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[Socrates said:] "And now I shall let you alone, and
proceed with the discourse upon Love which I heard one day from a
Mantinean woman named Diotima: in this subject she was skilled, and in
many others too.... “‘Into these love-matters even you,
Socrates, might haply be initiated; but I doubt if you could approach
the rites and revelations to which these, for the properly instructed,
are merely the avenue. However I will speak of them,’ she said, ‘and
will not stint my best endeavors; only you on your part must try your
best to follow. He who would proceed rightly in this business must
not merely begin from his youth to encounter beautiful bodies. In the
first place, indeed, if his conductor guides him aright, he must be in
love with one particular body, and engender beautiful converse therein;
but next he must remark how the beauty attached to this or that body is
cognate to that which is attached to any other, and that if he means to
ensue beauty in form, it is gross folly not to regard as one and the
same the beauty belonging to all; and so, having grasped this truth, he
must make himself a lover of all beautiful bodies, and slacken the
stress of his feeling for one by contemning it and counting it a trifle.
But his next advance will be to set a higher value on the beauty of
souls than on that of the body, so that however little the grace that
may bloom in any likely soul it shall suffice him for loving and caring,
and for bringing forth and soliciting such converse as will tend to the
betterment of the young; and that finally he may be constrained to
contemplate the beautiful as appearing in our observances and our laws,
and to behold it all bound together in kinship and so estimate the
body's beauty as a slight affair. From observances he should be led on
to the branches of knowledge, that there also he may behold a province
of beauty, and by looking thus on beauty in the mass may escape from the
mean, meticulous slavery of a single instance, where he must center all
his care, like a lackey, upon the beauty of a particular child or man or
single observance; and turning rather towards the main ocean of the
beautiful may by contemplation of this bring forth in all their splendor
many fair fruits of discourse and meditation in a plenteous crop of
philosophy; until with the strength and increase there acquired he
descries a certain single knowledge connected with a beauty which has
yet to be told. And here, I pray you,’ said she, ‘give me the very
best of your attention.
“‘When a man has been thus far tutored in
the lore of love, passing from view to view of beautiful things, in the
right and regular ascent, suddenly he will have revealed to him, as he
draws to the close of his dealings in love, a wondrous vision, beautiful
in its nature; and this, Socrates, is the final object of all those
previous toils. First of all, it is ever-existent and neither comes
to be nor perishes, neither waxes nor wanes; next, it is not beautiful
in part and in part ugly, nor is it such at such a time and other at
another, nor in one respect beautiful and in another ugly, nor so
affected by position as to seem beautiful to some and ugly to others.
Nor again will our initiate find the beautiful presented to him in the
guise of a face or of hands or any other portion of the body, nor as a
particular description or piece of knowledge, nor as existing somewhere
in another substance, such as an animal or the earth or sky or any other
thing; but existing ever in singularity of form independent by itself,
while all the multitude of beautiful things partake of it in such wise
that, though all of them are coming to be and perishing, it grows
neither greater nor less, and is affected by nothing. So when a man by
the right method of boy-loving ascends from these particulars and begins
to descry that beauty, he is almost able to lay hold of the final
secret. Such is the right approach or induction to love-matters.
Beginning from obvious beauties he must for the sake of that highest
beauty be ever climbing aloft, as on the rungs of a ladder, from one to
two, and from two to all beautiful bodies; from personal beauty he
proceeds to beautiful observances, from observance to beautiful
learning, and from learning at last to that particular study which is
concerned with the beautiful itself and that alone; so that in the
end he comes to know the very essence of beauty. In that state of
life above all others, my dear Socrates,’ said the Mantinean woman, ‘a
man finds it truly worth while to live, as he contemplates essential
beauty. This, when once beheld, will outshine your gold and your
vesture, your beautiful boys and striplings, whose aspect now so
astounds you and makes you and many another, at the sight and constant
society of your darlings, ready to do without either food or drink if
that were any way possible, and only gaze upon them and have their
company. But tell me, what would happen if one of you had the
fortune to look upon essential beauty entire, pure and unalloyed; not
infected with the flesh and color of humanity, and ever so much more of
mortal trash? What if he could behold the divine beauty itself, in
its unique form? Do you call it a pitiful life for a man to
lead—looking that way, observing that vision by the proper means, and
having it ever with him? Do but consider,’ she said, ‘that there only
will it befall him, as he sees the beautiful through that which makes it
visible, to breed not illusions but true examples of virtue, since his
contact is not with illusion but with truth. So when he has begotten
a true virtue and has reared it up he is destined to win the friendship
of Heaven; he, above all men, is immortal.’
