Wotan

In 1936 Jung was trying to frame his understating of what was happening only about 30km away from his home in Zürich, over the border in Germany. A profound shift had happened in just three years and it was being reflected in what he was hearing from his patients during analysis, especially from his German speaking patients. Their dreams and dream symbols were worryingly disturbed. He wrote Wotan to explore his thoughts about what he was observing.

We are always convinced that the modern world is a reasonable world, basing our opinion on economic, political, and psychological factors. But if we may forget for a moment that we are living in the year of Our Lord 1936, and, laying aside our well-meaning, all-too human reasonableness, may burden God or the gods with the responsibility for contemporary events instead of man, we would find Wotan quite suitable as a causal hypothesis. In fact, I venture the heretical suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism than all three reasonable factors put together. There is no doubt that each of these factors explains an important aspect of what is going on in Germany, but Wotan explains yet more. He is particularly enlightening in regard to a general phenomenon, which is so strange to anybody not a German that it remains incomprehensible, even after the deepest reflection.

Perhaps we may sum up this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit – a state of being seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one who is seized) but, also, an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan is an Ergreifer of men, and, unless one wishes to deify Hitler – which has indeed actually happened – he is really the only explanation. It is true that Wotan shares this quality with his cousin Dionysus, but Dionysus seems to have exercised his influence mainly on women. The maenads were a species of female storm-troopers, and, according to mythical reports, were dangerous enough. Wotan confined himself to the berserkers, who found their vocation as the Blackshirts of mythical kings.

Jung received his university education during the 1890s, a period when the second wave of Darwinians were trying to work out how evolution applied to the human species. Both ethnography and anthropology were thriving because of the opportunities for studying human diversity offered by the global extent of European empires. Was human kind a single species, or were there distinct races, each competing with the other in the battle of survival? Were some races more evolved than others, more adapted and fitter to survive and thrive? It was far from clear. Many people were happy to have 'scientific' underpinning to their racialist views. It suited countries with empires. It suited some in communities with ethnic minorities amongst them as a means of justifying discrimination. It suited those who felt 'good breeding' was something organic and conferred superiority: they had good genes which is why they were at the top. It justified eugenics. Social-Darwinism was to be very much part of the zeitgeist of the first half of the twentieth century.

Jung was not utterly immune. He was a man of his age. He did not embrace such theories, but it seems he did toy with them, allowing them to colour his thinking to greater or lesser extents during  periods of his long career.  He had developed his theories of archetypes and of the collective unconscious. He did wonder how far the archetypes were inherited, and how they might differ between peoples. He thought he could identify differences between the deep minds of German and Jewish peoples. His recommendation that Westerners do not adopt Eastern religious practices were based on his belief that the deep structures of European minds would attach themselves incorrectly to the symbols and practices of Eastern religions. Those had been evolved to suit different minds. It would be like trying to use an imperial toolkit to service an engine built using metric nuts and bolts.

There are eminent Jungian scholars, such as Andrew Samuels, who claim that Jung was antisemitic because of such thinking. Jung was a man of his age and there are certainly traces in his work, however, he did not behave in an antisemitic way: he had Jewish colleagues, Jewish patients, used Jewish businesses, corresponded with Jewish people as equals, and even had a Jewish mistress.

Jung felt he could detect the footprint of an earlier paganism in the German mind – in the collective unconscious of German peoples – as perhaps an organic part of their racial heritage? One that had been masked over by the Christian centuries, but one that lurked there waiting to be reawakened. He called that archetype Wotan after the Norse/Teutonic god. He was much concerned by what he saw as the mass-psychosis that had infected the German people; or, as he called it the phenomena of Ergriffenheit. It is possible to veiw his essay Wotan as an apologia for the intoxication of Nazism, excusing Germans because they could not help themselves from being carried away: being swept along by the symbolic power of the Third Reich was unavoidable because it awakened deep racial responses. The Gothic-romantic symbolism of the Nazi Party reached into the emotive brain, into the unconscious, into the non-rational. It connected with and activated the Wotan archetype – the dark potential of cataclysmic fury: the want to destroy all who oppose: the want to seek the glory of death in battle.

Questions are asked as to why Jung continued in contact with so many people in Germany, even within the regime, right up to 1940, suggesting that he sympathised with the regime to some extent. It can be countered by remembering that he was a doctor of the mind, and not only many Germans, but Germany itself he saw as his patient: if someone is sick you do not abandon them. As a native speaker of German he was exposed to, and engaged with, what was in effect his own wider native culture. It seems he hoped to help Germans, and maybe even Germany itself, escape their Ergriffenheit. 

