THE ROAD TO SALVATION (4); BERTRAND RUSSELL and JORDAN PETERSON

My previous 3 pieces described two Christian orators and the proponents of the Marxist ideology. Both these life-views (or superstitions, if you prefer) are in decline and I turn my attention to two thinkers who have been influential and who try to come to terms with the modern world.

Jordan Peterson

Bertrand Russell

                                                                          

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) had a brilliant mind and had a highly privileged background. He was the second son of the heir to the Russell earldom but both his radical atheist father and his mother died when he was very young. He was brought up by his grand-parents, the famed Lord John Russell, twice a Whig Prime Minister (who soon died) and his formidable grandmother who was a puritan Scots Presbyterian. His godfather was the eminent utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill.

Bertrand was educated privately and his great interests were religion and geometry – a gift of Euclid from his elder brother was life-changing. By the age of 18 Bertrand had convinced himself there was no God and he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge to read mathematics and philosophy. He joined the Apostles and met the fine minds of his generation including G E Moore, Alfred North Whitehead and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He married his first (of 4) wives, the American Alys Pearsall Smith in 1895 and made much academic progress publishing his seminal Principia Mathematica written jointly with Whitehead in 1910-12, laying down in 3 volumes the principles of logic. He became a founder of the school of analytical philosophy which displaced idealism and dominated UK universities for 50 years.

Russell in 1907

Yet Bertrand soon got into trouble. He was agnostic at a time when Cambridge academics were expected to respect the church; he conducted several known affairs after he decided, while cycling in Cambridge. that he no longer loved Alys; worse, he embraced pacifism just as the Great War erupted in an orgy of patriotism. He lost his position at Trinity when he was convicted of an offence under the Defence of the Realm Act by publishing articles criticizing the War and later served 6 months in Brixton prison for a similar DORA offence. He was reconciled with Trinity after the war but he curtailed his academic career and became a writer on popular ethical and political matters.

He visited the USSR and met Lenin who did not impress him. He did not join the hordes of credulous fellow-travelling intellectuals but wrote in 1920 his highly critical The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism instead. His 1927 essay Why I am not a Christian was shocking but influential and a wide audience appreciated his Marriage and Morals of 1929. He wrote on education, founding progressive Beacon Hill School in 1927 and was in the forefront of “liberal opinion”. On the death of his brother Frank he became the 3^rd Earl Russell in 1931. His pacifism made him slow to condemn Hitler until even he saw the merits of self-defence, though during WW2 he was expelled from teaching at a New York college as being “morally unfit”.

Russell wrote persuasively and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. He was a familiar presence on radio and TV discussion programmes and was a respected public intellectual. Much of this respect was dissipated by his espousal of the cause of nuclear disarmament, quite consistent with his pacifism. His CND and the later Committee of 100 were penetrated by hard Left groups, who ignored rational discussion and were animated by visceral anti-Americanism. Russell’s participation in his 90’s in endless sit-ins and demos was a sad finale for a principled man.

Russell seeks to Ban the Bomb

      

The merits of Jordan Peterson (1962 -) are still to be fully assessed. The son of a teacher and librarian in Fairview, Alberta, Canada, he is a typical prairie radical of conservative leanings. Educated locally in the frozen North, he studied psychology and politics at Alberta University before moving to psychology at McGill becoming a doctoral fellow. From 1995-99 he was a lecturer at Harvard and returned to Canada as a full professor at Toronto where his lectures in psychology are highly popular. He is also a practicing clinical psychologist seeing about 20 patients a week.

An unbearded Jordan Peterson

In 2018 he published 12 Rules of Life: An Antidote to Chaos which has sold over 3 million copies. It is a handbook for modern living and strikes a chord with a wide range of readers. In Peterson’s view our lives are a struggle with evil and with small daily increments of virtuous behaviour we can overcome the suffering we inevitably confront. He gives sound advice on parenting, marriage and human relationships generally, hopefully leading to happiness and inner contentment. His vision is sometimes rather joyless and puritanical in my view but, to be fair, it is still clearly “work in progress”.

