Corrosive Inequality

Given that it still seems as though we have a long way to go on this issue is seems worthwhile republishing this post from five years ago as well as another related one tomorrow.

‘The Gift of Integrity,’ in Freeman’s book Gifted Lives, looks at a sad and disappointing life trajectory.

Alison was someone transplanted from an ordinary background to the class conscious intellectually top-heavy culture of Oxford (page 146-147):

Those from state schools who made it to the dreaming spires of Oxford were often deeply shocked to find their faces – and accents – did not fit. Both Oxford and Cambridge Universities still take about half their undergraduates from the tiny seven per cent of private schools, and only about 10 per cent of undergraduates there could be called working class, so the social dominance is of the privately educated. . . .

These powerful social effects were to devastate the life of Alison Cranfield. She was an outstandingly brilliant girl whose school, without much consideration as to whether it was the right place for her, had pushed her to Oxbridge for the pride of her school. This meant a big leap across the social-cultural divide and it proved too wide for her. She had slipped, fallen badly and suffered deep long-term emotional damage. Even to think of it, many years after the debacle, brought tears to her eyes.

William Golding‘s life story gives further insight into the impact of this kind of chasm between classes. In his daughter’s memoire, The Children of Lovers, she checks for herself what her father’s record at Oxford contained about him (page 69-70):

The University Appointments Committee – an early form of careers service – had carefully noted on their index card their considered  judgement of my father as ‘not quite a gent.’ The jaunty, Wodehousean tone doesn’t mean it’s a joke, and it’s certainly not a compliment. The judgement was precise and professionally significant.

She found similar statements elsewhere (page 70):

On a letter card, from his DipEd studies in 1937-8, they describe him as ‘a decent, sincere man,’ and they mention his book of poems published by MacMillan in 1934 –  a considerable feat for a grammar-school boy of twenty-three. But in the coded initials of his entry (interpreted for me once more by the scrupulous university archivist), he was N.T.S. Not Top Shelf.

Her conclusions were (ibid.):

Oxford in the 1930s was still a place of outrageous privilege, of rigid and effective class divisions, which both subtly and unsubtly apportioned opportunity by rank, and permanently shaped people’s careers and lives, so reinforcing privilege for the next generation.

She sheds further light on how exactly this process works in practice (page 70-71) and can pass down the generations:

One might say that the University Appointments Board had to safeguard the currency of its recommendations, given the expectations of future employers. After all, otherwise someone like my father, on the basis of his many good qualities, might have ended up quite unsuitably in charge of some top-shelf children. But the board makes sure this will not happen. It carefully notes that he is ‘fit only for day schools.’ So he sent his daughter to a place he hoped would fix that.

It’s perhaps worth noting that the visitor in RAF uniform who ended up outside my bedsit looking for an English Teacher, as described in an earlier post, was there as a result of the workings of the ‘old boys’ network. He had got his degree at Clare College many years earlier and had used his contacts to discover there was a more recent graduate in his area who might need a job. It was only a day school after all, but even so, after the kinds of interactions we had which I described earlier, he may have come to regret his decision and seen me as coming from too far below the top shelf altogether. And, to be truthful, I had never felt at home in the world of venison and bump suppers into which, willing but naive, I had agreed to be thrown on the back of my A level results and at the behest of my Headmaster. A more telling disadvantage though was probably my difficulty in adapting, after grammar school spoon-feeding, to the need for a more self-directed style of study.

All this highlights the full significance of the point that Michele Obama was trying to make in hosting the gathering of school girls from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson at an Oxford college.

Michelle Obama takes school pupils to Oxford University to encourage them to aim high. But only just over 1 per cent of Oxford’s undergraduates are of black British origin, Channel 4 News learns.

The First Lady first visited the all-girl Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (EGA) School in north London in 2009 (pictured), and has kept in touch with the school since.

Now, as part of her trip to the UK with the President, she visited Oxford University with around 35 of the school’s pupils. In 2009, Mrs Obama encouraged the pupils to “be the best that you can be”, and the trip to the university is expected to encourage the students – the majority of whom are from ethnic minority backgrounds – to think about studying for a degree.

The trip was designed as a day-long “immersion experience” at Oxford, including campus tours and mentoring sessions. The First Lady, who has a modest family background but attended Princeton and Harvard, also answered questions from the students, after telling them she was “thrilled to be back”.

