Music, Old or New?

 

Just take those old records off the shelf
I'll sit and listen to 'em by myself
Today's music ain't got the same soul
I like that old-time rock 'n' roll (1)

 

About fourteen or fifteen years ago I was talking with a young lady when the topic of conversation turned to music.  I don’t recall exactly how we got started on the subject but I’ll never forget her response to something I had said.   After commenting that a band I had mentioned was the sort of thing her father listened to – she was seven years my junior, mind you – she said that she made a point of never listening to any music from before 1995.

 

I didn’t really know what to say to that.  I had, of course, heard young people dismiss the music of their parents before but to declare oneself to have purposely shut oneself off from all the music from prior to what at the time would have been less than the last fifteen years, that was new.   To be fair to the young lady, about a decade later when I found myself seated fairly close to her at a concert it was of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra performing Beethoven.   I refrained from reminding her of her previous words.   Perhaps her tastes had matured or perhaps she had distinguished between popular and classical music, excluding the latter, when making he statement.   There is a third possibility but it would be uncharitable to spell it out.

 

Thinking over the conversation later it struck me that she had expressed the exact opposite sentiment to that in the Bob Seger song quoted above.   It is interesting to observe that while “Old Time Rock and Roll” has demonstrated itself to be a true classic – a song that is timeless and never really gets old in the sense of past its time – the examples provided within the song of the “today’s music” which “ain’t got the same soul” have not weathered the test of time nearly as well.   The next stanza goes:

 

Don't try to take me to a disco
You'll never even get me out on the floor
In ten minutes I'll be late for the door
I like that old-time rock 'n' roll

 

Disco was an early antecedent of electronic dance music named after the type of nightclub in which was played throughout the 1970s.   Think the BeeGees and Studio 54 and John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (1977).   It remains permanently associated with the 1970s, having reached the apex of its popularity at approximately the same time that Seger recorded “Old Time Rock and Roll” after which it sharply tanked, at least in North America.   The Last Days of Disco (1993) the third and final instalment in a trilogy - in the loosest possible meaning of this term - of films by Whit Stillman, is set at the very beginning of the 1980s.    Music so closely associated with a particular decade is dated rather than timeless.

 

Interestingly, however, eleven years after Bob Seger’s song was first released the Australian Princess of Pop, Kylie Minogue, recorded the song “Step Back in Time” on her third album Rhythm of Love.  This song, which was written by the London production firm of Stock Aitken and Waterman with which the soap actress turned diva had begun working after her cover of Little Eva’s “The Locomotion” had become a hit three years previously, is similar in sentiment to “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll” except that the negative flip-side, the not-so-subtle rejection of “today’s music” is absent and the sentiment is directed towards the very music rejected in Seger’s song.  Here is the refrain preceded by the bridge that leads into it:

 

Remember the old days?
Remember the O'Jays?
Walkin' in rhythm
Life was for livin'

 

When you can't find the music
To get down and boogie
All you can do is step back in time

Ball of confusion
When nothing is new, and
There's nothing doin'
Step back in time (2)

 

Some have found it amusing for Kylie to sing these lyrics.   She would have been four years old when “Love Train”, the only O’Jays single to reach the number one position in the charts, was released (3) and she was singing for an audience younger than herself.  The song would chart the path for her future career, however.  The following year she covered “Love Train” herself in her world tour and she would continue to pay tribute to disco right up to her last studio album which is entitled Disco (2020).   Bob Seger, incidentally, would have been roughly the same age during the years of “that old time rock ‘n’ roll” that Kylie was during the years of disco.   Don Maclean, who is the same age as Seger, paid tribute to the same music in his “American Pie”, although in his case he noted his having been merely in the early days of adolescence at the time Buddy Holly died in the lyrics which he wrote himself, with his reference to learning it from the pages of the newspapers he delivered on his paper route.

 

If asked to identify the sentiment shared by these two songs most people would probably say it is nostalgia.  This is not quite right, however, because while nostalgia shares with this sentiment the element of looking to the past with fondness, it also includes an element of sadness. (4)   The sadness of nostalgia is the sadness of loss.   It is the sense that what one looks back to with affection in the past is lost in the present and will never come again.   Think of the sentiment expressed by A. E. Housman in the fortieth poem in his A Shropshire Lad:

 

Into my heart an air that kills 

  From yon far country blows: 

What are those blue remembered hills, 

  What spires, what farms are those? 

 

That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain, 

The happy highways where I went 

  And cannot come again.

 

This sad sentiment is notably absent from the songs we have been discussing.   Both are upbeat, neither assume that the old music they are praising is something lost to time.   Indeed, they assume the contrary.   In Seger’s song he defiantly declares that he will “sit and listen” to those old records “by himself” and Kylie’s song calls on the listener to “step back in time” as a genuine possibility.   If there is a name for this sentiment, like nostalgia but without the sadness, it escapes me.   There should be one because the distinction is important.   Music that is truly timeless cannot be the object of true nostalgia..

 

For an example of a song that expresses a similar rejection of newer music to Bob Seger’s but with actual nostalgia, or at least imputes such to its title character, consider the following from the Bellamy Brothers’ 1985 country and western hit “Old Hippie”:

 

He gets off on country music
'Cause disco left him cold
And he's got young friends into new wave
But he's just too friggin' old
And he dreams at night of Woodstock and the day John Lennon died
How the music made him happy and the silence made him cry
Yeah, he thinks of John sometimes
And he has to wonder why (5)

 

Even more obvious an example is a song we have already mentioned, Don MacLean’s folk rock classic “American Pie” originally recorded and released in 1971.   Like Kylie’s song, MacLean’s is not critical of newer styles of music the way Seger’s is.   It expresses a sense of sadness and discontent and while this has to do with much more than changing styles of music, the lengthy song relating a number of events representing the sweeping societal and cultural changes of the volatile era through which the artist had lived, it does so through the lens of nostalgia for the music of his early childhood,  the same old time rock ‘n’ roll Seger’s song references.   As with the character in the Bellamy Brothers’ song, the nostalgia is focused on a tragic death that symbolizes the closing of an era, in MacLean’s case “the day the music died”, i.e., the day in 1959 when a single plane crash took the lives of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens.  

A third song that expresses nostalgia towards older music is “Video Killed the Radio Star” which was originally released by The Buggles the same year as “Old Time Rock and Roll”.   In this case the nostalgia is not directed towards a style of music but an era of music distinguished from that which succeeded it by stages in the development of media technology.  Also, the loss expressed is not primarily the loss of the singer expressed in the first person, but the loss of the radio star, left behind by technological advancement, which is expressed in the second person in the stanzas and the third person in the chorus:

 

Video killed the radio star
Video killed the radio star
In my mind and in my car
We can't rewind we've gone too far
Pictures came and broke your heart
Put the blame on VCR (6)

 

We have just discussed five songs that have one thing, at least, in common.   Whether nostalgically or not, whether coupled with criticism/rejection of the new or not, they all express an attitude of fondness towards older music.   Other examples could be given.  Country music abounds with songs of this type.    The title single of George Jones’ 45^th album, Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes (1985), is a good example.   How many country singers since 1953 have not paid tribute in one way or another to Hank Williams Sr.?   Not many.

 

How many songs, I wonder, express the opposite sentiment, that of my friend from the conversation mentioned at the beginning of this essay?

 

Not too many come to mind.   The year after “Old Time Rock and Roll” was released, Billy “The Piano Man” Joel, recorded “It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll to Me” which was number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for a couple of weeks.   The timing of the two songs made it seem like the one was an answer to the other.  This may or may not be the case, but even if it is true, Joel’s answer is to assert continuity between the new music and the old rock ‘n’ roll, not to set the two against each other like Seger but picking the opposite side.   The following lines should demonstrate that conclusively:

 

Hot funk, cool punk, even if it's old junk
It's still rock and roll to me (7)

 

In fact the only song that really stands out as expressing anything remotely similar to the contempt for older music shown by my friend – and this is ironic for several reasons as you will see if you go back and re-read the first few paragraphs of this essay – is “Roll Over Beethoven”, originally written and recorded as an R & B single by Chuck Berry in 1956, but covered several times, including by The Beatles in 1963. 

