Posted on by Stoddard Martin

The genial and the unintelligible – George Santayana on Ezra Pound

STODDARD MARTIN traces the connections and contrasts of two utterly different Americans

George Santayana and Ezra Pound would have known of one another for decades before they ever corresponded, let alone met. Twenty-two years apart in age, they were at least a generation distant in sensibility and more than that in temperament. But Santayana was a poet at heart, if a philosopher in the world, and Pound a poet in the world, if philosopher at heart. Both were mainly products of the American northeast, though neither was born there. Both were dropouts from academia and expatriates in Europe for much of their life, principally and finally in Italy. Santayana ended in a modest room in a convent in Rome under the care of the Little Sisters of Mary, Pound in a workman’s cottage in a relative backwater of Venice under the care of the mother of his daughter Mary.

T. S. Eliot had studied under Santayana at Harvard, and Santayana’s protégé Daniel Cory attended Pound’s Ezuversity in Rapallo in the early 1930s. The former may have provided a link between Pound and Santayana in thought, the latter would in person. A general impression had formed for each of the other before association. In 1928 we find Santayana, living in Paris, writing to a young man who has sent him some sonnets:

I have just been reading hard words written by Mr Ezra Pound on the subject of the sonnets in The Dial for this month [i]

He praises the young man for aperçus shared with Homer but chastises him for “rebelling” against his chosen form’s strict tradition of ten syllables per line. The letter continues:

Unless you can say these things better than Homer and company people will prefer to read about them in them rather than in you

It concludes:

Words, words, words are the foundation of everything – in literature. If you feel the force of each word, and its penumbra of association, the rest will take care of itself, and if ever you have anything to say, it will say itself for you magnificently

It is intriguing to speculate that this judgement may have been stimulated by Pound as much as by its recipient. Santayana’s last sentence suggests respect for an imagist method, but his view of a modernist treatment of Homer is ominous. He seems to be developing a response to a modernist aesthetic akin to Pound’s at this stage; later he will be more specific. In 1935 he writes to a young woman who has sent him her collection, praising her for “freedom from religion”, a “clear view of truth” and “naturalism” [ii]. As to her free verse, he cites Pound’s Quia Pauper Amavi, which he’s been reading:

You would deceive nobody into mistaking you for a real modern. Though your restrained voice may not attract attention so scandalously [as Pound’s], I am sure that you will give more pleasure to those who do hear you, and will be more gratefully received

Ouch. The versifier of the 1890s clearly finds it hard to adjust to what a new age is up to.

In 1936 Santayana writes to another admirer about Faulkner’s Sanctuary:

Like all these recent writers, the author is too lazy and self-indulgent and throws off what comes to him in a sort of dream, expecting the devoted reader to run about after him, sniffing at all the droppings of his mind. I am not a psychological dog and require my dog biscuit to be clearly set down for me in a decent plate with proper ceremony [iii]

Two months later, half-regretting his verdict, he qualifies it to the same recipient:

What I say about ‘droppings’ would be more applicable to other people – e.g. Ezra Pound – than to [Faulkner]

Ouch again. Such a reaction would not escape the courteous Santayana’s lips when he finally met Pound in 1939; but even given their frequent correspondence during the War, he could praise yet another young person who would send him unsolicited poems for not “threatening” his readers with

…the horror, for instance, of passing in Ezra Pound, who can write good verse, into the most vulgar journalese, and the most insolent irrelevance [iv]

That first meeting took place in Venice. Pound’s biographer David Moody records how Pound had written to Santayana, “whose clarity and integrity of mind he admired”, seeking “sidelights” on his “notes to [Guido] Cavalcanti (1) and one or two Chinese texts” [v]. They met at the Hotel Danieli, where the well-off philosopher liked to plant himself for a few weeks every year. Pound arrived with his 13 years-old daughter from her mother’s modest dwelling on the far side of the Grand Canal. Santayana, Pound would write to Eliot, “failed to see the connection” between Cavalcanti, Chinese ideograms and Scotus Erigena (2). Santayana for his part felt “talked at”, Moody surmises, and at one point he retaliated with a comment from The Education of Henry Adams which Pound would remember in Canto 74: “Teach? At Harvard?/Teach? It cannot be done”. Pound’s verdict on the visit, reported by his daughter years later, was that it was “a relief to talk philosophy with someone completely honest – a nice mind”.

Here we might pause to consider the social milieu. Santayana was not only well-off but well-connected. Less than a decade before, he had given away John D. Rockefeller’s favourite granddaughter in marriage to the Marquis de Cuevas when her father, Santayana’s dear friend the philosopher Charles Strong, failed to turn up [vi]. Santayana was of an echelon of American expatriate depicted in Henry James, whose brother William had been his instructor and colleague in the philosophy department at Harvard [vii]. A lifelong bachelor, Santayana was unencumbered by practicalities such as might interfere with aesthetic or intellectual pursuits. An admired stylist in English, he was also fluent in his native Spanish and French and to large extent Italian and German. Respected by almost all with whom he came into contact, he was belittled only by a few British empiricists such as Bertrand Russell – hardly a mark against him for the increasingly Anglophobic Pound. He was, in short, a character to appeal to the poet on many bases: American, expatriate, linguistic. He was also a socially desirable mark for an Idaho-Yankee arguably less secure in pedigree and definitely less so in income.

A crucial connective would be the War, during which both writers were essentially trapped in Italy [viii]. This was not wholly a matter of hardship: both were confirmed Italophiles, and Santayana at that time was politically indifferent as between liberal democracy and fascism. But everyone in situ in Italy at the time would share in the deprivation of heat and electricity and food as it grew, and Santayana’s chronic bronchitis worsened. What he and Pound had most in common perhaps was being cut off from funds in the UK and US and from ability to communicate with publishers. Santayana’s manuscripts had to be smuggled out to Scribner’s via the Vatican and the American embassy in Madrid. During this era, Pound was much in Rome, as we know, and visited the philosopher who, we are told, was

…impressed by Pound’s unusual appearance (his mass of frizzy red hair) and manner… Some of [his] letters, like his radio broadcasts for the Mussolini government, Santayana found incomprehensible

To Cory he would write in May ’41:

Pound was here yesterday, quite mad… Complains of people’s utter ignorance of economics, and says that it is the root of all trouble. And half his speech is indecipherable to me. I wonder if he is understood when he speaks through the radio. Why does he talk that way? Is it incapacity, or inspiration? Perhaps 9/10th the one and 1/10th the other

Such a critique is scarcely surprising. Santayana’s early writing on literature had attacked a vogue for Browning and Whitman in America of Pound’s youth.

It is a mere euphemism… to call this perpetual vagrancy a development of the soul… Crude experience is [its] only end, the endless struggle [its] only ideal… self-serving subjectivity… poetry of barbarism… stepchild of German romanticism and idealism [ix]

No fan of the transcendentalists, Santayana was in favour of objectivity vs. “emotional slither” and of an authorial use of personae to disguise personal “vent”. In such principles we may see elements of his later attraction to, bemusement by, and repulsion from Pound. “Santayana was capable of sensing danger where others felt only excitement” in the revolt against “old fogeyism in the Edwardian era”. Not for this patrician poet-philosopher to inveigh against effeminacy in American letters such as the author of Patria Mia would. Yet both had fled some tendency common to their formative tradition.

What brought them together was almost certainly one-sided: Pound’s desire for a grand old man’s imprimatur, as Moody implies. In an attempt to provide a pointer for the poet’s elusive paradiso, Santayana lent Pound a copy of his Realms of Spirit, fourth and most recently finished part of his magnum opus on religious impulses and much else. Evidently sceptical that Pound might actually read the book, Santayana writes in afterthought,

Please keep in mind that I don’t believe anything existent can be defined, only indicated; so that all sorts of different figures or words pointed at are better than any one name… Spirit is not an independent substance or centre with a persistent individuality: only a spark of light [x]

He goes on to report that he has been perusing a volume by the historian Brooks Adams, Henry’s racially biased brother, which Pound had apparently recommended to him, and states that he is disappointed by its “lack of philosophy”. Such flickers of incompatible mindset may be reflected in a paragraph Pound would insert a year later into one of his Rome Broadcasts, about Marx and materialism [xi]:

George Santayana calls himself a materialist. It rather shocked old William James. Ole William told young George, he was younger at that stage of world history, that his, Santayana’s philosophy was organized rottenness. I cannot agree with fuzzy old James. It appears to me that George Santayana rather agrees with Thomas Aquinas. I mean the materialist Santayana ends up by writin’ a book called The Realm of Spirit [sic]. I occasionally plunge into the work to calm my heated mind. I mean when I am not up to Confucius and Mencius. And Thomas Aquinas says somewhere that the soul is the first ACT of an organic body. Well, I ask George Santayana what THAT means. And he says entelechy, which seems to me to be dodgin’ behind a Greek word. But anyhow, a materialist definition of the soul seems to be that it is the first act, or first action, or first condition of an organic body. Don’t ASK me. I am merely trying to show how far the word or idea materialist can be stretched by people who play with abstractions

Santayana’s copy of Realms of Spirit, apparently his sole one, was never returned [xii] – lost in Pound’s flight following the fall of Rome, we assume, or during his later incarceration for treason. There is no clarity about how much Pound read of it or of Santayana’s earlier work, such as Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), which might have contained much to Pound’s taste. Communication between the two broke off until May ’46, by which time Santayana was back in funds and being fêted for a novel and a fragment of autobiography which had become bestsellers in the United States as he shivered through to the War’s end. To Pound, now shut in but not shut up in a ward for the insane at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington D.C., he writes: “I am glad to hear directly from you” [xiii]. He goes on to discuss Pound’s Ballad of the Goodly Fere, which he caricatures as a picture of “Christ qua gangster [that] only makes me laugh”. This leads him to speculate that his own recent work on “the idea of Christ as pure spirit in the flesh… would perhaps turn your stomach.” Good-natured badinage, but not without spike. Shortly afterwards, Santayana asks his publisher to send Pound a copy of his book The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, which Pound has requested in a letter written “partly in Chinese characters” [xiv].

