History Is A Cycle, Not A Line: Douglas Murray And T.S. Eliot Put Our Tumultuous Times In Perspective

"It's the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine." REM; "We gotta get outta this place, there's a better life for me and you," Eric Burdon

Introduction

I occasionally get a sunset that puts a lot of things into perspective. This was one from earlier this year-when it still rained.

By the time I “thin out my blood” with my third cup of coffee-San Francisco Fog Chaser this AM as it happens, along about 5 AM typically, I am in a bit of a philosophical mood. I don’t listen to the news much on the weekend, as I devour it during the week-mostly on Fox Business with occasional dips into Fox News. I simply must have a buffer and a period of rest and release from the incessant negativity and compression of the news cycle, where each show refines and repeats the topic and runs clips from previous shows, putting perhaps their own unique spin on them. The uniqueness of each treatment remains to be decided, but come the weekend I need a break from it. All of it. Completely. Fortunately we have sports, and then there are the odds and ends of things I find to do around my property-other than write financial articles for Seeking Alpha and general interest oil-related articles for OilPrice. And before you know it, it’s Monday again and its back to the grind.

A post from Douglas Murray, author, essayist, and frequent social commentator, arrived in my inbox just as I was casting about for something to do-I have three financial writing projects in process and the clock is ticking on all of them. But, I will drop everything when a note from Murray arrives, in this case by way of the Free Press-a daily blog put out by top writers, journalists, and essayists, (and in my view the best $80 bucks a year you can spend on thought-provoking reading material that doesn’t have an overt liberal or conservative slant or spew the mindless pablum the larger online dailies do. You know who they are.)

Murray’s topic, essentially the creeping nihilism and corrosive demagoguery that’s become the mainstay of our political discourse, caught me in a very receptive frame of mind-(who else would ground an essay in the writings of a largely forgotten poet and philosopher of the last century?) No matter in what camp you find yourself, Left or Right, the over-arching message of each is exactly the same, “If the other guy wins, it’s the end of civilization or democracy as we know it.”

Really? Murray writes in today’s column-

T.S. Eliot is always with me. His words frequently rise to the surface of my mind. They are particularly powerful as a counter to despair—which is, in contemporary America, rife. As its citizenry has been preparing to exercise its right to vote next week, we have been warned that—regardless of the result—everything, everywhere is doomed: America’s education system, its birth rate, the planet, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, democracy itself.

The notion of having a “counter to despair” has me mentally bookmarking, Read some T.S. Eliot…soon. Certainly before the world ends-kidding. Murray continues-

Once, an impending election might have encouraged America to imagine a better future. Instead, so many influential voices fall back on fearmongering. Last week, for instance, Vice President Kamala Harris chose to amplify the divisive rhetoric of her most extreme followers when she opted to describe her opponent, for the first time, as a “fascist.” This comment could not have been made in a time of hope; it is confirmation that the culture is giving in to the temptations of pessimism, declinism, this idea that America has had its time. In certain circles, there has been a surge of interest in the infamous theory of Oswald Spengler—that, when a civilization finds itself on the road to ruin, it can never recover itself.

I have often wondered why some people adopt this way of thinking. One possibility is that it is true. Another possibility, however, is that some of us are vulnerable to the intellectual equivalent of an optical illusion. As the years go by, you—hopefully—know more and more, while the people coming up underneath you apparently know less and less. Humanity appears to be increasingly ignorant. Things seem coarser than they once did. On occasions, that might be true. But not always.

The presumption of progressives is that things should always get better and better. The presumption of doomerists is the flip side of that: Civilization always gets worse and worse. The truth is, as usual, neither extreme. The evidence of history is that things go back and forth; it is a cycle, not a line.

The prospect that T.S. Eliot, whom I dimly remember from undergrad Comp and Rhetoric classes in my freshman year of college, (circa 1971), and of whom I’ve not spared a single thought since, except for occasionally running across his oft quoted, “this is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper,” line taken from the Hollow Men, might have words of comfort is indeed intriguing. (Good Lord, my 12 grade English teacher would rap my knuckles for this run-on sentence!)

Before we continue its certainly fair, and must be pointed out that angry, and divisive inflammatory rhetoric comes from both sides of the aisle, with Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for president describing his opponent as “mentally impaired.” Sigh! Commentary that does not serve him well, but seems to be part of the package. I confess to being a little disappointed that Murray-whom I greatly admire, didn’t balance out his commentary in this instance. No problems, Douglas. I took care of it.

The word count is beginning to run up on this piece and I’ve exhausted most of the 45 seconds or so most you will devote out of your Sunday to reading it, without getting to the meat of this post, so here we go.

Murray discusses how the backdrop of World War I may have-certainly did, impact Eliot’s perception of the human condition and society in general. To buttress his larger point that human history is on a wheel, and everything old is new again, and in the fullness of time will history will endlessly repeat itself, Murray cites Eliot’s masterwork, the play, Murder in the Cathedral, which if you’ve never read it-as I admittedly had not, dramatizes the murder of Eleventh century, Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett by Henry II.

We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The same things happen again and again.
Men learn little from others’ experience.
But in the life of one man, never
The same time returns. Sever
the cord, shed the scale. Only
The fool, fixed in his folly, may think
He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

(The subject of historical movie in the 60’s, Beckett. And as a side note reading the notes in the link, it’s obvious where George R.R. Martin got his inspiration for the characters of Robert the King, and Ned Stark in Game of Thrones.)

Powerful stuff. Do people write like this anymore? Are people even capable of writing like this anymore. Fodder for a future post, perhaps. Ok, wrapping up. I think we all yearn for a little more statesmanship from our political leaders. Rising above the discord they now spew forth. I hope it arrives. Soon. Before the wheel turns too much farther.

Cheers all and thanks for reading!

Dave