Tumbling into war: 1914 and all that

Remember the butterfly flapping its wings in a jungle clearing? The unpredictability of chaos where overwhelmingly the turbulence caused by the flapping of the wings is damped out and the air settles back into being calm, except when one flap sets up a vortex that grows into a hurricane? That was the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife. The political stabilisers of the age – the doves among the diplomats, politicians and civil servants – should have damped out the shock waves. They didn't. They tried to, but they didn't: the hawks within the administrations eventually dominated and millions died. 

Revisiting 1914 for a short chapter needed because of the epoch changing nature of the First World War within the Quaker microverse as much as in broader society, I was struck by how vulnerable societies are to the effects of decisions made by tiny numbers of people in powerful positions. According to William Jannen (1996: The Lions of July. The prelude to War, 1914) fewer than 100 individuals across the entire continent of Europe, all confined within tiny, highly privileged and selective governing elites, were involved in the decision making processes that led to war. Barely anyone outside those circles was referenced at all, let alone consulted. A finding born out by other scholars:

Within the respective state executives, the changeability of power relations also meant that those entrusted with formulating policy did so under considerable domestic pressure, not so much from the press or public opinion or industrial or financial lobbies, as from adversaries within their own elites and governments. And this, too, heightened the sense of urgency besetting decision makes in the summer of 1914.    (Christopher Clark, 2013: The Sleepwalkers. How Europe went to war in 1914)

Perhaps one of the more disturbing things I discovered during my background reading, was the deal done between the British and German High Commands via Swiss intermediaries. As the war progressed Britain became short of optics for range-finding, and Germany became short of rubber for the tyres needed on its troop transports. Both shortages were impeding the 'pursuit' of the war. An exchange via Switzerland was organised so that the shortages were made good and the war could proceed. (See Adam Hochschild, 2011: To End All Wars. How the First World War Divided Britain.) Perhaps I am alone in finding this shocking, but it does speak to me of the detachment of the those who both started and ran the war from those embroiled in its guts.

Such was the enormity of the scale of death and destruction unleashed that attributing responsibility for starting and continuing the war has been an issue ever since. The blame had to be placed somewhere, but it was too toxic to be anywhere near: blame is best projected onto others. In the immediate aftermath it was on Germany and its militarism: the goose-stepping 'Hun'.

This justified the punishment of Germany inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles. Germany had to be reduced so that it could never again be a threat. There was no point in blaming The Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Ottoman Empire, nor for that matter the Russian Empire – they no longer existed, all destroyed by the war. It would have been far too painful to admit that either the governments of Britain or France had any part to play. Given the enormous sacrifice and suffering admitting such culpability would have made those in power seem perfidious in the extreme. Political donkeys may have been leading the lions, but no-one was about to say so.  

As time and distance from the mutual carnage increased the focus shifted to blaming the miliary, the war plans of Germany especially. The fact that the German secret war plans to attack France via Belgium failed because of the secret Anglo-French war plans for the rapid deployment of British Forces into Northern France was conveniently forgotten. Guilt still had to point firmly at Germany.

Now it is more popular to see it as a massive failure of government, particularly of diplomacy: a war by accident. The perception is that wars are created by governments, but fought and suffered by peoples; wars are indeed that "continuation of policy by other means" which Carl von Clausewitz suggested they were; and in 1914 there was massive amounts of hubris among the governing elites about how easily those policies would be realised.

As unclear as the causes of the war may be, what is clear, however, is that 1914 was the shock that seemed to changed everything:

When we look back on the time before 1914, we seem to be living in a different age. Things are happening today of which we hardly dreamed before the war. We were even beginning to regard war between civilised nations as a fable, for surely such an absurdity would become less and less possible in our rational, internationally organised world.      C G Jung, 1936: Wotan

There had been those who had sensed an underlying mood among populations that was receptive to war, no matter how much the state-change from peace may have shocked:

It is difficult for generations that have come to maturity since 1914 to realise fully the impact of horror and betrayal which the war made upon people's minds. A few here and there, it is true, had seen it coming, had realized that, as Rufus Jones wrote "Beneath all overt acts and decisions the immense subconscious forces, charged with emotions, have been slowly pushing towards this event."     Elizabeth Grey Vinning, 1958: Friend of Life, a biography of Rufus M Jones

But there were also Quaker voices that realised what the impact of war was on civilian populations and were not afraid to say so:

What is a truth of war: that the old die before their time; the sick die for lack care and sustenance when there was no need; the vulnerable die for the scantness of resources; children fail to survive and those that do, do not thrive; babies die for the lack of their half starved mother's milk; mothers fail to carry to full term, their babies undersize and struggling if they do not die; miscarriages abound;  women die more often from childbirths because they are not strong enough; populations are half starved and have no resistance to diseases; homes, if not destroyed, lack warmth in winter; clothes become scarce and are often too poor to offer protection against the weather. This is the lot of the civilian population. Whatever horrors the soldier faces, he is often better fed, better clothed and even better sheltered.      (Mea culpa! I have lost where this quote comes from, which is why I did not include it in the book. I would be grateful if anyone could identify what the source is.)