There is a dense philosophic foundation to his writing eclectically drawing inspiration from the ethics of the New Testament, from Judaism and from Taoism. He often quotes Jung among psychologists and draws on writers like Dostoyevsky, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn and Ayn Rand.

Peterson thrives as a controversialist and is well known amid the University campuses of the English-speaking world, not to mention in TV interviews, conferences and podcasts. With polite restraint he has attacked the hypocrisies and catch-words of our age – militant feminism, gender fluidity, supposedly unjust pay gaps, the demeaning of masculinity, climate change et al. His opponents are usually a noisy mob of post-modernist (which Jordan equates with Marxists) students or academics and the puffed-up bien-pensants we have seen in the UK in droves during the Brexit debate. Peterson usually skewers them comprehensively with his incisive debating skill.

Our democracies need vigorous and informed debate. A figure like Jordan Peterson brings much encouragement to the Centre and the Right, long out-gunned by an intellectually flabby but well-established Leftist “consensus” embodied in our civil service, teaching and acting professions and political classes.

Thankfully, at last their time is up throughout the West. Nemesis is at hand.



SMD
31.08.19
Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2019

NARRATIVE PAINTING

Painting is both a public and a private art, depicting great events and telling a story or reflecting the artist’s eye on a subject, sometimes realistically and sometimes imaginatively. This piece will focus on the former – story telling – and is a mixture of great art and more pedestrian but still striking efforts, earnestly trying to win over the viewer.

Paintings handling a number of people give particular pleasure and a supreme master like Raphael sets the scene with this evocation of the ancient world featuring Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and a host of other philosophers and mathematicians:

The School of Athens by Raphael - Fresco in the Vatican Palace (1511)

In the same room as the often-over-rated Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre, is The Wedding at Cana by Paulo Veronese (1563) rewarding close study – its detail is a joy.

Rather later (1601) we can admire Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus, with his characteristic use of light. The dramatic re-appearance of Christ is brilliantly rendered, telling its story powerfully.

The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese

The Supper at Emmaus by Caravaggio

 

Moving forward rapidly, the many conflicts of the 18^th century gave opportunities to military paintings. In days before flash cameras and TV coverage, artistic images provided the essential information to the public. They were often propagandist and inaccurate, but they told their stories memorably. Two Anglo-Americans, Benjamin West and John Copley, were masters of this genre.

The Death of General Wolfe at Quebec in 1759 by Benjamin West

The Siege and Relief of Gibraltar (1782) by John S. Copley

Entering the sinister period of the French Revolution, we have J-L David, in sympathy with the murder-stained Jacobins, painting the death of Marat as if he were some martyr to a great cause. In fact, he was a terrorist, bravely assassinated by Charlotte Corday.

Death of Marat by J-L David

Scotland Forever! by Lady Butler (1870), The Charge of the Royal Scots Greys at Waterloo in 1815

Revolution gave way to Napoleon and his glittering victories, until he too met his match on the field of Waterloo. How inspiring to British patriotic spirits this painting must have been!

French revolutionary fervour still bubbled away. In 1830, the last of the Bourbons, Charles X, was deposed amid fighting in the streets of Paris – an iconic scene immortalised by the radical imagination of Delacroix.

Liberty leading the People by Eugene Delacroix (1830)

In the UK, the Victorian age changed so many aspects of society, the economy, the move to industry from agriculture, religious fragmentation and vastly improved communications. Emigration to America or Australia became widespread, yet painful, encapsulated in Pre-Raphaelite Ford Madox Brown’s image The Last of England telling its sad little story.

The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown (1855)

The centre of mass production moved to the US and in 1932 the Ford Motor Company in Detroit commissioned the Mexican painter Diego Rivera to paint murals depicting the manufacturing process. It was intended to be a tribute to working people but it came to be seen as yet another example illustrating the inhumanity meted out to labour by the industrialist – not unlike the conveyor-belt in Chaplin’s 1936 movie Modern Times.