She said: “I remember back at a young age trying to decide what schools to apply to and how well-meaning but misguided people questioned whether someone with my background could succeed at an elite university. When I was accepted I had all kinds of worries and doubts, I wouldn’t be as well prepared as students from privileged families and I wouldn’t fit in.

“But after a few months away from home I realised I was just as capable and I had just as much to offer [as] any of my classmates. We passionately believe that you have the talent within you, you have the drive, the experience to succeed at Oxford and universities just like it across the country and the world.”

This kind of self-belief is hugely important. However, Gifted Lives clearly indicates, and not just from one person’s experience, that even talent cannot protect you completely from the toxic effects of inequality. This has echoes of the description of the depressing effects of inequality explored across a number of dimensions in The Spirit Level. The Baha’i Faith has much to say on this issue (see link for the summary article by Bryan Graham from which the following quotations are taken).

. . . .  there are many examples of exploitation in the world; whether it is a senior executive exploiting corporate shareholders or a local landowner exploiting peasants. To refer to the passage quoted above: “When we see poverty allowed to reach a condition of starvation it is a sure sign that somewhere we shall find tyranny.”

He expands on this a little later in his summary:

Dahl interprets the modifying principle of poverty as tyranny as implying that “every human being has the right to a reasonable level of personal welfare,” a belief echoed by Sabetan and Fish in their call for the meeting of basic needs. Mohtadi emphasizes that the Bahá’í teachings on volunteer giving, progressive taxation, huqúqu’lláh, and zakát would all operate in such a way as to eliminate extremes of wealth in society. Huddleston highlights similar teachings and identifies the elimination of extreme differences in per capita wealth as one “of the main economic functions of the world government.” The Bahá’í system, therefore, combines voluntary and mandatory means for the elimination of the extremes of wealth, operating within a framework where wages are conceived as just rewards. The Bahá’í world would be more equal but not absolutely equal.

This suggests that, even though such initiatives as Michele Obama’s are praiseworthy and valuable, they are by no means a complete answer. She would be the first to agree with that, I’m sure. What is required is for all of us to put our best energies into reshaping of society. Each of us has to find a path of action by which to do that in a concerted way with other people. We can’t do it alone. This blog is attempting to look at as many possibilities of this kind as will fit into its compass. We each must decide what we are going to do. Not an easy task!

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How Close Are We to the Edge? (1/2): Is capitalism the answer?

Goya’s ‘The Cudgel Fight’ (for source of image see link)

I was recently set thinking about some key issues of concern to me. I am still in the process of refining my thoughts as subsequent posts will hopefully testify but I felt that drafting an interim report, even though still slightly confused, would help move my thinking forwards.

Are we locked in a fight to the death?

Amy Chua’s book, World on Fire, remains evidence for me about one of the sources of violence within society.

There were two threads to her argument: one was capitalism, and the West’s over-eagerness to export it, as well as democracy, and the problems which arise from forcing the pace of its implementation. 
Capitalism alone, some suggest, can make possible the rising standards of living that will in themselves reduce violence. Unfortunately, almost all statements which include ‘always,’ ‘never,’ ‘only’ and the like are automatically suspect. Amy Chua’s book strongly suggests that fast tracking a sawn-off version of capitalism in any country, especially when this is combined with a fledgling democracy which allows a previously oppressed minority to gain power, is a blueprint for disaster. The Phillipines, the country of her birth, spurred her to research this phenomenon more widely. She pins down the core of her concern early in her book (page 14):

It is striking to note that at no point in history did any Western nation ever implement laissez-faire capitalism and overnight universal suffrage at the same time – the precise formula of free-market democracy currently being pressed on developing countries around the world.

In the West capitalism and democracy in their present forms both evolved slowly over long periods of time. They cannot be parachuted from outside into an unprepared culture.

I have been influenced greatly by Michael Karlberg’s book – Beyond the Culture of Contest – which raises serious questions about a society like ours that is founded historically on:

1. competition in politics, when the urgent and critical need now is to achieve consensus across all divisions of opinion in certain areas;
2. adversarialism in the court room, where truth is less important than winning; and
3. hyper-competition in the market place, where the need for profit and the desire to consume find their perfectly destructive match.

