Matters for All

At the start of Lockdown in 2020, an overwhelming majority of the population had no idea what was going on. As it progresses many are finding the speed and extent of the changes incomprehensible. A host of new rules and regulations come at a time when the climate crisis, unemployment, hunger, poverty, armed conflicts and forced migrations demand our attention.

It is all too easy to forget that the social sphere of life is not something 'out there', constructed by specialists in geopolitics, and nothing to do with us personally. On the contrary, as we go about our daily business, we are each one of us an integral part of the world economy. So it concerns us all. And, since absolutely everyone is a part of the whole, we must all take the time to develop an understanding of how it functions, so that we may rightly have a say in the way it is ordered.

As a recently circulated discussion document, entitled ‘Memorandum-Easter 2021' and written by Dr Michaela Glöckler and Andreas Neider, observes:

"Many people are asking themselves, what kind of future is in store for us? What kind of citizen participation is needed to keep democracy viable in the face of this changed overall situation? How can civil society be concretely involved in the process of a necessary rethinking – also in Corona politics?"

The authors note five different reactions to the Lockdown measures. These can be broadly summarised as follows:

1. There is a deadly virus that has spread worldwide. It must be eliminated by the full force of modern mechanistic-materialistic science and technology.

2. Health is a complex balance between the generation, degeneration and regeneration of living organisms. The task is for individuals to use all the resources to hand to maintain a healthy balance for their families and society as a whole.

3. Isolation, restrictions on movements, disruptions in education, curtailments of social interaction, all these measures are counterproductive to well-being because they escalate malaise.

4. Authoritarian regimes can be imposed from above when fear is let loose in society. Citizens of all ages and all walks of life must guard their freedoms by entering into discussions with others of differing viewpoints.

5. The mechanistic world view presently dominating the social order serves to obscure the spiritual dimension to life. Yet humanity is rooted in the wider worlds of nature and the life of the spirit. The cycles of life, death and rebirth facilitate appreciation of the spiritual science dimension of the social order.

Over the decades following World War II humanity worldwide threw itself into the zero-sum game of monopolistic materialism. By unthinkingly following the rules of the game, as taught in schools and colleges during childhood and adolescence, we create poverty amidst plenty, an endless series of devastating wars, rampant disease, ecological catastrophe, widespread migration, homelessness, endless waste, artificial intelligence and blanket ignorance. In these circumstances democracy goes by the board. Global corporations, and the governments they control, design, produce and market the basic necessities and luxuries of life. Through the financial system of waged and salaried slavery, food, clothing and shelter and an infinite range of internet toys are supplied in standardised packages to meet the demand artificially created by the corporate world. Entertainment, information, education, sport and medical care come ready-made and packaged, to be consumed regardless of any detrimental effect upon ourselves or others, or on the natural living world. Goods and services that were once designed and produced by households set within their local communities, are now determined by their financial profitability. The current crises can only be solved if men and women of all ages and all walks of life, in their local communities, recover responsibility for their thoughtlessly given proxies.

To the extent that we seek to carry on as normal, we merely endorse the decisions made by a corporate world that is intent on imposing mechanistic materialism over every state on the planet. In doing so we forget that the state, like the human being, is a threefold entity. First, there are the individual functions that each individual citizen contributes as a creative spirit. Through religion, art, inventive genius and the world of education these activities form the cultural sphere. Second, there is the economic sphere through which individuals cooperate in community to create the commodities necessary for physical, intellectual and cultural life. And thirdly, balancing the two, is the independent body-politic of the rights sphere, where the legal rights and responsibilities of individuals in the other two spheres are moderated.

Whether we know it or not, we and our families are presently, totally dependent upon a social order, dictated from above, that is fundamentally flawed. The task ahead is to explore the history of those social institutions upon which we currently depend for our everyday needs. What inalienable rights do we have? How do we care for the lands and the natural world that provide our daily bread? What responsibilities do we have towards fellow human beings currently forced into waged labour by a financial system based upon greed and self-interest? The time is right for us to come together in our local communities and talk round the table. We need to seek out others, not of like mind, but of many and varied points of view, to explore ways to create a sustainable future. And we need to remember that there is no time like the present.