Then there were Quakers who pledged to have nothing to do with it, such as Henry Hodgkin, one of the founders of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. A very difficult stance in the face of the first total war where opting out – especially after the introduction of conscription – was simply not tolerated. To refuse to join the military, or to support them, was cast as deeply unpatriotic; and, after 1916, as not only unpatriotic  but unlawful and criminal as well. For some the idea that the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount were suspended for the duration of the war was simply not tenable, no matter what the personal consequences. 

Quakerism, which might have seemed faintly peculiar and eccentric in 1913, was by 1916, with the state-change of war, seen as subversive and dangerous and worthy of attention by Special Branch. 

Quakers were once more showing themselves to be members of a counter culture, resisting the dominant trends of the time, even at the risk of social ostracism or penal sanctions. According to M E Hirst (1923), only one third of the male members of the Society of military age volunteered or were conscripted. 

However, it was the women of the Society who, not being shackled by the expectations of military service in the way men were, led the way in living out the peace testimony by providing relief work, even among those now counted as 'enemies' – a remarkable story in its own right, as I was to discover. That is where my researches took me next.

Warp and Weft: an anthological approach to history

Adjective. anthological (not generally comparable, comparative more anthological, superlative most anthological): of or pertaining to anthology; consisting of extracts from different authors. (Wiktionary)

Writing a history based on an archive presents the question to the author of how best to tell the story of how and why the archive was created, how to showcase its contents, and how to convey its significance to the reader. 

History, unlike chronology, is never a passive activity: there is always a dialogue between the past and the present. In this case a dialogue with five threads: the social-theological*, the Jungian, the developing praxis of peace-work, the biographical, and the historial context in which the archive was created, particularly its political climate.

The social-theological thread (or sociotheological, as I have seen it termed) approaches people's lives through recognising the pervasiveness of their religion or spirituality to the whole of life: for many people it shapes their weltanschauung. Their faith is not simply an epiphenomena, or a private foible, but is fundamental. It involves "the recognition that politics has a religious side and religion can be an inherent part of public and political life" as Mona Kanwal Sheikh says in her Sociotheology: The Significance of Religious Worldviews (2015). This it certainly was in the case of the subjects of my study: Quakerism is often said to be a way of life, not a fixed set of beliefs. My subject's life experiences shaped their theology, and the evolutions in theology, from nineteenth century liberalism through Barth, Buber, Bonhoeffer, Tillich and Robinson to the non-realism of Don Cupitt, helped inform the inspiration and motivation they derived from their spiritual practice and experience.

The Jungian thread twines in with the social-theological thread; from my subject's first encounters with Jung's ideas, through their meeting with him at his home in Zürich, to their disseminating his ideas among the Quaker communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Echoes of their encounter with Jung still persist among Quaker communities today.

The thread of peace-work, starts with how and why Bertram and Irene Pickard were in Geneva and why they remained there for the majority of their working lives, and tells how they created a template for peace-work that is still used; a template that embodied both the social-theology of their Quakerism and their deepened understanding of the dynamics of humanity as illuminated by Jung's analytical-psychology. 

The biographical is of necessity part of account as Irene's achieve was principally created by the five key members of the Quaker-Jungian group which formed in Geneva in 1934. The group formed with the aim of exploring Jung's ideas in depth in order to understand their relevance, both to personal lives, and to the then current and fast deterioration political situation in Europe, with the hope that Jung's methods might aid in redressing the seemingly remorseless drift into another catastrophic pan-European war.

The historial context and its political climate are the background to the other four threads, a background that at times erupted into being a foreground, impacting massively on the lives of all of my subjects. 

How we see and understand an era of the past is very much subject to our current milieu, its fashions, and needs. How we see the past is far from set in stone, unlike its chronology. Viewing the sweep of twentieth century European history from the perspective of my subjects creates a very different vision compared to what might be called the 'standard received version' – the version taught in schools and subscribed to by much of the popular media. It certainly involved my re-assessing much of what I had taken as fixed truths about the twentieth century, revealing those truths to be more honoured by repetition than grounded in fact.

