Durer, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”
I see that Roger Cohen of the New York Times used a Rudyard Kipling poem to frame a despairing column today. The poem is “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” in which Kipling laments that we have forgotten universal wisdom to follow the fads of the day. Because we do, we can expect only disaster or what Cohen calls “the great unraveling.”
In Cohen’s vision, the great unraveling includes the rise of terrorism, Russia’s new imperialistic ambitions, Europe’s decline (led by Germany’s refusal to assume leadership), America’s withdrawal from the world, the rise of race hatred (whether anti-Jew or anti-Muslim), the loss of faith in democracy, and the outbreak of Ebola and other diseases. Among other targets, Cohen goes after the United States and the Obama administration:
It was a time of weakness. The most powerful nation on earth was tired of far-flung wars, its will and treasury depleted by absence of victory. An ungrateful world could damn well police itself. The nation had bridges to build and education systems to fix. Civil wars between Arabs could fester. Enemies might even kill other enemies, a low-cost gain. Middle Eastern borders could fade; they were artificial colonial lines on a map. Shiite could battle Sunni, and Sunni Shiite, there was no stopping them. Like Europe’s decades-long religious wars, these wars had to run their course. The nation’s leader mockingly derided his own “wan, diffident, professorial” approach to the world, implying he was none of these things, even if he gave that appearance. He set objectives for which he had no plan. He made commitments he did not keep. In the way of the world these things were noticed. Enemies probed. Allies were neglected, until they were needed to face the decapitators who talked of a Caliphate and called themselves a state. Words like “strength” and “resolve” returned to the leader’s vocabulary. But the world was already adrift, unmoored by the retreat of its ordering power. The rule book had been ripped up.
Cohen concludes:
It was a time of disorientation. Nobody connected the dots or read Kipling on life’s few certainties: “The Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire / And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.”
Until it was too late and people could see the Great Unraveling for what it was and what it had wrought.
It must be difficult to be a political columnist. Periodically one is tempted to throw up one’s hands and declare everything is (to use a copybook phrase) going to hell in a hand basket, even though this can hardly be called the worst of times. (As I see it, the 14th and 20th centuries contend for that dubious honor, although there are other centuries for which one can make a good case.) If you know your Lord of the Rings, it can be Denethor gazing into the palantir. Still, it feels good to vent, just as Kipling was doing in 1919—which is to say, right after World I had ravaged Europe and killed his son.
“Copybook headings” were wise maxims that school children were expected to copy as they learned how to write. “The Market Place,” meanwhile, is where people pick up fashionable, and therefore dubious, new ideas. “Gods of the Copybook Headings” reads like a set of cranky complaints written by an old curmudgeon who is sick to death of “the Hopes that our World is built on.” These he sees as vain wishes along the order of “if pigs had wings, they could fly.” Or as another old maxim puts it, “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.”
Kipling’s complaints sound like those of today’s radical Republicans. He appears to be attacking pacifism and the new League of Nations (which will disarm us and then deliver us “bound to our foe”), the decline of the family and the suffragette movement (which will cause women to have no more children and men to lose “reason and faith”) and a new economic order based on taxing the rich to pay for collective benefits (robbing “selected Peter to pay for collective Paul”), thereby sapping people of the will to work. (Kipling may have in mind either communism or Teddy Roosevelt-style progressivism.)
If we ignore the older verities and plunge into what we think is “Social Progress” or “the March of Mankind,” then (Kipling predicts) “as surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,” we will experience terror and slaughter. And the Gods of the Copybook Headings will be able to say, “We told you so.”
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
By Rudyard Kipling
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
I wonder if Cohen, no rightwinger, really considered Kipling’s ideas when he wrote his column. After all, if the speaker of the poem were to have his way, women would still be subjugated to men and we would lack the safety net programs that have reduced poverty and hunger for millions. That’s as true as Two and Two make Four.
To be sure, it’s very useful for liberals and conservatives (by which I mean true conservatives, not the GOP’s radical fringe) to engage in debate, with liberals dreaming of a just world free of suffering and conservatives pointing out how imperfect human nature invariably undermines our dreams. Kipling’s ironic use of Miranda’s “brave new world,” which may have given Aldous Huxley the title for his famous dystopia, is an appropriate critique of naïve idealists. The Dog will return to his vomit just as humans, although fired by “Uplift, Vision, and Breadth of Mind,” will return to certain base impulses.
But Cohen himself seems to be a hopeless idealist in suggesting that the United States is weak for deciding it can’t do more. If anything, Obama’s foreign policy minimalism is more in line with Kipling’s conservatism than Cohen’s contention that America should be “an ordering power.” (Obama’s emphasis on “hope and change” at home is another matter.) Actually, like most rants, both Cohen’s and Kipling’s are contradictory and incoherent. Old maxims, rather than being ineluctable truths, can actually be used by partisans on either side of any debate. Think of the essay and the poem psychologically rather than as useful policy prescriptions.
Still, whenever a columnist turns to poetry to sort out a confused world, an interesting discussion emerges.