An individual of Santayana’s courtesy could not fail to respond to a fellow writer, especially one in trouble, but often it was not easy. A month after the preceding, we find him writing to Dorothy Pound thanking her for posting Ezra’s “letter telling me that p. 6 of my book had reconciled him to the frivolity of the rest.”[xv] “I have also received his new canto,” Santayana reports, “and should have written to him about it if a ray of light from it had been able to pierce my thick skull. But really I can’t catch the drift of his allusions.” He adds that Pound’s “subjectivity” resembles his own in his autobiographical People and Places, if at a distance. This remark seems motivated in part, if not all, by politesse. To his publisher, Cory and others he vents.

From Ezra Pound I continue to receive communications: the last was stark mad: a few scattered unintelligible abbreviations on a large sheet of paper, and nothing else. Yet the address, although fantastically scrawled, was quite correct and intelligible. His madness may be spasmodic only [xvi]

At around this time Santayana’s attention was drawn to Robert Lowell among young American poets, and he struck up a correspondence with him rivalling that with Cory. One of their first exchanges is about Pound. “I have received a letter of his”, Santayana tells Lowell,

…with a Chinese character in the middle of the page, and below, in ‘traditional’ English the maxim: ‘Respect the intelligence of a cherry that can make cherries.’ I am touched by his remembering me, as I have not answered one or two earlier letters that were wholly unintelligible [xvii]

In a subsequent letter he asks Lowell why Pound favours Propertius (3); this is in prelude to observing,

It is a pity that he prints so many mistakes in his foreign languages, even in the Greek alphabet. I thought some passages in these ‘Cantos’ [the Pisan] very good; but why so much trash? I must write to him [ xviii]

This about sums it up. Pound has a soupçon of recognisable quality for Santayana but is shoddy and unintelligible, and he would really prefer for the poet to take a hint and stop pestering him with missives, but then rather repents a lack of grace in the sentiment.

For one of Santayana’s fastidiousness, it boils down to taste. “I don’t agree in taste at all with Ezra Pound,” he remarks to another correspondent,

…whom Eliot (once a pupil of mine) thought the ‘best of workmen’, quoting Dante about the most artificially laboured of Provençal poets… Matters of taste are matters of sympathy [xix]

Rowing back again towards repentance, he adds that differences in taste are “not a sin”. To another correspondent in 1950 he complains of an article in The TLS alleging that “the chief benefit of Browning for our times” is that he “inspired the early poems of Pound” [xx]. “He, who was as good a dramatist as Shakespeare!” Santayana fumes in defence of a bard whom, as we have seen, he attacked roundly when an aspiring young poet. In a letter to his publisher about his own Christ book, Santayana varies the complaint, deploring that the work of Browning, which provides “a better (because more cheerful) moral guide than the Sermon on the Mount” should “survive only as a contributor to the poetry of Ezra Pound!” [xxi]

Santayana’s ill-temper may have been exacerbated by a concurrent episode with the poet Peter Russell, an acolyte of Pound’s who turned up at his door soliciting a passage for his journal NINE from the old man’s translation of Tibullus.[xxii] Russell went on to publish an article about the visit, “An Afternoon with George Santayana”, which Santayana found “a surprising travesty of what I said to him, especially about Mr T. S. Eliot and Mr Ezra Pound.”[xxiii] What in fact had he said about the two poets? In an exchange with Lowell about Racine, Santayana would chide that, whereas Racine’s work had plot, Lowell’s was like Pound’s: in danger of “furnish[ing] landscape splendidly, but leav[ing] us confused about your plot and characters.”[xxiv] Later when Cory reports that Lowell has called Pound “a great man”, Santayana responds crossly.[xxv] Later still, in a letter to an old Oxford acquaintance, he sheds some light on emotions lurking beneath these reactions:

I have recently become deeply interested in the new American poets. I have long known Ezra Pound, and I saw him often here during the war, but was never reconciled to his ways in speech or in writing. But Robert Lowell from the first attracted me for various paradoxes that I found realised in him; and his rugged personality now that I have seen him, has not frightened me away [xxvi]

The response is fundamentally based on aesthetics. Pound was antipathetic to Santayana in a way that Lowell was not. A streak of homoeroticism may lurk in it, also an affinity for the echt-New England patrician Lowell’s reaction against the Puritanism of his background in favour of an older Catholic tradition.[xxvii] Despite the Europhilia of his expatriation, Pound would rarely strain for a quietude or “Ewig weibliche” (4) (Mariolatry) intrinsic to this and congenial to Santayana. That said, it is worth noting that Santayana’s last effort veered like much of errant Ezra’s towards this world and its politics. A year before his death, Santayana wrote to his publisher, then preparing his book Dominations and Powers:

I have received a comparatively clear letter from Ezra Pound in which he writes ‘What about this book of yours? Are your publishers trying to suppress your indecorous opinions? Or is it merely the usual American tempo – molasses flowing uphill below zero?’… To disperse his morbid fears, will you please add his name and send him a copy… with my compliments? [xxviii]

A month later he reports to Lowell:

Pound has written me quite intelligibly and in a placid mood, on receiving my book. I am very glad I sent it to him [xxix]

After Santayana’s death in 1952, it was left to Cory to collate his papers and publish what of them appeared not to deserve oblivion. There was sufficient money and academic interest to provide annotated editions; Cory in 1963 also published a memoir based on the vast bulk of letters the philosopher had written to him since their first meeting in 1927. From these one cannot fail to see that Santayana never stopped struggling to come to terms with the expatriate moderns who dominated poetry in his later years. His friend Logan Pearsall Smith had warned Cory when a young man in London not to “go slumming with such an eccentric fraud [as Eliot]”[xxx]; Santayana would repeat this in various housebroken guises:

Eliot is entangled in his own coils. How can he publish such an indecent article as that of Ezra Pound in this number of The Criterion? [xxxi]

He deprecates Eliot for finding Pound “magnificent” and questions the value of his judgement overall. The Uses of Poetry and the Uses of Criticism he judges damningly “English” –

I don’t think Englishmen are inclined to think, unless there is something wrong with them [xxxii]

After Strange Gods, he would find more impressive, but remarks with faint praise: “Eliot is honest and brave, but limited.”[xxxiii] Murder in the Cathedral elicits the quip,

England is becoming stranger and stranger to me, and less and less appealing. I once loved it so much that this is rather a tragedy [xxxiv]

Eliot, it seems, could feel the vibrations. Cory prodded him into publishing an essay on Santayana’s later philosophy but reported his impression that Eliot was reluctant to revive interest in the Hispano-American for an English audience.[xxxv] No doubt aware of the antipathy of Russell & Co. – “nothing original in Santayana: all Plato and Leibniz” [xxxvi] – the politic Eliot may have felt it rash to sail against a prevailing wind. Reception and response of this kind in England might suggest a growing similarity between Santayana and Pound, but if so, it did not lead to solidarity. Cory, in Santayana’s pocket, refused Eliot’s request to review Pound’s Guide to Kulchur; and Santayana would scold Cory for encouraging Pound to send him the book, saying that he would return it at once as he was only an admirer of “putrid Petrarch” or “miserable Milton” [xxxvii]. Politic himself, Cory did manage to cajole Eliot into letting him review Realms of Truth for The Criterion [xxxviii], so perhaps Eliot’s view of Santayana was in fact more favourable than it appeared, or improved over time: after he closed The Criterion, he would join Pound in inviting the philosopher to help them launch a journal about education; Santayana declined the honour, and the idea was dropped.[xxxix]

Disillusionment with England and its bien-pensant certainly grew in Santayana during the War and after. He would express qualified regard for works by Cyril Connolly, Karl Popper, Arnold Toynbee and others [xl], but Russell would continue to annoy him, prompting the remark, “I feel how inhuman these high-principled self-righteous people are” [xli]. He recalls with contempt a “personal shamming involved” in mixing with such English folk, citing not only Russell but Lady Ottoline Morrell [xlii]. Reading Osbert Sitwell moves him to inveigh, “This aristocracy deserve[s] to disappear more than the French” [xliii]; and C. S. Lewis earns his disdain for a “cheap way of summing things up in two words and announcing that all else is effete”. [xliv] The scars of war, as for Pound, may have added intensity to these reactions; but there is substance in them as well. The “error of British empiricism”, Santayana would muse, “is that it reduces ideas from essences to perceptions” [xlv] – a crucial distinction, leading him to reflect, “That traditional British philosophers dislike me is perfectly natural”.[xlvi] In his view Russell et al had “missed the bus… for all [their] talent and omnipotence.”[xlvii] In the end “science is only a side development” to religion; “the bulk of human experience is incorrigibly poetical”; and “the important thing [is] to retain a sense of piety”.[xlviii]

The extent to which a half-broken and aged Ezra Pound would come to similar attitudes is debatable. As Santayana in later years laboured to understand more of the method of his two “great” American expatriate successors [xlix], so perhaps Pound came to aspire to a touch of a grace he could not have failed to glimpse in their grand predecessor. Perhaps this is part of why, when the foremost disciple of Santayana visited him in Venice in 1966, Pound chose the moment to remark that he had

…botched it… I picked out this and that thing that interested me, and then jumbled them in a bag. But that’s not the way to make… a work of art [l]

This verdict, reported by Cory, has disarmed or qualified formidable criticism for many, as would the equally famous aside reported by Allen Ginsberg not long after about “that stupid suburban prejudice [which] spoiled the whole thing”. But how much an otherwise substantially laconic old man genuinely meant these apparent repentances is anyone’s guess. It is plausible that, as is probable at his first meeting an eminent, well-heeled philosopher three decades before, Pound may in part have been trying simply to charm his interlocutor with a becoming humility and/or imitative courtesy.

