from a long letter concerning the symbolism of the owl of Athene sent to a friend...

Further to the owl of Athene. I had originally thought of symmetries with Zeus, inasmuch as Athene is like a female counterpart to Zeus. So I had Athene’s owl as the counterpart to the Zeusean eagle. Thus: The owl is to Athene as the eagle is to Zeus, one nocturnal and one diurnal. Thus the owl here is eagle of the night – the big, sharp eyed, swooping bird of prey. And indeed many owls are formidible, but they are not the owl of Athene. Rather, her owl is very specifically the so-called ‘little owl’, called glaux in Greek. This is the owl in question, so the inquiry becomes an investigation into the owl symbolism of Athene relevant to this owl. The ‘Little Owl’ is not a counterpart to Zeus’ eagle. That symmetry doesn’t supply the relevant symbolism.

 

Glaux is perhaps a pre-Greek word, very old, and its basic meaning is ‘bright’. Assuredly, the name refers to the Little Owl’s bright eyes. At some point, though, the word takes the meaning of the colour ‘blue-grey’ and this continues from the Greek, so in English there is the adjective glaucous meaning ‘blue-grey’. I find this a very interesting shift in meaning. For a start, the ‘Little Owl’ has bright eyes but they are not blue-grey. More likely, the shift came from Homer where ‘glauk’ = bright is used to describe the shimmering of light on the sea (with no colour implied) and later elaboration perhaps surmised the colour of the sea to expand upon Homer’s text. But that is odd because, in any event, blue-grey is not ‘bright’. What shade of grey is ever bright? The term becomes tangled because Athene comes to be called ‘owl-eyed’ or ‘bright-eyed’ or ‘blue-grey eyed’, all translations of the same epithet, Glaukopis (Glauk-eyed).

 

I personally suspect that the application of the colour ‘blue-grey’ to Athene’s symbolism is meaningful and integral, not accidental or mistaken. In fact I suspect it is an important anomoly, but as yet I am not sure what it signifies or where it fits in. My suggestion, though, is that it has to do with Athene as a goddess of Air and that the ‘blue-grey’ is a sky colour, and this explains the shift from ‘bright’. Ruskin probably deals with it best. I haven’t pursued it. It remains a loose thread…

 

I am certain of the most central symbolism, however. It is, of course, the owl’s gaze. With any owl, or nocturnal bird, you would have the symbolism of seeing in the dark – and this is what wisdom does, therefore. In this sense the owl is wise. Sure. But this particular owl – Athene’s owl - has a conspicuously wondrous gaze, large glowing eyes all the more conspicuous on a smaller bird. Why the ‘Little Owl’? Why not a big owl to match the owl of Zeus? It is the Little Owl because in the smaller bird the important feature is accentuated, namely the large glowing eyes. The big eyes are bigger on the small bird. It is therefore the eyes that hold the key here.

 

I had also considered the owl as hunter with an implicit contrast between Athene and Artemis. In that case, the owl is distinguished as a bird of prey that both hunts and thinks. How did Athene move from a war goddess to an intellectual goddess? I thought her emblem, the owl, might provide a link if taken as a model of the thinking hunter. Perhaps, but the eyes of the bird are the central symbolism, and that is why it must be the ‘Little Owl’. Little Owls have big eyes.

 

Certainly, those big eyes see in the dark. Which is to say they see what is hidden. The owl tells us that about Athene. Her power is to see what is hidden, and wisdom (sophia) is seeing what is hidden. There are many extensions of this. But yes, the owl sees what is hidden – a fact underlined by the big eyes of the Little Owl – and for this reason alone is a fitting emblem for this intellectual goddess. The idea is that nous penetrates the darkness of existence, sees beyond appearances. Mind looking into the darkness of ignorance, and so on. That is of course the immediate symbolism.

 

More than that, though, the eyes of the Little Owl seem to glow. This is very important. The eagle is sharp-eyed and has long range, and flies high and is solar, but it does not carry its own inner light. The most conspicuous thing about the owl is that its eyes glow in the dark, and it is as though they have their own inner light that they cast onto the objects under their gaze. It is quite a different seeing to that of the eagle. I think this is the peculiar and unusual feature about owls, owls in general, or many of them, but again underlined in the bright glowing eyes of Athene’s Little Owl. So it is not just that the owl – this owl – sees in the dark. So do all nocturnal birds. More impressively, this particular nocturnal bird carries its own light into the depths of night. We can say: owls in general signify inner light.

 

This fact opens up a web of interconnected symbolisms. For a start, the symbolism is surely lunar in the sense that the moon too brings light into the night, and Athene is certainly a lunar deity who requires a lunar bird. And yet the eyes of the Little Owl are conspicuously yellow-gold – not at all blue-grey – and one would have to describe them as distinctly solar. Golden eyes. The moon, of course, might be called the sun of the night, so lunar significations are not unimportant, yet the signature of the bird is somewhat solar all the same. The moon reflects. The sun radiates. The eyes of Athene’s owl radiate. The inner light that does the radiating then becomes of prime interest. What light does the owl carry within it by which it illuminates the darkness? Or should we ask what inner fire? In any case, the owl keeps it within itself and has it under command.

 

Is the owl a lunar or solar bird? I think there’s an interesting ambivalence. It is most obviously lunar, just by being a bird of the night, and yet it is very solar, especially in regards the feature being underlined, the eyes. The owl of Athene has solar eyes. So the inner light, the inner fire, is the fire/light of the sun. So, more fully, the owl signifies something like the sun in the realm of the moon. That is the relation between its lunar and solar natures. The owl is externally lunar but internally solar.