“This, Phaedrus and you others, is
what Diotima told me, and I am persuaded of it, [said Socrates.]
--
Symposium, by Plato, prepared under the supervision of Lisa Cerrato,
William Merrill, Elli Mylonas, David Smith
With the passion
of a Puritan minister dispensing hellfire sermons, Shaw preached through
his plays his vision of How Things Ought to Be. This included, at
various times, such harmless beliefs as vegetarianism and abstention
from alcohol, but they also included such vile beliefs as the endorsement of
fascism and a blind devotion to Stalinism. All had a cynical edge to
them, of disdain for lesser folk.
"Socialism is not charity nor loving-kindness, nor sympathy with the
poor, nor popular philanthropy ... but the economist's hatred of waste
and disorder, the aesthete's hatred of ugliness and dirt, the lawyer's
hatred of injustice, the doctor's hatred of disease, the saint's hatred
of the seven deadly sins." Basing society on hatred fit well with Shaw's
disdainful character....
Although Shaw
professed interest in helping laborers, like many socialists today, he
confined his personal relationships to the intellectual and social
elite. What friends he did make were primarily political allies within
his socialist circles. He was profoundly uncomfortable around ordinary
people, preferring words over actions and ideas over human contact when
it came to helping the poor....
Shaw came to see
value in brutality. As the old saying goes, you can't make an omelette
without breaking eggs, and Shaw wanted his omelette. He found a new hero
in Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists. Shaw
would describe Mosley admiringly, as "the only striking personality in
British politics." He also admired the Italian fascist Mussolini and,
even more, the communist Stalin. Shaw visited Stalin in Moscow, in 1931,
and found nothing disconcerting about Stalin's mass murders: "Our
question is not to kill or not to kill, but to select the right
people to kill ... [T]he essential difference between the Russian
liquidator with his pistol (or whatever his humane killer may be) and
the British hangman is that they do not operate on the same sort of
person." The playwright famous for inventing Shavian irony would,
without irony, recommend Joseph Stalin for the Nobel Peace Prize.
--
The Playwright in Spite of
Himself -- George Bernard Shaw: Man, Superman, and Socialism, by Laurie
Morrow
Oswald Mosley,
the 1930's BUF leader, modeled his party of Blackshirts on Mussolini. He
played a role in the "Hitler Project:" the installation of Nazism by the
City of London and Wall Street, in order to bring about the mutual
destruction of Germany and Russia, the two great European rivals of the
century to Anglo-American hegemony. Research points to the conclusion
that the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Fascists and Nazis were all countergangs
introduced by British Imperialism to debase rival nations.
--
Obama, The Postmodern Coup -- Making of
a Manchurian Candidate, by Webster Griffin Tarpley
Oswald Mosley began an affair with
Diana Mitford the daughter of the 2nd Baron Redesdale, one of his
wealthy supporters. Diana left her husband but Mosley refused to desert
his wife. It was not until Cynthia Curzon died of peritonitis that
Mosley agreed to marry Diana. In October 1936 Diana and Mosley secretly
married in the house of the Nazi propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.
Adolf Hitler was one of only six guests at the ceremony. While in Nazi
Germany Diana talked to Hitler about the possibility of establishing a
pro-Nazi radio station in Britain, but it never materialised....Mosley
appointed William Joyce, the infamous traitor who broadcast pro-Nazi
radio broadcasts from Germany, and was known as Lord Haw-Haw, as the
BUF’s full time Propaganda Director.
--
Life and Times of Sir
Oswald Mosley & The British Union of Fascists, by Victor Smart, John
Underwood Phillips
I do not know
whether you have any illusions left on the subject of education,
progress, and so forth. I have none. Any pamphleteer can show the way to
better things; but when there is no will there is no way. My nurse was
fond of remarking that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear,
and the more I see of the efforts of our churches and universities and
literary sages to raise the mass above its own level, the more convinced
I am that my nurse was right. Progress can do nothing but make the most
of us all as we are, and that most would clearly not be enough even if
those who are already raised out of the lowest abysses would allow the
others a chance. The bubble of Heredity has been pricked: the certainty
that acquirements are negligible as elements in practical heredity has
demolished the hopes of the educationists as well as the terrors of the
degeneracy mongers; and we know now that there is no hereditary
"governing class" any more than a hereditary hooliganism. We must either
breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy, which was forced on
us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet if Despotism failed
only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy,
which requires a whole population of capable voters: that is, of
political critics who, if they cannot govern in person for lack of spare
energy or specific talent for administration, can at least recognize and
appreciate capacity and benevolence in others, and so govern through
capably benevolent representatives? Where are such voters to be found
to-day? Nowhere. Promiscuous breeding has produced a weakness of
character that is too timid to face the full stringency of a thoroughly
competitive struggle for existence and too lazy and petty to organize
the commonwealth co-operatively. Being cowards, we defeat natural
selection under cover of philanthropy: being sluggards, we neglect
artificial selection under cover of delicacy and morality.