To help Germany escape its intoxication – and to help explain it to the wider world – Jung felt that it was necessary to identify the component of the unconscious mind that was the source of the problem. The shift of the God-archytype from being expressed through the Christian-Judaic "God" to the older and more primitive and furry filled Wotan, and its projection over the person of Hitler would, Jung felt, account for much that he was witnessing. As he states, "But since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces" – and, in his view, such psychic forces were largely at play in our lives unconsciously – those possessed by the intoxication of Wotan would not realise they were so afflicted. It would impel them from deep within. The pagan iconography of the Nazi regime, the appeal to Teutonic myths – tangibly as re-interpreted by Wagner in his Ring-Cycle of operas – the wide cultivation of a pagan völkisch-Norse aesthetic and the belief in Aryan superiority, all fed into revitalising Wotan as a living force in the deep, collective mind of the German peoples, and were outwards expressions of its vigour. Realisation of the fact of possession, Jung hoped, would help liberate from the affects.  

A mind that is still childish thinks of the gods as metaphysical entities existing in their own right, or else regards them as playful or superstitious inventions. From either point of view the parallel between Wotan redivivus and the social, political, and psychic storm that is shaking Germany might have at least the value of parable. But since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces, to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented. Not that ‘psychic forces’ have anything to do with the conscious mind, fond as we are of playing with the idea that consciousness and psyche are identical. This is only another piece of intellectual presumption. ‘Psychic forces’ have far more to do with the realm of the unconscious. Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.

Jung then suggests Hitler as the agent of infection which will inevitably lead Germany towards the destruction that it did indeed suffer, but only after having engulfed most of Europe in a blaze of its fury. He was certainly showing foresight in 1936 about what would take most of the next decade to unfold.

For the sake of better understanding and to avoid prejudice, we could of course dispense with the name ‘Wotan’ and speak instead of the furor Teutonicus. But we should only be saying the same thing and not as well, for the furor in this case is a mere psychologizing of Wotan and tells us no more than that the Germans are in a state of ‘fury’. We thus lose sight of the most peculiar feature of this whole phenomenon, namely, the dramatic aspect of the Ergreifer and the Ergriffener. The impressive thing about the German phenomenon is that one man, who is obviously ‘possessed’, has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition.    

Irene Pickard and the other of the Quaker-Jungian group in the Geneva Meeting felt that Jung held the keys to explaining much that was happening around them with the rise of fascist movements across Europe, especially of the Nazis in Germany. In addition to how his ideas illuminated their understanding of their own personal struggles and conflicts, it was one of the main motivating factors for their intense study of his ideas during the period between 1934 and 1936. They hoped that understanding Jung might provide them with tools to strengthen their peace-work in order to combat the rise of militarism and the lurch towards war.

All the quotes are from C G Jung's ‘Wotan’, in Essays on Contemporary Events (London: Kegan Paul, 1947; a translation of the 1936 original).

Refuge, Relief, and Reconciliation

I was asked recently what defined Quaker responses to war. The assumption was that it would be conscientious objection, but actually Quakers are more proactive than that. Their responses, at least in the twentieth century, were overwhelmingly to tend the wounds of war. Only by looking at the history of male Quakers of military age does conscientious objection come to the fore.

I suspect that a feminist might comment that it is another example of His-story, which all too often comes to fill the pages of our his-story books, which predominantly chronicle his-stories to the exclusion of a broader and more inclusive vision of our past. A glance at the history section of any of our major booksellers, or the history section of our libraries, would tend to confirm the suspicion that the feminists have a point. 

Katherine Storr's book Excluded from the Record: Women, Refugees and Relief, 1914-29 (Perter Lang, 2010) was something of a welcome antidote to so much of the published history of the period I was researching. I needed to know so much more about the times in which Irene Pickard's archive was embedded, and the massive – yes I do mean massive – publishing bias in favour of male and militaristic histories of the period from a male and military perspective made hunting for those gems that would provide a more balanced picture something of a challenge. Especially any that included accounts of the Quaker experience!