Dr Frances Hutchinson

https://www.douglassocialcredit.com/

Women, Artists, Farmers and the Un-payed

Social credit’s enduring appeal is to the vast sections of society whose income insecurity precludes active participation as mainstream actors in the political economy. Industrial capitalism and all waged and salaried workers have clearly defined economic roles. Although home-makers, mothers, carers, farmers and ‘artists’ are essential to the maintenance of the social order, these roles are less easy to define within the terms of the formal economy. The ‘artist’ includes all whose work springs from internal motivation, not only the fine artist but also the writer, the musician, the crafts-person, the gardener, the inventor and the engineer, without whose work civilisation would not exist. These are the mainstay of support for the Social Credit movement, past and present.

The futility of securing political freedom without economic freedom is stressed throughout social credit literature. Recognition is also given to the significance of a National (Citizen's) Dividend, payable to the individual rather than to the family unit, as a means of securing women’s civil rights. The active role of women in the worldwide social credit movement has received scant attention in historical accounts, and remains a fruitful area for future research. To date the involvement of many thousands of women in the study and promulgation of social credit lies hidden by male command of public platforms, publications and historical analyses. Nevertheless, traces of women’s presence can be detected. A series of articles on women and social credit gave rise to a spirited debate in the correspondence pages of The New Age on the relevance of social credit ideas to women. R. Laugier argued that ‘Man has made a mess of managing the economy. Woman revolted once to become the equal of man; let her revolt again and be his superior’. Men’s responsibility for ‘the mess’ was not at issue. The debate centred on the extent to which men had usurped women’s role as providers and protectors. ‘Woman, when she does not imitate man, is a realist’, observed a reader of The New Age in 1934.

The economics of paid employment, and women’s role in the real-life economy, have, like the broader political movement, repeatedly risen to prominence, only to give way to ‘more important’ mainstream considerations. The Social Credit movement of the 1930s sought to enable women to step ‘out of the margin’ and into the mainstream. Following from women’s growing interest in ‘the new economics’ of CH Douglas across Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand’, America, women were encouraged to banish the notion that economics is a ‘man’s subject’. According to the American publication Independent Woman in 1934, man’s lust for power could be countered if women applied the simple test to all economic proposals: ‘Is it good social housekeeping?’ Women’s emancipation into ‘salaried slavery’, observed a writer in The New Age in 1934, has done nothing to ameliorate women’s status or conditions. Those words have not dated with the passage of time.

For details of social credit economic thought see the booklet Social Credit: Some Questions Answered, available electronically on www.douglassocialcredit.com

Revolt Again

Revolt from the Center

Niels I Meyer, K Helveg Peterson & Villy Sorensen

Translated by Christine Hauch

Marion Boyars, 1981

When published in Danish in 1978, Revolt from the Center sparked a vigorous popular debate across Scandinavia, giving rise to an ongoing influence on social legislation over the intervening decades. Written by three eminent figures in their respective fields of politics, philosophy and physics, the success of the book in a small Scandinavian country with a population of only 5 million is not perhaps remarkable. However, from the first the book was tailored for a world readership. Written in a single voice speaking, sound common sense within the setting of a world political economy already hell-bent on social and ecological devastation, the book has not dated with the passage of time. The central theme is the responsibility of the individual citizen to take account of the common good of the earth community as they go about their everyday concerns.

To assist in the process of freeing the individual from the inherited straight-jacket of welfare through paid work, the authors of Revolt from the Centre suggest the payment of a 'Citizen's Wage'. The unconditional payment of an income to every citizen from the moment of birth is seen as a means to blur the divisions between work, education and leisure. Over recent decades calls for a 'Citizen's Wage' have come from a variety of notable individuals and interest groups across a wide spectrum of opinion, speaking with varying degrees of experience and authority in their chosen fields. However, although discussions have ranged across the continents, engaging academics and activists concerned with social justice and environmental sustainability, they have been based on the assumption that the division of labour and the wages system as we know it are set in tablets of stone. In REVC we find refreshing discussion of devolution of power and responsibility to the individual and the local community.

William Cobbett

Local production for local consumption, the sustainable tending of the earth, its plants and animals, sound educational practice and a healthy, thriving cultural life based on sufficiency rather than endless growth and consumption of material goods: at present, all these policies must be justified financially – or they cannot be put into practice. The need to be on guard against the growing power of finance was apparent to William Cobbett early in the 19th century. At the time – and since – Cobbett has been dismissed as hopelessly out of touch with modern life, as trying to live in the past. It now appears that Cobbett was far more clear sighted than many zealous reformers realised.

