Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30th, 1865 at Bombay, India. Selling his first written work at the age of 17 by 27 he was probably the best known living author in the English speaking world. Britannica describes that "not since the English poet Lord Byron has such a reputation been achieved so rapidly. When the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson died in 1892, it may be said that Kipling took his place in popular estimation." It is almost impossible for a modern audience to understand how popular and admired in the last decade of Victoria's reign and during the Edwardian era Kipling was. In an age when few living writers are known outside of the ever shrinking number of fully literate and engaged readers Kipling's brillant rise to prominence, and unfortunately all too brief preeminence in English letters, seems, and is, something out of another time.

What destroyed Kipling's reputation among English speaking authors and critics was the same force that was to destroy the world, both Indian and British, that he knew, the First World War. A strong imperialist, as examplified by his classic The White Man's Burden which contray to revisionists attempts was not meant as an ironic liberal criticism of British imperial and missionary efforts, he argued for the moral obligation of the leading nations of the world, obviously Europe, to civilize the under-developed. He also argued for a strong stance against German militarism in years before 1914 and lost a son at the Battle of Loos. By 1919, when he wrote The Gods of the Copybook Headings, imperialism and the glorious cause of 1914 seemed dated, and perhaps more darkly responsible for the horrors of the Great War. Combined with this was that Kipling's own style of blank verse was now deeply unfashionable. The 1920s and 1930s was to be the age of Gertrude Stein (who was satirized brilliantly as the minor character Lois Cook in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead) and the Kipling style, politics, and sense of life was now seen as part of a deservedly dying age. Though not a classical liberal he was yet another victim of the "strange death of liberal England."

While lacking the visual imagination of the Romantics before him, or of T.S. Elliot (a strong admirer) and W.H. Auden after him, his mastery of blank verse and strong moral sense were unrivaled before or since. He admired capitalists, inventors, scientists, soldiers and imperialists, like his friend Cecil Rhodes, and held nothing but comtempt for bureaucrats, decadent aesthetes and mad left-wing idealists who seemed to be gradually seizing control of Britain and the Empire. He was not, as subsequent generations have tried to label him, a bigot or a brute. His anti-semitism occasionally surfaced, but how much better or worse he was than his contemporaries is a matter of debate. His opinion of the non-European world, or indeed the non-British European world, was a low one, but he was no English Nietzsche and indeed viewed much of the world with a skeptical, even at times cynical, conservative paternalism that would have had at least something in common with Carlyle and Ruskin. The famous Times headline published a few years after his death, "Fog in the Channel, Continent Cut Off," captures something of his anglo-centric world view, but the author of Kim was a far more subtle thinker than many of his critics. An unthinking jingoist he was not. Re-read the books and try to understand that his intentions toward what we now call the Third World were at essence no different from those who set up the IMF, the World Bank, and the U.N., his grasp of human nature was, however, far better.

The reason that the authors of this blog chose the name The Gods of the Copybook Headings, in honor of Kipling's 1919 poem, which is posted on the upper left hand side of the page, was because of its strong moral and historical sense. The idea that there are Gods of the Copybook, certain basic truths about the human condition that transcend time and which subsequent generations ignore at their peril, was one that we thought was desperately needed in an age of profound skepticism. More than few view the poem as "moralistic" or "preachy." Such comments only highlight the problem. Before we can seriously discuss the issues of the day we must reach not an understanding on politics, economics or ethics, but deeper still, agree that there is something called truth, however reached. Truth is a word that is almost never used, in either intellectual discussion or common conversation, unless referring to a very narrow statement of a particular concrete, or ironically. The idea of truth, that there are principles that are universal is what is not merely eschewed but treated with contempt today.

Once one rejects the idea of a law of logic, or the necessity of principles, when one says simply that everything is relative or a shade of grey, the result is the kind of myopia we now have in our political discourse. Look at the so-called debate on health care, a debate that should have taken place a least a decade ago and with far more vigour and serious thought than is happening now. Try explaining to just about anyone outside of a relatively few thoughtful conservatives, libertarians and objectivists that the very same moral and economic principles that destroyed the Soviet Union, and nearly destroyed Britain in the 1970s, are putting people on waiting lists for MRIs and CAT scans, and leading to needless deaths now in Canada, and you'll get blank stares, at best. You cannot explain the law of supply and demand, or the necessity of prices for economic calculation, to people who are still on the fence about the law of cause and effect. What happened then and there can happen here and now. This is why the last lines of The Gods of the Copybook Headings inspire what we try, and sometimes succeed in doing here at this blog:

And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire --
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!