In the words of Will Durant[li], whose vastly popular writings on philosophy Pound would have known of more than a decade before that meeting, Santayana had

…the soul of a Spanish grandee grafted upon the stock of the gentle Emerson; a refined mixture of Mediterranean aristocracy with New England individualism… the accent of some pagan scholar come from ancient Alexandria… resolved to subject all ‘the phases of human progress’, all the pageant of man’s interests and history, to the scrutiny of reason

Santayana recognised that “the poetry of [myth] helps men to bear the prose of life”; that “to love one’s country, unless that love is quite blind and lazy, must involve a distinction between the country’s actual condition and its inherent ideal”; and that “the great evil of the state is its tendency to become an engine of war… [for] no people has ever won a war”. He despised the waste of capitalism, which destroys self-realisation, yet abjured collectivist doctrines of innate equality. Ultimately he valued the importance of detached judgement and “wisdom [that] comes by disillusionment”.

All this, Durant sums up, “[wrote] itself down quietly, in statuesque and classic prose [with] an undertone of sweet regret for a vanished world”. It is hard not to see in it a marked resemblance to conditions of being and thought that an often agitated, unruly and tormented Ezra Pound yearned after in his own manner.

Editor’s Notes

  1. Guido Cavalcanti, c. 1255-1300, a major Florentine poet who wrote love lyrics in the dolce stil nuovo (“sweet new style”)
  2. John Scotus Erigena, 810- c. 877, Irish philosopher whose translations helped promote Greek patristic writings
  3. Sextus Propertius, 55-43 BC-after 16 BC, author of four books of poetic elegies, most famously Cynthia 
  4. Ewig weibliche – “eternal feminine”, a concept popularised by Goethe in Faust

Author’s Notes

[i] 10 July 1928 to (Unidentified) Rubin. The Works of George Santayana, volume v, book 4 (1928-32), edited by William Holzberger et al (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003)

[ii] 19 January 1935 to Sylvia Bliss. The Letters of George Santayana, edited and with introduction and commentary by Daniel Cory (London: Constable, 1955), 290

[iii] 22 June and 3 September 1936 to Robert Shaw Barlow. Ibid,312, 314

[iv] 8 December 1949 to Cornel Lengyel. Ibid, 387

[v] Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and his Work, volume III ‘The Tragic Years, 1939-72’, A. David Moody (Oxford University Press, 2015), quoting Pound to Santayana, 8 December 1939, and to Eliot, 18 January 1940, as well as Mary de Rachewiltz in Discretions (1971), 127-8

[vi] See Santayana: the Later Years: a portrait in letters, Daniel Cory (New York: Braziller, 1963), 26-7

[vii] He disliked James and an atmosphere of intense masculinism encountered at Harvard. Ibid., 41

[viii] See Works vol. v, book 7 (1941-47), Preface

[ix] See Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), edited by William Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990), Introduction by Joel Porte, xix-xxi

[x] Works, v, 7. Letter of 29 June 1942

[xi] Radio Broadcast #102, 26 June 1943

[xii] See Works, v, 7. Letter to John Hall Wheelock of 23 January 1947

[xiii] Ibid., Letter of 19 June 1946

[xiv] Ibid., to Wheelock, 6 October 1946

[xv] Ibid., Letter of 24 November 1946

[xvi] Ibid., See letter to Wheelock, 16 January 1947

[xvii] Works, v, book 8 (1948-52), letter of 1 March 1948

[xviii] Ibid., letter of 29-30 December 1949

[xix] Ibid., letter to Bysshe Stein of 1 September 1949

[xx] Ibid., letter to Cyril Coniston Clemens of 10 January 1950

[xxi] Ibid., to Wheelock, 3 January 1950

[xxii] Ibid., see letters to Russell and Cory of 15 August and 25 October 1949

[xxiii] Ibid., see letter to Stefan Shimanski, 8 December 1949. The article had appeared in World Review (London: xii ’49), 45-7

[xxiv] Ibid., letter of 25 December 1950

[xxv] Ibid., letter of 1 March 1951

[xxvi] Ibid., to John Brett Langstaff, 13 June 1951

[xxvii] Alluded to in the letter to Lowell mentioned in note 25 above

[xxviii] Works, v, 8, letter to Wheelock of 25 March 1951

[xxix] Ibid., letter of 25 April 1951

[xxx] Later Years, 27

[xxxi] Ibid., 120. Pound’s essay was about Housman

[xxxii] Ibid., 128

[xxxiii] Ibid., 130

[xxxiv] Ibid., 155

[xxxv] Ibid., 142-43

[xxxvi] Ibid., 268

[xxxvii] Ibid., 188

[xxxviii] Ibid., 192

[xxxix] See ‘“It doesn’t . . . matter where you begin”: Pound and Santayana on Education’, by Martin Coleman, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, volume 44, number 4 (Winter 2010), 1-17. Coleman finds Pound ‘genuinely fond’ of Santayana and that the two had enough in common for such a collaboration to make sense. Among other things, he cites the apprehension both had that pressure of social life, money and the ‘business of the universities’ could prelude proper thought and creativity and encouraged young teachers to write and lecture on subjects which they had not yet properly mastered. He also sees similarity between the two in the foundational principle of what Santayana labelled ‘animal faith’

[xl] See Later Years, 257, 262 and passim

[xli] Ibid., 264

[xlii] Ibid., 267

[xliii] Ibid., 264

[xliv] Ibid., 281

[xlv] Ibid., 272

[xlvi] Ibid., 285

[xlvii] Ibid., 292

[xlviii] Ibid., 312, 315 and 330

[xlix] He reports to Cory, for example, that reading Eliot on Pound in Fiera Letteraria ‘really throw[s] some light on the mystery of their kind of poetry.’ Ibid., 266

[l] On these late utterances of Pound’s, see, for example, Moody, 799-802

[li] See The Story of Philosophy: the lives and opinions of the world’s greatest philosophers, Will Durant (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926; The Pocket Library, 1954), 488-508

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Forget coronavirus – the true global existential threat

ROBERT HENDERSON warns of the unprecedented challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence

The attention of the world is currently fixed on coronavirus, but there is another far more serious danger hurtling towards us, in the shape of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics.

Both are advancing rapidly. Probably within the lifetime of most people now living – quite possibly in the next 15 years – there will be general purpose robots (GPRs) capable of doing the vast majority of the work now undertaken by humans. When that happens, international free trade and free market economics will become untenable. The real “final crisis” of capitalism will be the development of technology so advanced that it makes capitalism in the long run impossible, as machines make humans redundant across vast swathes of the economy.

Before the advent of digital technology, technological advance created new work. It may have had very painful consequences for individuals whose livelihoods disappeared – the British hand-loom weavers of the early Industrial Revolution are a classic example – but new opportunities for employment have always appeared as an economy becomes more sophisticated and variegated. The hand-loom weaver found work in the new factories – the redundant Western factory worker of today in a call centre. At worst they might only get a MacJob, but at least it was a job.

But if the GPRs can do the MacJobs as well as the more demanding work, then there will not be many new jobs for humans – not even much supervisory work because GPRs will need little supervising, and less and less of that as they become ever more sophisticated. Hence, this technological advance will be like no other; GPRs will not only take away existing jobs, they will devour any new work – the easier work first, then the more complex.

‘It’ll never happen’

The normal human response to such ideas is not reasonable scepticism, but rejection based on a refusal to accept the reality of change, a rejection expressed with ridicule along the lines of the Victorians’ response to the car: ‘It will never replace the horse’. Mention robots, and people commonly scoff ‘science fiction’ to get rid of the matter without further debate.

This type of response is natural enough because human beings, apart from disliking change, do not like to think of themselves as dispensable or redundant. Moreover, incessant propagandising by Western elites has made it received opinion that work is becoming ever more demanding and requires an increasingly educated and knowledgeable workforce – which seems to most humans to make them uniquely capable of doing the jobs of the future. By implication, this excludes mechanisation (and robots) from the majority of future human employments.

