Various - "Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920"

G. A. Henty - "With Moore At Corunna"

Various - "The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasglow Chamber of Commerce Battalion)"

August von Kotzebue - "The Stranger"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

A Preface to Politics

W >> Walter Lippmann >> A Preface to Politics




The democratic experiment is the only one that requires this wilful
humanistic culture. An absolutism like Russia's is served better when the
people accept their ideas as authoritative and piously sacrifice humanity
to a non-human purpose. An aristocracy flourishes where the people find a
vicarious enjoyment in admiring the successes of the ruling class. That
prevents men from developing their own interests and looking for their
own successes. No doubt Napoleon was well content with the philosophy of
those guardsmen who drank his health before he executed them.

But those excellent soldiers would make dismal citizens. A view of life
in which man obediently allows himself to be made grist for somebody
else's mill is the poorest kind of preparation for the work of
self-government. You cannot long deny external authorities in government
and hold to them for the rest of life, and it is no accident that the
nineteenth century questioned a great deal more than the sovereignty of
kings. The revolt went deeper and democracy in politics was only an
aspect of it. The age might be compared to those years of a boy's life
when he becomes an atheist and quarrels with his family. The nineteenth
century was a bad time not only for kings, but for priests, the classics,
parental autocrats, indissoluble marriage, Shakespeare, the Aristotelian
Poetics and the validity of logic. If disobedience is man's original
virtue, as Oscar Wilde suggested, it was an extraordinarily virtuous
century. Not a little of the revolt was an exuberant rebellion for its
own sake. There were also counter-revolutions, deliberate returns to
orthodoxy, as in the case of Chesterton. The transvaluation of values was
performed by many hands into all sorts of combinations.

There have been other periods of revolution. Heresy is just a few hours
younger than orthodoxy. Disobedience is certainly not the discovery of
the nineteenth century. But the quality of it is. I believe Chesterton
has hold of an essential truth when he says that this is the first time
men have boasted of their heresy. The older rebels claimed to be more
orthodox than the Church, to have gone back to the true authorities. The
radicals of recent times proclaim that there is no orthodoxy, no doctrine
that men must accept without question.

Without doubt they deceive themselves mightily. They have their invisible
popes, called Art, Nature, Science, with regalia and ritual and a
catechism. But they don't mean to have them. They mean to be
self-governing in their spiritual lives. And this intention is the
half-perceived current which runs through our age and galvanizes so many
queer revolts. It would be interesting to trace out the forms it has
taken, the abortive cults it has tried and abandoned. In another
connection I pointed to autonomy as the hope of syndicalism. It would not
be difficult to find a similar assertion in the feminist agitation. From
Mrs. Gilman's profound objections against a "man-made" world to the lady
who would like to vote about her taxes, there is a feeling that woman
must be something more than a passive creature. Walter Pater might be
quoted in his conclusion to the effect that "the theory or idea or system
which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of experience, in
consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some
abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only
conventional, has no real claim upon us." The desire for self-direction
has made a thousand philosophies as contradictory as the temperaments of
the thinkers. A storehouse of illustration is at hand: Nietzsche advising
the creative man to bite off the head of the serpent which is choking him
and become "a transfigured being, a light-surrounded being, that
_laughed_!" One might point to Stirner's absolute individualism or turn
to Whitman's wholehearted acceptance of every man with his catalogue of
defects and virtues. Some of these men have cursed each other roundly:
Georges Sorel, for example, who urges workingmen to accept none of the
bourgeois morality, and becomes most eloquent when he attacks other
revolutionists.

I do not wish to suggest too much unanimity in the hundreds of artists
and thinkers that are making the thought of our times. There is a kind of
"professional reconciler" of opposites who likes to lump all the
prominent rebels together and refer to them affectionately as "us
radicals." Yet that there is a common impulse in modern thought which
strives towards autonomy is true and worth remarking. In some men it is
half-conscious, in others a minor influence, but almost no one of weight
escapes the contagion of it entirely. It is a new culture that is being
prepared. Without it there would to-day be no demand for a creative
statesmanship which turns its back upon the routine and the taboo, kings
and idols, and non-human purposes. It does more. It is making the
atmosphere in which a humanly centered politics can flourish. The fact
that this culture is multiform and often contradictory is a sign that
more and more of the interests of life are finding expression. We should
rejoice at that, for profusion means fertility; where a dead uniformity
ceases, invention and ingenuity flourish.

Perhaps the insistence on the need of a culture in statecraft will seem
to many people an old-fashioned delusion. Among the more rigid socialists
and reformers it is not customary to spend much time discussing mental
habits. That, they think, was made unnecessary by the discovery of an
economic basis of civilization. The destinies of society are felt to be
too solidly set in industrial conditions to allow any cultural direction.
Where there is no choice, of what importance is opinion?

All propaganda is, of course, a practical tribute to the value of
culture. However inevitable the process may seem, all socialists agree
that its inevitability should be fully realized. They teach at one time
that men act from class interests: but they devote an enormous amount of
energy to making men conscious of their class. It evidently matters to
that supposedly inevitable progress whether men are aware of it. In
short, the most hardened socialist admits choice and deliberation,
culture and ideals into his working faith. He may talk as if there were
an iron determinism, but his practice is better than his preachment.

Yet there are necessities in social life. To all the purposes of politics
it is settled, for instance, that the trust will never be "unscrambled"
into small competing businesses. We say in our argument that a return to
the days of the stage-coach is impossible or that "you cannot turn back
the hands of the clock." Now man might return to the stage-coach if that
seemed to him the supreme goal of all his effort, just as anyone can
follow Chesterton's advice to turn back the hands of the clock if he
pleases. But nobody can recover his yesterdays no matter how much he
abuses the clock, and no man can expunge the memory of railroads though
all the stations and engines were dismantled.