This study reveals women's hitherto ignored lives as refugees and relief workers during the First World War and shortly after. The focus is on coping with and changing the devastating effects of war on civilians, rather than on the fighting of it. Wherever fighting took place, people fled from their homes or were trapped behind enemy lines. Most refugees were women and children. While some came to Britain, others remained in or near their country of origin. They were helped, sometimes under bombardment, by Quakers and suffragists.     (From the blurb about Katherine Storr's book)

It was women who spearheaded the Quaker response to war. Men were tied up with the social expectation that they should 'do their duty' and serve with the military; an imperative made so much more complex when conscription was imposed in 1916: the Flanders fields having eaten up the bodies of the willing leaving the war-machine short of fodder to feed to the machine guns. The imperative did not extend to women, who were thus free to see the war for what it was – the greatest of human tragedies which heaped suffering on suffering. Tending to that suffering was what they did. 

It became clear when mapping Quaker responses to war during my research that they fell under three headings: refuge, relief and reconciliation. Patterns that were to repeat themselves over and again through the twentieth century. 

Unlike the cornucopias of material available on the studies of the wars themselves, there is a dearth of works about relief work. Katherine Storr's work along with that of a paper written in Italian by Bruna Bianchi called Grande, Pericolosa Avventura: Anna Ruth Fry il 'relief work' e la riconciliazione internazionale (1914-26) [A Grand Dangerous Adventure: Anna Ruth Fry, relief work as international reconciliation (1914-26)] and Campbell Leggat's Friends in Deed stemming from outside the Quaker universe. The rest from within. 

Notable among the Quaker works are John Ormerod Greenwood's three volume Quaker Encounters; A Ruth Fry's A Quaker Adventure. The Story of the Friends' Relief Work in Europe during the War and After ; David McFadden & Claire Gorfinkel's Constructive Spirit; Quakers in Revolutionary Russia ; Joan Mary Fry's In Downcast Germany 1919-1933 [a very rear and almost unobtainable book that it is such a condemnation of the British role in inflicting starvation on the German population] ; Sheila Spielhofer's To Vienna with Love - Quaker Relief Work 1919-1922 ; William R Hughes's Indomitable Friend. The Life of Corder Catchpool, 1883-1952 ; Geoffrey Carnall's Gandhi's Interpreter. A Life of Horace Alexander ; A T Teglar Davies's Friends Ambulance Unit. The story of the F.A.U. in the second world war 1939-1945 ; Roger C Wilson's Quaker Relief; an account of the Relief Work of the Society of Friends 1940-1948 ; and C H Mike Yarrow's Quaker Experiences in International Conciliation.

Armed with these, and what other papers and references I could find, I was able to provide the context for why my subjects were in Geneva during the 1930s engaged on peace-work, and how they coped with the tidal wave of war which swept over them in 1940. 

What placed them there in the first instance, stemmed from another consequence of the outbreak of the First World War – the virtual collapse of support for peace movements. 

Carl Heath (1869- 1950) was appointed secretary of the National Peace Council in 1909, a body connecting the disparate anti-war organisations, ranging from trade unions through socialist societies and the suffragettes, to religious groups such as the Quakers. The declaration of war in August 1914 saw almost all but the Quakers desert the Council. Even the suffragettes mostly followed Emmeline Pankhurst in withdrawing and suspending their protests in support of the war. The desertion of the National Peace Council by so many organisations led in time to Heath throwing his lot in with the Quakers – the only remaining members – joining them in 1916. It was his suggestion for the need for 'Quaker Embassies" – as he call them – that led to Irene and Bertram being in Geneva as staff of one such, and their eventually encountering Carl Jung.  

Ever since their almost accidental formation in the seventeenth century, Quakers have been a counter-culture because of their deriving their moral compass from inward revelation engendered by the practice of silent waiting, rather than from alignment with the prevailing zeitgeist – the ethos of an era. As a result they were for much of the time a people apart. A community that gave equal weight to the words of women as those of men – as seeing female revelation as just as valid and inspiring as male revelation. As being prepared to be led by women as men, if those women felt compelled to act under a concern; and many remarkable Quaker women were so compelled, providing much of the leadership in relief-work; addressing as much of the suffering caused by the unleashing of wars in the first half of the twentieth century as they could. Ruth and Joan Fry, Hilda Clerk, and Bertha Bracey are names that stand out as indomitable leaders of relief efforts.

Researching Irene archive and its context proved to be a study in counterpoint to the mainstream flow of history. Event making dominated by an almost exclusively male political and military patriarchy finding a reciprocal counter flow of outpouring of human compassion, often led by Quaker women. A story little told of providing refuge, of providing relief and of working to promote reconciliation, by a community set apart by a charismatic tradition that centred its ethics on inward revelation not on conformity to the prevailing ethos. What greater nonconformity than being pacifists and peacemakers in times of war; of tending to the wounds of war rather than adding to them. 