The hard truth is that most modern work requires less knowledge and skill than was required in the past. A peasant 400 years ago had to know about his soil, his plants and animals, the seasons, the weather, where natural water was, and to be able to do 101 practical things such as ploughing, sowing, harvesting, making and repairing of fences and ditches, using tools and turning out cheese and cream and dried meat and vegetables. How many jobs today require a tenth of that volume of knowledge?

Nor did more demanding work stop at peasants. A 17th century craftsman would have served a long apprenticeship. Jobs which did not require an apprenticeship would have probably required some manual skill. Those who aspired to intellectual employment had to laboriously write and amend their works rather than enjoying the immense convenience of a word processor. That, and the cost of writing materials, forced them to become precise in a way that virtually no one is today. Perhaps most importantly, modern division of labour with one person doing a repetitive job was not king. A person making something four centuries ago would probably make the entire item, and quite often a variety of other items; a 17th century blacksmith would not merely shoe horses but make a wide range of iron goods. GPRs today could take over a great deal of employment in Western economies and much of the industrialised parts of the developing world, especially China, because there are so many simple jobs which would be within the capabilities of very basic GPRs.

But that is only half of the story. If most jobs are not demanding of much by way of learned skills and even less of intellect, they do need diligence. Human beings are generally more than a little reluctant to put themselves out in work which has no intrinsic interest for them, or which is not very highly paid. So what will an employer do when he can employ a robot instead? He will go and get himself some GPRs which will do what they are told, keep working all the time without being watched, do not make regular mistakes and require no wages, or social security taxes, or holidays, or sick leave. And it will not be able to sue you for being a bad employer.

What will an employer do when he can employ a robot instead? He will go and get himself some GPRs which will do what they are told, keep working all the time without being watched, do not make regular mistakes and require no wages, or social security taxes, or holidays, or sick leave. And it will not be able to sue you for being a bad employer

In the beginning at least, there will still be a sizeable chunk of jobs which GPRs will not be able to do. These will be the jobs which cannot be reduced to quantifiable tasks – jobs which cannot be done by following an algorithm, jobs which require judgement motivation to achieve a complex end which is not obvious from the units of means which are required to achieve it.  But that work is only a minority of jobs, probably a small minority, perhaps 20% of the total. If the earliest GPRs could only undertake 50% of the jobs which humans do that would be catastrophic.

There will be two further advantages enjoyed by GPRs over humans. In principle there are no limits to increases in the capabilities of GPRs; there is no such human potential in the present state of knowledge. For the foreseeable future, there is nothing to suggest that human capacity can be raised dramatically through education and training, not least because attempts to raise IQ substantially and permanently through enhanced environments have a record of unadulterated failure over the past 50 years or more.

The second advantage is that GPRs will come with a guarantee of performance. An employer gets what it says on the tin. Moreover, the performance will be consistent. Humans beings do not carry such a guarantee. The individual’s qualities only become apparent once on the job and are subject to variation according to the physical and mental wellbeing of the person. This makes them a gamble for anyone who employs them. A faulty or rogue GPR could be repaired or replaced without moral qualms; sacking a human being raises all sorts of ethical questions and matters of sentiment.

What could governments do?

When the first GPRs appear, those in political authority will probably try to say everything will be all right. It might be thought it would be pretty obvious that a GPR which could do everything the average human could do and then some would spell trouble for the human race. But it never does to underestimate the power of custom, ideology and the sheer unwillingness of human beings to face troubles which are not immediately upon them. The tired, old and worthless comparison with technological change in the past will doubtless be made, namely, that new jobs for humans will be generated by the GPRs. But that will not last long, because the reality of the situation will very rapidly force elites to accept entirely new circumstances.

There will be a dilemma for the makers and distributors of goods and services. At first it might seem attractive to use GPRs, but as humans lose their employment and the purchasing power derived from it the question for private business would be who are we producing for? Fewer and fewer people, would be the answer. For politicians, the question would be how can we finance government, including public services, when our tax base has collapsed? The answer is we cannot as things stand.

As GPRs threaten to destroy the world’s economy, politicians will be faced with an excruciating dilemma. If GPRs are allowed free rein by governments, the consequence will be a catastrophic collapse in demand as humans lose their employment en masse – highlighting the inability of the state as presently constituted to provide welfare to those put out of work or even to maintain the essential services of the minimalist state, such as the police and army.

The situation will be pressing no matter how supposedly rich a country is, because the majority of people even in the developed world are actually poor – only a few pay packets away from destitution. Even those who own their own home will not be able to sell the property because who will there be to buy it?

To begin with, attempts will probably be made to control the crisis bureaucratically by instigating rationing and price controls. But how to sustain an economy in which most people are not working? In the end, politicians will be faced with two choices: ban or at least seriously curb, the use of GPRs, or adopt a largely non-market economy. Banning GPRs completely would create a particular problem because some countries would continue to use them and this could lead not merely to cheaper goods and services but technological leaps which exceeded anything humans could do. A country which relied only on humans would be at a hopeless disadvantage.

The widespread banning of the use of GPRs in national territories would severely shrink international trade, because not all countries would stop using GPRs to produce items for export. Any country using GPRs could undercut any country which banned them. Protectionist barriers against countries using GPRs freely would have to be erected, although human nature being what it is, this would doubtless result in GPR products being supplied through a third country which had ostensibly banned GPR-produced goods and services. The likely outcome of such a situation would be for protectionism to grow beyond the banning of GPR products to the banning of products simply because they were suspected to be GPR-produced. This would also be a convenient excuse for simply banning imports.

The alternative to a protected economy in which GPRs are banned or severely restricted is a society in which the market is largely defunct. A perfectly rational and workable society could be created in which human beings stopped thinking they had to work to live, and simply lived off the products and services the GPRs produced. The GPRs would do the large majority of the work and the goods and services they provide would be given free to everyone whether or not they had formal employment. No GPRs would be allowed in private hands. Such a situation would mean the market would not make the choice of which goods and services were provided. Rather, the choice would be made by the consumer through an expression of what was needed or wanted before products were developed or supplied.  This could be done through elected representatives to online voting by any member of a community for which goods and services should be supplied. For example, all available items could be voted from by the general population and those which were least popular dropped. The provision of proposed new lines or inventions could be similarly decided.

As for allocating who could have what in such a world, money could be issued equally to everyone in lieu of wages (a form of the social wage). Alternatively, in a more controlled society, vouchers or ration cards could be issued equally to everyone for specific classes of goods. Greater flexibility could be built into the system by allowing the vouchers to be swopped between individuals, for example, a voucher for footwear swapped for food vouchers.

In such societies there would be scope for a limited use of private enterprise. People could provide personal services, for example, entertainment, and produce goods just using human labour (‘human-made’ would gain the cachet ‘handmade’ has now). There would also need to be some greater reward for those who occupied those jobs which still required a human to do them such as political representation, management and administration. The reward could either be material or public approbation. It would not be unreasonable to imagine that in a society where necessary work was at a premium quite a few would take on such positions for the kudos. There could also be some legal requirement to undertake work when required.

It might be thought that the people best placed to survive would have been those in the least industrially developed states because they would be less dependent on machines. But there is scarcely a part of the world which has not been tied into the global economy. Even countries that do not manufacture products or offer services on a large scale probably export food and raw materials. One could even include the recipients of foreign aid, for that flow of money, goods, expertise and manpower is dependent on the aid-giving countries remaining economically robust.

The rate at which robotics evolves will play a large part in how the story unfolds.  The speed with which GPRs replace human beings could be truly bewildering. Digital technology to date suggests that the stretch from a primitive GPR doing simple work which can be broken down into physical actions, to a GPR with some sort of consciousness or a facsimile of what humans think of as consciousness, will not be massive.

Such development could well be speeded up by GPRs assisting with development as they attain more and more sophisticated abilities. The faster the development of really sophisticated GPRs, the more chaos there is likely to be, because there will be little time to plan and implement changes or for people to accommodate themselves psychologically and sociologically.

It is reasonable to assume technology will develop until GPRs are showing behaviour which suggests consciousness. They will make decisions such as what would be the best way of achieving ends which are loosely defined, for example, an instruction to design a city redevelopment in a way which would have the greatest utility for human beings. At that point the GPRs would be effectively making value judgements.

This is a real danger with potentially catastrophic world-wide consequences. The problem is getting people in power to address the subject seriously. There needs to be discussion and planning now about how far GPRs, or indeed robots or any type, should be allowed to displace human beings in the functioning of human societies. Nor should we assume humans will happily tolerate GPRs for reasons other than economic. Robots which are too like humans make humans uncomfortable, probably because it is difficult to view a machine which looks like a human and acts like a human simply as a machine. 

But the loss of jobs and incomes is only part of the problem which comes with intelligent machines. The general consequence of our ever growing reliance on digital technology is that we are increasingly being controlled by the needs of the technology, rather than using technology to serve us. It is very difficult to escape such control. A person in work will almost certainly have to use it; if in education, they definitely will. Even if a person does not encounter digital technology in their work or education, they find it increasingly difficult to avoid it in their private lives even if they refuse to use a computer or a mobile phone, because businesses and governments increasingly require those dealing with them do so by computer. People are being driven to own and use computers to avoid feeling isolated and excluded.