"From this survival of the past," says Bergson, "it follows that
consciousness cannot go through the same state twice." This is the real
necessity that makes any return to the imagined glories of other days an
idle dream. Graham Wallas remarks that those who have eaten of the tree
of knowledge cannot forget--"Mr. Chesterton cries out, like the Cyclops
in the play, against those who complicate the life of man, and tells us
to eat 'caviare on impulse,' instead of 'grapenuts on principle.' But
since we cannot unlearn our knowledge, Mr. Chesterton is only telling us
to eat caviare on principle." The binding fact we must face in all our
calculations, and so in politics too, is that you cannot recover what is
passed. That is why educated people are not to be pressed into the
customs of their ignorance, why women who have reached out for more than
"Kirche, Kinder und Kueche" can never again be entirely domestic and
private in their lives. Once people have questioned an authority their
faith has lost its naivete. Once men have tasted inventions like the
trust they have learned something which cannot be annihilated. I know of
one reformer who devotes a good deal of his time to intimate talks with
powerful conservatives. He explains them to themselves: never after do
they exercise their power with the same unquestioning ruthlessness.

Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never
be a repetition of the past. This insight we owe to Bergson. The
application of it to politics is not difficult because politics is one of
the interests of life. We can learn from him in what sense we are bound.
"The finished portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the
nature of the artist, by colors spread out on the palette; but even with
the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not even the artist, could
have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict it would
have been to produce it before it was produced...." The future is
explained by the economic and social institutions which were present at
its birth: the trust and the labor union, all the "movements" and
institutions, will condition it. "Just as the talent of the painter is
formed or deformed--in any case, is modified--under the very influence of
the work he produces, so each of our states, at the moment of its issue,
modifies our personality, being indeed the new form we are just assuming.
It is then right to say that what we do depends on what we are; but it is
necessary to add also, that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and
that we are creating ourselves continually."

What I have called culture enters into political life as a very powerful
condition. It is a way of creating ourselves. Make a blind struggle
luminous, drag an unconscious impulse into the open day, see that men are
aware of their necessities, and the future is in a measure controlled.
The culture of to-day is for the future an historical condition. That is
its political importance. The mental habits we are forming, our
philosophies and magazines, theaters, debates, schools, pulpits and
newspapers become part of an active past which as Bergson says "follows
us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought, and willed from our
earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to
join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain
leave it outside."

Socialists claim that because the McNamara brothers had no
"class-consciousness," because they were without a philosophy of society
and an understanding of the labor movement their sense of wrong was bound
to seek out dynamite. That is a profound truth backed by abundant
evidence. If you turn, for example, to Spargo's Life of Karl Marx you see
that all through his career Marx struggled with the mere
insurrectionists. It was the men without the Marxian vision of growth and
discipline who were forever trying to lead little marauding bands against
the governments of Europe. The fact is worth pondering: the Marxian
socialists, openly declaring that all authority is a temporary
manifestation of social conditions, have waged what we must call a war of
culture against the powers of the world. They have tried to arouse in
workingmen the consciousness of an historical mission--the patience of
that labor is one of the wonders of the age. But the McNamaras had a
culture that could help them not at all. They were Catholics, Democrats
and old-fashioned trade-unionists. Religion told them that authority was
absolute and eternal, politics that Jefferson had said about all there
was to say, economics insisted that the struggle between labor and
capital was an everlasting see-saw. But life told them that society was
brutal: an episode like the shirtwaist factory fire drove them to
blasphemy and dynamite.

Those bombs at Los Angeles, assassination and terrorism, are compounded
of courage, indignation and ignorance. Civilization has much to fear from
the blind class antagonisms it fosters; but the preaching of "class
consciousness," far from being a fomenter of violence, must be recognized
as the civilizing influence of culture upon economic interests.

Thoughts and feelings count. We live in a revolutionary period and
nothing is so important as to be aware of it. The measure of our
self-consciousness will more or less determine whether we are to be the
victims or the masters of change. Without philosophy we stumble along.
The old routines and the old taboos are breaking up anyway, social forces
are emerging which seek autonomy and struggle against slavery to
non-human purposes. We seem to be moving towards some such statecraft as
I have tried to suggest. But without knowledge of it that progress will
be checkered and perhaps futile. The dynamics for a splendid human
civilization are all about us. They need to be used. For that there must
be a culture practiced in seeking the inwardness of impulses, competent
to ward off the idols of its own thought, hospitable to novelty and
sufficiently inventive to harness power.

Why this age should have come to be what it is, why at this particular
time the whole drift of thought should be from authority to autonomy
would be an interesting speculation. It is one of the ultimate questions
of politics. It is like asking why Athens in the Fifth Century B. C. was
singled out as the luminous point of the Western World. We do not know
enough to cut under such mysteries. We can only begin to guess why there
was a Renaissance, why in certain centuries man seems extraordinarily
creative. Perhaps the Modern Period with its flexibility, sense of
change, and desire for self-direction is a liberation due to the great
surplus of wealth. Perhaps the ease of travel, the popularizing of
knowledge, the break-down of frontiers have given us a new interest in
human life by showing how temporary are all its instruments. Certainly
placid or morose acceptance is undermined. If men remain slaves either to
ideas or to other men, it will be because they do not know they are
slaves. Their intention is to be free. Their desire is for a full and
expressive life and they do not relish a lop-sided and lamed humanity.
For the age is rich with varied and generous passions.

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