Thirty years ago I read Anthony Burgess’ novel The Wanting Seed, about an overpopulated globe where homosexuality was privileged in an attempt to reduce the birthrate. Governments only fell into two categories, Pelagian and Augustinian, and swung between the two forms.
Augustinian governments believe in Original Sin, that man is naturally given to vices which need to be checked. Tend to be hierarchical and militaristic.
Pelagian governments believe in Man’s perfectibility and innate goodness. As this fails to produce the perfect society, so do initially liberal Pelagians tend to turn towards coercion, more laws and greater police powers. Remind you of anything ?
‘’Pelagius is fond of police,
Augustine loves an army’’
And this one :
It is not without reason that Llan Ddewi Brefi has been called a place of old renown. In the fifth century, one of the most remarkable ecclesiastical convocations which the world has ever seen was held in this secluded spot. It was for the purpose of refuting certain doctrines, which had for some time past caused much agitation in the Church, and which originated with one Morgan, a native of North Wales, who left his country at an early age and repaired to Italy, where having adopted the appellation of Pelagius, which is a Latin translation of his own name Morgan, which signifies "by the seashore," he soon became noted as a theological writer. It is not necessary to enter into any detailed exposition of his opinions; it will, however, be as well to state that one of the points which he was chiefly anxious to inculcate was that it is possible for a man to lead a life entirely free from sin by obeying the dictates of his own reason without any assistance from the grace of God - a dogma certainly to the last degree delusive and dangerous. When the convocation met there were a great many sermons preached by various learned and eloquent divines, but nothing was produced which was pronounced by the general voice a satisfactory answer to the doctrines of the heresiarch. At length it was resolved to send for Dewi, a celebrated teacher of theology at Mynyw in Pembrokeshire, who from motives of humility had not appeared in the assembly. Messengers therefore were despatched to Dewi, who, after repeated entreaties, was induced to repair to the place of meeting, where after three days' labour in a cell he produced a treatise in writing in which the tenets of Morgan were so triumphantly overthrown that the convocation unanimously adopted it and sent it into the world with a testimony of approbation as an antidote to the heresy, and so great was its efficacy that from that moment the doctrines of Morgan fell gradually into disrepute.
The Pelagian heresy, that man is basically good and perfectible, is what Rousseau taught and what hippies and Guardianistas believe. (Rousseau was indeed so good and perfectible that he dumped his five children in an orphanage as soon as they were weaned.)
13 comments:
Rousseau was the first baby-boomer metropolitan intellectual.
It is no exaggeration to say that most of the assumptions, doctrines and prejudices of the left-liberal outlook can be traced back to Rousseau in some form...
While you are regaling us with treats about the history of these islands, may I suggest that "..the thousands of white slaves shipped from Bristol to the Viking kingdoms of Ireland after the Norman conquest" (as you noted below) is, while true as far as I know, also sometimes (I suspect) an attempt to disguise the fact that the Oirish themselves had always been happy slave-masters and prone to slave-raids on Britain. The life of St Patrick is a reminder of that. I don't know when Irish slave-holding ended - perhaps in the 16th or 17th century?
Laban,
The hideous personal character of many philosophers is a subject of which Bertrand Russell makes much in his 'History of Western Philosophy'. He also identified Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as being slightly less amenable than your average yeast. If you've not read it, I recommend it to you.
In moments of despair, Robespierre would go to weep at Rousseau's tomb, in a manner similar to that in which Nixon is alleged to have wept in front of Lincoln's portrait. Rousseau is not just the father of the Guardianistas - by helping inflict the poison of Romanticism upon the world, he was also the father of Hitler.
Dearieme,
Re the 'Oirish', whoever they might be -
A quick googling of 'slavery' and 'Ireland' produces the following rubric of a book by a Dr. Nini Rodgers entitled 'Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865'. -
"Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865 uncovers a forgotten aspect of Ireland's history and reveals the importance of the Irish in global developments surrounding the slave trade. Black slavery made fortunes for the Irish abroad as they participated in the slave trade and in the establishment of slave plantations in the Caribbean. (Should Irish 'bound servants' also involved in this process be regarded as white slaves?) At home the sale of such crops produced wealthy merchants, urban growth and an impact on politics, eventually resulting in the 1790s in an anti-slavery movement which would claim roots in the Ireland of St Patrick (Does investigation uphold this view? ) Ireland played an important role in the lives of famous slaves - Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, while the Famine emigrants found themselves confronted by a United States divided over slavery."
It's on Palgrave.com. With the usual reservations concerning Wikipedia, I would also direct you to its page 'Slavery in Britain and Ireland', which records that Cromwell ordered the deportation of Catholic women from Ireland to serve as comfort women in the West Indies.