Despite all these pressures, there are still a large number of people in Britain who have remained distant from the digital world. According to a 2019 Office for National Statistics report, millions of  British adults have never been online. It  is unreasonable in a civilised society to simply hang the computer-ignorant or the intellectually-underpowered out to dry as digital technology looms ever larger. Yet that is precisely what is happening.

There is one thing the government of any advanced country should do – create circumstances in which those who cannot come to terms with digital technology can live in an ever more computer-controlled world. They can do this by maintaining non-computer access to state-funded organisations and forcing through legislation larger businesses and not-for-profit organisations to do the same. Worryingly, there is little evidence that UK politicians are taking this problem seriously. There have been rather half hearted attempts to ensure that cash point machines are provided so that  no one has to travel more than a few miles to draw cash, but that is wholly inadequate because many people, especially the old, cannot readily travel several miles.

At the same time the UK government is dragging its feet over making access to cash a legal right. Failure to do so could all too easily allow the UK to sleepwalk into a cashless society, a state of affairs which would not only potentially give the government immense opportunity to intrude on private lives, but be a constant worry even for those accustomed to digital technology.

Someone living in Britain between 1815 and 1914 saw more radical technological change than any generation before. But that change was the difference between living in a still largely pre-industrial society (in 1815) and an industrial society in its early middle age (in 1914). Moreover, the change did not require the vast majority of the population to master complicated machines at their work, let alone in their own homes. In 1914 the most complicated machine most people would have had to operate was probably the telephone, and vast swathes of the population would not even have had to go that far into the world of technology. 

In the past 30 years, all this has changed hugely. We are now in a world in which computers are absolutely integral to business and public administration, and are the norm rather than the exception in homes. For most people, it is literally impossible to escape them. Worse, they have become ever more complex and demanding to use, and invade ever more of our lives, as microprocessors are inserted into the most unlikely things, such as clothes. All machines are becoming more and more demanding. We desperately need politicians who will act to avert the looming disaster this unique situation threatens to bring. Don’t hold your breath waiting.

Posted on by Paul Garner · 2 Comments

Blake’s 7: moral darkness in outer space

Gareth Thomas as Roj Blake

PAUL GARNER pays tribute to an innovative sci-fi series which gave grim glamour to late Seventies and early Eighties evenings

In the dark winter months at the beginning of 1978 I began to regret signing up as a cub scout. We met on Monday evenings in the school hall, and, thanks to the vagaries of BBC scheduling, that was also when episodes of the brand-new science fiction series, Blake’s 7, were being broadcast. I remember hurrying home from all the ‘dyb-dyb-dybbing’, anxious that I was going to miss the beginning of the latest instalment.

For Doctor Who fans like me, the new series would help to fill the gaps between Saturdays when the TARDIS would whisk us off on another adventure. But if we expected Blake’s 7 to emulate the fantastical whimsy that characterized late-1970s Doctor Who, we were in for a shock. The BBC’s new ‘space opera’ was tonally very different and about to subvert all our cosy assumptions.

Creator Terry Nation claims to have pitched the series to BBC executives as “The Dirty Dozen in space”. Blake’s 7 is set in a dystopian, post-atomic future in which the Terran Federation controls the human population with a combination of drugs, mind control techniques and old-fashioned thuggery. The earth and its colonies are police states, with Stasi-like informers everywhere. Citizens can trust no one and betrayal is the order of the day. In the opening episode, we are introduced to Roj Blake (Gareth Thomas), a man who has been brainwashed and can remember nothing of his previous life as a resistance leader. When his former compatriots help him to break his conditioning they are mercilessly eliminated, and Blake is subjected to a show trial with trumped-up accusations of child molestation. It is hard-edged stuff.

Blake is convicted and sent on a transporter to a prison planet, Cygnus Alpha, but en route organises a rebellion and manages to escape with two of his fellow convicts. Kerr Avon (Paul Darrow) is a computer genius and embezzler and Jenna Stannis (Sally Knyvette) is a space pilot and smuggler. Commandeering an abandoned alien ship, the Liberator, with its master computer Zen (Peter Tuddenham), they mount a rescue bid, and on Cygnus Alpha recruit Olag Gan (David Jackson) and Vila Restal (Michael Keating). Vila is a thief and expert lock-breaker, Gan guilty of killing the Federation guard who had raped his girlfriend. Soon they are joined by Cally (Jan Chappell), a telepath from the planet Auron and lone survivor of an anti-Federation guerilla force. Pledging to destroy the Federation, the seven head off into space, hotly pursued by the leader of Space Command, Servalan (Jacqueline Pearce), and her psychopathic henchman, Travis (Stephen Greif in series one, Brian Croucher in series two).

Given this set-up, Blake’s 7 could easily have lapsed into two-dimensionality, but one of the most notable things about it is that nothing is cast in black and white. We are never entirely sure that the ‘good guys’ really are good guys. The Federation is ruthless and brutal, but the rebels are not averse to some ruthlessness and brutality of their own. The body count is unquestionably high whenever Blake’s crew are around, and not just on the Federation side. Blake himself seems fully prepared to risk the lives of others in pursuit of his political ideals, and his quarrelling followers often seem ready to abandon one another to save their own skins. They are at best anti-heroes. The most morally ambiguous of them all is Avon, whose obvious self-interest leads to some tense confrontations with Blake early in the series. Avon is not the kind of man on whom it would be wise to turn your back. Even Vila, for whom Avon shows some grudging affection, is not safe. In the episode Orbit, Avon is ready to throw Vila overboard so their shuttle can overcome the gravitational pull of the planet from which they are making their escape, and his stalking of Vila through the darkened corridors, while his companion cowers terrified in the shadows, is genuinely chilling. Avon’s callousness is also spotlighted in other episodes, such as Stardrive, in which he coldly sacrifices Dr Plaxton, and Rumours of Death, in which he seeks revenge against Shrinker, the man he suspects of murdering Anna Grant, the only woman he ever loved. Shrinker is soon reduced from sadistic torturer to quivering wreck, begging Avon for mercy, in a fantastic performance by guest actor John Bryans. But viewers are left wondering, with the crew of the Liberator, whether Avon is any less monstrous than the man he is punishing.

Jacqueline Pearce as Servalan, and Paul Darrow as Kerr Avon

Later episodes introduce changes to the regular line-up. At the end of series one, Orac, a flashing box of tricks with an irascible personality, is acquired by Blake and his companions from the computer genius Ensor. Midway through the second series Gan dies under falling masonry during a raid on Federation Central Control and at the end of the season Blake and Jenna go missing after bailing from the Liberator during an intergalactic conflict. With Blake’s departure, Avon appoints himself leader, and in the third series the crew is joined by Dayna Mellanby (Josette Simon), the daughter of a fugitive and revolutionary, and Del Tarrant (Steven Pacey), a defector from the Federation’s Space Academy.

At the end of the third series, Avon’s recklessness in the teeth of opposition from his fellow crewmembers leads to the destruction of the Liberator, along with Zen, and the unhappy survivors are trapped by Servalan on the planet Terminal. This was originally intended to be the climactic episode, but late in the day the decision was made to commission a fourth series. By this time the production office had already closed down and there was a scramble to reenlist cast and crew, and get a production line of scripts going, which accounts for much of the unevenness of the first half of series four.

The fourth and final series opens with Cally’s death in a booby trap left by Servalan. Then we are introduced to Soolin (Glynis Barber), an expert gunslinger whose parents had been murdered by hired mercenaries. The rebels acquire a new ship, Scorpio, along with its computer, Slave, and they establish a base from which to launch an offensive against the Federation. Meanwhile, Servalan, who by this time has been deposed as Federation president, takes on a new identity as Commissioner Sleer and resumes her vendetta against Avon and his crew.

Forty years on, Blake’s 7 remains loved by many, though it is difficult to regard it as high art. It has a reputation, not wholly undeserved, for looking cheap, though it must be remembered that it was made in the unionized days of the late 1970s, when budgets were stretched by rampant inflation and there was an ever-present threat of strike action bringing a halt to production. The clichés about dodgy special effects, wonky sets and quarries masquerading as alien worlds are clichés for a reason, and the constraints that faced the production team are often all too evident in what appeared on screen. Despite this, the series has a loyal fan following and conventions continue to be held annually, sadly with a dwindling number of original cast and crew as the years pass.

Inevitably, comparisons are made between Blake’s 7 and Doctor Who, though in reality the two programmes are very different. Blake’s 7 is darker, grittier and more clearly written for an older audience. There are references to sex, drugs and alcohol in Blake’s 7 that would never have been allowed in classic Who. Blake’s 7 is also much less reliant on aliens and monsters, preferring to concentrate on human drama and action. On the few occasions when Blake’s 7 does venture into monster territory the results are less than satisfying, object lessons in how ambition cannot always triumph over practicalities. Director Vere Lorrimer wisely keeps the Phibians lurking in the shadows in Orac, teasing the viewer with occasional glimpses of claw or tail, but on other occasions the programme makers are less circumspect, and, unfortunately, the giant insect in The Harvest of Kairos possesses all the menace of a pantomime horse and the climax of Moloch is rather spoiled by a laughable monocular glove puppet.