He does not argue that these can be replaced overnight, even though the need to do so is becoming increasingly urgent.

Which brings me onto the third point.

While I am sympathetic to those who argue that these problems are neither new nor necessarily worse,  and even to those rational optimists who believe that the statistics prove that most of us have never been safer or healthier, I am attracted by the credibility of Jeremy Rifkin’s case, to give just one example, in his book, The Empathic Civilisation – where he argues that our strong empathic tendency has enabled us to build ever larger civilisations and the current version is globally interconnected. He writes (page 44):

The tragic flaw of history is that our increased empathic concern and sensitivity grows in direct proportion to the wreaking of greater entropic damage to the world we all cohabit and rely on for our existence and perpetuation.

In short, in history our separate civilisations have all too often got too big to sustain themselves and thereafter collapsed. In the past, that has been tragic but not catastrophic, in that there have always been other parts of the world totally unaffected by the crash. Not so now, possibly, when we have a virtually single civilisation planet-wide. If one part goes down we probably all do. I will be returning to his thesis in more detail in a later sequence of posts.

In that respect, as well perhaps as in others, our situation is therefore not exactly the same as it has always been, and our degree of interconnectedness potentiates the impact of destructive processes in a way that lifts them to a higher level, a difference of degree only perhaps, or possibly renders them of a different quality, i.e. different in kind.

Ken Wilber’s book, A Theory of Everything, which I will be reviewing in the next sequence of posts, points to another key factor i.e. the access those with narrow and hostile views now have to destructive high level technology. This is a fear that Jeremy Rifkin also shares in his panoramic survey The Empathic Civilisation to which I shall also be returning (page 487):

Weapons of mass destruction, once the preserve of elites, are becoming more democratised with each passing day. A growing number of security experts believe that it is no longer even possible to keep weapons of mass destruction locked up and out of the hands of rogue governments, terrorist groups, or just deranged individuals.

Nor are these the only perspectives on our tendency to violence and how to remedy it. Being oppressed is no guarantee that I will not be an oppressor in my turn if I get the chance. That was clear right from the French Revolution (See Michael Burleigh‘s ‘Earthly Powers‘) and nothing that has happened since causes me to think that anything is different now. Following on from the possibly flawed but none the less illuminating Milgram studies of obedience, Philip Zimbardo looks at the disturbing way group and organisational processes foster evil doing and explains ways of effectively counteracting that (‘The Lucifer Effect‘).

Jonathan Haidt in his humane and compassionate book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis‘ indicates that, in his view, idealism has caused more violence in human history than almost any other single thing (page 75).

The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism. . . . Threatened self-esteem accounts for a large portion of violence at the individual level, but to really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism — the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end.

Richard Holloway sees it much the same way:

More misery and disillusionment has been visited on humanity by its search for the perfect society and the perfect faith than by any other cause.

(‘Between the Monster and the Saint‘: page 136)

Both Haidt and Holloway emphasise that not all such ideals are by any means religious. Haidt, for instance,  also quotes the attempt to create utopias as well as the defence of the homeland or tribe as frequently implicated.  Also, when Hitler’s probably narcissistic self-esteem successfully cloaked itself in the rhetoric of idealistic nationalism, mixed with scapegoating anti-semitism, we all know what happened next: narcissism and idealism make a highly toxic and devastatingly deadly combination.

What Haidt regards as central is this:

Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it . . . the belief that the ends justify the means.

Marc Hauser‘s examination of morality, ‘Moral Minds,’ comes at the issue primarily from a developmental angle, and he emphasises the power of labelling and disgust to remove inhibitions against genocide. I don’t think his argument here has been undermined by evidence that his own moral life in an unrelated aspect was not entirely exemplary. He explains (page 199):

Disgust wins the award as the single most irresponsible emotion, a feeling that has led to extreme in-group-out-group divisions followed by inhumane treatment. Disgust’s trick is simple: declare those you don’t like to be vermin or parasites, and it is easy to think of them as disgusting, deserving of exclusion, dismissal, and annihilation. All horrific cases of human abuse entail this kind of transformation, from Auschwitz to Abu Ghraib.

I don’t think any of us, expert or otherwise, can claim to have a clear, complete and valid picture yet. In my view, though a layman in terms of my mastery of the complex evidence involved, it seems that we can either learn to sink our differences to a degree that will transform our culture, or else stick with our current patterns and sink without trace under our differences.