 

While it hardly surprising when young people have a preference for newer music and see it as their own,  the contrast is almost always with their parents’ music rather than older music in general much less all music prior to a certain recent date.  Usually, the only people you will hear painting older music with a broad brush so as to condemn it wholesale, are left-wing activists or academics, with a political axe to grind against anything they associate with dead, white, males.   The reverse, where someone says that newer music has all gone to pot after such-and-such a date is much more frequent and there is a reason for this.   The position that older music is better and newer music is corrupt, while it can easily be articulated in such a way as to show the person speaking up to be a fool, is intellectually defensible.   The opinion that all older music must be rejected as bad – or, and this is worse from the perspective of those holing this kind of opinion, irrelevant – and that only the music of today is worth listening to instantly and always demonstrates the stupidity of the person who expresses it.   Most people, of course, would reject both of these viewpoints usually on the basis of a general consensus that likes and dislikes in music – and art and culture in general for that matter - are entirely matters of taste, that taste is 100% subjective, and that most or all attempts to evaluate types of music objectively, merely disguise the subjective tastes of those doing the evaluating.   I disagree with this consensus, but even if it were accurate, I would say that there are still a couple of differences between the two viewpoints that make the one more obviously stupid than the other.   First, the person who rejects all older music in favour of today’s music, is deliberately shutting himself off from the vast majority of music ever made for reasons that are either superficial (it is no longer fashionable), solipsistic (it is not relevant to me), or political (it was made by dead, white, males) with the only one of these reasons that bears any resemblance to an objective complaint against the rejected music being the worst of them all.   The person who dismisses today’s music in favour of the old shuts himself off from a much smaller percentage of the music out there even if his reasons are no better than those of the other person. The second difference between the two viewpoints is that the person who rejects today’s music rejects that which has yet to prove itself whereas the person who rejects the music of the past rejects that which has already proven itself.   Music, like all other art, is not automatically entitled to our acceptance.   For these reasons, even if there were no objective “better” or “worse” when it comes to music, the person who writes off today’s music wholesale is objectively less stupid than the person who writes off the music of the past wholesale.

 

The person who writes off today’s music may do so for reasons that are no better than those of the person who writes off the music of the past.   There are, however, better reasons available to the person looking to objectively justify rejecting at least some of today’s music.   This is because the idea that there is no “good” or “bad”, “better” or “worse” when it comes to music, or any other kind of art, that all is subjective, simply does not bear up under scrutiny.  Consider the history of the types of music that have come up in this discussion so far.   With the exception of Beethoven, all are types of popular music, and with the exception of country and western, all the rest came about after World War II.   The “old time rock ‘n’ roll” itself, the first stage of what is now just known as rock music, was subjected when it first came out, not merely to aesthetic criticism of the professional sort that all art and culture receives, but to moral condemnation as well, coming primarily from parents and clergymen, especially fundamentalist preachers.   These have been mocked in popular culture ever since, but were they wrong?

 

Although many people, probably most, assume that they were, it would be very difficult to make an intelligent case for this.   The fundamentalists warned that rock ‘n’ roll was contributing to the overthrow of sexual morality and respect for parental authority and religion.   To this day such preachers are mocked for their warnings of seventy years ago and the basis of much of the mockery is the tameness of the objects of their homiletic wrath at the time compared to what is normal now.   This, however, is the textbook example of a self-defeating argument.   Look around at society today.   The traditional sexual morality of keep it within marriage by the traditional heterosexual definition of the word and if you can’t do that at least have the decency not to flaunt your indiscretions in public has indeed been overthrown and replaced with an identity-politics based one in which “slut shaming” is condemned rather than sluttiness and every conceivable alternative to heterosexuality and to even being male and female comes with high status points.   Parental authority is at all-time low and here in the Dominion of Canada progressive nincompoops are promoting Bill S-251, currently before Parliament, which would abolish parental authority altogether.   In North America and throughout Western Civilization we are far more secular today than we were at the end of the Second World War and secularism itself has evolved from a tolerant, classical liberal, secularism towards one more resembling the intolerant secularism we used to associate with Communism.   We have arrived, basically, at exactly where the fundamentalists of the 1940s and 1950s said we were headed, and the fact that the music and movies and culture in general of today is far worse by the standards of said fundamentalists than the kind they actually preached against, hardly demonstrates them to have been wrong.   The point, to be clear, is not that rock ‘n’ roll caused the moral collapse of civilization.   It is that the forces which were moving us towards this collapse were already in motion in the 1940s and 1950s, that the fundamentalists of that era correctly perceived rock ‘n’ roll to be in alignment with those forces, and so the objective moral grounds of their preaching against it has been borne out by history.  

 

The fundamentalist complaint that rock ‘n’ roll was undermining parental authority has particular bearing on the “it is all subjective” argument.   The moral position of the fundamentalists was based upon the Fifth Commandment – “Honour thy father and thy mother”.   The fundamentalists maintained that rock ‘n’ roll was influencing young people to break this commandment.   Rock’s identification with rebellion against authority, especially parental, would become much more explicit in the 1960s, but the earlier rock ‘n’ roll marked the beginning of the generational conflict that has so persisted ever since that it is often assumed to be part of the unavoidable “the way things are”.   A good case can be made that the “It is all subjective” argument has more to do with fatigue brought upon by this conflict and the desire to escape it than with the nature of music and musical taste.

 

In the 1995 comedy film Clueless, which borrows the plot of Jane Austen’s Emma and loosely translates it into the world of rich, 1990s, Beverly Hills teenagers, the matter of the generation conflict is raised by one of the minor characters in one scene.   The main character had just given a presentation in class on Haitian refugees, the teacher played by Wallace Shawn had asked the class for “further insights”, and the character of Travis, who corresponds to Austen’s character of Mr. Martin and is played by Breckin Meyer as a Jeff Spicoli type (referencing an earlier movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, from the same director) offers the following, off-topic remark:

 

OK, like, the way I feel about the Rolling Stones is the way my kids are going to feel about Nine Inch Nails, so I really shouldn't torment my Mom anymore, huh?

 

The assumption behind this is that kids always hate the music their parents listened to when they were their age.   It has been my experience that this assumption does not have much  validity except for kids whose musical preferences fall within pop, rock, and other genres derived from or closely associated with these.   It certainly wasn’t valid for me when I was a kid.   My first musical preference was for country and western and while I listened to artists like Randy Travis, Ricky Skaggs, George Strait and Dwight Yoakam who were the new face of country at the time, with the exception of Steve Earle my favourites were mostly those of my father’s era – Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Charlie Daniels and especially Johnny Cash and Ray Stevens.     Even with pop and rock, to the extent I had any use for them at all at the time, it was certainly not ‘80s music, which I did not appreciate until I could look back on it from a distance, but my mother’s music, especially Elvis, that I liked.  Of course I recognize that my experience was atypical.  I was born with a thoroughly reactionary disposition and even before I reached my tenth birthday took, or at least affected, a curmudgeonly attitude towards the pop/rock favourites of my peers as “the devil’s music” that would have put the best fundamentalist preacher of the ‘50s to shame.   That having been said, I can think of people I have known over the years who are musically inclined from the creating and performing end of things, and these almost always have had a very broad appreciation for music of all types and eras and shown no evidence of the sort of attitude the Clueless character was talking about it, exemplified to the nth degree by the friend mentioned at the beginning of this essay.   While classical music was for me an acquired taste, one that I developed in college – except, of course, for that which I acquired from Bugs Bunny and other cartoons as a meme my sister recently sent me reminded me  – I did know a couple of people who were classical music aficionados from childhood.   There is considerable overlap between these and the creative types just mentioned but my point is that it is difficult to conceive of someone whose musical taste has been classical from childhood experiencing the kind of generational gap in taste that seems to go with pop and rock.   Indeed, it is comical to imagine it.   Try and picture someone attending the first performance of Beethoven’s Fifth in Vienna in 1808 and then going home and mocking his father for having attended the premiere of that stuffy old “Jupiter” (Mozart’s 41^st) back in 1788.   It would be “inconceivable”, to borrow from another Wallace Shawn character (Vizzini the Sicilian in The Princess Bride) but use the word correctly.   The loose equivalent to what “pop”, “rock”, “disco”, “hip hop” and the like are to popular music in classical music are Baroque (Bach, Vivaldi, et al.), Classical Proper (Haydn, Mozart), and Romantic ((Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner, et al.) with Handel as a transitional bridge between the first two, and Beethoven as the same between the last two.   This is an oversimplification, but the point is that the principle classifications within classical music speak of eras each of which could contain within itself the whole of the period that saw all of these styles of popular music rise and replace each other.      