Murals for the Ford Motor Company, Detroit, by Diego Rivera

The 20^th century was marked by two World Wars, the Holocaust, the horrors of Marxist persecution and countless other conflicts. The iconic painting by Picasso, Guernica, commemorated an episode in the Spanish civil war but it could easily stretch to represent all mankind’s suffering in war.

Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1937)

SMD

25.08.19

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2019

EATING AWAY

Der Mensch ist, was er ißt – “Man is what he eats” - pronounced the sage German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, observing no doubt that an excess of Bratwurst and beer did his compatriots no favours when it came to bodily beauty, healthy exercise or coherent speech. I believe there is a wider context, that of the nation itself, which is defined by what it eats. In looking for the reason why people and nations behave as they do, I reckon we can discard the usual suspects – forget about Cherchez la Femme – and focus our attention instead on Cherchez la Légume!

An excess of Bratwurst and Beer?

   

Let us look at Scotland. A generally beautiful area on the wrong (i.e. North) side of Hadrian’s Wall, Scotland struggled to prosper compared to larger, well-populated England. Working the unyielding land was the fate of many and a strong rural strain is apparent in many Scots, most of whom are 3 generations from the kailyard. They like humble fare, even though surrounded by incomparable beef, fish and sea-food – scotch broth, lamb, haggis, oatcakes, barley, leeks etc., - winter warmers all!

Nourishing Scotch Broth

 

It is not altogether surprising that many frozen Scots have a pinched look, impervious to the world’s daily beauties but responsive to raucous merrymaking as a kind of Promethean safety-valve. We see this enigmatic aspect in performers like Billy Connolly, who takes native hardships to hilarious extremes, or in the pronouncements of humourless Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish first minister, who is oh-so deadly serious. She well represents the heavy oats-and-tatties (and, alas, deep-fried Mars bars) world-view of her Lumpen-SNP-constituents, overpowering the charming and competent professional class and the thrusting middle classes and peddling her peculiar brand of visceral Anglophobia at every opportunity.

Moving South to balmy England, we are in a diverse nation, within living memory one of the most powerful in the world. It has a rich and often triumphant history, a confident Establishment and an outward-looking attitude to the world. Its stereotype is the well-upholstered figure of John Bull, acute and genial, and its staple diet, toothsome roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

John Bull

His favourite Roast Beef and Yorkshire Puddiong

  

The English are by no means saints and the industrial revolution took a heavy toll. There is much unspoken resentment of the gap between the haves and the have-nots; yet the tenor of the people is broadly tolerant, compromising and civilized. The favourite dishes of the English constitute a wide range, fish and chips, steak and kidney pie, Eccles cakes, pickled eggs and Eton mess (presumably loved by Boris!) – cholesterol-clogging butter and sugar much in evidence.

To digress, I believe there to be a mathematical correlation between the decline of the British Empire and the decline of Soup Drinking. The great soups of Scotland – Scotch Broth, Cock-a-leekie and my favourite Cullen Skink (based on smoked haddock) – and those of England – Oxtail, Ham and Pea and Mulligatawny once comforted millions of Brits but had to be made slowly, with tender loving care. I blame the suffragette / feminists who wanted to protect 1920s flappers from kitchen boredom and foolishly undermined a foundation liquid of the Empire, and fobbed us off with processed tinned rubbish and, oh horrors, with soup in hydrated packets!

The French are more enigmatic and difficult to analyse. Very distinct regional variations exist and the difference between the expansive, gourmandising denizen of the Midi and the thin-lipped, logical citizen of the Nord is very marked. De Gaulle, Macron and Barnier fall into the latter category, hostile to their neighbours, self-regarding and preening like peacocks in many estimations. To be sure, their food is superb but it is often eaten in grim solemnity – blanquette de veau, boeuf bourguignon, escargots, lobster thermidor, camembert cheese and the finest wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy, topped off by a frivolous soufflé. I always suspect a thin Frenchman (even Bonaparte had a cosy pot-belly) and would dine with Macron with a very long spoon indeed.