Hate had found respectable motives

Polarisation of opinion happens as soon as wars break out. Nuanced understandings of the issues disappear and taking sides becomes, not just normal, but a social requirement. Lining up with the mass opinion is not simply a matter of choice, but a defence reflex – no one enjoys being a pariah, or risking social censure or ostracism. We may not like the fact, but we are like iron filings in a magnetic field. We flatter ourselves that we are immune to such social pressures, but we are not.

Long before 1933, there was already a faint smell of burning in the air, and people were passionately interested in discovering the seat of the fire and the incendiary. And when denser clouds were seen to gather over Germany, and the burning of the Reichstag gave the signal, then at last there was no mistake as to where the incendiary, evil in person, dwelt. Terrifying as this discovery was, in the course of time it brought a certain sense of relief; now at least we knew for certain where all unrighteousness was to be found, whereas we ourselves were securely entrenched in the opposite camp, among the respectable people, whose moral indignation might well be expected to rise higher and higher with every fresh sign of guilt on the other side. Why even the call for mass executions no longer offends the ears of the righteous, and the burning of German towns was looked on as the judgement of God. Hate had found respectable motives, and had emerged from the state of more secret and personal idiosyncrasy. And all the time the highly respectable public had not the slightest inkling that they themselves were thus living in the immediate neighbourhood of evil.     [C G Jung: p.50, After the Catastrophe: in Essays on Contemporary Events: (trans - Welsh, Hannah & Briner) Kegan Paul, London, 1947]

The polarities in 1930s and '40s Europe were simple to observe. The more Germany under the Nazis was seen as the epicentre of evil, the more virtuous by contrast its opponents seemed; even Soviet Russia under Stalin was rehabilitated as a virtuous ally. 

The stark truth was that the British became blind to the horrors they were raining down on German civilians – women, children, infants, the infirm, the elderly. Being German, or even simply being in Germany was sufficient, regardless of whether that was by choice or whether it was as forced labour. The bombing of Coventry and other cities during the Blitz became a cause célèbre justifying the destruction of German towns and cities without compassion or remorse. 

I once met an Englishman from Jersey, who during the German occupation of the Channel Islands was deported to Germany as forced labour. Being skilled at horticulture, he was put to work as a field hand in the Eder Valley. He survived the catastrophic flood caused by the destruction of the Edersee Dam by the Dambusters' raid, but then was detailed to the rescue operation. 

He spoke of the horror of digging the bodies of children and babies out of the mud. Of the valley being clogged in places with bodies of people and animals, mangled in with uprooted trees and vegetation and the flotsam and jetsam from the destroyed houses. Even forty years after he still had nightmares. The work took months.

In Britain the raid is still commemorated. It has become legendary. It has been the subject of radio programmes, films, memorial flypasts, re-enactments, computer games, blog sites, and even been used in a Carling Black Label advert. 

As Jung pointed out:

And all the time the highly respectable public had not the slightest inkling that they themselves were thus living in the immediate neighbourhood of evil. 

Polarisation blinds. Societies have their own force fields that highlight what flatters their collective self-image and develops collective amnesia about uncomfortable truths: the ridges and troughs of belonging. Comforting and shared narrative lines about the past and present become communal folklore, heavily re-enforced by the media, and even built into school curricula, becoming a standard received version of history.

In researching about the Pickards and their circle I was of necessity dealing with a counter-culture: a community not in synch with the mainstream; pacifists when the dominant ethos was anything but pacifist, especially during the two World Wars and in their aftermath. Imperialism and militarism were closely allied to patriotism in the collective imagination. Questioning either was tantamount to being a traitor. The contempt felt for 'conchies' (conscientious objectors) was visceral. 

 

 

Ourea, or the numinous presence of Allt-fawr

 

Capel y Gorlan, Cwmorthin

Numinous this, numinous that, all I know is that sometimes we are forced out of our skin. A moment in time that is different, where we are knocked sideways whether we would or not. 

That is what happened to me in Cwmorthin, near Capel y Gorlan (chapel in the sheep fold). It is a stiff walk up into the mouth of Cwmorthin, and then along the cwm to the tumbled down remains of the chapel. A  remote place in a deserted valley where the stillness soaked through the skin along with the damp. A silence so deep that even the grazing of the odd sheep on the far hillside could be felt; and then a sense of presence overwhelming. Something ancient. Something that had taken form both of itself and of the communion offered in the chapel, and, who knows, of older offering long before time was counted. Allt-fawr – its name a tribute to its size – a presence by it sheer wall of endless hill stretching up beyond the cloud, and wrapping the valley in its curve to the exclusion of all else. No wonder the Greeks thought such mountains to be gods, 'ourea', their brooding presence being so tangible. 