 

Newer classical music, whatever one might think of it – as a rule I am not too fond of classical music composed after the nineteenth century – is not written and performed to set kids against their parents and produce generational strife.   Nor is newer country and western music.  As different as classical and country and western are both are living traditions in which respecting the past is expected of present artists. 

 

So why did rock ‘n’ roll music and its progeny do this?  

 

To understand this it is helpful to recognize that the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll coincides in time with the development of the LP record.  While ways of recording sound had been discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century, and commercialized following Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, it was the LP – what we just called a “record” when I was a kid and now, since its recent revival, usually call vinyl – that really introduced the factory, mass production, mindset into the music industry, because their far superior storage capacity and playback quality made them far more suited to this than their predecessors.   This turned popular music itself into a mass consumption commodity.   The production companies saw young people as the largest market for record sales and began making music to be marketed to young people as their music, a marketing strategy that ended up pitting young people against the parents, a result that become more extreme over time.   Shortly after Columbia introduced the first LP in 1948, record companies began to release music oriented towards adolescents under a number of new style names of which rock ‘n’ roll caught on the most, sometime around the mid-1950s.   Histories of rock music tend to focus on the race politics of the era of its origin, some from a liberal perspective (rock ‘n’ roll bringing black rhythm and blues and white country together in the last days of Jim Crow) others from a hard left racial grievance perspective (rock really beginning with black R & B but not taking off the way it deserved until “stolen” by white artists like Bill Halley, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly), neither of which is entirely wrong although both contain a lot of codswallop.   The real story is that more than any other older types of popular music, rock music, beginning with R & B rock ‘n’ roll, was far more the product of the marketing strategy of the firms that distributed it than of the artists themselves, despite the “No True Scotsman” fallacy employed by the many who claim that “real rock” is distinguished from pop by the independence of its artistic creators.   While the fundamentalist preachers of the ‘50s blamed the Communists, the real villain was capitalism.   Capitalism is far more effective at accomplishing the evil ends of Communism than Communism itself.

 

Now, there are those who would insist that the arguments I just laid out are not really better than those of the person who rejects the music of the past and accepts only today’s music because they are not about the music itself but the way it is made, the intentions of the producers, and social and civilizational ills with which the music was associated but which it did not cause. To fully and consistently maintain that the arguments raised over the last seventy years or so against each new wave of rock music are invalid, however, requires the separation of lyrics from music because it would be insane to claim that today’s music is not much worse than that of decades ago in terms of lyric content.   This separation is indeed at the heart of the case made for Christian rock.   I remember having a heated debate in the dormitory at Providence College on the subject of Christian rock in the very year my previously mentioned friend thought of as the cut-off point before which no music was worth listening to.   I took the con position, my opponent took the pro position.  In the interest of full disclosure, while I was not arguing a side simply for the sake of arguing, i.e., as devil’s advocate, my music collection at the time did include cassettes by Petra, the Newsboys, and One Bad Pig (Christian punk band – the album in question was the one in which they did a cover of Johnny Cash’s “Man in Black” with Johnny himself joining in the vocals).   My position on Christian rock is that it belongs to two categories, Christian music and rock music, within both of which it is generally inferior with a few exceptions – the examples just given not being among them – that prove the rule.   My opponent’s argument, or the portion of it that did not consist of accusations of legalism and similar rhetoric, reduced to the idea that music is neutral with goodness or badness found solely in the lyrics.   It is an argument that is well suited to the music of ApologetiX – basically the Christian version of Weird Al Yankovic.    It is deeply flawed when examined on its own merits, however.   In music, all the component parts are put together to make a whole.   Someone can make music without including words just as he can make music without include a piano or without including a guitar or stings in general or percussion.   Once it has been made, however, the words are as much a part of the music as the notes played on whatever instrument is used.

 

Furthermore, instrumental music speaks in the same way lyrics do.   Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture is entirely instrumental but it tells the story of the event it was written to commemorate – Napoleon’s invasion of Moscow in 1812 and Tsarist Russia’s successful repulsion of the invasion.   Johnny Mandel’s “Suicide Is Painless”, better known as the theme song for M*A*S*H is just as horribly morbid and depressing when Michael Altman’s lyrics are omitted – as they were in the television series – as when they are included, as they were in the original 1970 film. I defy anybody to listen to the karaoke track of Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” without it inspiring the urge to go out and punch someone in the face.  The message spoken by the instruments may complement and support the message of the lyrics.   This is the norm.   Sometime it can contradict the message of the lyrics.   This is usually inadvisable, but it worked for John Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater Revival with “Bad Moon Rising” (1969) and for pretty much the entire oeuvre of Sheryl Crow.   Whether in harmony or discord with the lyrics, the instruments speak, and this makes the claim that sans lyrics music is neutral, utter nonsense.  

 

Ultimately, however, the most important standard by which music and art in general must be evaluated is the aesthetic.   This is not a cession to the subjectivists, not if one accepts the view of the Ancients, that Beauty, like Goodness and Truth, is what it is and is not what we decide it is.   This is why the distinction stressed earlier in this essay between the timeless and the dated is so important.   Remember the difference between the two.   Both are old in the sense of having been around for some time.   A song or genre that is dated, however, is also old in the sense that it belongs to the time that produced it.  A song or genre that is timeless, belongs to all ages, being appreciated today in the same way it was yesterday, a quality that can only be discerned with the passing of time.   This is directly related to the aesthetics of the ancients because if Beauty is what it is and is not what we decide it is then it is the same to everyone, everywhere, in all times.    Saying, therefore, that a song – or a poem or a painting or a statue – is beautiful, is not the same thing as saying that I like the song – or poem, painting or statute.   Not necessarily at any rate.  When I say “I like X song” I could be saying that X song appeals to the part of me that recognizes in X song that eternal, fixed, transcendental quality that is Beauty and which is the same for everybody, whether they recognize it or not.   I could, however, be saying that it appeals to something else in me, an emotion or passion or such, in which case I am not making an aesthetic statement.

 

It is not always easy to recognize this difference, especially in an age like ours which has gone to war with the Ancient universals.   Similarly, it is not always easy to tell whether a song is timeless or dated.   There is middle territory, or at least a number of ways in which something that is dated can partially escape its datedness.   A song or book or movie may, for example, develop a cult following that remains attached to it long after the wider culture has set it on the shelf belonging to yesterday.   Or it may undergo a temporary revival like a retro look in fashion.   Or it might attain a lasting value that is not the same as timelessness but is derived in a meta sort of way from its own datedness, in a manner similar to how camp (stuff in bad taste that is appreciated for its own, often exaggerated, bad taste) works, in this case the music having to first become dated in order to be valued in a nostalgic way.   Remember the other distinction that I made a point of stressing earlier in this essay.   That which is truly timeless can never be the object of true nostalgia because it is never lost to us, never out of date.   That having been said, a little common sense goes a long way towards distinguishing between the universal appeal of true Beauty and that which appeals to what is base in us.   If the reason you like music is because of the adrenaline rush produced by negative emotion of some sort that it stirs up in you, or because its lyrics are profane, obscene, rebellious or violent, then you can mark that down on the non-Beauty side of the ledger.

 

I think that what I have said is sufficient to demonstrate that preferring older music and taking a wait and see approach to that which is new, looking for timelessness and Beauty,  while treated as a sign of crankiness by the masses, is a far more sensible approach to the opposite, so amusingly expressed by my friend of years ago.  So I will conclude with the words of Bob Seger:

 

Call me a relic, call me what you will
Say I'm old-fashioned, say I'm over the hill
Today's music ain't got the same soul
I like that old-time rock 'n' roll

 

 

 

 (1)   George Jackson, Thomas E. Jones III, “Old Time Rock and Roll”, recorded by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band on the album Stranger in Town, 1979.

(2)   Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, Peter Waterman, “Step Back in Time”, recorded by Kylie Minogue on the album Rhythm of Love (1990).

(3)   Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco closes with a memorable scene of Chloe Sevigny and Matt Keeslar dancing to this song on a literal train, a subway, after the disco era has ended, but so infecting the rest of the passengers with their enthusiasm that they all join in. 