Blanquette de Veau a l'ancienne

                                       

Other nations are easier to categorise. The Germans consume huge quantities of tasty pork, enjoy sauerkraut and excellent beer but their cuisine is rather heavy and perhaps lacking in inspiration. Don’t we see the same qualities in their politicians? “Mutti” Merkel is a reassuring figure to Germans, homely and unfashionable, but surely she too is rather stolid and bland.

The Belgians delight us with their delicate cuisine, combining the quantity of Germany with the quality of France, wolfing down waffles, endives and mussels with chips. They also produce matchless chocolates but, alas, they host and embrace the European Union with a fervour that would mystify Hercule Poirot and which seems to many Brits as a tragically wrong choice.

Moules-Frites from Belgium

               

As ever in Europe, the US casts a long shadow. Endowed with every natural nutritional blessing, America has instead created the bulk of the fast foods we greedily consume – hot dogs, burgers, chlorinated chicken – dishes which do not detain the fastidious. They produce delicious beef, slow-cooked brisket and clam chowder to savour. Predictably Donald Trump is a fan of fast food, enjoying McDonalds, KFC, pizza and (OMG!) Mexican tacos while drinking Diet Coke through a straw – he is teetotal. Obesity is doing real damage to the US (and the UK too). Eating too much, going OTT, everything in excess, is a perilous national propensity.

America in Denial

The Western nations are a disparate group and it is not surprising they do not easily agree. Their food preferences tell us much about their characteristics. Add in some rogue element like paprika, Mexican jumping beans or English mustard and international exchanges will become even more spicy. Maybe we should revert to bland infants’ fare in the cause of peace!

SMD

21.08.19

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2019

THE ROAD TO SALVATION (3): THE MARXIST CATASTROPHE

Visiting the agreeably historic German city of Trier on the Moselle, one muses about the Romans who named this place the capital of Gaul, as one quaffs the delicious local wine. Much less agreeable is the thought that this is the birth-place of Karl Marx, a gadfly pain in the neck in the 19^th century while alive, and the posthumous inspiration of untold misery and human suffering in the 20^th.

Marx's Birthplace in Trier

Karl Marx in 1875

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) was born into a once-observant Jewish family, while his father was a reasonably prosperous lawyer, who baptised his children in the Prussian Lutheran church and generously supported Karl. His son was academic, eventually reading law at Berlin University from 1836. Karl was attracted to philosophy and joined the Young Hegelians, a club propagating liberal ideas. The Prussian authorities were reactionary and imbued with the spirit of Metternich, viewing him with suspicion. Marx presented his doctoral thesis to the University of Jena, a more enlightened body than Berlin University and it was accepted. He became engaged in 1842 to an aristocratic lady, Jenny von Westphalen, whom he married 5 years later, and edited a socialist newspaper in Cologne, much harassed by the censors and by the police. He fled to Paris where he met his lifelong friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels in 1844 but soon had to move again to liberal Brussels.

Marx became an advocate of violent revolution and with Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, a year of revolutionary turmoil throughout Europe. Marx and Engels argued that history is a record of class struggle between the private property-owning bourgeoisie who exploit the impoverished masses (the proletariat) mercilessly and that it is necessary to destroy the power of the bourgeoisie by confiscation to usher in a just society. Whatever its intrinsic merits, the Manifesto made stirring reading;

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Working Men of All Countries, Unite!

In 1848 Marx supported insurrectionary movements in France, Germany, Poland, Hungary and even Belgium but none was successful. Soon he retreated to more tranquil Britain, where Chartism was noisy but basically law-abiding, and received support from Engels, whose father had owned a substantial cotton thread business in Salford, by Manchester.

Friedrich Engels

Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin

Marx, London-based for the rest of his life, turned his attention to economics and was famously to be found in the Reading Room of the British Museum researching his seminal Das Kapital, the first of 3 volumes being published in 1867. The final two volumes were published posthumously, finished and edited from Marx’s notes, by Engels.