Is Capitalism really the answer?

There is clearly quite a lot depending upon which model of the way the world works the majority of humanity accepts – one model which accepts the inevitability of competition, the other which holds out hope for the probability of co-operation.

Evolutionary theory, when it has taken a psychological turn recently, accepts that humanity has a dual potential in that respect and, according to Michael McCullough, we can move beyond revenge towards forgiveness and cooperation, just as Robert Wright can legitimately argue that, throughout human history, we have proved ourselves capable of widening our sense of identity beyond the family or tribe to include ever more disparate and distant groups of people.

Economic theory is not my specialism. I do have a view though about its overall validity. For me, the problem with economics, as with any other social science such as psychology, my own discipline, is that it only goes as far as to provide a lens of our own, albeit systematic creation through which to observe and understand ourselves – a very tricky process whose conclusions have to be approached with extreme caution.

For example, what a convinced capitalist says reads well within its own assumptions, as does what I write to me of course. What he describes may apply if we accept the same premises and assumptions especially concerning human nature and the consequent social dynamics. For instance, one might argue that nothing does more to reduce violence and many other social ills than the rising standards of living that capitalism alone makes possible.

While I accept that capitalism has brought many benefits, as has liberal democracy, it seems to me that such optimism is missing a crucial point. It is not ‘rising standards of living’ that are necessarily the main issue but the rising inequality which unrestricted capitalism seems inevitably to produce, with all the socially destructive consequences this brings in its wake. Hardly a rationally desirable outcome, it seems to me, and certainly not a morally desirable one. I have already posted a review of The Spirit Level so I won’t rehearse those points again here.

Also, as John Fitgerald Medina pointed out in his book, Faith, Physics and Psychology (page 238):

 Economic theory does not allow economists to make distinctions between renewable resources and non-renewable resources.

In a 2012 BBC4 documentary – Surviving Progress – David Suzuki indicated that this defect is at the core of economics, which he describes not as a ‘science’ but as ‘a set of values.’ He contemptuously refers to its dismissive description of natural resources as ‘externalities’ as ‘a form of brain damage.’ The sense of urgency in this recent programme suggests that any remedy to the current model of economics, so kind to short-term profits, has some way to go before it gains widespread and effective acceptance. It is not clear whether we have that much time before disaster strikes.

There is a need to dig a bit deeper though, and I plan to do so in the follow up post next week.

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Corrosive Inequality

‘The Gift of Integrity,’ in Freeman’s book Gifted Lives, looks at a sad and disappointing life trajectory.

Alison was someone transplanted from an ordinary background to the class conscious intellectually top-heavy culture of Oxford (page 146-147):

Those from state schools who made it to the dreaming spires of Oxford were often deeply shocked to find their faces – and accents – did not fit. Both Oxford and Cambridge Universities still take about half their undergraduates from the tiny seven per cent of private schools, and only about 10 per cent of undergraduates there could be called working class, so the social dominance is of the privately educated. . . .

These powerful social effects were to devastate the life of Alison Cranfield. She was an outstandingly brilliant girl whose school, without much consideration as to whether it was the right place for her, had pushed her to Oxbridge for the pride of her school. This meant a big leap across the social-cultural divide and it proved too wide for her. She had slipped, fallen badly and suffered deep long-term emotional damage. Even to think of it, many years after the debacle, brought tears to her eyes.

William Golding‘s life story gives further insight into the impact of this kind of chasm between classes. In his daughter’s memoire, The Children of Lovers, she checks for herself what her father’s record at Oxford contained about him (page 69-70):

The University Appointments Committee – an early form of careers service – had carefully noted on their index card their considered  judgement of my father as ‘not quite a gent.’ The jaunty, Wodehousean tone doesn’t mean it’s a joke, and it’s certainly not a compliment. The judgement was precise and professionally significant.

She found similar statements elsewhere (page 70):

On a letter card, from his DipEd studies in 1937-8, they describe him as ‘a decent, sincere man,’ and they mention his book of poems published by MacMillan in 1934 –  a considerable feat for a grammar-school boy of twenty-three. But in the coded initials of his entry (interpreted for me once more by the scrupulous university archivist), he was N.T.S. Not Top Shelf.