Those five themes – the sociotheological, the Jungian, the praxis of peace-work, the biographical, and the political and historical context – are the warp threads. The weft is provided by the archive and related texts. 

What the archive presented me with was an abundance of materials, much of it in the words of my subjects, or in the words of those who influenced them. Arranging those words into a narrative pattern was the authorial task – the weft woven across the warp of the five narrative threads.

The task of marshalling the disparate documents and texts of the archive into some sort of coherent order, and then selecting from them quotations which would advance the five narratives involved a great deal of editorial selection. A task that very much supported Alun Munslow's contention that:

My analysis of the historian as an author is predicated on the ontological assumption that history has the status of a narratological act. (Alun Munslow: The Historian as Author: 2020 – http://culturahistorica.org/)

The process certainly involved the development of discourse as story by creating a story space – or a number of them to frame different threads and texts – and considerable focalisation on what would advance the five narrative threads.  

Writing about an archive such as Irene's involves curating the content and then setting the selected 'exhibits' into an interpretative context; but it also involved much more, because Irene, Elined, P W and Marjory Martin disseminated Jungian ideas across the Quaker communities on both sides of the Atlantic, helping to initiate and sustain a lasting interest in the relevance of Jung to Quaker (and wider) spirituality. Tracing that influence involved searching for Jungian inspired articles in Quaker publications – especially in the Inward Light and the The Seeker – and selecting passages to incorporate into and advance the narrative. It turned out to be a trail of articles that largely petered out by the turn of the millennium.

My choice in writing about the archive was as far as possible to let the archive and related materials speak for themselves, hence the anthological approach. Each quotation being like a stepping stone in advancing the narratives. At times it felt like being a barrister, calling witness to the stand in order for them to testify in their own words, only interrupting them in order to highlight one point or another. 

In a way writing about an archive such as Irene's could be compared to being a jeweller: the gemstones are the selected quotations from the primary sources – the archive, the works referred to in the archive or, in the latter part of the book, the Jungian related published texts written by Quakers – the setting is the narrative and analysis that surrounds them and sets them off.

Far better to let my subjects and their influencers speak for themselves – a case of show not tell – than to try to re-express what they have said so clearly in their own words. It is a method that works well for the subject matter: a blend of psychology, theology, philosophy, politics, peace-work and history.

By far the biggest influencer whose thoughts are reflected in the archive was, of course, Carl Gustav Jung, but he was not the only influencer. T S Elliot, Kierkegaard, Isaac Penington, Chuang Tzu, Thomas Merton, Jeremiah (he of the Old Testament), Evelyn Underhill, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Lewis Mumford, H G Baynes, Thomas Traherne, Esther Harding, Meister Eckhart, Jakob Böhme, Julian and Aldous Huxley, and many others found a place. An eclectic mix of spiritual explorers, mystics, analysts and commentators, both ancient and modern.

In selecting what to quote, or refer to, in the narrative I applied a hierarchy. The documents of the archive had priority of focus. These are unique texts in which the authors were processing what they learned from Jung and the other influencers. The texts form a unique record of how a Quaker community was impacted by the intellectual climate and events of their times. Irene's library of books came next, as these clearly were crucial in informing the text of many of her archive's documents. Then both other texts that had been referred to in the archive – the influencer's texts – but also the other Quaker produced texts that were influenced by Jung's thoughts – the influenced texts. Finally, the texts of commentors on Jung. 

That hierarchy governed the focalisation – the allocation of attention –  in the book and profoundly shaped the story space, the narrative. The first seven chapters deal with developments in British Quakerism, the shattering of the world in 1914, how Irene and Bertram Pickard met, and the evolutions in Quaker peace-work which took them to Geneva; twenty-three chapters are directly based on the contents of the archive; the final six trace the impact of Jung on the wider Quaker world and issues arising from that.

If a film were made of a stone dropped into a pond and the ripples spreading out until they die away, that would be a good image of the historical impact of Jung on the Quakers. The dropping of the stone was the discovery of Jung by that small group of Quakers in Geneva. The spreading out and dying away of the ripples, in so far as we have a record, are the texts that resulted. Texts that were produced in the Quaker community all the way from 1934 to the end of the twentieth century, and on until now. There may not be much reference made to Jung in Quaker circles today, but there has been a lasting shift in Quaker understanding of what spirituality is because of the interaction; unlike dropping a stone into water, everything has not returned to how it was before – the Quaker waters themselves are different because of the influence of Jung. 