Marx analysed the rise and stages of capitalism, developed his notions of class struggle and broadened the theology of his creed with studies of the labour theory of value, exploitation and dialectical materialism. His work gave insights into social and industrial changes although later commentators, like Keynes, doubted if there was much relevance to later generations. Marx believed only well- established industrial working classes like those in England and Germany could precipitate a revolution and believed peasant Russia was too backward to play a part.

Marx remained a dedicated agitator. The First International of socialist working-class parties soon fragmented into rival factions but by 1872 there was a total split and the Marxists and the Anarchists went their separate ways. The Anarchists under the Russian Bakunin wanted an extra-parliamentary struggle which the Marxists thought premature. Bakunin was more disposed to immediate violence and castigated Marxists as authoritarian and no better than the existing bourgeoisie.

For the last 10 years of his life, Marx suffered ill-health, thought at the time to be caused by liver problems. He erupted in boils and carbuncles and a recent retro-diagnosis suggests he was afflicted by the skin disease hidradenitis suppurativa aggravated by poor diet and an unhealthy lifestyle including excessive alcohol and tobacco. He died in 1883 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery in North London. Engels lived on until 1895, dying of throat cancer, with his ashes being scattered from Beachy Head, Eastbourne.

This motley crew of hairy-faced agitators might have disappeared into the mists of history were it not for the convulsions of the Great War and the collapse of Tsarist Russia in 1917. The tiny Russian Communist Party, split between Menshevik and Bolshevik, battened on to the dire sufferings of the peasant masses. Led by a fanatical but effective agitator, Vladimir Lenin, the Bolsheviks seized power and withdrew their war-weary nation from the war. Accepting as gospel the analysis of Marx, Lenin dispossessed the middle classes and started a ruthless purge of the richer peasants, the kulaks, encouraging their local murder and persecution. Around 1 million died in the 1920s.

Lenin died in 1924 but much worse was to come. His colleague and arch-revolutionary Leon Trotsky had led the Bolsheviks to triumph in the bloody civil war, taking revenge on dissidents of any kind. Trotsky sought to spread the incubus of communism everywhere and welcomed the creation of the Comintern for this purpose. He was edged out of power by the sinister figure of Joseph Stalin, a devious Georgian, suspicious, pitiless and psychotic. Trotsky himself was to be assassinated by Stalin’s agent in Mexico in 1940.

Vladimir Lenin

Leon Trotsky

 

One of the many baleful aspects of Marxism is that, in talking of class warfare, the individual and his rights are ignored. It is simpler to drum up hatred against, say,” the intelligentsia” or “the rich” than against Mr. Petrov, the grocer, with a wife, 3 kids and an old mother to support. Dehumanisation was a technique employed by Marxist and Nazi alike; a slaughter of innocents was the result.

Lavrenti Beria and Josef Stalin, creators of Terror

Lenin had first sponsored Terror but Stalin was the master-terrorist, aided and abetted by his top secret policeman, twisted Lavrenti Beria. The peasants were cowed by forced collectivization, resulting in horrendous famine, notably in the fertile Ukraine. The whole exercise was an ideological Marxist absurdity, persisted in even when failure was obvious. Political dissidents were mercilessly purged with top Bolsheviks like Carl Radek and Bukharin queueing up to confess and be liquidated in the 1930’s show trials. Lesser figures were furiously denounced, insulted and executed in hordes by state prosecutor Vyshinsky. The Marxist logic of confession was chillingly explained in Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon. Despite plenty of evidence of Terror, the Soviet Union was able to seduce large numbers of “useful idiots” to turn a blind eye to its hideous reality and to persist in expressing utopian ecstasy at its New World. Bernard Shaw, Sydney and Beatrice Webb headed this shameful rota from the UK but Ernest Hemingway from the USA and Jean-Paul Sartre from France were similarly gulled, a huge propaganda coup for Marxism.