Writing in 1925, G.K. Chesterton wrote a life of William Cobbett. He observed: “In one thing he was a very lucky and lonely mortal:

“He could see before he could read. Most modern people can read before they can see. They have read about a hundred things long before they have seen one of them. Most town children have read about corn or cattle as if they were dwarfs or dragons, long before they have seen a grain of wheat or a cow. Many of them have read about ships or churches, or the marching of soldiers or the crowd cheering a king, or any other normal sight, which they have never seen. By a weird mesmerism which it is not here necessary to analyse, what people read has a sort of magic power over their sight. It lays a spell on their eyes, so that they see what they expect to see. They do not see the most solid and striking things that contradict what they expect to see. They believe their schoolmasters too well to believe their eyes. They trust the map against the mountain. Cobbett was a man without these magic spectacles. He did not see what he expected to see, but what he saw. He liked books; but he could not only read between the lines but through the book.
“Now, in nothing is this more vivid than in his vision of history. Most of us know what was the accepted general version of English history when we were at school; at any rate when I was at school, and still more, of course, when Cobbett was at school-in so far as he ever was at school. England had emerged out of a savage past to be the greatest empire in the world, with the best balanced constitution in the world, by a wise and well-timed progress or series of reforms, that ever kept in mind the need of constitutionalism and of balance. The Barons had extorted a constitutional charter from the King, in advance of that feudal age and a foundation for parliamentary freedom. The Commons came into the struggle for parliamentary freedom when it was waged against the Stuarts. By that time the Revival of Learning had led to the Reformation or sweeping away of the superstition that had been the only religion of the ruder feudal time. This enlightenment favoured the growth of democracy; and though the aristocrats still remained, and remain still, to give dignity to the state with their ancient blazonry of the Conquest and the Crusades, the law of the land is no longer controlled by the lords but by the citizens. Hence the country has been filled with a fresh and free population, made happy by humane and rational ideas, where there were once only a few serfs stunted by the most senseless superstitions. I ask anyone if that is not a fair summary of the historical education in which most modern people over forty were brought up. And having read it first, we went to look at the towns and castles and abbeys afterwards, and saw it or tried to see it. Cobbett, not having read it, or not caring whether he had read it, saw something totally different. He saw what is really there.” (FN G.K. Chesterton William Cobbett, House of Stratus, 2008 edition, p49).

When You're Lying Awake

When life gets too much, and you can't sleep because of all the doom and gloom flying around the internet - try learning this song. It should be sung, or read aloud, very fast - until the very last line. Worth a try.

When You’re Lying Awake

From Iolanthe
Libretto by William S. Gilbert, Music by Sir Arthur Sullivan
Sung by Lord Chancellor

When you’re lying awake
With a dismal headache,
And repose is taboo’d by anxiety,
You conceive you may use
Any language you choose
To indulge in, without impropriety;

For your brain is on fire—
And the bedclothes conspire
Of your usual slumber to plunder you:
First your counterpane goes,
And uncovers your toes,
And your sheet slips demurely from under you;

Then the blanketing tickles—
You feel like mixed pickles—
So terribly sharp is the pricking,
And you’re hot, and you’re cross,
And you tumble and toss
Till there’s nothing ’twixt you and the ticking.

Then the bedclothes all creep
To the ground in a heap,
And you pick ’em all up in a tangle;
Next your pillow resigns
And politely declines
To remain at its usual angle!

Well, you get some repose
In the form of a doze,
With hot eye-balls and head ever aching.
But your slumbering teems
With such horrible dreams
That you’d very much better be waking;

For you dream you are crossing
The Channel, and tossing
About in a steamer from Harwich—
Which is something between
A large bathing machine
And a very small second-class carriage—

And you’re giving a treat
(Penny ice and cold meat)
To a party of friends and relations—
They’re a ravenous horde—
And they all came on board
At Sloane Square and South Kensington Stations.

And bound on that journey
You find your attorney
(Who started that morning from Devon);
He’s a bit undersized,
And you don’t feel surprised
When he tells you he’s only eleven.