The role of the true Scots in the slave trade should not be under-estimated. For all his 'a man's a man for a' that' crap, Burns seemed quite willing to act as slave overseer. Before joining the Clapham Sect, Zachary Macaulay, whose father was the Meenister at Inverary, was a plantation manager and user of slave labour.
Martin - So its fair to say then that there is guilt enough to go around as regards slavery and all the peoples of the British Isles.
Modern leftist nationalists in Scotland, Ireland and Wales are more than happy to scapegoat the English for all the ills of colonialism and slavery and are often abetted in this by English Guardianistas.
Anon,
If you care to read my blog, I think you'll see that my opinion of 'modern leftist nationalists' in Scotland is not, well, high.
You wouldn't happen to be an English nationalist, would you? Oh dear.
Russell's 'History of Western Philosophy' was a potboiler: it is poor philosophy and history (of ideas).
Rousseau, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Leibniz and Wittgenstein were monsters - and Russell's character left much to be desired; but Aristotle, Hume, Locke, Spinoza, Kant, Aquinas were fine upstanding men - and Aquinas and Spinoza were saintly.
Rousseau's most pernicious idea is that human institutions constrain and oppress the individual - Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. His concept of the general will is totalitarian, as his notion that one can be forced to be free.
Interesting post, Martin: thank you.
"the importance of the Irish in global developments surrounding the slave trade": irrelevant to my point, which was about how long Irish slave-owning persisted. It may, I suppose, have ended when Brehon Law was supressed and replaced by English Law, but a change of law code doesn't guarantee a change of habit. The Irish owned slaves before the Norse came and, I should think, afterwards. So, of course, did Britons and Anglo-Saxons and, no doubt, Picts; slavery in England seems to have ended after the Norman Conquest. When it ended in Wales and Scotland I don't know. My question was, when did it end in Ireland? I don't know that either, but I suspect that allusion to the Norse in Ireland is just a red herring.
Paul,
There is a school of thought which suggests that Russell was a congenital schizophrenic - many of his children suffered from the condition. The principal criticism I have of the book is that its starts to get intereting on Page 572 - but his analyses of Hegel, utilitarianism and Darwin make it a worthy effort.
Dearieme,
Slavery in Scotland was only declared illegal in 1778, in the case of 'Knight - v - Wedderburn'.
Discussions about which country in the British Isles (or North West European Archipelago) was the worst for enslaving its neighbours are all very interesting but I think the point is that slavery was (and is) widespread and people of all colours were enslaved and made fortunes from slavery and it’s only whiteys who are expected to atone for the terrible wrongs done hundreds of years ago.
The West African slave trade would not have been possible without the active participation of many black West African kingdoms that preyed on their neighbours and sold them to the slavers on the coast. North Africans raided the Western European coast even up to the British Isles for slaves for the Arab markets (white gold). The list goes on and on and could involve almost any country or ethnic group on the planet as both victims and perpetrators. So why is it all the fault of white people?
If you care to read my blog, I think you'll see that my opinion of 'modern leftist nationalists' in Scotland is not, well, high.
Yes, I do read your blog from time to time Martin. I didn't think we were disagreeing about anything particularly.
What I find exasperating about modern Europeans is their pussy whipped mentality. They readily own up to all the supposed ills of their collective ancestors. But given the slightest opportunity they will unload those crimes onto other European groups, exonerating their own particular ancestors.
"Slavery in Scotland was only declared illegal in 1778, in the case of 'Knight - v - Wedderburn'." Fair enough, but that's not my point - that was a case concerning a slave brought back from the Empire, and simply concluded that the idea of owning a slave in Scotland was not to be abided. In other words it effectively said that slave-owning was not to be re-introduced to Scotland. There was a similar celebrated case in the English courts that was interpreted in the same way. But when did the ancient tradition of owning slaves here die? Perhaps my point can be put most simply as "Does anyone know when the Dark Age (and older) traditions of slave-owning died out in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland?" Come to that, when did the Roman (and older) tradition die out in Italy, France...? I'm not asking about shipping negroes to the Americas - there's tons of histories of that. Nor about castrating negroes and marching them across the Sahara. I'm asking about our native tradition.
Dearieme,
Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, 'The Patriot' of immortal memory, was an enthusiastic proponent of re-introducing slavery, particularly for the Highlanders.
Theodore W. Allan's 'The Invention of the White Race' states that slavery was still being practiced by Scots in Scotland upon other Scots as late as 1685.
As Adam Smith said,
"By the Union with England, the middling and inferior ranks of people in Scotland gained a compleat deliverance from the power of an aristocracy which had always oppressed them" -
Wealth of Nations, V.iii.89 (Oxford, 1976), P.944,
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