Her conclusions were (ibid.):

Oxford in the 1930s was still a place of outrageous privilege, of rigid and effective class divisions, which both subtly and unsubtly apportioned opportunity by rank, and permanently shaped people’s careers and lives, so reinforcing privilege for the next generation.

She sheds further light on how exactly this process works in practice (page 70-71) and can pass down the generations:

One might say that the University Appointments Board had to safeguard the currency of its recommendations, given the expectations of future employers. After all, otherwise someone like my father, on the basis of his many good qualities, might have ended up quite unsuitably in charge of some top-shelf children. But the board makes sure this will not happen. It carefully notes that he is ‘fit only for day schools.’ So he sent his daughter to a place he hoped would fix that.

It’s perhaps worth noting that the visitor in RAF uniform who ended up outside my bedsit looking for an English Teacher, as described in an earlier post, was there as a result of the workings of the ‘old boys’ network. He had got his degree at Clare College many years earlier and had used his contacts to discover there was a more recent graduate in his area who might need a job. It was only a day school after all, but even so, after the kinds of interactions we had which I described earlier, he may have come to regret his decision and seen me as coming from too far below the top shelf altogether. And, to be truthful, I had never felt at home in the world of venison and bump suppers into which, willing but naive, I had agreed to be thrown on the back of my A level results and at the behest of my Headmaster. A more telling disadvantage though was probably my difficulty in adapting, after grammar school spoon-feeding, to the need for a more self-directed style of study.

All this highlights the full significance of the point that Michele Obama was trying to make in hosting the gathering of school girls from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson at an Oxford college.

Michelle Obama takes school pupils to Oxford University to encourage them to aim high. But only just over 1 per cent of Oxford’s undergraduates are of black British origin, Channel 4 News learns.

The First Lady first visited the all-girl Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (EGA) School in north London in 2009 (pictured), and has kept in touch with the school since.

Now, as part of her trip to the UK with the President, she visited Oxford University with around 35 of the school’s pupils. In 2009, Mrs Obama encouraged the pupils to “be the best that you can be”, and the trip to the university is expected to encourage the students – the majority of whom are from ethnic minority backgrounds – to think about studying for a degree.

The trip was designed as a day-long “immersion experience” at Oxford, including campus tours and mentoring sessions. The First Lady, who has a modest family background but attended Princeton and Harvard, also answered questions from the students, after telling them she was “thrilled to be back”.

She said: “I remember back at a young age trying to decide what schools to apply to and how well-meaning but misguided people questioned whether someone with my background could succeed at an elite university. When I was accepted I had all kinds of worries and doubts, I wouldn’t be as well prepared as students from privileged families and I wouldn’t fit in.

“But after a few months away from home I realised I was just as capable and I had just as much to offer [as] any of my classmates. We passionately believe that you have the talent within you, you have the drive, the experience to succeed at Oxford and universities just like it across the country and the world.”

This kind of self-belief is hugely important. However, Gifted Lives clearly indicates, and not just from one person’s experience, that even talent cannot protect you completely from the toxic effects of inequality. This has echoes of the description of the depressing effects of inequality explored across a number of dimensions in The Spirit Level. The Baha’i Faith has much to say on this issue (see link for the summary article by Bryan Graham from which the following quotations are taken).

. . . .  there are many examples of exploitation in the world; whether it is a senior executive exploiting corporate shareholders or a local landowner exploiting peasants. To refer to the passage quoted above: “When we see poverty allowed to reach a condition of starvation it is a sure sign that somewhere we shall find tyranny.”

He expands on this a little later in his summary:

Dahl interprets the modifying principle of poverty as tyranny as implying that “every human being has the right to a reasonable level of personal welfare,” a belief echoed by Sabetan and Fish in their call for the meeting of basic needs. Mohtadi emphasizes that the Bahá’í teachings on volunteer giving, progressive taxation, huqúqu’lláh, and zakát would all operate in such a way as to eliminate extremes of wealth in society. Huddleston highlights similar teachings and identifies the elimination of extreme differences in per capita wealth as one “of the main economic functions of the world government.” The Bahá’í system, therefore, combines voluntary and mandatory means for the elimination of the extremes of wealth, operating within a framework where wages are conceived as just rewards. The Bahá’í world would be more equal but not absolutely equal.