*Social Theology - The systematic study of and preoccupation with issues of human welfare from the perspective of divine revelation, a term that includes natural revelation in its widest Reformed sense.

A Reasonable Faith: Francis Frith, William Pollard & William Turner

 

 

When faced with the challenge of writing about Irene Pickard's archive – at first sight a seemingly disparate collection of Jungian and Quaker related items assembled over her lifetime – deciding where to start was always going to be a headache. If the papers in her collection were regarded like Christmas cards hung from a line, then the narrative would be the line, holding them together in some sort of order, giving them relationship one to another. The narrative would need to be fixed at both ends – an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction would be the context which the story grew out of, and the conclusion would be where it fixes itself into the reader's lives. That is the point of history, it provides sustenance for reader by relating to them – it is not simply entertainment – it is part of that function of history as dialogue between the past and the present.

The anchoring of the narrative in Quaker history means, given that the Society of Friends is not well known by non-Quakers, introducing it origins, but briefly enough for Quakers to skim over: a very short synopsis of its early history and its peculiarities would suffice, it is hoped; and, yes, Quakers are a very peculiar lot. 

Next comes setting the scene for the entry of the protagonists – the first length of line. That is where A Reasonable Faith (1884) comes in, or to give it its full title A Reasonable Faith, short religious essays for the times by three "Friends". It was a landmark book that altered the direction of Quakerism in Britain, but considered potentially so heretical and shocking to the Quaker community that the authors dared not give their names: they were speaking the unspeakable! Although there was also a strong element of Quaker modesty that forbade them from seeking fame: it was the message that mattered, not who told it. Being "Friends" with a capital "F" was enough to establish their credentials. Being Friends meant that the truth spoke through them rather than simply their telling the truth; just as in Meeting when a Friend is compelled to rise and give ministry, the compulsion and the message is not their volition, they are simply the vehicle, or so it is held.  

The acceptance of A Reasonable Faith by the rising generation of Quakers changed the Society from one which, because of the Evangelical emphasis on salvation by faith, on devotion to Jesus, on loving Jesus, would have almost automatically rejected the likes of Jung and any suggestion of a psychological approach to understanding religion, into being a community that was receptive. Many Quakers, after the publication of A Reasonable Faith, might not have agreed with the contentions coming out of the new discipline of psychology, but at least they were becoming accepting of the need to accommodate their faith to the findings of the sciences – to reflect on the truths that the sciences might contain for them; especially those of evolution, of the vast age of the earth and of the extent of the universe. To use Bergson's terms, Quakerism had once more become a dynamic faith not a static one: it was open to transformation. 

Although in the book I did not write at length about A Reasonable Faith in that scene setting second chapter – Re-visioning Quakerism: Jones, Harris and Rowntree – and referred to it little thereafter, discovering it and its relevance to the narrative occupied research time far greater in extent than its use might suggest, and produced, as I prefer to do, a set of notes. My method has always been to read a source and make notes on it containing my own interpretation and reflections seeded with quotes, especially those which would seem to contain key points, and which would advance the narrative. Far better to let authors speak for themselves, than paraphrasing – a case of show not tell.

Here they are some of my reflections, quotes and notes from reading the book:

p.7: A Reasonable Faith

And finally, every article of Religious faith must be in harmony with sound reason and common sense; otherwise it becomes mere Superstition. The teaching of True Religion must never contradict the best exercise of the intellectual faculty, however much they may transcend, or supplement, its intuitions.

p.10

We hold, therefore, that no theory of Religion can possibly be satisfactory, which is not broad enough in its range, from the elementary simplicity to reasonable completeness, to comprehend all real God-seeking and truth – and goodness loving of all mankind – savage and civilised, learned and ignorant, child and man.

p.22: re a notion of God = loving father.

Such evidently is the Christian teaching as regards God. How, then, has it happened that one of the most influential schools of though in the Christian Church [the Evangelical] has, during the last three centuries, so far distorted and misrepresented a beautiful and tender religious faith like this, as to sanction and uphold all the horrors of predestination and the injustice of substitutional punishment? We thankfully believe, however, that these doctrines are now rapidly loosing their hold upon the minds of thoughtful Christian people, though not until they have wrought untold mischief and misery in the world.

The paradigm being suggested as the fundamental core of Christianity is that of the Loving Father, a paradigm that has evolved through a process of progressive revelation. The parable of the Prodigal Son is taken as exemplifying this: p.24:

. . . There is the long suffering love that rebellion and disobedience cannot destroy; the changeless love that cannot forget the absent; the deep hopeful love that does not despair of the reprobate; the active unslumbering love that is bent on winning back the beloved, though deluded, wanderer.

p.104: of the Bible as a source:

It is also of the utmost importance to bare in mind, that the Bible is an account of a progressive development, an adaptation of religious truth to the slowly growing capacity of the human race. The unfolding of wisdom and moral righteousness of God was given only as men were able to appreciate and apply it.