Well, you’re driving like mad
With this singular lad
(By the by, the ship’s now a four-wheeler),
And you’re playing round games,
And he calls you bad names
When you tell him that “ties pay the dealer”;

But this you can’t stand,
So you throw up your hand,
And you find you’re as cold as an icicle,
In your shirt and your socks
(The black silk with gold clocks),
Crossing Salisbury Plain on a bicycle:

And he and the crew
Are on bicycles too—
Which they’ve somehow or other invested in—
And he’s telling the tars
All the particulars
Of a company he’s interested in—

It’s a scheme of devices,
To get at low prices
All goods from cough mixtures to cables
(Which tickled the sailors),
By treating retailers
As though they were all vegetables—

You get a good spadesman
To plant a small tradesman
(First take off his boots with a boot-tree),
And his legs will take root,
And his fingers will shoot,
And they’ll blossom and bud like a fruit-tree—

From the greengrocer tree
You get grapes and green pea,
Cauliflower, pineapple, and cranberries,
While the pastrycook plant
Cherry brandy will grant,
Apple puffs, and three corners, and Banburys—

The shares are a penny,
And ever so many
Are taken by Rothschild and Baring,
And just as a few
Are allotted to you,
You awake with a shudder despairing—

You’re a regular wreck, with a crick in your neck, and no wonder you snore, for your head’s on the floor, and you’ve needles and pins from your soles to your shins, and your flesh is a-creep, for your left leg’s asleep, and you’ve cramp in your toes, and a fly on your nose, and some fluff in your lung, and a feverish tongue, and a thirst that’s intense, and a general sense that you haven’t been sleeping in clover;

But the darkness has passed, and it’s daylight at last, and the night has been long—ditto ditto my song—and thank goodness they’re both of them over!

________________________________________

Heaven and Earth

At this time of year we have a problem. Too many apples. We inherited an old orchard with the house we bought thirty years ago, and have been on a steep learning curve ever since.
Like everybody else of our acquaintance, we thought, if we thought about it at all, apples came in two types – eaters and cookers. And that all apples were used for desert. Gradually, we have learned that apples encapsulate a whole culture.
According to a little book published over twenty years ago, by Common Ground, “you could make an apple pie every day for 16 or more years and not use the same variety twice, eating your way from Stirling Castle to Exeter Cross in the company of the Reverend Wilks and Bess Pool.” What is more, apples are traditionally used for savoury dishes. Apple sauce is served with pork. Apples form an essential ingredient in the red cabbage dish which accompanies rich poultry such as duck and goose in Scandinavia.
“The German kitchen has some particularly good potato recipes,” we are told by cookery writer Elisabeth Luard in The Apple Source Book”, including delicious pancakes made with raw grated potatoes and served with apples or stewed fruit: and an excellent dish known as “Himmel und Erde” which mixes boiled potatoes with apples and crisp fried bacon. This mixture of fruit and vegetables, sweet and sour, is characteristic of northern country cooking – Holland, Belgium, Alsace, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Scandinavia all have similar mixtures.”

To make the Heaven and Earth dish, use firm but sweet apples like reinettes. This makes an excellent supper or light lunch dish.

2lb (1kg) potatoes
2lb (1kg) apples [such as King of the Pippins]
salt
8oz (225g) slab bacon in ¼ inches (6mm) thick slices

You need a large saucepan and a small frying pan.
If the potatoes are new and small, you merely need to wash them. If they are old, peel them closely and quarter them. Put them to boil in plenty of salted water. Peel and cut the apples into chunks the size of the potato pieces. Add them to the potatoes after 10 minutes. Finish cooking both together. By the time the potatoes are cooked the apples will be soft but still holding their shape. Meanwhile, dice the bacon and fry it in its own fat. Drain the cooked apples and potatoes. Pile them into a hot dish and scatter the crisp bacon, with its cooking juices, over the top. Serve immediately.

Other recipes in the book include Grilled Sausages with sage fried apple rings, and Devonshire Rabbits. Vegetarian options include Orchard Toasted Cheese, and Leek and Cockpit Quiche. The book includes information about the growing, harvesting and storing of apples from a number of well-known chefs, gardeners and writers.
As far as I can tell, this book is no longer available, which is very sad. As things stand, people are so busy that they have ‘no time’ to use apples from local gardens – preferring to buy them from the supermarket, in the form of jars and packets of ready-made apple sauce mix – whilst the apples are left lying on the ground beneath the trees. Something is not quite right.