I sensed a fluidity over time in the presence. The last imprint on it being the close harmony hymns of the slate miners sung on their one day off. Their one day not under the ground. Miners who had hollowed out that vast hill. A slate mine 1500 feet from the top level down 25 floors of stale caverns to its lowest. 50 miles of tunnels and tramways all inside Allt-fawr, the mountain. A mine as big as the vastness of its name. The scars of the mining now fading as the mountain reclaimed them, wreathing them in rain soaked moss, lichen, bracken and grass. The soft tread of sheep being all that disturbed them now, and the chapel itself fallen to ruin. 

But still the presence persists, tentatively described by a word from a tongue alien to those Welsh hills – god? – and that from one who is no theist; hills that were used to hearing the word "Duw" sung with confidence in their embracing fold. 

The theologian Rudolf Otto was in want of a term to describe what he felt was special about religious experience, so he created 'numinous' from the Latin numen, meaning "arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring."  Jung found Otto's term of great value, because he knew how such moments shone in the minds of his patients – they were touch-stones of religious experience; the access points where the safety and supposed sufficiency of the rational ran out and exposure to the spiritual happened. Once exposed the doorway was open to growth by incorporating the spiritual, the numinous, the religious, into the life of his patients, releasing them from their psychological malaise. They were suffering because they were shut off from deeper communion with life, often by their overdeveloped rationality, and their rejection of the mystical, the numinous, the religious.

In a letter to P.W. Martin (20 August 1945), the founder of the International Study Center of Applied Psychology in Oxted, England, C.G. Jung confirmed the centrality of numinous experience in his life and work: "It always seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events characterized by a strong emotional tone. You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character" (Jung 1973, 1: 377). If one holds the classical Jungian view that the only genuine cure for neurosis is to grow out of it through pursuing individuation, then treatment based on this model would seem necessarily to include "the approach to the numinous," as Jung states so firmly in this letter.   [ Jung - Martin letter 1946 "On the Importance of Numinous Experience in the Alchemy of Individuation" Murray Stein, Ph.D.]

P W Martin was one of the main members of the Geneva Quaker-Jungian group to which Irene Pickard belonged. Her archive included papers by Martin. He was perhaps the most enthusiastic of the group, often travelled to Zürich to see Jung during the 1930s, and maintained contact with him after the war, gaining Jung's support over the establishment of the centre at Oxted.

Spiritual experiences, religious experiences, are not rational. They are something else; divine intoxication; divine madness; opening of the being; being touched; stopping the world: they are a door into another way of relating to the world; to another dimension of being. They have the authenticity of the moment of transport; they need no validation because in that moment they simply are.

Jung was a complete relativist at this point. He did not believe that only one source of the holy could have a healing influence. He did not subscribe to the view, for instance, that only Jesus can give us the salvation we need. Jung believed that the numinous could derive from countless sources, and religious traditions, from mythologies, cosmologies, esoteric systems, and arts and science. Moreover, he believed that the numinous is present, at least potentially, in common experience, and can be felt and made known through meaningful coincidence, synchronicity and an ‘inner’ relationship with the facts of the world. He did not believe that institutions of faith or creedal doctrines could regulate the spiritual experience, but that such experience occurs spontaneously, as we enlarge life with depth and commitment.   [David  Tacey: How to Read Jung: Granta Books, London, 2006]

Nor did Jung think that belief, whether inherited, inculcated or otherwise acquired, was any form of substitute for honestly accepted experience, of openness to the numinous:

When people say that they believe in the existence of God, it has never impressed me in the least. Either I know a thing and then I don’t need to believe it; or I believe it because I am not sure that I know it. I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or divine.    [ Jung in answer to Philp’s question #3: Is the God-archetype All?: H L Philp: Jung and the Problem of Evil: Rockliff, London, 1958]

Vranyo

A blatant lie that it is necessary to believe. A substitute truth that forms an integral part of a fabricated reality. Vranyo say much about the power of the networks that promotes them and are supported by them in turn. It is a Slavic word that says much about Russia's past. 

When we were in Ukraine, Yuri explained how it was during Soviet times: "They pretended to tell us the truth, and we pretended to believe them." An entire web of vranyo. 

