On the search so far...

A central search in this blog feels like it may be reaching its conclusion...

Just watching Michael Wood and Seamus Healey talking about Beowulf I am gripped by the fundamental elements of all narratives that i seem to be hell bend on subverting...

The Hero undergoes trials both physical and spiritual that are driven by the need to win; even if this is the destiny of the hero, failure is not an option; becoming the very best we may be is the struggle and the destiny of the hero.

This is in absolute contrast to my own direction of approach for the last few years. What I have been gripped by is the relative and temporary nature of everything. We may indeed win but it is only until next time. We may indeed conquer, build and acquire but it is only until it is lost. Furthermore that which is lost can not remain so forever it will of its own accord become found. There is also the awareness of dialectic that a hero can only be so at the expense of a foe. There can only be triumph at the destruction of adversity, which is great as long as you do not seek to gain from another adversity. As a friend always points out death is good business for undertakers, and I will add, until it strikes at home.

The instinctive narratives we feel the logic of innately only ever seem good in the telling of half the story. The tragic nation of Grendels who are outcast from human society and even the patronage of God; we don't hear their story. As Kierkegaard notes about all love stories we only hear of the conquest, we never have to endure the years of the tale that lie idle in port afterwards [my metaphor].

And so I have been drawn in stages to the ideal of Peace where all narratives stop without want of more or echo of the past; the silence between the words of the bard; that satisfaction that looks neither forward nor gloats upon what lies behind. The death that we can enjoy as the living. This is the true heroic death in this view. Not the ecstatic death of the fallen in hectic and bloody battle, nor the noble death of those burned upon the funeral pyre of past achievements, but simply the death of those who strive no longer for tractable evidence of ones own virtue or existence in this world.

But let me now that I have pursued this line for a few years consider Nietzsche and the alternative views again.

The Nietzschian argument against my view is that this is exactly the view that the Lords would wish... or at least a variation on that view. The Lords want a passive people who are hard working without complaint, who even eschew the liberties and indulgencies of the powerful. The Lord, so argues Nietzsche, of these lower people turns people away from worldly pleasures in favour of a dream of afterlife, even accepts death without struggle, offering up taxes to the Lords without complaint (give unto Caesar what is Caesar's etc). This is coincidentally exactly the mind set that a class system needs so that the Lords can rule. Christianity et al. are simply the products of the slave minds and the True way of man lies in the behaviours of the Lords - almost diametrically opposite to the slave mind. Thus fighting, posturing, indulgence, egoism, wealth, flamboyance, opulence, ostentatiousness, indulgence etc etc are the real free mode of human life from which the slave class have simply gained their code by negation.

There is some truth - but my view of Peace seems at odds even with Nietzsche and Christ because I don't accept taxes, ownership nor even labour in any fundamental sense. Certainly I accept them as they actual do exist, and have a long history and there is no sense that they will ever change - but i don't accept any argument based upon them. They are unfortunate symptoms of misunderstanding much deeper realities and truths it seems to me... (hence my search.). A ruling class I simply don't accept. They may believe they are a ruling class but they are not really ruling in any demontsrable way other than they can pay enough people to kill dissenters - it is that simple law of nature which is what ruling means... everything else - all this talk of Magna Carter and law etc is a thin paper facade over the fundamental law that the strongest can do what they want. It was because the King ran out of money that he was ever brought to bear; if he ever gained the money again I'm sure he would rip that piece of paper up. Problem is History is not a Markov chain and the Future cannot escape the thin windy mountain path of the Past.

But again that said I disagree with the program The Medieval Mind. Professor Robert Bartlett, undoubtedly bound by the need to make exciting TV, seems to me to force the Medieval period into a rather stereotypical mold - that of a brutal and impoverished time of oppression, plagues and torture chambers ('get Medieval on yer ass' from Pulp Fiction). Yet the small amount of reading I did on work in the medieval period (for my book 'Work on Work' which seems ever further from completion - it's a huge project) threw up a completely different view of certainly the existence of bad land lords but a complex land system with itinerant workers benefiting and wanting to work within the confines of a Manor where they had higher wages and access to justice, and the tenants themselves varying from those paying high rents to completely free holders. The idea at the the start of the program that we should be shocked at the prices put on people is a joke to me. Killing a noble man demanded 6 times the compensation payment to killing a serf - I remember the police didn't even want to investigate the Ipswich murders of prostitutes until it became a press story. A homeless person get murdered and a doctor gets murdered - is the police interest and legal fees really going to be the same? An Indian get killed abroad and an American gets killed abroad do they really get the same response? And more of a joke does a cleaners really sell their time (and working life) at the same rate as a doctor? Is the life of a cleaner really equal to that of a doctor since 25% of it is going to be spent at a 20th of the rate. If anything inequality is worse now than in the Medieval period. The difference it seems to me, which plasters over the cracks well, is that people are not dying in the street (in UK) anymore because of the invention of oil driven machines and a vast global surplus of food - not the economics, politics, legal system or wisdom of ruling class - as we are daily told is the cause of our prosperity. I am suspicious of the daily avoidance of the link between cheap oil and global food. It seems more and more that things are going well and the ruling classes simply take the credit for things they have no interest in understanding. Of course when things go badly we can be sure they will quickly side step any involvement. Reading 'Mice and Men' (and 'Grapes of Wrath' by association) for GCSE revision also highlights that things certainly hadn't improved, probably even got worse, almost a 1000 years later - in America of all places: the land that was supposed to be the model for the rest of the world.