I will not weary you with a full account of the Marxist rise, decline and fall. The success of Soviet armies in 1945 allowed communists cruelly to dominate Eastern Europe for a generation. China ominously fell to Mao-Tse-Tung in 1949. Stalin died in 1953 and Beria was summarily shot. Russian regimes led by Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachov became progressively less oppressive but their economic performance was feeble compared with the West. The market pricing method was anathema to Marxists, property remained “theft” and unaccountable bureaucrats tried to run a command economy – an impossibly complex procedure. The production of food and consumer goods were neglected to the anger of communist populations. Finally, the Soviet Union and her satellites collapsed in 1991 long after brave writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky and Daniel had exposed to their own people the crimes and horrors of the Marxist state.

Between 60 and 100m people are estimated to have died under the oppression of the Marxist system between 1917 and 1991, a global catastrophe and a bitter waste of human talent. Their apologists like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders are thankfully now on the precarious margins of political relevance where once their predecessors were contenders. As a Road to Salvation Marxism was a dead-end. We can say we have made our escape, but in truth it was “a damn close-run thing”.

SMD

16.08.19

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2019

ANIMAL PAINTING

I am not sure if it is a dog, a horse or even a cat that is supposed to be “a man’s best friend” but the special relationship between man and animal has long been celebrated. The caves of Lascaux depict admired buffalo, the Egyptians worshipped animal-faced gods, the Greek comic genius Aristophanes fantasised about rule by “The Birds” and the Roman Emperor Caligula made his horse consul. The pedants of the 17^th century ranked the painting of animate creatures only below the depiction of humans and above landscapes and still life; I will not join that debate but simply enjoy some of the images great artists of the past have bequeathed to us.

Exotic animals excited great public interest in Europe in the era of discovery and exploration. A famous image is Dürer’s Rhinoceros, which he created without actually seeing the formidable creature:

Woodcut of a "Rhinocerus" by Albrecht Durer (1515)

              

We must fast-forward to the 18^th century, a time of ease for the leisured classes, when pets could be indulged and animal sentiment expressed without embarrassment. Contact with animals was easily made in the farm-yards, parks and forests of great estates. The Dutch d’Hondecoeter family of painters specialized in familiar birds. Their works are well represented in British collections, including this one from Dyrham Park, near Bristol, displaying true virtuosity..

Cock and Turkey fighting, by Melchior d'Hondecoeter

           

Much more popular were domesticated animals and the French depicted young girls with their favourite cats as with this effort from Perrenneau (Kitty looks decidedly bad-tempered to me!):

Miss Bowles and her Dog by Joshua Reynolds

A Girl with a kitten by J-B Perrenneau (1745)

Pace cat-lovers but I rather prefer Reynolds, sentimental admittedly, but I am a big softie.

One of the great English masters was George Stubbs who flourished in the 18^th century. His horse-paintings are unmatched:

John Banham Day's dark bay horse by George Stubbs

By the end of that century Britain was at war with Napoleon’s France and there was some rivalry regarding the merits of Napoleon’s steed Marengo and Wellington’s sturdy Copenhagen. Both were splendid.

Wellington by Sir Thomas Lawrence

Napoleon crosses the Alps by J-L David

The 19^th century brought further riches. Franco-American J J Audubon published his seminal The Birds of America over 12 years from 1825. The wonderful bird paintings, displaying his mastery of ornithology, are a marvel even today.

Carolina Parrots by J J Audubon

In Britain the most eminent animal painter was Sir Edwin Landseer and his works were enormously popular. When Queen Victoria and Albert moved their summer residence to Balmoral on Deeside, high society followed them to newly fashionable Scotland. Landseer’s famous stag painting was copied everywhere:

The Monarch of the Glen by Sir Edwin Landseer

Landseer was many-sided, being a sculptor too, but he was also happy to feed the sentiments of his public with heroic images of rescuing dogs:

Saved! by Sir Edwin Landseer

In the 20^th century, paintings became almost unrecognizable but a few conservative artists carried on in their traditional fashion. One such was Sir Alfred Munnings, a friend of Winston Churchill, and his horse paintings are as good as any.

The Bramham Moor Foxhounds by Sir Alfred Munnings

SMD 

3.08.19 

 Text copyright Sidney Donald 2019