(4)   The “alg” in nostalgia comes from an ancient Greek word, the one Homer uses in the second line of the Iliad for the suffering and woe which Achilles’ dreadful wrath caused to the Achaeans assembled at Troy.

(5)   David Bellamy, “Old Hippie”, recorded by the Bellamy Brothers on the album Howard & David, 1985.   The Bellamys would later record several sequels to this song providing the characters entire life story.

(6)   Bruce Woolley, Geoffrey Downes, Trevor Charles Horne, “Video Killed the Radio Star”, recorded by The Buggles on the album The Age of Plastic, 1979.

(7)   Billy Joel, “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”, recorded by Billy Joel on the album Glass Houses, 1980.

The Poet versus the Pandemic

John Tory, the current mayor of the city of York in Upper Canada, or, as people who prefer to be up to date like to call it, Toronto, Ontario, must be a poetry hater. That is the conclusion to which I was led by reading about one of his recent decisions.

On Wednesday April 22nd, he issued the order that when the cherry blossoms begin to bloom in High Park, the park was to be sealed to the public, to re-open only after the bloom period ended. Accordingly, on April 30th the park was sealed. By sealed, I mean that he had erected a temporary steel fence around the park, ordered the police to barricade the entrances, and sent in the by-law officers with their ticket books to fine everybody they could find. All of this to prevent people from looking at flowers. Anybody who wanted to see the cherry in bloom would have to watch it livestream. On the evening of Sunday, May 10th, the park re-opened. Not because the Hogtown mayor had come to his senses but because the cherry bloom period was over.

This decision was, like virtually all government decisions in response to the pandemic, stupid, heavy-handed, and over-the-top. If it were the expression of a thought, rather than the absence of thought, that thought would be the opposite of that found in the second poem in A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad.

A Shropshire Lad, which appeared in 1896, was the first of two volumes of poetry that classical scholar Alfred Edward Housman published in his lifetime. The second, entitled Last Poems, appeared almost three decades later in 1922. It is in the latter that one can find “The Laws of God, the Laws of Man.” This is another poem which the government response to this pandemic brings readily to mind. In this case it is not any one particular decision that evokes the poem, any of their repressive, totalitarian, rules will do. The poem expresses the perspective of someone caged in by rules made without his consent but from which he cannot escape. It begins with the lines:

The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;

and includes the memorable:

And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.

Anyone who remembers Steve Gerber's 1970's comic, Howard the Duck, published by Marvel, will probably recognize the source of its tag-line here.

If these sound like the sentiments of some sort of radical, anarchist, subversive or rebel, think again. Housman had been, like his six siblings, raised in the political convictions of their father Edward whose post-dinner toast was “Up with the Tories and down with the Radicals!” Unlike his sister Clemence and his brother Lawrence who abandoned this political creed for its opposite, Clemence becoming a prominent feminist and Lawrence becoming a socialist and pacifist activist, Housman did not. While his partisan enthusiasm eventually died down, he continued to cheer for Conservative victories, if mostly because, they, in his words “will vex the kind of people I don’t like.” He ridiculed and mocked the causes his brother and sister supported and to the end of his life rebuffed their efforts to enlist him. He described himself to a Dr. Barnes, whose petition to reform the English language he had returned unsigned, as “a real conservative, who thinks change an evil in itself.”

Like Dr. Johnson, and probably most “real conservatives”, he was prone to melancholy, or what they would call depression today. There were other factors that presumably contributed to this. After his mother passed away, he lost his early Christian faith when he was thirteen. His spiritual trajectory followed the opposite path to that of his protégé Enoch Powell. Powell, who studied under Housman at Trinity College in Cambridge University where the poet was Professor of Latin, before becoming an acclaimed classicist and later the Conservative statesman legendary for sounding the alarm against creeping socialism, the European Common Market, and especially mass immigration, had received no religious upbringing, fell under the spell of Nietzsche in the 1930s, but was eventually drawn, through the beauty of Cranmer's liturgy, to a sort of high Anglicanism. Housman had been raised in this faith and lost it. Unlike Nietzsche, who was the son of a Lutheran pastor, and several more recent examples, he did not become a zealous evangelist of unbelief, labouring to destroy the faith he once held, but rather mourned the loss of the consolation it offered. The hymn sung at his funeral was of his own composition. The other major factor was the devastation of unrequited love which has been the dark muse of more than one poet. In Housman's case it was all the more devastating due to the complicating factors of his having been by nature a highly introverted individual and the love having ben of the type of which, only a few years later, the Irish poet-playwright Oscar Wilde, speaking in his own defence at the trial that his ill-advised and self-destructive defamation suit against the notoriously pugnacious and pugilistic Marquess of Queensberry had brought down upon him, would say that it "dare not speak its name" which was true at the time, although more recently, Robertson Davies, the Canadian novelist who, incidentally, borrowed several lines from Housman as chapter titles in one of his novels, has with equal truth said that it has become the "love that won't shut up."

Housman's melancholy is very evident in the tone that characterizes his verse. It frequently takes the form of lament for youth cut short or nostalgia for something that has been lost through time and change. In “1887”, which is the very first poem in A Shropshire Lad, it is wed to a celebratory tone. This poem, as is indicated by its title, was written for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria and begins by describing the celebrations across the realm, as dales and hills light up with beacons “Because ‘tis fifty years to-night/That God has saved the Queen.” This leads into:

Now, when the flame they watch not towers
About the soil they trod,
Lads, we’ll remember friends of ours
Who shared the work with God.

To skies that knit their heartstrings right,
To fields that bred them brave,
The saviours come not home to-night:
Themselves they could not save.

It dawns in Asia, tombstones show
And Shropshire names are read;
And the Nile spills his overflow
Beside the Severn’s dead.

We pledge in peace by farm and town
The Queen they served in war,
And fire the beacons up and down
The land they perished for.


As he brings it to a conclusion, the voices of the lamented dead and the living join in the celebratory cry “God save the Queen” and the poet ends with this admonishment:


Oh, God will save her, fear you not:
Be you the men you’ve been,
Get you the sons your fathers got,
And God will save the Queen. (1)


Later in the fortieth poem in the volume, to which he gave no other title than XL, we find the nostalgic aspect of his melancholy on full, undiluted, display:


Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.


In the above verses there is not the slightest trace of hope, or any other mitigating positive sentiment, mingled with the lament. The “blue remembered hills” and the "happy highways" in the “land of lost content” are lost forever. The air that brings their memory to heart is an air that "kills"

This is not so in the second poem in this anthology, the one alluded to at the beginning of this essay and the one with which we shall bring it to a close. This is quite probably Housman’s best-known poem. While it is difficult to judge this because, like those of his contemporary Rudyard Kipling or, for that matter, pretty much any Victorian era poet, his poems have the quality of sticking in your mind, of practically memorizing themselves, I am going by the fact that it is the one that appears most often in anthologies. The poem just cited and "When I Was One and Twenty" would be the closest contenders for the title. In this poem reflection on the brevity of human life is the source of sadness. In an ironic twist, this reflection is placed on the lips of one who is only twenty, which is not ordinarily an age in which one morbidly contemplates his own mortality.


Here, however, he is not helpless. There is a positive step he can take, however, to ameliorate the situation, by making the days which are quantitatively few, qualitatively better:


Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.


To translate this into prose: death is inevitable, life is short, don't waste it, fill it with beauty such as that of the blossom of the cherry tree.

The opposite notion, in other words, to that of erecting a barrier to prevent people from seeing the cherry blossoms in the foolish hope of thereby keeping the Reaper away.

What would Housman have thought of someone like John Tory?

(1) There was a famous encounter between Housman and Frank Harris that concerns the interpretation of this poem and which illustrates the difference between Housman and his pacifist brother Lawrence. Harris, taking the poem to be a, anti-war polemic and a “bitter satire” written against patriotism and the like, offered his congratulations, based on this interpretation, to its author who repudiated him to his face:


I never intended to poke fun, as you call it, at patriotism, and I can find nothing in the sentiment to make mockery of: I meant it sincerely; if Englishmen breed as good men as their fathers, then God will save the Queen. I can only reject and resent your truculent praise.