***
ANN. I love my mother, Jack.
TANNER. [working himself up into a sociological rage]
Is that any reason why you are not to call your soul your own? Oh, I
protest against this vile abjection of youth to age! look at fashionable
society as you know it. What does it pretend to be? An exquisite dance
of nymphs. What is it? A horrible procession of wretched girls, each in
the claws of a cynical, cunning, avaricious, disillusioned, ignorantly
experienced, foul-minded old woman whom she calls mother, and whose duty
it is to corrupt her mind and sell her to the highest bidder. Why do
these unhappy slaves marry anybody, however old and vile, sooner than
not marry at all? Because marriage is their only means of escape from
these decrepit fiends who hide their selfish ambitions, their jealous
hatreds of the young rivals who have supplanted them, under the mask of
maternal duty and family affection. Such things are abominable: the
voice of nature proclaims for the daughter a father's care and for the
son a mother's. The law for father and son and mother and daughter is
not the law of love: it is
the law of revolution, of emancipation, of
final supersession of the old and worn-out by the young and capable. I
tell you, the first duty of manhood and womanhood is a Declaration of
Independence: the man who pleads his father's authority is no man: the
woman who pleads her mother's authority is unfit to bear citizens to a
free people.
***
THE DEVIL. [heartily] Have I
the pleasure of again receiving a visit from the illustrious Commander
of Calatrava? [Coldly] Don Juan, your servant. [Politely] And a strange
lady? My respects, Senora.
ANA. Are you—
THE DEVIL. [bowing] Lucifer, at
your service.
ANA. I shall go mad.
***
DON JUAN. My
dear Ana, you are silly. Do you suppose heaven is like earth, where
people persuade themselves that what is done can be undone by
repentance; that what is spoken can be unspoken by withdrawing it;
that what is true can be annihilated by a general agreement to give
it the lie? No: heaven is the home of the masters of reality: that
is why I am going thither.
ANA. Thank you: I am going to
heaven for happiness. I have had quite enough of reality on earth.
DON JUAN. Then you must stay
here; for hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for
happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven, which is, as I tell you,
the home of the masters of reality, and from earth, which is the home of
the slaves of reality. The earth is a nursery in which men and women
play at being heros and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are
dragged down from their fool's paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold
and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves
of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a
century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance,
and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer, "Make me a
healthy animal." But here you escape the tyranny of the flesh; for here
you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an
illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There
are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious
questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you call
your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism,
your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no
hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your
pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a
universal melodrama. As our German friend put it in his poem, "the
poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and
the Eternal Feminine
draws us ever upward and on"—without getting us a step farther. And yet
you want to leave this paradise!
***
DON JUAN.
Since you have endured so much you may as well endure to the end.
Long before this sterilization which I described becomes more than a
clearly foreseen possibility, the reaction will begin. The great
central purpose of breeding the race, ay, breeding it to heights now
deemed superhuman: that purpose which is now hidden in a mephitic
cloud of love and romance and prudery and fastidiousness, will break
through into clear sunlight as a purpose no longer to be confused
with the gratification of personal fancies, the impossible
realization of boys' and girls' dreams of bliss, or the need of
older people for companionship or money. The plain-spoken marriage
services of the vernacular Churches will no longer be abbreviated
and half suppressed as indelicate. The sober decency, earnestness
and authority of their declaration of the real purpose of marriage
will be honored and accepted, whilst their romantic vowings and
pledgings and until-death-do-us-partings and the like will be
expunged as unbearable frivolities....
ANA. You see
you have to confess that marriage is necessary, though, according to
you, love is the slightest of all the relations.
DON JUAN.