Another description I came across recently, dating from 1983 by David Shipler in Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams: A Russian friend explained vranyo in this way: "You know I'm lying, and I know that you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes."

When we were in Lviv and being shown round one of the folk museums we came across a pair of candelabra proudly displaying a sign below them saying A pair of bra. We couldn't help but giggle and comment on the mistranslation. The attendant looked sad. "Yes, I know" she said "All the English speakers giggle about it and tell us it is wrong, but the Director says we must keep it because that is what it says in the Department of Culture's manual." The power of vranyo. 

At worst they are official lies that it would be dangerous to disbelieve. Stalin's purges relied deeply on them, as did the Tsarist regime before his time. Authur Kustler's Darkness at Noon explores how it is to be trapped in a web of them. Both his inquisitors and Rubashov are aware that they live inside a spiders web of vranyo. However, this week's official vranyo must be believed, which is why Rubashov, someone who promoted yesterdays vranyo, must confess his guilt, and in doing so agree to the necessity of his own execution. 

When Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, declared himself victor the the election in 2020, the people came out on the streets because they were no longer prepared to play their part in that particular vranyo. His security forces explained to them why they should. Thousands have been arrested and suffered. Not playing your part in vranyo can have deadly consequences.

So what of the post-truth world of Donald Trump? They counted all the the votes, carefully, accurately. Then comes the big lie claiming that he won the election by a landslide, except in the eyes of many it is not a lie, not even an alternative truth, but the truth: his victory in spite of all of the evidence. In the minds of believers all that evidence simply proves just how successful the fraud was. The biggest electoral fraud ever. A conspiracy by the the deep state to thwart the ascension of the rightful victor.  A fraud so well executed that how it was done cannot be found out, even when challenged in the courts. But it was done – of that believers are sure: it has become an article of faith. And America steps into the world of post-truth, a world that blurs the distinctions between misinformation, disinformation and malinformation – the three disorders of information – and takes a step closer towards adding vranyo to the list. 

Fake, such a useful appellation when you wish to dismiss discomforting or challenging news; the dissonance between what you would like to be true and what you are being confronted with. Humans do not like dissonance. We work hard to dissipate it. It invites a blurring between belief and knowledge in order to make ourselves comfortable: comforting beliefs are so much more preferable than confronting discomforting truths. Belief may allow and element of choice, of choosing the comforting, because believing is not knowing. It has a degree of latitude; it might be so, it might be not so. Knowledge does not: there is no latitude. Beliefs may be plural because there is uncertainty. Knowledge is always singular: it is what is. Acquiring it is is hard work. It tests itself against reality. 

Has the consumer society engendered consumer truth? Versions the tests for which is that they sit comfortably with you. Fast food versions that need little effort to acquire and which are tested against how little discomfort they cause rather than against the hard edge of reality? 

Fake, ersatz, faux, fabricated, surrogate, facsimile, artificial, substitute, imitation, synthetic, false, mock, simulated, pseudo, sham, bogus, spurious, counterfeit, forged, pretended, manufactured, forgery, fraud, hoax: there are so many words with which to convey information distortion or substitution, but perhaps the worst modern concoction is 'alternative'. It invites the Schroedinger possibility of manifold truths about the same thing at the same time – but even Schroedinger knew the box would be opened and only one truth would remain – we simply would know which in advance. There is no such thing as an alternative truth. There are alternatives until the box is opened, but then reality rules, OK!

As for Britain, an adept of the 50 shades of untruth is now its leader. According to one observer, he has perfected the art of lying, in fact he has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence, and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie and the bullshit lie.

Poor truth has taken a battering in recent years. Post-modern sophistry has made it seem a hall of mirrors. It is not reality's problem: that is always singular. The moment we attempt to transpose it into words it become a plurality of possibles, but they are far from all equally good. Sifting to the best fit, the most authentic, is the service required. That is where the danger lies of generating alternatives; a stopping short of refining down to the singularity; of choosing to be blind to the evidence for reasons of political expediency, or in order to avoid the dissonance. 

In our world of political affairs, respect for truth is pivotal: edging towards that singularity matters. Discounting the weaker alternatives, screening out prejudices, watching for confirmation bias are all part of what is required. Truth is not what makes us feel comfortable: often it is what makes us feel uncomfortable. The blight of populist 'truth' and the lack of integrity shown by the holders of public office has led to the formation of organisations concern with returning truth in public affairs to where it belongs – as something fundamental to our democracy.