The Lessons of Poetry: Part Two - The "Good War"

War is a basic reality of human existence. Individual human beings cannot live together without generating friction that sometimes bursts out in disagreements, disputes, and fights and the same is also true of human societies. When societies clash in war destruction is generated on a much larger scale then when individuals clash and it has long been a dream of many that one day man would lay down his arms forever and war would be no more. The Christian Scriptures speak of such a day but they place it in the world-to-come, beyond the end of history and the Return of Christ. Only those with a naïve and foolish faith in the ability of human ingenuity to overcome each and every limitation placed upon us by the realities of our nature – we call such people “progressives” – envision the abolition of war as a human accomplishment to be achieved inside of history. The schemes they propose to achieve this end generally strike those of us who are not progressives as being unduly optimistic at best, pathways to evils greater than war at worst, and for better or for worse, inevitably doomed to fail.

Once we accept that war is a basic reality of our existence that we cannot, however much we may wish it to be otherwise, do away with forever we are forced to consider how we will deal with this reality. Two questions stand out as being of utmost importance. The first is what limits or boundaries, if any, we may place on war so as to lessen and minimize its destructive potential. The second is how we can best prepare our countries so as to be ready for war when it comes. This second question has two quite different facets depending upon what we have in mind when we think of preparation for war. We might think of such preparation in terms of fortifications, arsenals and military training of a strategic and technical nature. Or we might think of it in terms of the cultivation of the virtues, the habits of character, of the warrior. Since the virtues that serve a man on the battlefield serve him elsewhere as well the second would seem to be clearly the more important of these two perspectives and it is a powerful indictment of the modern mind and the education that forms and feeds it that it thinks of military preparation almost exclusively in terms of the first.

These two questions, of how we may limit war so as to lessen its destructiveness and how we may cultivate the virtues of the warrior so as to prepare our country for war are the subjects of two long-standing traditional discussions in the civilizations of the Western world and it is a further indictment of modern education that it has, to a large extent, cut the modern mind off from these discussions and the traditions which contain them. The first question is what philosophers and theologians traditionally sought to answer in their discussion of justice in war – for what causes may we justly go to war and how, once we have gone to war, we may conduct it in a just manner. The second question is the subject of an older and longer discussion that goes back at least as far as Homer in the eighth century BC, a discussion carried out in the language of poetry.

It was poetry that took the Greek word for a man of war – hero – and exalted it into a term of adoration and praise. Although poetic language is not exactly noted for its realism, poetic licence being a byword for exaggeration, hyperbole, and the dressing up of the facts, the inescapable realities of human existence – life, death, joy, suffering, love and yes, war – are its subject matter. Of the themes that recur throughout the poetry of the Great Tradition when war is the subject, it is that of the hero and his mighty deeds which stands out. It is a theme which the modern mind, formed by utilitarian education and fed by comic books, video games, fantasy novels, television, and cinematic film easily misunderstands and in such a mind the concept of the hero is inevitably reduced to that of the “good guy”.

The good guy is the person you are supposed to cheer for because he is on the side of Light opposed to Darkness. The hero is not so one-dimensional a character. He is good in a sense, for otherwise he would not be the object of praise, but his goodness does not consist of his being on the side of Light or even of his being a particularly moral person. It consists of his possessing, as evidenced through his actions, the qualities that befit a warrior. While these include such natural traits as physical strength (Achilles, Heracles) and crafty intelligence (Odysseus) it is traits of character, foremost of which is that of courage or valour, that are awarded the highest praise. Indeed, gallantry is held to be of such importance that it is worthy of glory regardless of whether it ends in victory or defeat, or even if, as is the case in Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, it is wasted due to some grotesque mistake.

This immortalisation in verse and song was justly due the warrior for risking or even laying down his life in duty and service to his country and it fell to the poet to pay this due on his country’s behalf. It also served a pedagogical purpose. To hold up examples of courage and other martial virtues for adulation is to also hold them up for emulation, particularly when the learning of these verses by heart played so important a role in the training of young minds.

In one of the earliest known discussions of educational theory, that which takes place between Socrates and his friends in Plato’s Republic, the pedagogical aspect of poetry is a major concern and it is famously proposed that lines from Homer that might teach the wrong lessons be bowdlerized. It is a repugnant proposal, of course, but the concern behind it is one the poet may very well have shared, as there are varying degrees to which heroes are worthy of adulation and emulation and even the best of them possessed less desirable or even undesirable traits and qualities in addition to the heroic virtues. With this in mind, consider how Homer presented his heroes.

The main hero of the Iliad is Achilles, king of the Myrmidons. The epic begins with the poet evoking the Muse and asking her to sing of the wrath of Achilles and is structured around that wrath as first, in anger against Agamemnon, Achilles withdraws himself and his men from the siege of Troy causing the tide of the war to swing against the Achaeans then later, in sorrowful anger over the death of Patroclus he returns to battle to slay Hector, crown prince of Troy. Yet the poem ends by honouring the latter in a funeral that is made possible by divine intervention. This intervention is necessary because Achilles in his wrath is determined to defile the body of Hector by dragging it behind his chariot and leaving it to be devoured by dogs, thus incurring the anger of the gods.

It is Hector, not Achilles, nor any of the other Greeks for that matter, who comes across as the noblest, the most worthy of emulation of Homer’s heroes. It is significant that while it takes Achilles, Greece’s bravest and strongest warrior, to slay Hector, Achilles’ own death, which takes place outside of the time-frame of the Iliad but is prophetically alluded to, is at the hands of Paris, Hector’s weak and cowardly brother.

Achilles is portrayed as the embodiment of the follies of youth. He is arrogant and impetuous, easily swayed by passions, and overly concerned with his own glory. Indeed, the latter seems to be his only real purpose for going to war for, while he hints, when he reminds Agamemnon in their dispute that he has no personal quarrel with the Trojans (1), at the mercenary motivation that had shocked and offended Plato, he and his mother make frequent reference to his having been presented with a choice by fate – he could stay at home and live a long but unsung life or he could go to Troy where he would die before its gates but win a name that would live in song forever. He chooses the latter and accordingly is remembered as the greatest of the Greek heroes, with the possible exception of Heracles, but in the discontent of the words of his shade in the eleventh book of the Odyssey, expressing a preference for the lowest station on earth over the highest in the underworld, the message comes across that there can be no satisfaction in glory sought for its own sake.

It is Hector, by contrast, who fights for worthy reasons. Hector, “tamer of horses”, fights not for his personal glory but out of a sense of duty to his father and mother, his wife and son, and to their city. He fights for family and home and is all the more noble in doing so because he is aware that it will ultimately be to no avail, that he will die, the house of Priam will fall, Ilium will be destroyed, and his wife taken away into captivity. To fight and die for these things is what the poets have honoured heroes for down through the centuries from Homer to Horace to Thomas Babbington Macauley.

This view of war and the warrior, of what is worth fighting and dying for, and of the standard by which the warrior is judged worthy of praise or shame, is worlds removed from an image that has pervaded the popular consciousness in recent decades. This image began as a way of looking at and explaining the Second World War but it has grown into a paradigm by which all new conflicts are to be parsed and which has even been superimposed upon previous wars including the First World War and the war the American states fought between themselves in the 1860s. The image is the “Good War” narrative which has supplanted both the poetic idea of the heroic warrior, winning praise and renown for his gallantry as he lays down his life for family, friends, home, and country and the traditional discussion about what constitutes justice in war.

It is in keeping with the older traditions to say that the Allies were justified in going to war with Nazi Germany. By the fall of 1939 Hitler had proven himself to be thirsting for war, a threat to his neighbours, and a pathological liar who could not be trusted to keep his word given in negotiations. He had given Britain and France more than enough of a casus belli to justify their declarations of war. For countries like my own, Canada, and Australia, it was loyalty which moved us to enter the war and stand by our king and mother country in their hour of need. What could be more in keeping with the older traditions than this?

The Good War narrative goes far beyond any of this. It declares the war itself to have been good because the character of the two sides was such that it was a microcosm of the great struggle between Good and Evil. The Allies were the Forces of Light, embodying all that is pure and good, and the Axis were the very Forces of Darkness. What need is there to find a just cause for such a war? It is its own just cause. Who dare speak of limitations on how war can be justly conducted when the enemy is the avatar of Evil?

This narrative embraces a cosmology that is considered heretical by the standards of traditional, orthodox, Christianity. Dualism, the idea that the cosmos is eternally engaged in a battle between the matched forces of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, is part of the mainstream of several Eastern philosophies and religions but within the Christian West was a doctrine of Gnosticism, historically the heretical rival of orthodox, Apostolic, Christianity. The growth of the Good War narrative is, therefore, yet another evidence, as if more was needed, that the period after the Second World War is a post-Christian as well as a post-modern age.