How do you know that it is not the greatest of all the relations?
far too great to be a personal matter. Could your father have served
his country if he had refused to kill any enemy of Spain unless he
personally hated him? Can a woman serve her country if she refuses
to marry any man she does not personally love? You know it is not
so: the woman of noble birth marries as the man of noble birth
fights, on political and family grounds, not on personal ones.
***
THE DEVIL. What is the use of
knowing?
DON JUAN. Why, to be able to
choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the
direction of the least resistance. Does a ship sail to its destination
no better than a log drifts nowhither? The philosopher is Nature's
pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to
be in heaven is to steer....
THE DEVIL. Well, well, go your
way, Senor Don Juan. I prefer to be my own master and not the tool of
any blundering universal force. I know that beauty is good to look at;
that music is good to hear; that love is good to feel; and that they are
all good to think about and talk about. I know that to be well exercised
in these sensations, emotions, and studies is to be a refined and
cultivated being. Whatever they may say of me in churches on earth, I
know that it is universally admitted in good society that the prince of
Darkness is a gentleman; and that is enough for me. As to your Life
Force, which you think irresistible, it is the most resistible thing in
the world for a person of any character. But if you are naturally vulgar
and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into
religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls
from me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you
will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with
disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take
to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries
and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and
decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that
worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of
the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who
pursues the better before he has secured the good.
DON JUAN. But at least I shall
not be bored. The service of the Life Force has that advantage, at all
events. So fare you well, Senor Satan....
THE DEVIL. [gloomily] His going is
a political defeat. I cannot keep these Life Worshippers: they all
go....There
is something unnatural about these fellows. Do not listen to their
gospel, Senor Commander: it is dangerous. Beware of the pursuit of the
Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human. To a
man, horses and dogs and cats are mere species, outside the moral world.
Well, to the Superman, men and women are a mere species too, also
outside the moral world. This Don Juan was kind to women and courteous
to men as your daughter here was kind to her pet cats and dogs; but such
kindness is a denial of the exclusively human character of the soul.
THE STATUE. And who the deuce
is the Superman?
THE DEVIL. Oh, the latest
fashion among the Life Force fanatics. Did you not meet in Heaven, among
the new arrivals, that German Polish madman—what was his name?
Nietzsche?
***
Every
genuine religious person is a heretic and therefore a
revolutionist....Any person under the age of thirty, who, having any
knowledge of the existing social order, is not a revolutionist, is
an inferior.
***
IF there were no God, said the
eighteenth century Deist, it would be necessary to invent Him.
Now this XVIII century god was deus ex machina, the god who helped
those who could not help themselves, the god of the lazy and
incapable. The nineteenth century decided that there is indeed no
such god; and now Man must take in hand all the work that he used to
shirk with an idle prayer. He must, in effect, change himself into
the political Providence which he formerly conceived as god; and
such change is not only possible, but the only sort of change that
is real. The mere transfiguration of institutions, as from military
and priestly dominance to commercial and scientific dominance, from
commercial dominance to proletarian democracy, from slavery to
serfdom, from serfdom to capitalism, from monarchy to republicanism,
from polytheism to monotheism, from monotheism to atheism, from
atheism to pantheistic humanitarianism, from general illiteracy to
general literacy, from romance to realism, from realism to
mysticism, from metaphysics to physics, are all but changes from
Tweedledum to Tweedledee: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
[Google translate: The more things change, the more they stay the
same]. But the changes from the crab apple to the pippin, from the
wolf and fox to the house dog, from the charger of Henry V to the
brewer’s draught horse and the race-horse, are real; for here Man
has played the god, subduing Nature to his intention, and ennobling
or debasing Life for a set purpose. And what can be done with a wolf
can be done with a man....
The cry for
the Superman did not begin with Nietzsche, nor will it end with his
vogue. But it has always been silenced by the same question: what
kind of person is this Superman to be? You ask, not for a
super-apple, but for an eatable apple; not for a superhorse, but for
a horse of greater draught or velocity. Neither is it of any use to
ask for a Superman: you must furnish a specification of the sort of
man you want. Unfortunately you do not know what sort of man you
want. Some sort of goodlooking philosopher-athlete, with a handsome
healthy woman for his mate, perhaps....
For example,
we agree that we want superior mind; but we need not fall into the
football club folly of counting on this as a product of superior
body....If we must choose between a race of athletes and a race of
“good” men, let us have the athletes....