The one thing that I must uncover is more about the Saxon and Celtic land systems that preceded the Norman and Roman invasions respectively. Attitudes even amongst the experts seems to sway between extremes so it is any ones guess what life really was like for the ordinary people in any century in the past. Were Celts peaceful or violent warriors? If they were violent warriors it seems odd that they were completely annihilated by the Saxons. But even the Nordic people it seems to me had very just and noble kings, and systemic hardship doesn't seem to have been the way of things. A book I had time to read only a page of spoke of the noble kings of India in a time when Rulers felt strongly the duty of leadership - very much the spirit of nobility that I sense in the Saxons. It is the spirit of nobility (the arya) that I believe got passed down generations. My mother (brought up in the Mansion house in Ashbourne) with Holland and Sadler grandparents is my only testament to the spirit of arya - but from her the strength of duty and social obligation is unquestionably the main driving force of the gentry. Of course the gentry are human and have failing, but these failing have become the exceptions that the bourgeois revolution have capitalised (irony ;-) upon - in my developing view anyway. You simply cannot expect someone who was brought up to be concerned about a livelihood and a trade to suddenly take on social responsibilities - it simply doesn't make sense. It makes even less sense to me to have private individuals who are motivated by the accumulation of private wealth, power and influence to suddenly switch to a magnanimous outward social perspective. Not impossible, but made all the harder by their up bringing. Kings born of kings it seems to me are the best suited to politics and power. It is a logical point, I need read and understand a whole lot more history to substantiate that point. I also mean History that lies outside the tiny confines of the Western Dogma which is the interpretation of the UK period from 1066 to present that has been hijacked by the apologists for the current liberal, democratic, free market system. I feel even the experts are hopelessly seduced by the narrative of power evolution between church, monarch and people. Or is it that any other view at this point in unfashionable. There is a sense of this narrative being an opium to the masses to make them feel that they are in power. My own view is that in reality nothing ever changes (relatively). Obviously we can fly around the globe now which gives UK people the option of a weekend break in the tropics which they never had even 20 years ago, but relatively this "new experience" must rank distant second to the possibility of picking up a book when printing first made texts available to the masses. The "technology and form" may change but the "experience of the people" (which is what we are interested in when we compare human lives) I am saying doesn't. It's an almost impossible hypothesis to prove, but so is the current dogma that things are getting better, or the negation that things are getting worse. Remember that for most of Christian History the view was that things were getting further way from God's initial "good" creation and so worse, the renaissance Humanists simply turned that on its head - naively, egotistically and pointless I reckon. What if there is no change at all and we just live with what we have got? and that links to the point on Peace.

Returning to the concept of Gentleman professor Robert Bartlett takes the John Ball line that the one cannot be born into a way of life - that we are all free to pursue our own course in life: freedom to exercise one's destiny being critical. But this isn't the medieval mind but the birth of the modern mind. Only the modern mind reels at this thought, and I think equally erroneously. We are very much born into ways of life - language, parents, wealth. These are things I cannot really change. I may indeed become poor through choice (I have to some extent), and I could change my language and even my parents and even my race and sex by plastic surgery but it is a lot of work just to alter what you were "given". Consider also how many doctors have doctors as parents? I don't even need to do the statistics: there is an overwhelming correlation. This can't be explained by freedom to exercise our destiny can it? We speak of genes all the time these days: either our parents brought us to be a doctor or it is in the genes - either way it was not a "free" choice. Indeed this issue of freedom is one of the great metaphysical questions that remains unexplained at the heart of Protestantism - but while people like Dawkins strip away everything Godly from the movement they seem oddly reticent in approaching the aspects which underpin their own world views! (Isn't this always the case!!). John Ball it seems to me is part of the much larger movement which culminated in Martin Luther and the break from Catholic domination in the church too... will need to investigate that interesting link... Interesting that "gene" then has always been at odds with the notion of freedom and "gene-tleman" was just a part of a larger picture. Such a view as Bartlett's over looks the use of Arya (noble) in India for example. It was used by Buddha to speak of those people who had become masters not of others but of themselves (the highest mastery). It is in this latter sense that I understand my mother's talk of the gene-try. As power shifted from aristocracy to bouregoise (my mother's father was a mixed product of aristocratic and in part bourgeois pairing), the basis of gene moved from blood to one's behaviour. Except that refined behaviour is how Buddha and the Vedic books spoke about the gentleman 2500 years ago so it seems to me that it is part of the concept long before contemporary historians imbued it with revolutionary implications and progressive class struggle - I say progressive because I am maintaining that nothing has ever changed, that all the narratives that historians find in history are fabrications with contemporary motives - like putting Cleopatra's Needle by the Thames: a link to an extinct pagan empire, why? Maybe to give the illusion that London is the natural successor to Egypt... just a myth to satisfy and justify the establishment. So I don't buy the narrow concept of "gentleman" that is handed down by revolutionaries and I don't even accept that John Ball or his successors made any valid points about freedom, liberty or equality. It was simply that falling population placed power in the hands of the workers - but as Buddha says all things change, eventually; and I add, the reason, excuse or narrative is secondary. So Grendel was going to die, as was his mother, anyway whether at the hands of Beowulf, another hero or just mother nature and where I disagree with Michael Wood is that unfortunately Grendel will die in another way as the story itself gets lost and the monsters of the past are replaced by new ones. And, in an anthropomorphic way, we only speak of Grendel anyway because it was found, and only seek to preserve it because it was found by chance anyway.