Both of the traditions which the Good War narrative has supplanted have been accused of being instruments in the hands of hawks and warmongers. Not infrequently those who make these accusations on the one hand embrace the Good War interpretation of World War II on the other. Yet today, whenever a politician wants to bomb or invade some country it is to the rhetoric of Winston Churchill of which he can provide a poor imitation at best rather than the arguments of Cicero, St. Augustine, or St. Thomas Aquinas that he turns to make his case. The leaders of the country he wishes to attack are inevitably new Hitlers and those who oppose his plans for war are inevitably compared to Neville Chamberlain. Not to be outdone, the radicals who pour contempt on the poetic ideal of the hero and heroism and traditional just war theory and who automatically condemn any and every military action taken by their own country – or any Western country, especially the United States – regardless of the particulars, make use of the Good War narrative as well, except that in their rhetoric it is the Western leaders who are Hitler.

However did this image of the Good War arise? It could hardly be said to have been born out of the facts of the Second World War. The most repugnant and repulsive characteristics of the Third Reich – its tyrannical dictatorship, secret police, network of prison camps, and repressive totalitarian state which held the lives of its people extremely cheap - were shared by the Soviet Union. The war began with an alliance between these two powers that included a secret deal to divide the spoils between themselves. After this alliance was broken by Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union the Stalinist regime joined the Allies and one of the most obvious results of the war was a significant expansion of that regime’s territory. At least as strong of a case can be made that Stalin and his Bolshevik regime were the greater of the two evils as can be made that Hitler and his Nazi regime were. More people died in this war than in any other and well over half of these were civilian deaths. Those who were the Forces of Light, according to the Good War theory, invented weapons whose destructive potential was exponentially greater than any the world had known before and brought the war to an end by dropping two of these weapons on heavily populated cities. Then, when the war was over, the Forces of Light put the leaders of the Forces of Darkness on trial before a court that operated in accordance with a concept of “justice” far closer to that of Stalin than that which is traditional to the English-speaking world. No, the facts of the Second World War do not support the Good War narrative at all.

It is surely no coincidence that this narrative arose in a period in which the old tradition of celebrating heroes and their deeds in verse and inspiring through such verse the cultivation of virtues such as courage, loyalty, and dutifulness to home, family, and country was all but dead. It had been alive and well in the Victorian era but seemed to sing its swan song in the first World War, which saw a plethora of soldier-poets, some of whom, writing in the old tradition, produced the poems that remain part of our annual ceremonies of remembrance to this day, while others concentrated on the horrors of the war and expressed cynicism towards the old tradition and the heroic virtues. War has always been horrible, of course, but poets from Homer to Housman had managed to lament the cruel reality of war with its waste of so many lives struck down prematurely while at the same time praising the patriotic valour of the warrior. This became more difficult as modern technology changed the nature of warfare. It is easy to see the gallantry of light cavalrymen charging with sword in hand against a battery of artillery at the end of a valley with enemy guns on all sides. Where can it be possibly found in the dropping of bombs that kill civilians by the thousands from aircraft miles above?

It is not just that poets have found it difficult to maintain the old tradition in the face of new, modern, technological, warfare. It is also that poetry itself has come to be supplanted, first by other forms of literature such as the novel, then later by media such as film and television that have supplanted the written word altogether. It is films and television, novels and comic books, which form and feed the modern mind. These are the genres that have reduced the complex hero to the simple good guy and it is in the minds fed by such junk food that the image of the Good War was born.


(1) Achilles was the only one of the Greek kings who could say this. Paris, prince of Troy, after enjoying the hospitality of Menelaus, king of Sparta, had absconded with his wife, Helen. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and Menelaus’ brother had organized the retaliatory expedition against Troy. In doing so, according to the myth, he had reminded all of the other kings that when, in their youth, they had been rivals for Helen’s hand, the contest had been resolved when they swore an oath to support and uphold whomever Helen had chosen, which was Menelaus. Achilles, being much younger than the others, had no part in either the contest or the oath.

Enoch Was Right

Forty-five years ago today, the Conservative Political Centre for the West Midlands met in a room in Midland Hotel, in Birmingham.  It was a small meeting, not the kind that would ordinarily attract much media attention.   The man addressing the meeting, however, was no ordinary man, and his speech was no ordinary speech.  It would be the talk of the nation for days, weeks, even years to come.  It would earn the speaker, an articulate, well-educated intellectual, of High Tory convictions, the love of the lower and middle classes, and the hatred of the progressively inclined, academic and media elites.  It was due to this speech that dock workers, union members, and other manual labourers would march in defense of the most outspoken advocate of free enterprise since World War II and prior to Margaret Thatcher.

The Man

The man speaking that day was John Enoch Powell, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton, South West, the constituency he had represented since 1950. (1)   He had twice been Minister of State for Health in the government of Harold Macmillan.  In 1968, however, the Labour Party was in power and Harold Wilson was Prime Minister.  The Conservatives, led by that wettest of the “wet Tories”, Edward Heath, were in Opposition, and Powell was Shadow Secretary for Defence   Until he gave the speech, that was.  April 20^th was a Saturday that year.  On Sunday April 21^st, a vivid Heath sacked Powell from the Shadow Cabinet, replacing him with Reginald Maudlin, the Deputy Leader of the Party.  Powell would never again hold a position within a Conservative Cabinet, government or Shadow.   The rift between him and the Conservative Party leadership, especially Heath, would never be repaired.   In 1975 Heath was replaced as Conservative leader by Margaret Thatcher, an admirer of Powell’s who had advised Heath against firing Powell and who expressed agreement with the controversial speech in her memoirs, (2) but by this time Powell, while remaining a Tory by conviction, had left the Party in disgust over the way Heath had betrayed his Party’s principles and platform in his premiership and had compromised British national sovereignty by bringing the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community.  

 

Powell had been born in Birmingham, the city of his famous – or infamous, depending upon your perspective – speech, in  June of 1912, three years after the marriage of his parents.  His father, Albert Enoch Powell, of Welsh descent, was an elementary school teacher and later principal.  His mother, Ellen Mary Powell, nee Breese, a policeman’s daughter who had been a teacher herself before her marriage, was a woman of immense scholarly aptitude, who had taught herself classical Greek, and who encouraged this same trait when it manifested itself early in her only child.  He won an early scholarship to King Edwards’, a grammar school in Birmingham, when he was only thirteen.  He initially entered as a science student, but transferred to the classical form after one term.  In the break between, under his mother’s tutelage, he learned two years worth of Greek in two weeks, catching up with his fellow students.  (3)  

After graduating with distinctions in Latin, Greek, and Ancient history, he entered Trinity College at Cambridge with several scholarships,  where he studied Latin under A. E. Housman, the classical scholar more famous as the poet author of A Shropshire Lad, and read the writings of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.   Nietzsche had become the professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland when he was only 24.  Powell acquired an ambition to beat his then-idol’s record.   He did not succeed in this, but he came close to matching it.  He became full professor of Greek at the University of Sydney in Australia in 1937 when he was 25.   The following year his Lexicon to Herodotus was published by Cambridge University Press which also published, early in 1939, his History of Herodotus.  His career as a classical scholar was already well-established but events of that same year, would lead to the resignation of his professorship in a romantic answering of the call of duty.   On September 3^rd, 1939, the United Kingdom declared war on Nazi Germany.  On the following day, Powell resigned his position and caught a flight back to England, determined like the character of Guy Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh’s novels, to offer his services to King and country.

Powell was more successful in this than the fictional Crouchback, joining the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as a private in October of 1939, being promoted to lance corporal while still in basic training, and then selected to be trained as an officer.  This training began in January 1940 and lasted four months, after which he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the General List, to be shortly thereafter transferred into the Intelligence Corps.  This pattern of promotion continued throughout the war until he attained the rank of brigadier.   Stationed in Cairo, Algiers, and Delhi, he developed an ambition to become Viceroy of India and a lifelong dislike of the Americans, whom he correctly believed were trying to bring down the British Empire as well as the Axis Powers.