No doubt it
is easy to demonstrate that property will destroy society unless
society destroys it. No doubt, also, property has hitherto held its
own and destroyed all the empires. But that was because the
superficial objection to it (that it distributes social wealth and
the social labor burden in a grotesquely inequitable manner) did not
threaten the existence of the race, but only the individual
happiness of its units, and finally the maintenance of some
irrelevant political form or other, such as a nation, an empire, or
the like. Now as happiness never matters to Nature, as she neither
recognizes flags and frontiers nor cares a straw whether the
economic system adopted by a society is feudal, capitalistic, or
collectivist, provided it keeps the race afoot (the hive and the
anthill being as acceptable to her as Utopia), the demonstrations of
Socialists, though irrefutable, will never make any serious
impression on property....
But we have
now reached the stage of international organization. Man’s political
capacity and magnanimity are clearly beaten by the vastness and
complexity of the problems forced on him....
And so, if
the Superman is to come, he must be born of Woman by Man’s
intentional and well-considered contrivance. Conviction of this will
smash everything that opposes it. Even Property and Marriage, which
laugh at the laborer’s petty complaint that he is defrauded of
“surplus value,” and at the domestic miseries of the slaves of the
wedding ring, will themselves be laughed aside as the lightest of
trifles if they cross this conception when it becomes a fully
realized vital purpose of the race.
That they
must cross it becomes obvious the moment we acknowledge the futility
of breeding men for special qualities as we breed cocks for game,
greyhounds for speed, or sheep for mutton. What is really important
in Man is the part of him that we do not yet understand. Of much of
it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious
of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we
neglect it we die. We are therefore driven to the conclusion that
when we have carried selection as far as we can by rejecting from
the list of eligible parents all persons who are uninteresting,
unpromising, or blemished without any set-off, we shall still have
to trust to the guidance of fancy (alias Voice of Nature), both in
the breeders and the parents, for that superiority in the
unconscious self which will be the true characteristic of the
Superman....
But pray are
we to try to correct our diseased stocks by infecting our healthy
stocks with them? Clearly the attraction which disease has for
diseased people is beneficial to the race. If two really unhealthy
people get married, they will, as likely as not, have a great number
of children who will all die before they reach maturity. This is a
far more satisfactory arrangement than the tragedy of a union
between a healthy and an unhealthy person. Though more costly than
sterilization of the unhealthy, it has the enormous advantage that
in the event of our notions of health and unhealth being erroneous
(which to some extent they most certainly are), the error will be
corrected by experience instead of confirmed by evasion.
One fact
must be faced resolutely, in spite of the shrieks of the romantic.
There is no evidence that the best citizens are the offspring of
congenial marriages, or that a conflict of temperament is not a
highly important part of what breeders call crossing....But mating
such couples must clearly not involve marrying them. But
mating such couples must clearly not involve marrying them. In
conjugation two complementary persons may supply one another’s
deficiencies: in the domestic partnership of marriage they only feel
them and suffer from them. Thus the son of a robust, cheerful,
eupeptic British country squire, with the tastes and range of his
class, and of a clever, imaginative, intellectual, highly civilized
Jewess, might be very superior to both his parents; but it is not
likely that the Jewess would find the squire an interesting
companion, or his habits, his friends, his place and mode of life
congenial to her. Therefore marriage, whilst it is made an
indispensable condition of mating, will delay the advent of the
Superman as effectually as Property, and will be modified by the
impulse towards him just as effectually....
At certain
moments there may even be a considerable material advance, as when
the conquest of political power by the working class produces a
better distribution of wealth through the simple action of the
selfishness of the new masters; but all this is mere readjustment
and reformation: until the heart and mind of the people is changed
the very greatest man will no more dare to govern on the assumption
that all are as great as he than a drover dare leave his flock to
find its way through the streets as he himself would. Until there is
an England in which every man is a Cromwell, a France in which every
man is a Napoleon, a Rome in which every man is a Cæsar, a Germany
in which every man is a Luther plus a Goethe, the world will be no
more improved by its heroes than a Brixton villa is improved by the
pyramid of Cheops. The production of such nations is the only real
change possible to us....
The need for
the Superman is, in its most imperative aspect, a political one. We
have been driven to Proletarian Democracy by the failure of all the
alternative systems; for these depended on the existence of Supermen
acting as despots or oligarchs; and not only were these Supermen not
always or even often forthcoming at the right moment and in an
eligible social position, but when they were forthcoming they could
not, except for a short time and by morally suicidal coercive
methods, impose superhumanity on those whom they governed; so, by
mere force of “human nature,” government by consent of the governed
has supplanted the old plan of governing the citizen as a
public-schoolboy is governed....