Ring of Power

Ring of Power
Why is Lord of the Rings so popular?

Review of Patrick Curry, Defending Middle-Earth. Tolkein, Myth and Modernity (1998)

The publication of The Lord of the Rings more than forty years ago was greeted with cries of derision by the literary establishment. Nevertheless, sales have topped 50 million copies, and are still going strong, with public library lending total exceeding 300,000 per year. Despite the book’s steady popularity – it headed a poll of over 25,000 readers as the most important book of the twentieth century – it continues to be shunned by the “clever” world of adult literary fiction.
The popular success of The Lord of the Rings lies in its relevance to the contemporary struggle of “community, nature and spirit against the modern union of state-power, capital and technology”. Noting the “domination of financial and technological magic” over “God’s enchanted world”. Curry concludes that root-less science, existing beyond history and locality, becomes inseparable from science and power.
Curry has arranged his book around the three interrelated worlds of the Shire, its culture, politics and society, Middle-Earth, its nature and ecology, and the spiritual and ethical world of the sea. Each “world” is inextricably intertwined with the others, creating a powerful sense of specific and recognizable place. In Curry’s view, by setting the Shire in pre-modern England Tolkien gives his tale universal appeal. Itself not “Europeanized”, the Shire is invaded by modernizing Mordor. Within the state, the Hobbits who share a strong sense of community and of decentralized bioregionalism resist.
Although he omitted specific reference to religious practices, Tolkien perceived The Lord of the Rings as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work”. Curry argues that decisions based upon pure utility yield the centre ground to the forces of destruction: “the things, places and people we love will be saved for their own sakes or not at all; and that is ultimately a religious valuing.”
“The choice”, Curry observes, is between myths and stories that are liberating, and those that are destructive and debilitating.” The Lord of the Rings emerges as a major contribution to the former. Tolkien’s purpose was to challenge the myth of “progress” from primitive squalor to global civilisation based upon science and technology. His work echoes the ancient mythologies of a fall from a past golden age. It also rejects the inevitability of “progress” in favour of a belief in individuals as free agents capable of determining events good or ill.
Tolkien’s mythology contains hope for “the re-sacralization (or re-enchantment) of experienced and living nature, in the local cultural idiom”. Escape from the prison of enforced modernity is presently barred by its ”intellectual and cultural warders…the realists and rationalists” who declare “progress” is not only good for us, but also here to stay regardless of the trail of devastation left in its wake. The fatal charm of the Ring of Power leads its servants to feed it, rather than control it.
The book presents no simplistic division between good and evil: “one of the glories of Middle-Earth is its messy pluralism.” People with very different cultures, languages and habits, linked in a tenuous alliance, oppose the modernistic magic which is Mordor. Writing under the shadow of the “ongoing holocaust of the natural world” in the name of global capitalism, Curry quotes Ruskin:
“To watch the corn grow, and the blossom set: to draw hard breath over ploughshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray – these are the things that make men happy; they have always had the power of doing these, they never will have the power to do more. The world’s prosperity or adversity depends upon our knowing and teaching these few things: but upon iron, or glass, or electricity, or steam, in no wise.”
Curry suggests that the Ring has affinity with the most powerful economic and political forces in the material realm. Three Elven Rings, capable of creating beauty, understanding and healing are ultimately under the control of the One, which can transform and destroy their potential but is devoid of ability to create. The magic of the One Ring is its capacity for illusion. Evil, the lust for complete power in the world, arises from apparently innocent intervention in life in all its forms. In Tolkien’s works, “frightful evil can and does arise from an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others – and speedily according to the benefactor’s own plans”, This magic has been appropriated and transformed by modern science and technology.
Curry reminds us not only of the dangers of abandoning the lessons of history, as encapsulated in myth, but also of the good sense and good faith of the vast mass of ordinary people and the capacity of small individuals to stand against great evil.

This review was first published in Resurgence, No. 196, September/October 1999. Patrick Curry's book remains as relevant today as when first published. Frances Hutchinson