Neither America nor Britain have not yet passed from alternative-truth to vranyo. There is still choice to believe the alternative or reject the 'alternative', or even to insist on doing the hard work of finding the truth. With vranyo there is not. Such is the potential danger of not believing the vranyo that feigning authentic belief is a matter of survival: it is a way of life within the spider's web. In Russia vranyo has returned with a vengeance.

 

Wars are like fires

War is like a fire – if you do not put it out, it will burn itself out:  Sun Tzu, The Art of War 

The fact that Sun Tzu called his book of The Art of War speaks to how far wars are created by powerful elites for political gain, or as Carl von Clausewitz put it "War is a continuation of policy by other means". Means which inflict great suffering on populations, but little on the elites that command them into existence. Too often they are the play thing of bored autocrats or glory seeking politicians. They are too often attempts to alter the world to the likings of the powerful.  

But Sun Tzu's truth holds good: few wars end in a decisive victory that will 'put it out', but all too often end in a stalemate – the smouldering and smoking embers that all too easily can flare back up, but which have consumed and destroyed so much, mostly to no purpose. The exhausted combatants have then to be extricated by a protracted peace negotiation, during which the stalemate grinds on claiming lives.

Peace is often misunderstood as an absence of war, as if war was the normal default state and peace an aberration that fills in the gaps between. That is a hawk's vision of peace: a gap between wars to be tolerated whilst preparations are made for the next conflict, wherever it can be found. That is why we have a professional full time military – what other justification can there be for them? If there was never a next fire, there would be no need for a fire brigade?

The truth is peace is very much a constructed state that has to be built and maintained, just as wars have to be; but it takes a far greater amount of work and investment to maintain a war, far less to maintain peace. Besides, in peace societies and cultures flourish and become pluralistic, in wars they wither and become totalitarian – the single objective of survival and, ultimately, victory disciplining the society into a monoculture and justifying draconian controls. So much the better for leaders in war – they are massively elevated and empowered – so much the better for people in peace. Perhaps it is no wonder that leaders love to have war, or the fear of war, as a means of control and as the ultimate aggrandisement?

Investing in peace is very cost effective by comparison to the escalating cost of maintaining wars. That is because wars are indeed like fires. They need to be fed fuel, lots of fuel; and if defeat is to be avoided, the amount of fuel will increase up to a level that overwhelms and defeats the 'enemy'. (Isn't it interesting that we have a special word which legitimises lethal violence against those branded with the term?)

Much the same applies to the anticipation of war, which involves escalating expenditure on an armed peace. One might ask if armed peace is simply deferred war? That was certainly the logic that lead to the term 'cold war'. It also gives rise to what has been termed the Military-Industrial complex.

The peace theorist, Anatol Rapoport, suggests that there has been a decoupling of war making from the traditional goals of expressing and giving realisation to political power to that of a profession intent on perpetual preparation and organisation as a continual process. The military–industrial complex thus formed becomes a self perpetuating business with the military as consumers and the arms manufacturers as suppliers locked in what can be, at times, an economically cancerous cycle.

Reflecting on the post 1945 world economy, it is notable that for many years the two fastest growing and most successful economies were the two peace economies of the losers – Japan and Germany: they were not carrying the economic burden of high military expenditure.

The event horizon at the boundary between peace and war marks a complete shift in frames of reference. Many factors influence decisions in times of peace. There is much debate and disagreement about what should be invested in, what governments should or should not do, how much liberty might be enjoyed by people. All that stops the moment wars start. There is only one frame of reference for their duration – survival and, if possible, victory. 

The vortex of war sucks in resources and attention, just as raging fires draw in winds. A fact that the British relied on when setting fire to German cities or the Americans when they bombed Tokyo. The resultant firestorms creating infernos in which few could survive: those sheltering in cellars and basements being incinerated – even metal pots and pans melting. There is no discrimination in war as to who is killed and who survives: vulnerability alone determining fate. Anyone can be sucked into its vortex, regardless of their status. Wars kill babies, the elderly and the infirm as readily as they kill soldiers, especially as they are less able to escape from war's vorticities. The Americans even coined the term 'collateral damage' to help sanitise the truth that the innocent, the non-combatants, those unable to flee or to shelter, are routinely killed in war.

Economically, wars also suck in increasing amounts of resources, ultimately impoverishing the combatants and leaving them with debt burdens which may take generations to pay off. Britain's debt to the USA incurred prior and subsequent to the Lend-Lease – the agreement that allowed Britain unlimited credit for the duration of its war with Germany – only finally being paid off in 2006. Britain's part in the victory impoverished it for 60 years – a mere $3.75 billion at 2% interest ($40.5 billion plus interest at modern values). Some years Britain was so economically stretched that it could not even pay all the interest, let alone reduce the principle.