This suggests that, even though such initiatives as Michele Obama’s are praiseworthy and valuable, they are by no means a complete answer. She would be the first to agree with that, I’m sure. What is required is for all of us to put our best energies into reshaping of society. Each of us has to find a path of action by which to do that in a concerted way with other people. We can’t do it alone. This blog is attempting to look at as many possibilities of this kind as will fit into its compass. We each must decide what we are going to do. Not an easy task!

Read Full Post »

The Redress of Poetry

 

A Bridge between Worlds

 

When the artist develops confidence in a set of symbols as a bridge between the world of matter and the world of spirit, innovation in the way the elements . . . . are used . . . . can lead to an art that is deeply moving and reflective of high ideals.

(Otto Donald Rogers in Crystallizations: page 143)

Seamus Heaney has recently brought out a new volume of poems, Human Chain. Why should that matter to any of us? Surely poetry doesn’t change anything.

The title Seamus Heaney gave to his Oxford lectures, published in 1995, was The Redress of Poetry. He opens the book by referring to two poems, his own Squarings and George Herbert‘s The Pulley, which I have already quoted in full on this blog.  He quotes them because they are both doing something to which he wishes to draw our attention in the strongest way possible for a poet. He writes (page xiii):

Both poems are about the way consciousness can be alive to two different and contradictory dimensions of reality and still find a way of negotiating between them.

Those who are already acquainted with my obsession with Iain McGilchrist‘s book, The Master and His Emissary, will recognise one possible direction this could take us, i.e. back into the realms of hemispheric differences. Heaney’s next remark (ibid.) makes this difficult to resist:

I did not notice the this correspondence between [the two poems’] thematic and imaginative concerns until the whole book had been assembled in manuscript.

Once I saw the link, however, I was delighted. It confirmed my trust . . . . that a reliable critical course could be plotted by following a poetic sixth sense.

But this isn’t the only or even the most important aspect of what he is saying. The talk he gave on his birthday last year brings some of these other issues into focus in a most accessible way. (The section of his talk that does so comes 6.09 minutes into the video and ends at 11.90 minutes.) In just over five minutes of reflection upon the meaning for him of the myth of Antaeus and his eventual fight with Hercules we are given a glimpse into his philosophy of life and of poetry. The rest of the video is birthday ritual of little lasting importance – the setting for the gold of the main insights he wanted to share.

Hopefully you will have formed your own view of what he was trying to say. What follows is part of mine.

His ideas clearly go beyond left brain and right, hinting at matter and spirit, earth and heaven, and their relationships. There is humility, realism and balance in what he says. He speaks of the middle way, rather in the same as Bahá’u’lláh spoke of moderation.

Whatsoever passeth beyond the limits of moderation will cease to exert a beneficial influence.

(Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh: page 169)

We would of course be mistaken to think that the balance of the via media that he speaks of is easily maintained. The Spirit Level (1996) makes that very clear in a number of poems but most explicitly in Weighing In (pages 17-19), written in the context of the violence of the troubles in Northern Ireland. ‘Peace on earth’ he writes, using the image of two huge weights counteracting each other on a freshly-greased balance,

Holds good only as long as the balance holds,
The scales ride steady and the angels’ strain
Prolongs itself at an unearthly pitch.

This can become intolerable to the earthbound. His poem continues:

. . . . . . . . When soldiers mocked
Blindfolded Jesus and he didn’t strike back

They were neither shamed nor edified, although
Something was made manifest – the power
Of power not exercised, of hope inferred

By the powerless forever. Still, for Jesus’ sake,
Do me a favour, would you, just this once?
Prophesy, give scandal, cast the stone.

A critic comments:

Yet he does want to make a contribution. In the aptly titled “Weighing In,” he notes that an even balance in a controversy can be vacuous: “Two sides to every question, yes, yes, yes . . . / But every now and then, just weighing in/ Is what it must come down to.” When he voices regret at a missed opportunity to speak up in some long-past political argument, the strength of feeling may shock those familiar with Heaney’s immensely gentle soul: “I held back when I should have drawn blood . . . At this stage only foul play cleans the slate.” Heaney is a gentle man; but there is a fire in him, too.

This links with his discussion in The Redress on commitment and poetry. We’ll come back to that in a moment.