And thus of the hermeneutic understanding of what is written that results.*

The text of A Reasonable Faith is both humanistic, post-enlightenment, and focussed on an understanding of the paradigm of a Loving Father rather than on the Suffering Christ, or upon a Salvationist understanding. Christ is an aspect of the Loving Father, who has in Christ provided a paradigm of perfection. It is thus worldly [concerned with the ethics of living] and is about following in the footsteps as per the paradigm; not about alienation from the Divine Love – as so much of the Calvinistic tradition was – nor in over emphasis on the crucified Christ. It puts the God of love back at the top of the tree.

The text is a critique of the dominant Evangelical theology and practice of its times.

It seems to suggest that integrity is needed not to read into scripture what is not fully and clearly there. The honesty to know that the scriptures are the product of human hands, both in creation and in transmission, and so are not the infallible word of God.

It feels as if the writers are reaching back to the more God-centered, gradualist and circumspect vision of early Quakers – groping in the mist and slowly revealing rather than knowing. They appear to be recommending less certainty of doctrine, more openness to revelations cautiously explored.

They also seem to be recommending the primacy of God not Jesus in their faith. Jesus for them is seen as the manifestation of his will, not as the sacrificial atonement. God is not seen as a dark force fixated on punishment for sin, but as a loving father who came to earth to act as a guide. The Evangelical focus on salvation, resurrection, substitutionary punishment is set aside as not being as honest an interpretation of the bible as claimed. There is a refocussing on the life and teaching and not on the death and resurrection.

The writers seem to be challenging the almost unquestioning acceptance of a superstructure of doctrine, and also questioning the felicity of such acceptance; of whether it would deliver the deepening of faith and understanding that the stance of “what canst thou say” would seem to require? Should Quakers be simply climbing aboard the “ready-made” version of Christianity promulgated by the Evangelicals, and accept the “knowing” implied, or should they have greater humility of faith? Acknowledging that the seed needs careful cultivation and a slow growth into individual fullness, where perhaps that fullness may take different forms in different lives and in different times.

I have a feeling that they were growing wary of the 'we are saved' aspect of Evangelicalism as focussing on the individual salvation in an afterlife and thus focusing on the self, rather than taking on board the teaching of the scriptures as a guide to living more selflessly and discarding thought of afterlife rewards.

Did they feel Evangelism was dishonest? 

* Hermeneutics: the critical dialogue between the reader and the text resulting in evolving interpretations. An informed reader reads the text differently to a naive reader, filtering it with and relating it to their experience. There is not a single, therefore correct, interpretation; it will speak differently to different people's condition. The authors are also concerned with the changes over time in understanding consistent with human progress. There is concern with some readers projecting onto the text the interpretation they want to see, but which the text may not bear.

Bergson, Jung and the creativity of disruption

Exploring an archive will always take you on journeys that you had not anticipated. I first came across reference to Bergson in one document in Irene's archive: Proceedings of the discussions on belief, Geneva Study Group, Winter 1937/8.

Henri-Louis Bergson? I had no idea who he was or what he propounded, but two of the participants in the discussions referred to how important his ideas were to them – they were fundamental as a way of framing their beliefs. That gave me little option but to hunt up who he was, what his ideas were, how they related to my subjects, to the period they were living in, and to their fascination with Jung. 

It turned out that Bergson's ideas had considerable influence on Jung himself, so unpacking Bergson was going to be important. 

Researching an archive is a bit like archaeology: you are presented with incomplete and scattered bits and pieces and have to try to fit them into place. But there is an additional problem – time investment. As soon as you start researching a side-shoot there is a danger of that area ballooning and becoming a major endeavour in its own right. The challenge is, can you come up with a synopsis of the side-shoot that will contribute to understanding the spine? Knowing when to stop is almost as important as knowing what is worth following up – something you cannot know until you have followed it up! It is so easy to spend huge amounts of time trying to comprehend something abstruse and near impenetrable, being sucked further and further out in an effort to extract something tangible which would contribute to the main flow of the study. Bergson was one such side-shoot. 