However, the play’s the thing, and the great strengths of Blake’s 7 are in characterization and story. The regulars turn in some magnificent performances, even if, at times, a certain amount of scenery-chewing is indulged. Paul Darrow’s Avon is beautifully crafted, dark, self-centred and cynical, with a nice line in sardonic asides, such as when he says of Tarrant that he “is brave, young and handsome; three reasons not to like him”. Michael Keating brings great humanity to his portrayal of Vila, whose cowardice and complaining could have been irritating in the hands of a lesser actor. Yes, Vila is often employed as comic relief (there are lighter moments, even in Blake’s 7), but he is not stupid, on one occasion feigning drunkenness so that he could pass on to his crewmates the solution to an intractable problem while making sure he didn’t have to endanger himself by dealing with it. From the outset, Jacqueline Pearce’s Servalan is deliciously sadistic and scheming, and one can’t help relishing her performance even when it goes over the top. Finally, special mention should be given to Peter Tuddenham, who manages to invest all the series’ computers with distinct personalities, from the detached logicality of Zen to the fussy obtuseness of Orac and the Uriah Heep-like obsequiousness of Slave.

There were some notable guest appearances too, including Roy Kinnear as the bumbling, avaricious security officer of a passenger liner in Gold, Aubrey Woods as a corrupt and flamboyant casino owner in Gambit, and Julian Glover as an unpleasant neurosurgeon and Federation informer in Breakdown. As in any long-running series, the scriptwriting hits highs and lows, but Blake’s 7 delivers many stand-out episodes and even the most mediocre often contain memorable lines.

Among my favourites are City at the Edge of the World, in which Vila almost gets the girl and we meet Bayban the Butcher (Colin Baker in pre-Doctor Who days), Terminal, a well-crafted and pacey episode, with a heartbeat soundtrack that sets a funereal tone, and Sand, in which Tarrant and Servalan are thrown together in unlikely fashion on a planet with a very strange and threatening lifeform. Nor are the scriptwriters above the shameless plundering of plotlines from classic fantasy literature, especially in the fourth series which gives us episodes based on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (Rescue) and H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau (Animals). Even Headhunter trespasses into the domain of Frankenstein, with its lumbering android grotesquely wearing the decapitated head of its creator.

Blake’s 7 ran from 1978 to 1981. Looking back now, one is struck by how unremittingly bleak it all was. Every series ended in some kind of catastrophe, and there was never any guarantee our heroes would even survive. In the final series, we witness Avon’s slow descent into paranoia and madness, culminating in the shocking denouement on the frontier planet of Gauda Prime. For more than two years, viewers had eagerly anticipated Blake’s return, but when he does finally reappear it is not the glad reunion for which we had hoped. Blake, battered and world-weary, stands once again face-to-face with Avon, only for his old comrade to shoot him in the stomach at point-blank range, under the tragic misapprehension that Blake has betrayed him. What follows is one of the most shocking endings to any television series, with all the Scorpio crew except Avon being gunned down in slow motion by jack-booted Federation soldiers. As Avon stands over the bloody corpse of Blake, with the guards closing in around him, he raises his gun and smiles. And that’s where the curtain falls, the closing credits breaking in with another volley of shots. There is no happy ending. The ‘good guys’ don’t always win.

Of course, fans of the programme have been endlessly inventive in coming up with scenarios in which their favourite characters survived or the story continued. Sequels have been written, new episodes recorded for radio, and there have been rumours for years about a television revival, although a reboot seems as far away as ever. But I can’t help feeling that the ending we got was the right one. The rebellion is ultimately a failure. The Federation is still in control, even expanding after the setback of the Andromedan war. And Servalan, who mysteriously makes no appearance in the finale, is presumably still out there and plotting her route back to power. It’s bleak, but anything more hopeful would rob Blake’s 7 of its soul.

Posted on by Derek Gow

Return of a native

DEREK GOW welcomes the ‘New Nature’ revolution

The word ‘rewilding’ is in the wind, provoking elation and scorn in equal measure. It may yet spark a revolution.

Although those who make the rules are doing all they can to brush its disruptive brand of hope under the carpets of their palatial offices in Nobel House (London lair of the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), they know the metaphorical beaver has long since gnawed out of the bag and bolted. Shutting the reinforced stable door is pointless as real beavers are now swimming in the Tay and the Forth, the Tamar and the Otter.

The static world these bureaucrats worship is slipping steadily away.

And that is good.

I was born in Dundee but brought up in the Scottish borders, in a landscape where blackcock lekked by the sides of the road, and peewits whirled high in the cloud-mottled sky beyond Coulter Fell. I can still see the sprite-like reds of the squirrels running the drystane of the cottage wall that surrounded my father’s cottage in the Tweed Valley village of Broughton. I found a peregrine once whose broken wing and bloody breast testified to the gamekeeper’s art. Though still alive, with the talons on one golden leg capable of piercing my grandmother’s gardening glove with ease, nothing could be done to save its shattered life. With my mother I buried it gently in the garden. Its carcase at least did not degenerate and swing on the stinking gibbets suspended around its killer’s troll-like lair.

Nature was everywhere – in abandoned complexes of tomato houses – in wet fields where attempted drainage had proved futile in its time. In the winter the skies filled with northern geese as pinkfeet in their tens of thousands flanked down in honking cacophony into the stubble corn. I remember my grandmother telling me that the last wolf in Scotland had been killed at Wolf Clyde, a stone’s throw from our house. It had been finished off by a doughty wife when it attacked her children, and she in turn hit it over the head with a pancake griddle – a song-line and story ill-informed to silence an enquiring child. The tale was generic, and the name in the sheep lands of the Fleming family who once ruled from their fortress at Boghall was old long before the death of the last wolf in its deep, dark, den, high in the juniper-swaddled flanks of the northern hills.

I read the books of Gerald Durrell. There were marvels of colour in his Drunken Forest, and so much to consider in his Overloaded Ark. He talked of a world where life was failing. Joy and George Adamson of Born Free fame, Gavin Maxwell (author of Ring of Bright Water), Peter Scott, Guy Mountfort (author of 1954’s A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, and a co-creator of the World Wide Fund for Nature in 1961), Bernhard Grzimek (author of the 1959 bestseller Serengeti Shall Not Die) and David Attenborough all said the same. Poachers in Africa. DDTs in Europe. Acid rains.

Biber in der Küche by Ernst Zehle (1876-1940)

Looking back, these were the good times – before the great destructions of agricultural intensification, international forest loss and industrial pollution really began – when there were many, many fewer of us.

In my lifetime, I, like many others, have witnessed nature haemorrhaging away. Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring is near reality now.

Rewilding is no threat, although I do not care for the term. The Dutch who coined its initial use now refer to rewilding as “New Nature”, and that description is more fitting by far. Those who claim it to be a blight generally come from a cadre seeking to preserve the privileges they owe to the Common Agricultural Policy. They are afraid of change and do not relish examples of different ways. If these prosper, their failings will be spot-lit on the stage of life and they have no wish to dance.

New Nature is for me about many things. It’s about accepting that much of what we once knew and cherished has passed irrevocably. We are bereaved, and only words of comfort can be spoken at the wakes for species such as the complicated corncrakes whose short lifespans, tricky migratory routes and great fondness for old insect rich hay meadows renders recollections of their presence mere sepia now. It’s about what we can do to heal, and that involves farming. Played-out and exhausted soils, pesticides in rivers, toxic silts, antibiotics applied with merry abandon, slurries full of disease, and contaminants of all hues do not make for a prosperous or long-term future. We need to farm to produce top-end food sustainably in a rich natural environment. Perhaps we need to explore new technologies such as clean meats, cell-cloned on dark shelves, and other foods derived from soil-produced proteins if we are to ensure a future supply of nutrition for without destroying the earth completely. Given our species’ natural tendencies for greed, narrow-mindedness and shortness of thought this is going to be something of a mission.

New Nature is about large areas of land being enabled to become free-willed, where large, semi-domesticated and wild ungulates can create landscapes that give opportunities for smaller creatures – where purple emperors can flit to find sallow, here colonial bees excavate their burrows in bull-exposed soil, where burring squadrons of dung beetles pour down from the sky into piles of still-steaming shit.

The exhilaration that is Knepp Castle (1) demonstrates clearly that systems of this sort can enable fresh life to reform on a simply staggering scale of diversity and bio-abundance – and that this can be accomplished in even impoverished environments. More projects of this type are needed urgently in Britain, and everywhere else.

Beaver by Aert Schouman (1710-1792)

New Nature is about corridors – about linking landscapes around these dynamos of natural productivity as they cough and splutter into life and start to create a steady stream of creatures which spill out from them into the surrounding landscape. It’s not all about rewilding. It’s about reserves owned by the worthy, and their good deeds – the preservers of species and the environments they occupy, which would otherwise have been lost – the trusts and charities who have been toiling for years to save, innovate and replace. They understand full well that their efforts are not enough and that the widely dispersed nature of their holdings will not in itself prevent calamitous decline. Dwindling godwit, collapsing curlew or large blue populations in scattered pockets have no future on their own. It’s about making space in a farmed environment – not using all up to the edges of hedges, streams, and woodlands. It’s about relaxing and letting the wild creep back – just a bit.