In his introduction to The Redress of Poetry (page xv) he goes on to describe what he feels the imaginative life can achieve that will help move things in the right direction:

. . . . the imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it. What Virgil called lacrimae rerum, the tears of things, can be absorbed and re-experienced in the playthings in the playhouse – or in the words of the poem.

While the Bahá’í Writings warn us often about how the abuse of imagination can lead us into danger by blinding us to reality, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá also refers to it as a power of the spirit.

Man has also spiritual powers: imagination, which conceives things; thought, which reflects upon realities; comprehension, which comprehends realities; memory, which retains whatever man imagines, thinks and comprehends.

(Some Answered Questions: page 210)

So it is quite possible to imagine how poetry (The Redress: page xvii) can bring ‘human existence into fuller life.’

 

A Link in the Human Chain?

 

This may not be consistent with a strong desire to change the world in some particular way (page 2):

[Poetry] offers a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit, and yet I can see how such a function would be deemed insufficient by a political activist. For the activist, there is going to be no point in envisaging an order which is comprehensive of events but not in itself productive of new events. . . . . They will always want the redress of poetry to be an exercise of leverage on behalf of their point of view.

He sets an important criterion for the reality that poetry seeks to capture (page 7-8):

Poetry . . . whether it belongs to an old political dispensation or aspires to express a new one, has to be a working model of inclusive consciousness. It should not simplify. Its projections and inventions should be a match for the complex reality which surrounds it and of which it is generated. . . . . As long as the co-ordinates of the imagined thing correspond to those of the world we live in and endure, poetry is fulfilling its counterweighting function.

That would not be a bad definition of what a Bahá’í poetics should aspire to.

He gives a good definition of a ‘fully realised poetry’ when he writes (page 10) that it is:

a poetry where the co-ordinates of the imagined thing correspond to and allow us to contemplate the complex burden of our own experience.

Then, on page 15 of the book, he goes on to look more closely at what he means by ‘redress,’ which needs to be understood in the context of this definition of the poetic enterprise. ‘Redress’ can be ‘reparation.’ As a verb it can mean to ‘set upright’ or ‘restore.’ A rare archaic meaning from hunting is ‘to bring back to a proper course.’   He explains that this need not have an ethical connotation:

[I]t is more a matter of finding a course for the breakaway of innate capacity, a course where something unhindered, yet directed, can sweep ahead into its full potential.

Deeper consideration of what might be entailed in realising a full potential of any kind will have to wait for a later post when I’ll be looking at the spiritual and social implications of the effort versus natural talent debate to which Matthew Syed has made an eloquent and accessible contribution in his book Bounce.

For now I simply want to highlight how a relatively unpopular art form, poetry, has the potential to make a major contribution to our efforts towards excellence and understanding in both our individual and social lives.

 

So, that why I say I’m glad that Heaney is still writing, even after a stroke whose aftermath he describes (pages 14-16) in his most recent volume, Human Chain.

Strapped on, wheeled out, forklifted, locked
In position for the drive,
Bone-shaken, bumped at speed,

The nurse a passenger in front, you ensconced
In her vacated corner seat, me flat on my back –
Our posture all the journey still the same . . . .

The word ‘still’ is placed to convey exactly the right quiet emphasis on continuance and motionlessness with all that that implies.

The collection celebrates our common humanity, cutting across barriers of time, space and prejudice, sometimes held together by nothing stronger-seeming than a bus route – Route 110 (pages 48-59). The second poem in this sequence has him in Smithfield Market, hurrying to the bus stop with a second-hand copy of Virgil in his bag. He interweaves echoes of Virgil with echoes of his past, Lake Avernus, Charon‘s barge, adolescent antics, wakes, sports days, to culminate at the end in a new life coming into this world.

Long may he continue to offer us his contribution to the redress of poetry, without which there would be less hope for the future and which gives us a richer understanding of what our experience means, of what we should avoid and of what we might achieve. And at the end of the book, as a symbol perhaps of the heights our souls might lift our heart and minds to, we have a kite (page 85) –

. . . . my hand is like a spindle
Unspooling, the kite a thin-stemmed flower
Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher

The longing in the breast and planted feet
And gazing face and heart of the kite flier
Until string breaks and – separate, elate –

The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.

 

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