Arriving at an adequate synopsis is always hazardous. It is a bit like taking a photograph of a landscape. The resultant postcard is a snapshot of how it appeared at one time, on one day, in one season, from one viewpoint, and that before some major feature was changed for ever. It can never do justice to the evolving complexity of the place, nor reflect the near infinity of view points from which it could be seen. It would be easy spending a lifetime studying Bergson and still to feel that you had not reached the bottom of what he was saying; but in terms of my study of Irene's archive, he warranted little more than a footnote. However, in getting to grips with Jung, he deserved far more. 

Here is what I came up with in trying to explain the import of Bergson in the context of the document resulting from the 1937/8 discussion group on 'belief':

It is interesting to note that several of the participants refer either directly or indirectly to Bergson. Russell may well have become the dominant public face of English language philosophy between the wars, but it was Bergson who had caught the imagination of the French speaking world, especially after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Bergson's philosophy was important to Jung, who built on Bergson's notion of élan vital when constructing his own view of the psyche after his break with Freud, shifting Freud's notion of the libido from being essentially a sexual drive to being the basic vitality of life. He agreed with Bergson's notion of enduring – that our vitality is experienced as persisting through experienced time – so that we live dynamically in the tension between our past and our expectations of our future – and at a deeper level we also live in the dynamic tension between the greater communal past and the communal expectations of the future. Expectations which Jung thought of as being encoded in what he termed 'archetypes'. Jung also agrees with Bergson about the importance of intuition; that in many ways it is more powerful in helping us survive than intellect. Intellect for Bergson is derivative, a secondary factor: its function is to solve problems when we encounter them. Direction in life is given by our intuition, which is more fundamental. For Jung the process of individuation was very much one of letting intuitions – psychic forces – often carried by symbols – emerge from the unconscious.

Bergson is the very epitome of French language philosophy in contrast to the analytic tradition of English language philosophy. It is as much about feeling right as being right. It is about making sense of life as lived, as experienced; not about reductive analysis and pairing down to what can truthfully be said. It is abstract – very abstract – and fits the thinker like good couture: flattering them as much as serving them: creating an effect that is pure affect. It is fundamentally about what it is to be alive, to be in the human predicament.

Here are my notes on Bergson most influential work, the one for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927: 

Henri-Louis Bergson: Creative Evolution: concepts cannot capture the world – concepts fail to touch the whole of reality, being only a sort of abstract net thrown on things – intuition alone engages fully with reality. Neither rationalism nor empiricism grasp reality – the empiricist ultimately resolves reality into no more than a bundle of bits, the measurables which it can be reduced to; the rationalist keeps accreting more and more properties onto the substance that underlays things, such that "A thing-in-itself is a property-bearer that must be distinguished from the properties it bears" [see: substance theory] until it become infinitely saturated and is equivalent to God or the universe; "Thus they transform it into an unknowable container in which properties reside. Trying to obtain the unity of the object, they allow their substance to contain more and more properties, until eventually it can contain everything, including God and nature" [see: Intuition]. By contrast, true understanding comes from intuition, which Bergson defines as "a simple, indivisible experience of sympathy through which one is moved into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique and ineffable within it. The absolute that is grasped is always perfect in the sense that it is perfectly what it is, and infinite in the sense that it can be grasped as a whole through a simple, indivisible act of intuition, yet lends itself to boundless enumeration when analysed”  [see: intuition (Bergson)]; Intuition is driven by the "élan vital" – the fundamental life energy, the vitality of all things.
(Does "boundless enumeration" prefigure Deridda's deconstructionism?)

Bergson's demotion of reason to the service role of problem solving, and his promotion of intuition to the primary role of direction-giving fitted well with Jung's observations of the human mind. Intuitions, Jung observed, arise from the operations of the unconscious and drive our intent: how we feel is more powerful than what we think. Rationalising is almost an epiphenomena, tidying up, enabling and justifying, even masking our drives. He found that those who became trapped by reasoning suffered. Those who connected more deeply with their intuition flowed through life better, unless that dominate instead. Either one-sidedness was a recipe for disaster!

Bergson was anti-determinism, anti-mechanicalism* in his thinking, emphasising the spontaneity and unpredictability of creation. A view starkly in contrast to the almost triumphant determinism of so many of his contemporaries, especially in the sciences and mathematics. David Hilbert, the outstanding mathematician of the age, contended that the completeness of mathematics would be accomplished; Einstein's contended that all of physics would eventually prove to be determinable, and, in consequence, so would human behaviour. Everything would be calculable and explainable. It would be the final triumph of the sciences. 

It is interesting to note how that certainty has crumbled. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, Turing's Halting Problem, and, ultimately, the development of Chaos Theory, have eroded that world view. It seems Bergson had a point. The future cannot be predicted: chaos begets creativity and novelty. 