When the war ended, Powell had the pathways of two careers in which he had already achieved success open before him.  He could have retained his commission and continued to climb the ranks of the military.   He could have gone to Durham University, where he had been elected Professor of Greek and Classical Literature to resume an illustrious career in classical scholarship.   Instead, he resigned both commission and professorship to go into politics, initially with the idea of achieving his goal of becoming Indian Viceroy.

Powell was, by instinct and conviction, a Conservative, or, to use the term he preferred himself, a Tory.  His excellent definition of a Tory was “a person who believes that authority is vested in institutions.” (4)   In defending the authority of institutions which he had instinctively revered from his earliest days, he grounded it in the concept of prescription, i.e., legitimacy derived from tradition and tested and established through long usage.   It was because the Conservative Party traditionally embodied these concepts and not because he was particularly impressed with the way the Party handled the reins of government when in office that he sought to become a Conservative candidate for office.   He was added to the candidates list and, while he lost his first bid for office in Normanton in 1947, he was given a job in the meantime in the Parliamentary Secretariat and later the Conservative Research Department where he met Pamela Wilson, at first his secretary, later his wife and the mother of his two daughters.  His next candidacy, was in Wolverhampton.  One Sunday evening, on his way home to his Wolverhampton apartment, he heard the bells of  St. Peter’s Collegiate Church.  Although Powell had lost his faith as a youth,  become an atheist, and then an admirer of the notoriously antiChristian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he responded to the summons and entered the church to hear Evensong.  He found himself drawn to participate in the worship, and after that regularly attended the church each Sunday.  He soon abandoned his atheism to become a devout if idiosyncratic High Anglican. (5)   In 1950 was sent to the House of Commons by the electorate of Wolverhampton South West to begin his new career as a statesman.

As mentioned previously, Powell served as a minister in Macmillan’s government.  What most distinguishes his Parliamentary career, however, is his erudite and articulate speeches.   Although he is remembered today chiefly in connection with one issue in particular, he was hardly a single-issue controversialist.     When the Macmillan Conservatives introduced the Life Peerages Act he spoke out against it.   The Conservative leaders behind the Act, regarded it as a means of preserving the House of Lords through modernization.  The Labour Party rejected the Act on the same grounds, because they wished for more radical modernization.  Powell, however, regarded it as the first step towards the democratization of the House of Lords.  This would be an unacceptable redundancy, Powell argued, in which the two Houses would both be representatives of the same electorate, creating a constitutional crisis over which of the two is rightly representative.   He championed traditional, hereditary, peerages, soundly arguing that it was prescription that legitimized the authority of the Lords, just as prescription was the basis of the authority of the Crown and even of the elected assembly.

At the time the leaders of the Conservative Party had agreed to support the Keynesian and socialist economic policies brought in by Clement Attlee and William Beveridge after the war. Powell, however, broke with the Post-War Consensus, to insist that Keynesianism generated inflation, to call for monetarist reforms to combat such inflation, and to preach the virtues of private enterprise and the free market.

At the end of the war Powell was still an imperialist.  After India achieved independence in 1947, however, he was convinced the Empire could no longer be maintained and adopted a nationalist approach to foreign policy similar to that of  the Taft Republicans in the United States.  In the Cold War he opposed both the Communism of the Soviet Union and the hubris of the Americans.  His British nationalism led him to oppose the UK’s entry into the EEC in the 1970s and to take up the cause of Unionism in Northern Ireland.   It was also intimately related to the position he took in his most famous speech.

The Speech

The subject of the talk, that would earn Powell the love of the masses, the ire of the fashionable, progressive, chattering classes , and his place in history was immigration and racial strife.   His enemies accused him of trying to incite racial strife by stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment.   The reality is quite different.  In fact, he as actually trying to prevent racial conflicts and violence by warning that such would be inevitable if large scale immigration continued.   The progressive-minded, without listening to or reading the text of his speech in its entirety, responded to the selected excerpts highlighted by the media and accused him of racial prejudice and of promoting discrimination against new immigrants and their descendants.   In reality, Powell declared in the speech what he consistently maintained throughout his political career, that British subjects and citizens were entitled to the same rights and protections under British law, regardless of whether they had arrived on British soil yesterday or whether they lived where their ancestors had lived since the days of Alfred the Great.   It was the Labour government of Harold Wilson, Powell insisted, that was trying to create special privileges for new immigrants at the expense of born and bred, white British people, through their proposed Race Relations Bill.  The second reading of this bill was scheduled for the Tuesday after the speech.

The speech itself was masterfully constructed.   He began by declaring that “the supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”  (6)  The statesman, however, encounters difficulties in performing this function, because preventable evils lie in the future and are not perceived as being as pressing as present evils, leading to the “besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.”   The statesman must rest this temptation, for if he does not he will “deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after”. 

Having thus prepared his listening audience for predictions that they might find unpalatable he launched into his subject by recounting a conversation which had taken place a week or two previously between himself and one of his constituents.  His interlocutor was “a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries” who had expressed dissatisfaction with the direction in which Great Britain was going and a desire to emigrate and to see his children and their families settled overseas.   The genesis of this seemingly rather unpatriotic despair, Powell quoted in the man’s own words, as the feeling that  “in this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

Later in the speech, he quoted at length from a letter he had received describing the plight of another of his constituents.  The lady who wrote to him, told him about an elderly woman, who had begun renting rooms in her house to make ends meet after losing her husband and sons in the war, but who was now the only white on her street, the other, including her tenants, having moved away as the neighborhood filled up with immigrants.  Without the rent income, and unable to get her rates reduced because of an unsympathetic government, she was now subjected to threats, abuse, vandalisim, and the taunts of “Racialist” from immigrant children who followed her whenever she went to the store.  

 

Nothing in Powell’s address seems to have infuriated his critics, whether from Labour or among the “wet” leadership of his own Party, more than these anecdotes.  Ostensibly, the reason for this is that the most inflammatory rhetoric, the kind most vulnerable to the charge of racism, in the whole speech is contained within them.   Yet the glaring fact that in neither case was the rhetoric Powell’s own but rather that which had quoted from ordinary people who had spoken or written to him does not seem to have mollified his enemies’ rage in the slightest.  If anything it increased it.   One can only speculate as to why this would be so.  The Labour Party has always tried to present itself as being the voice of the ordinary, common, working, Briton, and presumably did not appreciate this lesson in how out of touch their thinking actually was with that of the very people they claimed to represent.(7) Those Conservative leaders who were enraged by the speech appear to have made the same mistake in reverse.   Powell’s  views on immigration were, as he himself pointed out in the speech, the official position of the Conservative Party, and men like Edward Heath, Quintin Hogg, and Edward Boyle appear to have seen Powell’s statement of that position as an embarrassment.  They misjudged the tremendous amount of popular support that actually existed for their own party’s position and jumped on the rhetoric Powell had quoted as an excuse for not acting on that plank of their platform, claiming, quite unreasonably, that Powell’s speech had made the subject of immigration untouchable.

Whatever his opponents may have thought, by including these quotations in his speech, Powell demonstrated his willingness to take seriously the concerns of ordinary British people, in his own constituency and elsewhere, that through forces beyond their control, including the inertia or even malice of their own government, they were becoming strangers in their own country. This was a refreshing change from the attitude of the typical modern intellectual who believes that such fears should be treated as irrational, dismissed and ignored, or changed through an aggressive campaign of social engineering on the part of government, church, media, and institutions of education.

In fact, the bulk of Powell’s speech demonstrated that such fears are far from being irrational in the sense of being contrary to fact and reason.  Noting that in some areas mass immigration was producing a “total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history”, he cited the Registrar General’s calculations that within fifteen to twenty years, there would be three and a half million immigrants and their descendants in the UK.  From these figures, he extrapolated that by the year 2000 the number would be between five and seven million, and pointed out that these would not be distributed evenly throughout the country, but would rather be concentrated in certain areas.

He made it clear that the problem is not immigration qua immigration but is rather a matter of scale. “[N]umbers are of the essence” he stated for:

the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent.

