Thomas Carlyle, Goethe and the Prophet Muhammad.

Tags

Carlyle Islam, Carlyle Mohammad, Christianity and Islam, Coffee, Cultural Marxism, Defend the modern world, Frederick, French Revolution, Fuhrerbunker, Germany, Goethe, Goethe Islam, Islam, Nazis, OPEC, Thomas Carlyle, WWII

Very few writers either merit or can withstand comparison with William Shakespeare. The only two I would dare to suggest are Edward Gibbon and Thomas Carlyle.

The first, in his Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, demonstrated a perfection in writing that has never been (and may never be) surpassed. The second, in his history of the French Revolution and his essays on Heroism, exposed the wilder possibilities of language, blurring the boundaries of thought and emotion, poetry and prose.

So in the past few months of frantic intra-national diplomacy, it’s been saddening to hear so little about Scotland’s greatest writer. Andrew Marr’s ‘Great Scots’ BBC series surveyed in detail the likes of Hugh Mcdiarmand and James Boswell, but had nothing to say of a man who influenced history in a greater and more dynamic way than either of them.

War leaders and men of power are particularly drawn to Carlyle’s thrilling voice. When the meth-addicted dictator Adolf Hitler lived out his last few days in the Fuhrerbunker, the book at his bedside (which – I’m pleased to say – he never got the chance to finish) was Carlyle’s history of Frederick the Great. On the other side, Sartor Resartus (Carlyle’s satirical novel) was referenced approvingly by the allied commander in the Pacific.

Carlyle’s writing is in some ways alike Wagnerian music. It makes the reader want to become something better than himself. Through its chaotic poetry, it breeds an orderly ambition.

Consider the beauty of the following paragraph:

“Behold therefore, the England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer’s Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil, between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell.”

Alongside the connection with Hitler, you may have also heard Carlyle’s name associated with that of the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims are known to bring him up because of the author’s portrait of the prophet in ‘Heroes, Heroism and the Heroic in History’ – a book advancing the Great Man Theory of history.

The following quote is taken from that work:

“Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments, — nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men toil for.”

Other positive comments are forthcoming from the same work. This use (or rather misuse) of Carlyle is typical of Muslim dishonesty. Carlyle, though he admired the impact of any great figure of world-history, retained a more exact part of his intellect for comparative judgement.

“Only a sense of duty could carry a European through the Qur’an.” he wrote in a section of the same book quoted less often by Muslim observers. In that same paragraph, he pronounces the book in general to be a “wearisome confused jumble” and Islam to be greatly lacking relative to his own (fiercely held) Protestant faith.

The same dishonesty that allows Muslims to make use of Carlyle also permits mistreatment of the reputation of Goethe. Regarded by Germans to be the equal of Shakespeare, the polymath Goethe was a notably cosmopolitan figure, run through with a very optimistic kind of xenophilia. His poems took elements from numerous foreign traditions, including in his ‘West-Eastern Divan’ volume, the traditions of the Middle East. That book contains poems which glorify the Prophet of Islam, sometimes comparing him to the giants of Greek and Roman mythologies and more or less (unlike Carlyle) maintaining a positive tone throughout.

However, the truth of the matter is that Goethe (writing in a less-informed age than Carlyle) had very little knowledge of the Middle East and Islam as they actually were (and still are). Indeed, his kindly impressions of the culture of Islam were drawn almost exclusively from the poetry of the Persian (pantheist) Hafiz. This is hardly valid.

More generally, the Muslim longing to find in Western thought a validation for their own historical glories is really quite revealing. Do they concede (even if just inwardly) that the West has the clearer mind and the intellectual upper-hand?

D, LDN

Advertisement

Russell Brand’s Childish Utopianism.

Tags

Bill o'reilly, Christianity, Civilisation, Cultural Marxism, Defend the modern world, Irish, Leftism, Lefty, london, politics, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Robin Williams, Russell Brand, Terrorism, Thomas Carlyle, Trews, YouTube

How far a society has degenerated can be gauged by looking at those it chooses to venerate. The country which in loftier times boasted of John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens in its pulpit of social commentary, now has markedly lesser standards, and this descent corresponds necessarily to a decline in popular acuity.

That one of the most popular political thinkers of our day is a comedian should itself communicate the point. More disquieting still is the light load carried by the man in question. 

Once a lowly television presenter, Brand, 39, now communicates daily on his YouTube channel in the manner of an Eastern prophet. He calls this broadcast the ‘Trews’ (a portmanteau of Truth and News). At their peak, episodes can reach an audience of over 500,000 people. The other day I took to watching a few of these myself and so here are some thoughts.

Politically, Brand’s point of orientation seems to be an extreme form of universalism. He repeatedly calls nation-states ‘meaningless concepts’ and ‘arbitrary lines on a map’. All cultures are apparently equal to him, including those which violently condemn this very worldview. Immigration is never a crisis meanwhile, but simply a means the rich use to distract the poor from the imperatives of class warfare.

These are old ideas indeed, many of them soaked in old blood.

From Stalin’s nation-destroying grip on Eastern-Europe, through Mao’s war on China’s ancient diversity, universalism has been roundly discredited by every possible moral measure. ‘Cultural equality’ meanwhile is a plague of illogic directly responsible for the tensions of the modern world.

On economic affairs, Brand’s anti-corporatism is absolute. No enterprise can be successful without simultaneously ‘oppressing’ or ‘keeping down’ other elements. He communicates a kind of ‘socialism without the details’, knocking the system whilst refusing to endorse a specific party or movement and often calling into question the very notion of voting.

Of course, wherever there is Leftism of this potency, one will also find hypocrisy, and Brand provides no exception to this rule. span>

In a video boldly examining the ‘hidden’ agenda behind television commercials, Brand mocks the inclusion of Native Americans in Coca Cola’s notorious multi-lingual Star-Spangled Banner ad. “Don’t take the piss.” he barks “You stole their fucking country.”

But what is that strange word he uses here – ‘country’? It seems to me a euphemism for ‘nation’, something which – as Brand has already informed us – is nothing more than a ‘construct’ of the mind. By the same stroke then, no ill truly befell the Native Americans, and if the notion of a ‘border’ has always been a nefarious restriction on human liberty, Sitting Bull was simply being xenophobic in resisting the path of the Yankees.

Brand repeats the same mistake on the subject of Israel. During the Gaza war, Brand consistently sided with the distinctly un-universalistic claims of Palestinian nationalism; a tendency of thought quite obsessed with ‘borders’ and the ownership of land.

But this freewheeling hypocrisy is part of the warp and weft of utopian thinking. And utopian Brand decidedly is. In the course of his pontifications, he has gone so far as to call for ‘revolution’. He doesn’t explain exactly for what end this rebellion would be, but perhaps he doesn’t need to.  

A more sensible British comic, Robert Webb, bravely took issue with Russell’s childish incitement in the New Statesman. In a letter addressed to Brand, Webb wrote the following:

“I understand your ache for the luminous, for a connection beyond yourself. Russell, we all feel like that. Some find it in music or literature, some in the wonders of science and others in religion. But it isn’t available any more in revolution. We tried that again and again, and we know that it ends in death camps, gulags, repression and murder. In brief, and I say this with the greatest respect, please read some fucking Orwell.”

A drug addict for most of his youth, Brand ascribes his newfound sobriety to the positive influence of Transcendental Meditation – a dippy, new-age excuse for light-headedness that became a hot product in Hollywood during the 1980s.

Perhaps political sobriety is a more difficult concept to master. Give him time.

D, LDN.