Jung felt that the phantasmagoria of symbols – images – arising in our dreams, in our imagination, in our fantasies and fictions, are the creative font from which inspiration is derived. They are the true vehicles of human inventiveness and originality. To live a life fully is to live a life symbolically, to unleash those potentials. Bergson's philosophy underpinned Jung's psychology.

Disruption being creative – something of a mantra in Silicon Valley – is now taken almost as an axiom.  Both Bergson and Jung would have been delighted. Both held that mystics and creative people show us that the static world may be comfortable, but it is not ultimately maintainable. It will decay, allowing chaotic interruptions to emerge full of creative potential. For Jung, that was the essence of the mid-life and other crises, and the harvests of personal growth and development – individuation in his terms – that might be reaped from them. 

The arts and culture at a time of stability tend to be flaccid: those from times of crisis tend to be innovative. Religions and spirituality likewise. Bergson not only anticipated the modern view of the vitality of chaos, he also proposed a distinction between static and dynamic religion and their related ethics, those of closed and open systems, anticipating Karl Popper in the process. Dynamic religion and its related open system of morality were rooted, he thought, in mysticism. His book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion explored this at depth. Much like Jung, Bergson linked mysticism to intuition, to the creative non-rational, and to the symbolic and evocative.

Quakers understand how a time of chaos, the British Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century (The Wars of the Three Kingdoms), provided the creative space for the genesis of Quakerism; and they understand being rooted in mysticism: the ministry that arise from the germinating silence of Meeting is so often inspirationally metaphoric, allegoric, poetic, symbolic rather than deductively rational – so much in accord with both Jung and Bergson. They also understand Bergson's open system of morality, being alert to continuing revelation.

 
 

* The character of being mechanical; mechanical action or procedure; specifically, in philosophy, the mechanical interpretation of the universe.

William Penn

History is always a dialogue between the past and the present. The down grading of William Penn in the esteem of Quakers by removing his name from one of the rooms at Friends House is very much part of such dialogue. 

How the mighty are fallen! Penn name must be removed from public display because he owned slaves. An unforgivable sin to our modern twenty-first century eyes, illuminated by Black Lives Matter. How could he! Surly one of the founding fathers of Quakerism, one of those who came to accept, propound and live by the testimony of equality, must have realised the crime against humanity he was committing, the massive hypocrisy he was indulging in? Did equality for Penn only extend to people with white skins?

Or should we be looking more carefully at this, and at our relationship with the past? 

There is always a danger of decontextualising when we project into the past our current values, resulting in misrepresentation. Historic figures always need to be appreciated in their context, not judged as if they were our contemporaries; although their significance to us is always part of the current public discourse. The dunking of Coulson into Bristol Docks speaks volumes about were we are in re-assessing our relationship with parts of British history.

William Penn was born in 1644, some 263 years after the Peasants Revolt of 1381, when the peasants of south-east England tried and failed to free themselves from forced labour, and 231 years before the 1875 Employer and Workman Act decriminalised the failure to perform labour. Penn lived near the midway point between the two; between the medieval, when almost everyone was bound into a web of enforced service, and the modern world of freedom of labour and individual liberty.

Prior to 1875 employees could suffer criminal sanctions, including fines and imprisonment, for withholding their labour. The Master and Servant Act of 1823 required "the obedience and loyalty" from servants to their contracted employer, with infringements of the contract punishable before a court of law, often with a jail sentence of hard labour. That act itself was a codification of earlier laws and practices that enforced work and bound servants to their masters. Servants were still legally bound to their masters even two centuries after Penn's birth.

It was not until 1574 that serfdom was finally abolished in England and Wales, although it had begun slowly disintegrating after the Peasants Revolt of 1381. However, the impression that people were anything like free thereafter was far from the truth. Being bound as an apprentice, indentured servitude, bonded labour, debt bondage, being bound in service, impressment into the military, convict labour and forced day labour, on road repair and such like, were all normal. It has been calculated that 80% of the world's people were in forced labour of one kind or another in Penn's time, and for much of the following century (see Adam Hochschild Burry the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery).

Wives and children fared little better being, in the eyes of the law, dependents of the man. Injury to a man's wife, child or servant was injury to him, and he would deserve compensation for such harm. As master of his household he was entitled and expected to administer 'just punishment' to all – wife, children and servants –  including the use of the rod.