A point I have raised a few times in this blog is the question of what would have happened had the Nazis won the war. I have suggested before that nothing would have changed for the masses. The Norman conquest it seems is a perfect example of what would have happened and it does seem that the Medieval period is basically what the Nazi occupation of UK would have been like with us paying huge rents to the Nazi over lords. But not wishing to get too swept along by this nightmarish suggestion it is worth pointing out that has always been the lot of the masses in this country. We payed rent to the Romans, then the Saxon kings, then the Norman, then to the Bouregois and Germans (when the Monarch changed) - nothing ever changes always seems my conclusion! What difference the Nazi? Honestly (war time propaganda aside). This point really rests upon the state of Medieval Britain under the Normans which needs to be seen comparatively against life under the Saxon kings like Alfred (comparative because we have no way of understanding what was the normatively accepted standard of comfort to people in that period).

Briefly raising that old argument: absolutists will say that things are absolutely better today than in the past so today is better than the past. My argument is that things will be absolutely better in the future given the rate of technological development, so therefore things are absolutely worse today than in the future. Now do we feel that things are absolutely worse today than in the future? Does this reduction in our quality of our life compared with the future affect our lives? Well it may do if we dwell on it (I wish I could have free energy for example), but in reality it makes no difference because we live with what we have and what is normative. In the same way the Medieval mind would not be really lamenting the lack of clean drinking water, mechanised agriculture or TV! Hence things must be contextualised and comparative to have any meaning - which puts all modern propaganda somewhere out of the park.

There is an extreme view (narrative) that the world is undergoing a vast shift at the moment toward global governance, but in a planned and hostile way by some supreme elite. I happen to agree with a friend who works in an NGO and has first hand experience of the "elite" who says that humans simply don't have the capacity for such high level agreement and planning. However I do agree with another friend who says that the masses are very much the victim of this shift. Intentional or otherwise the media (and I realise the markets, and politics) are all manipulated in the interests of the powerful and against the interest of the masses. Ian Stewarts 'From Here to Infinity' p17 he makes the interesting comment:

'...and it would be unthinkable to release [the key to secret codes] to the enemy (or the public, which many governments seem to view in the same light)...'

I think it is more a matter of psychology than deliberate machination for the powerful to behave in such a manner. If someone really believes that they have the best interests of someone at heart then they will feel justified in giving themselves unlimited license over that person. I can genuinely see some leader protecting himself by killing his own people in the belief that protecting himself is in their interests. There is a whole world of power psychology I realise I have to explore some day - the complex dialectic between myself as myself and myself as myself for someone else or The People. Probably accepting in the process the obvious conclusion that people can achieve "more" together under a strong leader than apart without one. However i still question what real gain there is to be had: a strong leader may bring a nation to win the war but then what?Alexander the Great a prime example... but then what? Lots of nice stories but the crops still need the sun and rain regardless what stories fill the heads of the farmers.

Reading this back I am made nauseous by the references to the world political stage - what a world teeming with lies, deceit and the most basic of human instincts, or so it seems to me on reading back. One thought about the vast complexity of the legal, political and economic edifice which seems to achieve nothing but shore up the existing structure sends a shudder through me - it seems as though I stare at the decaying bodies in the mausoleum of Caesar: the workers in the city the ants and other insects which scurry across the fragmenting burial shroud. All this built upon a dream of what the West should be like, dreamed in pagan times, and endlessly patched up and refounded. It doesn't sound like "Life" to me at all - it never has, I have always dreaded like death this thing busyness. I see the sun setting over the sky scrapers downtown and all I see are trees.

OK enough of the metaphor and emotive stuff, it is not my intention to persuade (I disagree with GCSE here on the use of emotive writing) it is simply to entertain and describe my own attitudes and feelings for fun of writing and to open the window and fly language outside the limited mode of factual analytic writing for a short mental break.

In summary of the current position: things never change so Peace is what is left when we stop trying to change them. That has been the approach and now the summary and I will try and test that view by shifting back a bit to hegemonic view of progress and change.