I am converting my modest Devon farm into a corridor too. I no longer wish to follow a conventional model to produce sheep and cattle which are worth very little in the southwest of England, while driving near all other life from my land. I do not want to smell the rankness of ovine waste which cannot decay, because the insecticides we spray on our flock allow no insects to approach. I don’t want to witness pastures which could contain flowers reduced to a psoriatic leaching of their top soils in the depths of the wind-whipped winter when they are gouged by a myriad of hooves. I want to forge a new partnership with nature which gives us both satisfaction, which is easy and content.

Beavers are the bringers of life. Their impoundments and tree felling provide the twin life essentials of water and light. Without them, there can be no wetlands brimming with life. No darting kingfishers. No purring demoiselles. No broods of peeping ducklings following their hard-harassed mums. They do so much more. My journey with beavers, although I hope not yet complete, has been long. They have taken much of my time and I of theirs. I am content with that. I love them for the wonder they are – for their creative abilities, humility and sociality – and for their care for each other. When my journey is over theirs will have barely begun. I hope in the end they will bring wonder to at least a few of the human lives that follow mine.

My farm is not on the scale of Knepp. I will have to cultivate change to protect the valuable assets and to promote and enhance the impoverished. To restore the drained fields of rush and ryegrass back to flower-rich meadows, excavate infilled ponds, fence out valley mires, readjust the course of streams, destock to the point where trees can grow again in fields, to plant the fritillaries and the southern marsh orchids where I consider they would do well. I feel sure already that nature will come. Every indication is that this is so. Within a year, we have had nesting reed buntings and grasshopper warblers, and this August our first marbled white butterflies.

But we need to reintroduce the lost. I intend to farm life – to produce English wildcats and release their kittens, protect my breeding beavers and nurture water voles, graze with much smaller groups of ungulates which will produce high end beef, mutton, pork and cheval on a scale that is more than adequate to feed to my customers. Their money will pay for more alteration – for monitoring the returning stonechats, assessing the distribution of the armoured tadpole shrimps colonising the welcomingly variable wallows wrought by pigs, for the creation of a market garden to grow good food, for tents, huts and gypsy caravans to encourage more folk to follow.

Beaver by Derek Gow

While this is not a model for all, farming is after all a business. It is not a hobby which deserves to be subsidised by society. It’s not a martyrdom essential, a combined cross and crown which one must carry alone. If it hurts, just leave; find another life-way and allow those who would come to change what you cannot or do not want to alter. It’s not difficult to understand. Farm well on the good land. Produce products that markets want, and let the rest produce a different kind of life. Hold water and grow trees.

New Nature is about people. It’s about individuals saying ‘I can’, and acquiring the skills they need. It’s about guerrilla gardening, and cultivating sedge and frogs. It’s about permaculture, and forest schools – restoring soils, and multiplying and repeating the good things already done. People small and large are beginning to do. Small gardens can join up. Hedgehogs can move through created gaps under fences. Not every tiny lawn or roadside verge must forever be shorn. Some of the great estates in England held in hand since Norman times are beginning to act well. They can rise to the challenge. With their landholdings and influence, their ability to accomplish is immense. They employ good minds and have a vision used to looking well beyond next month’s milk cheque towards a time that might yet come. Small organisations are releasing bison. Good-hearted souls have achieved much with pine martens and cranes. The legend that is Roy Dennis is returning the white-tailed eagles of the past to where they should be, on the sea cliffs of the Solent. Vultures have come and remarkably stayed, for the first known time in our island’s history. Is their presence an omen of hope or are they assembling to circle in more sinister anticipation? While the fate of the young lammergeier perched on the edge of the great grouse death lands is by no means certain, other problems remain.

Great issues hang in the balance. Farming will fight hard for business as usual. If they lose their subsidies for doing nothing much, it will never come again. Their influence will wither and their political power remit. They seek to imagineer a false vision of progress while remaining hermit crab-secure in their tight clasped shells. The ghouls of the timber-industry will try to grasp the gold in the casket being transported to fund future forests. They want chip and pellet; there is no room in their spreadsheets for carunculate giants, or vibrant scrub which resounds to the melodies of warblers. They don’t care, and laugh at those who do in closed court. If they can, they will swing down from the low limbs of their sitka plantations dressed in green mantle to get their hands on the loot.

The proposed system of government payments for Environmental Land Management (ELMs) is the mantra and myth of the moment. While it should be a system to reshape landscapes to give true coexistence with the wild, to subsidise carbon capture, store water and produce good for all, its acolytes attempt to form a belief with little faith of their own. Their hearts are torpid and contain no zeal. As they issue commandments from on high, their transparent commitments are of little current worth.

Official nature conservation bodies are mired in a do-nothing, say-nothing culture. They meekly print the death dues for badgers, and seek to explain why no killers of raptors – even those reared and recorded by them – can ever be found. They stall support for bustards and revile the joy of storks. They are out of touch with reality, so completely lost in a self-created maze that they can lead no more. The pace of change must be forced and forged by others. In the quarter century I have worked with beavers I have heard many pleas for delay from some of the most prominent people in conservation – to give time to ‘adjust’, to ‘get it right’, to stop or at least slow projects until more lumbering others can find their feet. Sometimes they made me wonder if my course was right; I am now utterly convinced it was.

Other life on this planet more than ever needs more of us to act in its (and our) interests now, without concern for fortune or favour – to do what’s both ecologically necessary and morally right. If we wait too long to aid, we will all suffer and perish together. There is no need for this. We are clever and must not let this happen.

There is never a perfect time, or an ideal place. There is only the here and now, with the good people you live alongside to help, with whatever knowledge and resources are at hand. As individuals we should not seek to pass with regret and remorse, but rather to help New Nature happen when we can.

Editor’s Note

  1. Knepp in Sussex is the best known English example of a rewilded landscape, its creation/recreation described in Isabella Tree’s 2019 book Wilding
  2. My Spectator review of Derek Gow’s book may be found here – https://www.derek-turner.com/2020/10/28/eager-for-beavers/
Posted on by Benjamin Gelman

Corporate account

Diego Rivera mural at the Detroit Institute of the Arts

BENJAMIN GELMAN describes a shocking – but salutary – first foray into the ruthless world of work

It was my first relaxing summer weekend. I had been toiling away at one of America’s ‘Big Four’ accounting firms as a consultant for ten months, and felt I needed a break. I received a negative COVID test, took off from work on Friday, and drove a couple of hours for a peaceful few days in the woods with a friend. I was about five minutes into my return journey when I got phone service again. Alone in my car, I pulled over to see if I’d missed anything important on my work phone. There were the Friday newsletters and a few emails I was CC’d on. I also noticed I now had A Conversation With the Talent Leader on my calendar for Monday midmorning, which I knew wasn’t the protocol for getting a raise. Sure enough, within 24 hours I had been fired.

Once COVID-19 sent the United States into full-blown lockdown, my firm claimed its employees were its number one priority. It would limit promotions and raises, reduce discretionary spending, and contract the partnership payout pool, all to protect employees during these tough times. The higher up in the company, the more you’d feel the impact – the logic being that higher-ups are, quite literally, able to afford it. As an entry-level analyst, this sounded quite fair, if not altogether redemptive for Corporate America.

Then COVID survived its first news cycle unhindered, and it was pretty clear we were dealing with a radically different kind of event. All bets were off. The Big Four entered survival mode, and would do whatever they had to. I was just one of thousands of employees left to fend for themselves.

My family and friends have assured me that these are unprecedented times. It wasn’t my fault and I shouldn’t beat myself up. And to some extent they’re right. If COVID hadn’t ravaged the world, I probably wouldn’t have had The Conversation put on my calendar. However, while COVID was the catalyst, my downfall began long before. If I’m being honest with myself, I deserved what came my way.

Even if the impetus was unforeseen, like all things done at the Big Four, the selection process was incredibly structured. The firm didn’t part with 50% or even 25% of their workforce. I was on the left-hand side of the bell curve. I fitted right in with the auto-generated list of lower-tier professionals to terminate. Given the circumstances, I would’ve fired me too. And yet…

It wasn’t always like this. In high school, I scored a 36 out of 36 on the college placement exam. I graduated from a prestigious undergraduate business school with just about the highest honours available. Several of my professors made it seem like my career success would be a given. But it turns out that academic success does not transpose so neatly into professional success.

It’s worth revisiting the university business structure at this point. To keep the lights on, private universities in America charge students hundreds of thousands of dollars. They also rely on alumni remembering their university days fondly enough to donate years later. These schools, therefore, have a strong incentive to keep their students happy and satisfied. Put another way, students are consumers. They pay money and expect an experience that’s ‘worth it’.

Much of my achievement has taken place within this quasi-consumerist framework. The institutions and people I knew were typically on my side, helping and rooting for me to succeed, conspiring alongside me. So I learned to work with understanding and patient stakeholders. When it took me longer to read than my sixth-grade peers, I was given extra time on my exams, which, astoundingly, lasted through the end of university. If I had too much on my plate during finals, I could almost assume one professor would allow me to turn in a term paper late. And even my summers spent in professional environments manufactured a sense that the intern had special privileges and status. Rules tended to feel more like guidelines. Accommodations were boundless.

Older people often tell my generation (I am 24) that we feel an undue sense of entitlement – we expect much more than we deserve. I have to admit I was a very fortunate child. My parents worked tirelessly to provide me and my brothers with all the opportunities they’d never had – private education from kindergarten to the age of 18, carefree summers, a debt-free college experience. If my laptop or phone broke, I knew I’d have a replacement soon enough. My family didn’t go on lavish vacations, but I struggle to remember a time when I didn’t get something I really wanted.

