The New Neo

Or perhaps they already have.

I’ve written before about how a course I took in college on Russian Intellectual History stopped me from joining the left in the late 60s. Here’s an excerpt:

It was there I learned – without anyone ever telling me directly – that in the 60s we were reliving those long-past Russian years in a somewhat altered, Americanized form. No, my generation was not unique; that was clear. No, we were not inventing something that had never been tried, going down some wonderful path that had never been trod. We were going somewhere that in the past had led to nothing good.

I could see it for myself; all I had to do was read, and think. If we don’t learn history we are indeed condemned to repeat it. And even if we do learn it, we may be condemned to repeat it anyway.

I’ve thought of that course again lately, for obvious reasons – the parallels are there. One of the many books we had to read and discuss was Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, about the intergenerational conflict between the generations. And that exists today, too.

Lo and behold, here’s a professor with similar thoughts to mine on that score, and who even uses the same book as example (although he apparently hates the right and Trump; he’s got a very fully developed case of TDS).

And that, in turn, puts me in mind of Rudyard Kipling’s chilling poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headlines.” Copybook headings were a now-defunct pedagogical tool by which a student learned both penmanship and maxims for wise living, two subjects which seem to have been cast aside in recent decades:

The “copybook headings” to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims, often drawn from sermons and scripture extolling virtue and wisdom, that were printed at the top of the pages of copybooks, special notebooks used by 19th-century British school-children. The students had to copy the maxims repeatedly, by hand, down the page. The exercise was thought to serve simultaneously as a form of moral education and penmanship practice.

Kipling wrote the poem right about World War I, that searing experience that is considered to have been the birth of the modern age, and which brought with it much cynicism and despair:

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 Headings 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!

I called the poem “chilling” and I meant it literally. I have never been able to read it without the hair on my body standing on end in fear and dread.

[NOTE: The next-to-last verse, which I consider most powerful, draws on this Biblical reference:

“As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly” is an aphorism which appears in the Book of Proverbs in the Bible — Proverbs 26:11, also partially quoted in the New Testament, 2 Peter 2:22. It means that fools are stubbornly inflexible and this is illustrated with the repulsive simile of the dog that eats its vomit again, even though this may be poisonous…

In Proverbs, the “fool” represents a person lacking moral behavior or discipline, and the “wise” represents someone who behaves carefully and righteously. The modern association of these words with intellectual capacity is not in the original context.]