 

Regarding this inner light, I am reminded at this point of the account of eyesight in Plato, in the Timaeus. It involves both a light coming into the eye and an inner light radiating out, and the actions of seeing are explained in this simultaneous mechanism. Long modern commentaries explain how Plato’s knowledge of eyesight was hopelessly faulty. But the projection of an inner light – a light of consciousness – is highly suggestive given the mythological background of the Timaeus cosmology.

 

I want to say that what is being described there are the eyes of the autochthon and that the autochthons are glaukopis. That is, the account of sight in the Timaeus is an account of owl eyes. The model for the Timaeus account is the (apparently) radiating eyesight of the owl. And in the context of the Timaeus, Athene’s owl. This is how to understand Plato’s account of eyesight and seeing. The idea of the inner light projected outwards and meeting the in-coming light has its model in the owl.

 

The Timaeus gives an account of the creation of the primal man by the Demiurge. Primal man is autochthonous. This is the mythology of the Athene cultus where the Athenians are descended from the primal autochthon. Plato gives us an account of the eyes, anatomy and physiology, based on the model of Athene’s owl – glaukopis. The text draws attention to this account. The section on eyesight in the Timaeus is out of sequence. More generally, I want to say that the Timaeus is a remarkably visual cosmology. Radiance and solidity produce a visual universe. Seeing is the most important of the senses in the Timaeus.

 

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The Egyptian hieroglyph depicting the owl is interesting. Once again, it is the Little Owl. Among hieroglyphs it represents the letter and sound M. The Roman representation of the letter M (m) that we use is very old and is a pictogram of water and waves. That association – the sound mmm – with water, sea, waves seems to be very ancient. But in Egyptian hieroglyphs the letter is shown by a stylization of the Little Owl. This stylization draws attention to another aspect of the bird that I think is important – another important symbolism – namely that the owl turns. In the hieroglyph we see the bird’s body in profile, but the face is turned full-frontal. Frontality, of course, is a common device within Egyptian art, but here I think it is worth noting. The hieroglyph wants to show the way in which this bird turns its face to the object of its gaze. It turns its face to look.

 

It might be objected that sundry birds do this, yet I think it is conspicuous in the owl. It is the gesture that accompanies the bird’s radiant gaze. The idea is a turning of attention. When we turn our attention to something in our mind it is the disembodied correlate of turning our face and gaze to it. The owl represents this. It represents this mental act: the act of turning. So not only is the bird known for its radiant gaze of an inner light, it turns this gaze onto things. This is very particularly the intellectual act that the owl symbolizes. This act of turning the mind is philosophically very interesting, and we could explore it, but for now I just want to note that the owl – Athene’s owl – is emblematic of it, and it is very clear in the Egyptian heiroglyph. Note the motif of turning.

 

****

 

An owl is a creature of the turning in another sense. It is associated with the middle of the night, the darkest hour of the night. But the darkest hour is the turning point. It is also where the light begins. That is the owl’s symbolic habitat – the turning point of night. Let us always place the owl in that natural context, the turning point of night. In all associations, across all traditions, the owl is a creature of the depths of night, and is therefore subject to negative symbolic readings as an ill-omen. Actually, that is the norm. It is notably not the case in Athens. The owl of Athene is not an ill-omen. Instead, we have a positive reading of the symbolism in Athene’s mythology. Seen positively, the depths of night are the beginning of the dawn and the owl – carrying an inner light – is a creature of that turning point. And also, therefore, a creature of all the symbolism that follows, because that turning point (from dark to light) is symbolically fecund.

 

We find this symbolism rendered by Coleridge. In fact, Coleridge supplies the key to the essential symbolism of the owl in the first few lines of his poem Christabel:

 

'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,

And the owls have awakened the crowing cock;

Tu—whit! Tu—whoo!

And hark, again! the crowing cock,

How drowsily it crew.

 

To summarize it: In the very middle of the night the owls awaken the cockerel, bird of the rising sun.

 

The poem is a spell, and its purpose is to lull us into a certain in-between world, which is a realm Coleridge knew well, not least through the agency of opiates. (Kubla Khan is about this realm as well.) Mr Coleridge is concerned with that in-between world of half-sleep. The crowing cock, how drowsily it crew. This is another way to think of the world of the owl. If the dead of night, the turning point, is also the birth of the light, then it is an in-between realm. The turning point is neither one side or the other. The turning point is the pivot of the duality but outside the duality itself, the point where night and day meet and overlap. The owl then is a creature of that middle world. This is the realm of the dream.

 

The owl is emblematic of dreams since our dreams seem lit by an inner light. Dreaming is a seeing in the dark. More particularly, though, the owl must represent the lucid dream, since the owl not only illuminates, it is aware. In fact, above all it is aware. Above all, sophia is an awareness. Conceived as a turning it is a coming to attention. The owl of Athene symbolizes this.

 

The deeper symbolism, though, must concern the idea of the sun in the night, which is also to say consciousness in sleep. The wide eyed owl with its inner light represents the Sun at Midnight and all the subsequent symbolism that that entails. The owl is a creature of the midnight sun. By analogy, its attentiveness, its gaze, is like consciousness in the darkness of sleep. I think this takes us very near to the heart of what the symbolism of the owl of Athene is ultimately about. We could explore it through a host of parallelisms from that point. That is to say, it’s the key that unlocks all the important doors.  

 

* * * * * *

 

Finally, philosophy begins in wonder. I think that wonder goes with turning. That philosophical act of turning (like the owl) is an act of wonder. Wondering and turning go together. Surely there is wonder in the big eyes of the Little Owl?