At all
events Australia and Canada, which are virtually protected
democratic republics, and France and the United States, which are
avowedly independent democratic republics, are neither healthy,
wealthy, nor wise; and they would be worse instead of better if
their popular ministers were not experts in the art of dodging
popular enthusiasms and duping popular ignorance....
The only
fundamental and possible Socialism is the socialization of the
selective breeding of Man: in other terms, of human evolution. We
must eliminate the Yahoo, or his vote will wreck the
commonwealth....
That may
mean that we must establish a State Department of Evolution, with a
seat in the Cabinet for its chief, and a revenue to defray the cost
of direct State experiments, and provide inducements to private
persons to achieve successful results. It may mean a private society
or a chartered company for the improvement of human live stock. But
for the present it is far more likely to mean a blatant repudiation
of such proposals as indecent and immoral, with, nevertheless, a
general secret pushing of the human will in the repudiated
direction; so that all sorts of institutions and public authorities
will under some pretext or other feel their way furtively towards
the Superman. Mr. Graham Wallas has already ventured to suggest, as
Chairman of the School Management Committee of the London School
Board, that the accepted policy of the Sterilization of the
Schoolmistress, however administratively convenient, is open to
criticism from the national stock-breeding point of view; and this
is as good an example as any of the way in which the drift towards
the Superman may operate in spite of all our hypocrisies....
Even a joint
stock human stud farm (piously disguised as a reformed Foundling
Hospital or something of that sort) might well, under proper
inspection and regulation, produce better results than our present
reliance on promiscuous marriage. It may be objected that when an
ordinary contractor produces stores for sale to the Government, and
the Government rejects them as not up to the required standard, the
condemned goods are either sold for what they will fetch or else
scrapped: that is, treated as waste material; whereas if the goods
consisted of human beings, all that could be done would be to let
them loose or send them to the nearest workhouse. But there is
nothing new in private enterprise throwing its human refuse on the
cheap labor market and the workhouse; and the refuse of the new
industry would presumably be better bred than the staple product of
ordinary poverty....
It will have
to be handled by statesmen with character enough to tell our
democracy and plutocracy that statecraft does not consist in
flattering their follies or applying their suburban standards of
propriety to the affairs of four continents. The matter must
be taken up either by the State or by some organization strong
enough to impose respect upon the State....
Let those
who think the whole conception of intelligent breeding absurd and
scandalous ask themselves why George IV was not allowed to choose
his own wife whilst any tinker could marry whom he pleased? Simply
because it did not matter a rap politically whom the tinker married,
whereas it mattered very much whom the king married. The way in
which all considerations of the king’s personal rights, of the
claims of the heart, of the sanctity of the marriage oath, and of
romantic morality crumpled up before this political need shews how
negligible all these apparently irresistible prejudices are when
they come into conflict with the demand for quality in our rulers.
We learn the same lesson from the case of the soldier, whose
marriage, when it is permitted at all, is despotically controlled
with a view solely to military efficiency....
On the other
hand a sense of the social importance of the tinker’s marriage has
been steadily growing. We have made a public matter of his wife’s
health in the month after her confinement. We have taken the minds
of his children out of his hands and put them into those of our
State schoolmaster. We shall presently make their bodily nourishment
independent of him. But they are still riff-raff; and to hand the
country over to riff-raff is national suicide, since riff-raff can
neither govern nor will let anyone else govern except the highest
bidder of bread and circuses. There is no public enthusiast
alive of twenty years’ practical democratic experience who believes
in the political adequacy of the electorate or of the bodies it
elects. The overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity
for the Superman. Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to
understand them. But every Englishman loves and desires a
pedigree....
A conference
on the subject is the next step needed. It will be attended by men
and women who, no longer believing that they can live for ever, are
seeking for some immortal work into which they can build the best of
themselves before their refuse is thrown into that arch dust
destructor, the cremation furnace.