At the same time, though, I do not feel wholly responsible for the charges held against me. In fact, those who complain about the young are themselves at least partly culpable. Children and adolescents react to what they see, absorbing and digesting what’s around them. And if ‘the culture’ is responsible for cultivating this sense of entitlement, who made that culture? I’m not sure of the answer, but if you let children eat candy, they’ll do it till they’re sick.

I don’t mean to offshore responsibility with this logic. I could spend time dissecting who’s to blame and why, or harping on what I would’ve done differently. But in the end, it doesn’t matter. Shifting the blame doesn’t shift the reality. Part of growing up is owning what’s yours. I thought I already knew this from books of ancient wisdom and modern psychology, which said essentially the same thing. For example, in Jewish culture, once you become Bar Mitvah’ed, and thus a man (at the respectable age of 13), you’re accountable for all your deeds, good and bad. Victor Frankle, a Holocaust survivor with all the reason to resent and crumble to his environment, credits his survival to the

…the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

More recently, J.K. Rowling counseled

There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

My ten months at the Big Four was a proper lesson in accountability – making me confront and internalize my failings.

When I started at my firm, I discovered immediately that a boss wasn’t the same kind of authority figure as my parents or professors. Bosses are not necessarily invested in your personal success or happiness. Moreover, I was receiving money, and others had their expectations of me. All my naive assumptions were flipped on their head. My belief in myself and benevolent cultural, even cosmic, forces was shaken to the root. I’m not sure all those carefree summers had prepared me properly.

I bumped up against my project manager almost immediately. Our personalities clashed head-on, and unlike many of the people I had known, he was unwilling to accommodate himself to me. I sought consensus and hoped to know my new colleagues on a personal level. He had more of a ‘Get Shit Done’ philosophy. When I asked about his weekends, he’d answer in a breath, “It was good,” then smile in a way that said this-is-the-end-of-this-conversation. In one feedback session over a firm-sponsored trendy coffee, he told me I wasn’t “hungry enough.” My other advocates and mentors scoffed when I unpacked the feedback with them. What the hell, they asked, does that even mean?

I did what was asked of me. I got my work done. I dropped the ball once in a while, but not markedly more than the other First Years. And I knew I was capable of persistent, strenuous effort. Maybe my mentors were right – he was speaking in vague terms because the subject of the feedback was subjective. We simply didn’t get along. But even if I couldn’t follow the exact calculus, in a way I understood my manager was picking up on something more profound than working styles. Eventually, I’d come to understand what he meant.

The first reason had to do with entitlement and expectations. Through recruiting pitches and conversations, I had developed a rather glamorous picture of consulting, and my reality simply didn’t match. For the entire, albeit short, duration of my employment, I was working on a long-term, internal project. That meant while my peers were flying around the country, rotating through different industries and teams, solving real-world business problems for Fortune 500 companies, I was maintaining internal programming for the Big Four. Furthermore, the “cross-functional” aspect of my project meant my superiors tended to be auditors or financial advisors instead of consultants. Almost none of the things I had expected to find in consulting were present. I was disappointed, unhappy, and unmotivated. I didn’t want to work myself into the ground on something I hadn’t signed up for.

So I tried to get out. I spent a lot of energy and brainpower ruminating on the shortcomings of my project and wondering how to remove myself. I dabbled in corporate politics. I even entertained an attempt to ‘fail out’ of the project (1). I thought I was being responsible – taking ownership of my situation, changing my environment. In hindsight, I see all this mental energy would have been better aimed at helping my project, succeeding where I was. I was wrong to expect my situation to adapt to my strengths and preferences, or to believe the onus was on the firm to find me better opportunities.

The second reason for my apparent lack of hunger had to do with why I entered consulting in the first place. For the easily compiled laundry list of gripes, I am extremely grateful for my childhood. I cherished the Jewish education I received from my private school, and I loved that my mom was always around to pick me up from the bus stop. I grew up with an air of love and support. When thinking about myself as an adult, I consistently return to these standards. To raise a happy, successful Jewish family, I must ensure there’s a yard on which to play and sound finances, including a near-bottomless education fund. Because I’m a man, tradition dictates financial responsibility falls mostly on me. Although my girlfriend says she cares about having a career of her own, the communal indoctrination of Man as The Provider lives deep in my psyche, kept alive by anxiety and responsibility.

Business schools espouse and reinforce similar values. From what felt like the first days of our first year, students were already preparing themselves to secure prestigious, high-paying corporate jobs. In many schools, students have an end-of-term practice, calculating precisely what scores they need on the final exam to secure an A in the class. My business school peers, meanwhile, would congregate to project the financial returns of various career trajectories. For a college student concerned about paying his bills as a 45-year-old, I found a strange satisfaction in the ritual. However, watching my talented friends filter into the same handful of jobs raised concerns. These were young adults who would succeed in anything they put their minds to. I had trouble believing half of my graduating class was so interested in investment banking.

When I got to the Big Four, I found myself doubting my motivations and decisions. I still felt acute pressure to ascend to the upper-middle class. If I wanted to raise a family like that of my childhood, the Big Four was certainly the place for me. On the other hand, I kept wondering why I felt the urgency to enter corporate life. I didn’t grow up dreaming of having a career in consulting, and could see enough of the industry to know it wouldn’t really stir my passions. Perhaps, I started to think, having a contented father was more important to a happy family life than money. While my childhood had been glorious, thanks to my parents’ self-sacrifice, maybe there were other possibilities. And yet, it’s possible – even probable – I wouldn’t be enamored of any job, so I might as well choose one with a large salary. Maybe I shouldn’t risk everything on account of a post-college existential crisis. Consumed with such doubts, I found it hard to exert myself to my true potential. I wasn’t “hungry” because I wasn’t fully bought in.

As I continued to ponder my manager’s feedback, I started to see myself more objectively. I developed a new attitude based on a simple fact – my project wouldn’t last forever. Even if this particular project, or this job for that matter, was not how I wanted to spend my energy, it was where I was. When I moved on to whatever was next, I’d be taking something with me. The demanding and unsympathetic nature of the corporate world had shocked me, but I had begun to realise the very discontinuity and discomfort could offer life-lessons richer than any business skill. But if I wanted to learn these lessons, I would need to exert earnest effort – a feat near-impossible while keeping a tally of what’s ‘fair’. Perhaps, as clichéd as it sounded, if I worked hard, was persistent, and stayed humble, things might even themselves out.

My performance slowly improved. I ended conversations by asking how else I could help, kept assignments and timelines organized for my team, and volunteered to do grunt work for my managers. I took notes and formatted documents. I drafted emails and double-checked instructions. But I’d left it too late. When my firm decided to terminate employees en masse, they didn’t look at my last month of work. That fell outside the firm’s fiscal year-end, and therefore outside their evaluation parameters. Truthfully, even with my new attitude I still had a long way to go. Nevertheless, it’s unfortunate; I would have loved to get an honest second chance, a tabula rasa. But that’s not the way things work.

My current challenge is parsing through my experience. Our culture often speaks of ‘resilience’ after a disrupting or shocking incident, but the way it is commonly described is misleading, if not altogether wrong. You tend to hear metaphors like you get hit and you have to pick yourself right back up, or when you fall off the horse you have to get back on. These suggest the incident from which you must recover happens in an instant. Sure, with proper traumatic experiences there might be a focal point of resilience. But there are many other categories that demand a different type of resilience.

I experienced a slow, steady mental rewiring. I willingly submitted, even conspired, in my own downfall. Over the course of ten months, I came to accept the hierarchical truth that I was replaceable – a nobody at the bottom of the food chain. In trying to play my corporate-assigned role and listen, I forgot what my voice sounded like. I forgot my drives, my passions, and my capabilities. I let the Big Four prey and when it was done, I found a neglected self. Even so, I’m resisting the urge to hit the reset button. Although I’m left with a larger sense of self-doubt and a greater risk-aversion, I also feel more grateful for – and less entitled to – the good in my life. My Big Four experience, though leaving psychological turmoil, has stimulated tremendous growth that I would dare trade-in. So I’ll continue to sit with my pain to (hopefully) make sense of my experiences.

From where I stand now, I see glimmers of hope. I remember that I’m smart and capable. I tell myself I don’t need to have my 25-year plan mapped out. I don’t need to hold myself to a preset standard of success, which is bound to cause stress and restrict some of life’s excitement. With good principles and the right amount of luck, I trust I’ll figure something out. It will take time for me to come to terms with my deflation, and rebuild confidence. But I know this confidence will be built on things more real and stable. Besides, all over the world, COVID has disrupted countless lives and forced millions to rethink all kinds of assumptions. I’m just one of many. This is the hand I was dealt. I might as well try to play with it.

Author’s Note

  1. In the back of my mind was a story Malcom Gladwell told of himself where he once purposely flew into the wrong Carolina to avoid the work he didn’t like. His editor told him to cover a story in XYZ town. But there was an XYZ town in both North and South Carolina. Instead of clarifying, like a normal person, he got on a plane to the wrong town, guessing (rightly) his editor would never book him on a similar project