He was also careful to distinguish between an immigrant, someone who entered the country with the purpose of settling there, and someone who entered the country to visit or to study, with the intention of going back home.   The problem, then, was not that alien people were entering the country, or even that alien people were entering the country to stay, but rather that the latter were coming in so fast and in so large numbers that it was transforming the country, or at least the parts of it where the immigrants were concentrating.   Later in the speech, after quoting from the letter about the widow who had lost her tenants and was experiencing harassment, he made another point that is logically connected to the idea that the scale of immigration was the problem.  This was with regards to the integration of immigrants.  Integration, he said, means that the immigrants “become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.”   Physical differences such as colour make integration “difficult though, over a period, not impossible”, and of the new coloured immigrants there were “many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.”  Nevertheless, it was, he said “a ludicrous misconception” to think that was true of the majority of them.  The large scale of immigration and the concentration of immigrants in particular areas, was, of course, a deterrent to integration, which Powell noted, although he brought it up in the context of discussing the Race Relations Bill, an even greater deterrent to integration.

Since the increase in the immigrant population would make it harder and harder to deal with this as time went on and it was happening at such a rapid rate that it was a matter of urgency that it be dealt with immediately.  The government could deal with it in a simple way, he declared, first by “stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow” and second by “promoting the maximum outflow”, noting that these suggestions are “part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.”    By “promoting the maximum outflow” he did not mean kicking people out of the country, but rather encouraging the re-emigration of those who wished to go, and providing them with “generous assistance” to do so.   He did not know how successful such a program would be because “no such policy has yet been attempted” but he noted that immigrants in his constituency had approached him, on occasion, asking for such assistance to return to their country of origins.

After discussing the possibilities of a re-emigration policy, he turned to “a third element of the Conservative Party’s policy” by way of introducing the subject of the Race Relations Bill.   That third element was that the law and the government ought to treat all citizens the same and not practice discrimination.   This, he said:

does not mean that the immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.

That, of course, was exactly what the Wilson government was setting out to do with its Race Relations Bill.   The supporters of this bill – among whom, Powell singled out the press and the ecclesiastical authorities for specific mention – were completely mistaken.  The bill was not a two-way street and was not intended to be.   It was being enacted to protect the new immigrants from discrimination on the part of the white British.  This kind of legislation was not only unnecessary, it completely mistook the situation and who needed protection from what.  The new immigrants were not in the same situation as American blacks.  The latter had been brought to their country as slaves before the country even existed, and who had gradually been emancipated, enfranchised, and given full citizenship rights.   The new immigrants, however, had entered the UK with full citizenship rights.  Their entrance was “admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought” and it was the existing populace that was feeling the adverse effects as:

For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.

Now the Race Relations Bill was set to make things even worse, being:

a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

Powell’s analysis of the problems inherent in mass immigration and anti-discrimination legislation and his proposed solutions were quite reasonable.  This is not what attracted the attention of the media and the British nation.  It was rather, in addition to the anecdotes referred to above, the apocalyptic tone in which he set his predictions of future evils.  The admission of immigrants at such a high scale was an act of national suicide:

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

The Race Relations Bill would give the immigrant communities a loaded weapon to use against their unarmed citizens.   Powell expressed his reaction to this in the most famous line in the entire speech, the one which caused it to be dubbed “Rivers of Blood”:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. (8)

The Parallel Voice

In that line, Powell compared his premonition of unnecessary racial strife due to mass immigration and the Race Relations Bill to the ominous prophecy of the Sybil in Virgil’s Aeneid.   From the perspective of hindsight, a more apt comparison might have been to Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy, or to Laocoon the Trojan priest.  Having been given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, but having spurned his erotic advances, Cassandra had been cursed by the jilted god, who made it that her warnings would not be believed.   She warned against accepting the wooden horse from the Greeks, as did Laocoon.  The warnings went unheeded.  Likewise, Powell’s warnings were disregarded by those with the authority to put his recommendations into action.

He was not the only one to fill the role of Cassandra with regards to immigration.  In 1973, a novel entitled Le Camp des Saints was published, written by French author Jean Raspail.  An English translation by Norman Shapiro was published a couple of years later.   The novel, set in a “near future”, told of an armada of one hundred ships, that had set out from Calcutta laden with thousands of the poorest of the poor and destined to arrive at the French Rivera on Eastern Sunday.   As the ships slowly make their way, the French debate what to do about it.   Leftist elites, in the government, the church, and the media, declare that the immigrants must be welcomed.  They declare the ships to be carrying “The Last Chance for Mankind” and utter banalities like “we are all from the Ganges now” but are basically given free reign to spread their views because the one right-wing publisher left in France, refuses to print anything about the matter except a map of the progress of the ships, and a countdown to the “moment of truth”, i.e., their arrival.  

Throughout the book various people who believe in France and French civilization, oppose the leftist consensus.  One of these is a man who had immigrated from India years previously but who had integrated into French society.   These gather in the home of one of their number, a retired professor whose house overlooks the beach where the ships have landed, and make a last stand for France and Western civilization, as it crumbles all around them, brought down by the burden of a liberal guilt that had rendered the West incapable of fighting to ensure its own survival against hordes armed with their own pitiable condition.

The Retrospect

How do Powell’s predictions appear in hindsight, forty-five years later?

If anything, he appears to have erred on the conservative side in the sense that the things he predicted have come true on a much larger scale.

The Race Relations Bill passed and, like similar anti-discrimination legislation in the United States and Canada, it has been used in exactly the way Powell predicted, as a weapon against white people.   It is more than just the anti-discrimination legislation, however.  A complete double-minded attitude towards race, racial prejudice, and even racial hatred has developed in the UK, North America, and other Western societies.  What is forbidden of white people is tolerated and in some cases even praised when directed against white people.

Powell’s described the United Kingdom’s admission of immigrants on a large scale as the act of a nation “engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”, i.e., committing national suicide.   Immigration rates have continued to be high and an additional factor has joined high immigration to contribute to the national suicide of Great Britain, i.e., a decline in British fertility rates.   Declining fertility and high immigration are a deadly combination.   For a nation, which is a living, collective, entity, to survive, its present generation must continue to be primarily descended from its past generations.   People from other nations can enter a nation and become integrated into the nation without threatening the nation’s survival, but if the nation takes to bringing in immigrants on a large scale to offset its own failure to reproduce, it will die.  

To maintain that mass immigration and multiculturalism have been good for the United Kingdom or any of the other countries that have adopted them is to bury one’s head in the sand and ignore reality.   The traditions and institutions of these countries have been undermined and in some cases changed beyond all recognition.  There has been a loss of a sense of continuity, and with that, of a sense of community.   With this erosion of social capital and increase in alienation have come the unnecessary ethnic strife that Powell strove to prevent.

 

It is not fashionable to say it, but it is nonetheless true, that Enoch was right!

(1) My main source for the biographical details about Enoch Powell contained in this essay is Simon Heffer’s Like The Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Phoenix Giant, 1998, 1999). This is a comprehensive biography, which, while not an “official” biography, was written with the cooperation of its subject, who made his archives available to its author, with the stipulation that his most private papers would be accessed only after his death. I have also consulted Patrick Cosgroves’s The Lives of Enoch Powell (London: The Bodley Head, 1989).

(2) Margaret Thatcher, The Path To Power (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995) p. 146.

(3) By the end of his life, he could fluently speak English, French, German, Greek (modern and classical), Italian, Latin and Urdu, read Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Welsh, and was learning Hebrew.

(4) This is in response to the question “Can you tell me what it is to be a Tory?” in the interview he granted to Naim Attallah in 1992. http://quartetbooks.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/no-longer-with-us-enoch-powell/ Variations of this same basic definition can be found throughout his various speeches and interviews

(5) The idiosyncrasy is most noticeable in his Biblical scholarship, which he took up as his primary pastime after his career as a statesman.

(6) The text of the Birmingham speech is available to read on The Telegraph’s website: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html

(7) To give the devil his due, while the Labour Party as a whole was vehement in its denunciation of Powell and his speech, there were exceptions. Michael Foot, later to become leader of the Labour Party, whose friendship with Powell crossed the vast divide between their different views and parties and survived the speech, said that Powell had been tragically misunderstood. Another Labour MP, Christopher Mayhew, cancelled a speech he had been invited to give at Birmingham University after the school reneged on an invitation to Powell. Mayhew told the school bluntly “People who believe in free speech and practice it should stick together whatever their other differences. If Birmingham University won’t have Enoch Powell they can’t have me.” (quoted in Heffer, op. cit., p. 472, italics added)

(8) According to Simon Heffer, in the actual address Powell quoted the line “Et Thybrim multo spumentem sanguine” from Virgil’s Aeneid, in its original Latin first, and then translated it, but provided only the translation in the press release. Heffer, p. 454.