The concentration on the Afro-American experience of slavery can lead to the impression that seventeenth century slavery was simply an issue of white people enslaving black. True, as long as the extensive enslavement of Europeans in North Africa by the Barbary Pirates, the enslavement of up to 80,000 Ukrainians, Russians, or other Slavic peoples a year by the Crimean Tartars for shipment into the Ottoman Empire, or the widespread trading in slaves along the Silk Road and elsewhere in Asia is ignored. Fear among Europeans of falling into Barbary or Ottoman slavery was very real. Upwards of two million Europeans were taken into slavery between 1500 and 1700, with the Barbary pirates raiding as far north and the English Channel and Iceland. It was only in the eighteenth century that numbers of African slaves in the Americas overtook that of European slaves in the Islamic world. There were also other very healthy and vigorous slave trades around the world in Penn's time. Slavery was globally endemic and horribly normal.

In the seventeenth century Quakerism was new and was finding its way, following those openings that George Fox spoke of, being led by the light. All of the first generation of Quakers came to it from outside, bringing with them the mores, beliefs, attitudes and values which they had grown up with and which they had lived by. Bending themselves to the emerging ethic as it grew was at times a painful struggle. There was no template for being Quaker. It all had to be worked anew. The rejection of all authority except that of the inward light meant being open to transformation. Nothing was a given. The seed had to be allowed to grow. Continuing revelation is never comfortable. It requires moving from what is, to what now seems required. The testimonies were not givens, they emerged through painful living and long hours of contemplative sitting in that collective and germinating silence, attending to the ministry that arose. 

It took many years for the testimony of equality to emerge and to see how it applied to all manner of people. Accepting the spiritual equality of women was not automatic – Margaret Fell's Woman's Speaking Justified dating from 1666 – and for many years men held Meeting for Business separately, not involving women in the proceedings; women's' Meetings were confined principally to matters of social wealfare. Likewise, how equality applied to children, servant, employees, non-Quakers, non-Christians, non-Europeans, or any other degree or kind of person, had to be worked through, including what aspects of life it applied to. A process that is still unfolding: the twenty-first century seeing Quakers addressing the issue of equal marriage amongst other issues.

For seventeenth century Quakers your lot in life, your estate, was simply a given. You might be a free man or bound. You might be a pauper, or the owner of great wealth. Equality in the spirit was separate to your earthly estate. William Penn counted amongst the wealthiest men of the age, especially after receiving the grant of lands in North America from Charles II, making Penn the greatest private landowner in the world: but his word arising from the gathered silence of meeting for worship was worth no more than that of the least of his servants, indentured, bound, or enslaved.

Equality did not mean material or economic equality for early Quakers, it applied to spiritual equality: being open to revelation, to speaking the word as it came from within. This perception was applied to slaves as well as to the 'free'. It appears that the first encounter between Quakers and slavery was in Barbados in the 1660s, where slaves were welcomed into Quaker meetings, even becoming elders. Nelson McKeeby has described this as a weird version of slavery.

By acknowledging that slaves had spiritual equality Quakers had laid the foundations for their coming to realise that slavery itself was wrong. A revelation first expressed in 1688 in the Germantown Petition against Slavery, only seven years after the grant of Pennsylvania to Penn, and six since the first colonisation of Philadelphia. Penn seems to have had 12 slaves, initially employed on the construction of his house and outbuildings. However, slaves were already part of the workforce of the Delaware valley, having been imported as early as 1639 by Dutch and Swedish settlers, and added to by later landings. It seems that Penn's slaves were purchased from that pool by Penn's agent as that was all the manpower to be had. Penn, like the Barbadon Quakers, was concerned with how slaves, other indentured people, including personal servants, were treated, and laid down regulations concerning them all after his return to Pennsylvania in 1699. Jack H Schick's account of Slavery in Pennsylvania includes a more detailed account of this. 

In an era when slavery was normal the interesting story is how the Quakers came to reject the practice and became leading campaigners for abolition. It almost conforms to George Foxe's revelation that in order to come to realisation of what was right, it was necessary to have a sense, and perhaps experience, of what was wrong. By giving spiritual dignity, respect and equality to everyone regardless of their estate, the Quakers lit a fuse that ended slavery. 

So should we feel shame about William Penn because of his slave owning? Should he have leaped in one bound from the normality of his times, to applying equality in every respect to everyone, or was this a work in progress? It may be that the removal of Penn's name from a room says more about our current discomfort about race than it says anything about Penn and his times. Is it a way of  avoiding the dissonance that its continued presence may invoke, rather than our engaging with the transformations we need to make?

[This item has been re-worked by removing the more polemical and confrontational tone of the original due to the criticisms it received, for which I am most grateful.]

 

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.