There is a sense in which wars could be regarded as a from of potlatch: countries investing in increasing stores of weapons until the stock piles are dissipated in a fest of violence. Acts which gains successful leaders considerable political kudos even whilst impoverishing their peoples. Exhortations as to the benefits of the sacrifices made to achieve victory being trumpeted by the very leaders who are usually the least at risk. 

War, famine, plague and death: the four horsemen of the apocalypse. No wonder they are so closely linked. War almost always bringing famine and plague in its wake; but unlike them, war is entirely man made – and one might add, man, not woman made. There is little history of armies of women facing each other off on battlefields, or their indulging in rape, pillage and wanton destruction: those are very much male prerogatives. 

War: commanded by the most privileged; fought by the least privileged; suffered by the most vulnerable. They are indeed the greatest of human failings.

Wars escalate to the level of violence necessary to obtain victory

Having stayed in Lviv for a month and given a couple of lectures at the university, I feel the awfulness of this war in a more personal way. My partner has far closer and longer connections with Lviv, going back some 18 years, and involving spells of teaching in the Department of Translation Studies at the university. She feels it far more: it involves people she knows, and places she knows. She has also seen a lot more of Ukraine, having taught in several universities as part of a poetry in performance and translation circuit. A connection she inherited from her mentor, Vera Rich, a translator honoured by the Ukrainians who awarded Vera their most prestigious medal in recognition of the services she had provided to Ukrainian culture.

I really hope that the war can be stopped, but I fear it will escalate to the level of violence necessary to obtain victory. That is one of the basic facts of war. Once started, there is only one criteria – victory or defeat. That is why they are so hard to stop, even though so many wars become bogged down in some kind of stalemate. The investment cost and the embitterment does not allow for easy extrication of the combatants.  

The Quaker, Jonathan Dymond (1796-1828), recognised the core problem inherent in war:

When nations are mutually exasperated, and armies are levied, and battles fought, does not every one know that with whatever motives of defence one party may have begun the contest, both in turn become aggressors? In the fury of slaughter soldiers do not attend, they cannot attend, to questions of aggression. Their business is destruction, and their business they will perform. If the army of defence obtains success, it soon becomes an army of aggression. Having repelled the invader, it begins to punish him. If a war has once begun, it is vain to talk of distinctions of aggression and defence. Moralists may talk of distinctions, but soldiers will make none; and none can be made: it is outside the limits of possibility.     (An inquiry into the Accordancy of War with the Principles of Christianity, and an Examination of the Philosophical Reasoning by which it is defended: with Observations on Some of the Causes of War and Some of Its Effects.1823)

Having lived through the Napoleonic wars, Dymond understood the fundamental truth for those engaged in war: "Their business is destruction, and their business they will preform." because they cannot do otherwise, for if they hesitate or relent, then they will be destroyed. The normal frames of moral reference are replaced by the need to survive and to win. Wars upend values: during them we give medals to murders and put peace-activist in prison.

That inevitable escalation of war was only too obvious during the Second World war. To obtain victory the allies were prepared to destroy dams, drowning thousands as a result, to fire-storm cities, or to use the ultimate weapon of destruction – the atomic bomb. The Soviet approach was to mass artillery and tanks to flatten everything in front of them. A tactic they used in more recently in Chechnya to reduce Grozny, making it, according the the United Nations, the most destroyed city on earth.

If there is no military victory – and there seldom is – then some sort of substitute victory may be manufactured, as at Versailles in 1919. Its imposition was only achieved by the mass starvation of the German population after the armistice of 11/11/18. The lack of military victory begat the need for victory by enforced starvation, to be followed by reparations designed to ensure the economic crushing of Germany: a Carthaginian peace.

If Putin wins, then a process of cultural erasure will follow – his version of a Carthaginian peace – which may be worse than it was in Soviet times. The Soviets regarded Ukrainian as suspect and dangerous, limiting its use and making Russian the official language and the language of education above elementary levels. Translation into and out of Ukrainian was severely limited and controlled. Putin has denied the legitimacy of Ukrainian identity and will enforce even more thorough Russification. The refrain we heard over and over again when we were in the Ukraine was "Please don't let the Russians came back" precisely because Ukrainians do not want to be submerged beneath the weight of Russian cultural dominance.

It can hardly be a surprise that my lectures on the survival of Welsh went down well: the parallels were too obvious.