--
Man and Superman: A
Comedy and a Philosophy, by Bernard Shaw
NEWTON: A CULTIST KOOK
The next phase of the corruption of
science by Venice depends on a rather obscure Cambridge don by the name
of Isaac Newton. For the oligarchy, Newton and Galileo are the only two
contenders for the honor of being the most influential thinkers of their
faction since Aristotle himself. The British oligarchy praises Newton as
the founder of modern science. But, at the same time, they have been
unable to keep secret the fact that
Newton was a raving irrationalist,
a cultist kook. Among the oligarchs, it was the British economist
Lord John Maynard Keynes and a fellow Cambridge graduate who began to
open the black box of Newton's real character. Was Newton the first and
greatest of the modern scientists, the practitioner of cold and
untinctured reason? No, said Keynes, Newton was not the first of the Age
of Reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians
and Sumerians, the last wonderful child to whom the Magi could do
sincere and appropriate homage. Keynes based his view on the contents of
a box. What was in the box? The box contained papers which Newton had
packed up when he left Cambridge for London in 1696, ending his
Cambridge career and beginning his new life in London as member and
president of the British Royal Society, director of the mint, resident
magus of the new British Empire.
Inside the box were manuscripts and
papers totaling some 1.2 million words. After Newton's death, Bishop
Horsley was asked to inspect the box, with a view to publication, but
when he saw the contents, he recoiled in horror and slammed the lid. A
century passed. Newton's nineteenth-century biographer, Sir David
Brewster, looked into the box. He decided to save Newton's reputation by
printing a few selections, but he falsified the rest with straight
fibbing, as Keynes says. The box became known as the Portsmouth Papers.
A few mathematical papers were given to Cambridge in 1888. In 1936, the
current owner, Lord Lymington, needed money, so he had the rest
auctioned off. Keynes bought as many as he could, but other papers were
scattered from Jerusalem to America.
As Keynes points out, Newton was a
suspicious, paranoid, unstable personality. In 1692, Newton had a
nervous breakdown and never regained his former consistency of mind.
Pepys and Locke thought that he had become deranged. Newton emerged from
his breakdown slightly "gaga." As Keynes stresses, Newton "was wholly
aloof from women," although he had some close young male friends. He
once angrily accused John Locke of trying to embroil him with women.
In the past decades, the lid of the box
has been partially and grudgingly opened by the Anglophile scholars who
are the keepers of the Newton myth. What can we see inside the box?
First, Newton was a supporter of the
Arian heresy. He denied and attacked the Holy Trinity, and therefore
also the Filioque and the concept of Imago Viva Dei. Keynes thought
that Newton was "a Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides," which
suggests that he was a Cabalist. For Newton, to worship Christ as
God was idolatry and a mortal sin. Even in the Church of England, Newton
had to keep these views secret or face ostracism.
ALCHEMY AND GREEN LIONS
Newton's real interest was not
mathematics or astronomy. It was
alchemy. His laboratory at Trinity College, Cambridge was fitted out
for alchemy. Here, his
friends said, the fires never went out during six weeks of the spring
and six weeks of the autumn. And what is alchemy? What kind of research
was Newton doing? His sources were books like the "Theatrum Chemicum
Britannicum" of Elias Ashmole, the Rosicrucian leader of British
speculative Freemasonry. Newton owned all six heavy quarto volumes of
Ashmole.
The goal of the alchemists was the
quest for the mythical philosopher's stone, which would permit the
alchemist to transmute lead and other base metals into gold. The
alchemists hoped the philosopher's stone would give them other magical
powers, such as rejuvenation and eternal youth.
Alchemy also involved the relations
between the astrological influences of the planets and the behavior of
chemicals. One treatise that dealt with these issues was the
"Metamorphosis of the Planets." [by Johannes de Monte-Snyder] Since the
planet Jupiter had precedence among the planets, it also occupied a
privileged position among the reagents of alchemy. Newton expressed this
with a picture he drew of Jupiter Enthroned on the obverse of the title
page of this book.
What were Newton's findings? Let him
speak for himself: "Concerning Magnesia of the green Lion. It is called
Prometheus & the Chameleon. Also Androgyne, and virgin verdant earth in
which the Sun has never cast its rays although he is its father and the
moon its mother. Also common mercury, dew of heaven which makes the
earth fertile, nitre of the wise. Instructio de arbore solari. It is the
Saturnine stone." This would appear to have been written in the 1670s. A
sample from the 1690s: "Now this green earth is the Green Ladies of B.
Valentine the beautifully green Venus and the green Venereal emerald and
green earth of Snyders with which he fed his lunary Mercury and by
virtue of which Diana was to bring forth children and out of which saith
Ripley the blood of the green Lyon is drawn in the beginning of the
work."
During the 1680s Newton also composed a
series of aphorisms of alchemy, the sixth of which reads as follows:
"The young new born king is nourished in a bigger heat with milk drawn
by destellation from the putrefied matter of the second work. With this
milk he must be imbibed seven times to putrefy him sufficiently and then
dococted to the white and red, and in passing to the red he must be
imbibed with a little red oil to fortify the solary nature and make the
red stone more fluxible. And this may be called the third work. The
first goes on no further than to putrefaction, the second goes to the
white and the third to the red." (Westfall, pp. 292, 293, 358).
And so it goes for more than a million
words, with Green Lions, Androgynes, male and female principles, Pan and
Osiris. Truly it has been said that Newton had probed the literature of
alchemy as it had never been probed before or since, all during the time
he was supposedly writing his Principia Mathematica. In addition, he
drew up plans for King Solomon's Temple, and later a chronology of
Biblical events which foreshortened that history by cutting out several
hundred years.
NEWTON'S "DISCOVERIES"
And what about Newton's supposed
discoveries? Upon closer scrutiny, it turns out that he had no
discoveries. Take, for example, Newton's alleged law of universal
gravitation, which states that the force of attraction of two point
masses is equal to the product of the two masses divided by the square
of the distance between them, times a constant. This is Newton's
so-called inverse square law. It has long been known that this was not
really a new discovery, but rather derived by some tinkering from
Kepler's Third Law. Kepler had established that the cube of a planet's
distance from the Sun divided by the square of its year always equaled a
constant. By supplementing this with Huygens's formula for centrifugal
acceleration and making some substitutions, you can obtain the inverse
square relationship. This issue is settled in the appendices to The
Science of Christian Economy [by Lyndon LaRouche, Washington, D.C.:
Schiller Institute, 1991]. But the partisans of Newton still claim that
Newton explained gravity.
By opening the lid of the box, we find
that Newton himself confesses, in an unpublished note, that his great
achievement was cribbed from Kepler. Newton wrote: "...I began to think
of gravity extending to the Orb of the Moon and (having found out how to
estimate the force with which a globe revolving presses the surface of a
sphere) from Kepler's rule of the periodical times of the Planets being
in sesquialterate proportion of their distances from the center of their
Orbs, I deduced that the forces which keep the Planets in their Orbs
must be reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers
about which they revolve...." (Westfall, 143). Newton "arrived at the
inverse square relation by substituting Kepler's Third Law into
Huygens's recently published formula for centrifugal force" (Westfall,
402). Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren claimed to have done the same thing
at about the same time.
Newton's love of alchemy and magic
surfaces as the basis of his outlook, including in his supposed
scientific writings. In his
"Opticks," he asks, "Have not the small particles of bodies certain
powers, virtues, or forces, by which they act at a distance.... How
those attractions may be performed, I do not here consider. What I call
attraction may be performed by Impulse, or some other means unknown to
me." This is Newton's notion of gravity as action at a distance, which
Leibniz rightly mocked as black magic. Newton's system was unable to
describe anything beyond the interaction of two bodies, and supposed an
entropic universe that would have wound down like clockwork if not
periodically re-wound. Newton also wrote of an electric spirit, and of a
mysterious medium he called the ether. What the basis of these is
in alchemy is not clear.
Then there is the story of Newton's
invention of the calculus. In reality, Newton never in his entire life
described a calculus. He never had one. What he cooked up was a theory
of so-called fluxions and infinite series. This was not a calculus and
quickly sank into oblivion when it was published nine years after
Newton's death. By 1710, European scientists had been working with
Leibniz's calculus for several decades. It was about that time that
Newton and the British Royal Society launched their campaign to claim
that Newton had actually invented the calculus in 1671, although for
some strange reason he had never said anything about it in public print
during a period of 30 years. This was supplemented by a second
allegation, that Leibniz was a plagiarist who had copied his calculus
from Newton after some conversations and letters exchanged between the
two during the 1670s. These slanders against Leibniz were written up by
Newton and put forward in 1715 as the official verdict of the British
Royal Society. The same line was churned out by scurrilous hack writers
directed by Newton. But scientists in continental Europe, and especially
the decisive French Academy of Sciences, were not at all convinced by
Newton's case. Newton's reputation on the continent was at best modest,
and certainly not exalted. There was resistance against Newton in
England, with a hard core of 20-25% of anti-Newton feeling within the
Royal Society itself. How then did the current myth of Newton the
scientist originate?
--
How the Dead Souls of Venice
Corrupted Science, by Webster Griffin Tarpley |
