Romantic Luddites

The Romantic Attack on Modern Science in England and America and Other Essays
by Roger Sworder
Angelico Press, 2015, 172 pages, $33
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I read Roger Sworder’s previous book, Mining, Metallurgy and the Meaning of Life, with enjoyment, profit and fascination. It remains on my bookshelf and I quote from it quite often.

When I saw he had published another book, The Romantic Attack on Modern Science in England and America, I sent off my $33 for it at once. To call it a disappointment is an understatement. Not that the subject matter is dull or unimportant. It is very important indeed. The disappointment springs from the fact that in the fight for civilisation the book is loudly on what I believe is the wrong side.

Perhaps as I write this I am not in the best position to be entirely objective. My wife delivered my copy of the book to me in hospital, where I was being treated in an intensive care unit and was being kept alive by machines that manifested themselves as a wall of screens and flashing lights. I did not, at that moment, feel it would have been fair of me to join in the actually now widespread attack on modern science.

The book looks, with plain approval, at three “romantic” English and three American poets, led by the most poisonous fruitcake of them all, William Blake. (It was a particularly delicious fruitcake that had put me into hospital with potassium poisoning.)

Blake is followed by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, Melville and Edwin Arlington Robinson, though I do not think it is in every case correct to lump the whole canon of their works together. Wordsworth and Coleridge certainly changed their ideas as they grew older. Nonetheless what Sworder appears to be praising in them is their attacks on science and modernity. I propose, for reasons of space, to deal here almost entirely with Sworder’s treatment of Blake, as the most representative, and also the most extreme, of the anti-scientists.

Blake, he argues, saw himself as having a mission to totally destroy English culture, as exemplified in his day by the likes of Burke, Newton, Reynolds and Locke, for whom he felt only abhorrence and contempt. Sworder says, “Blake’s claim that the purpose of the new science is to destroy the wisdom of the ages to gratify envy makes good sense.” No wonder Blake has been a magnet for cranks and even Satanists such as Aleister Crowley (who made Blake, along with himself, a saint in his own very peculiar church).

The term “Romantic” has many, many meanings, and when I use the term here it is to refer to the six broadly similar people dealt with here, not, say, to romantics like Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany or Rider Haggard, or even my own stories about felinoids flying spaceships or cricket-playing Morlocks.

It does not refer to C.S. Lewis, one of the most important things in whose life was a search for, or knowledge of, an indefinable “joy” and longing, which the German Romantics like Novalis called die blaue Blume. And which Lewis came to believe came from God. Lewis wrote a book, The Great Divorce, specifically to rebut Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Nor, emphatically, does it refer to such romantics as Werner von Braun or Buzz Aldrin. Nothing could be more “romantic” than G.K. Chesterton’s “The Ballad of the White Horse”, but Blake would have despised Chesterton’s Catholic orthodoxy and robust common sense.

Blake loathed “the reasoning power in man. This is a false body, an incrustation over my immortal spirit …” He went on, as Sworder quotes:

I come in Self-annihilation and the grandeur of Inspiration,

To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour

To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration

To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albion’s covering

To take off his filthy garments and clothe him with Imagination

To cast aside from Poetry all that is not Inspiration …

A Bex, a cup of tea and a good lie-down, anyone? These Romantics’ hatred of science—and, importantly, of economics and modernity in general—was of course hypocritical. It virtually always is: Gandhi attacked railways but had his own special air-conditioned railway carriage; he forbade Western medical treatment for his dying wife but accepted it for himself.

I know of no anti-modernist who has refused anaesthetics, insulin or antibiotics on idealistic grounds for himself, or indeed, any who have refused machine-woven clothes, much as they may have prescribed such abstinences for other people. How many latter-day attacks on the dehumanising effects of technology are composed on computers?

Fanny Burney’s account of undergoing a mastectomy without anaesthetic, performed by Napoleon’s own surgeon, one of the best of the day, on September 30, 1811, is available on the internet. I would not advise eating anything before reading it.

As for Blake’s advocacy of care-free, natural “free love,” sexual intercourse at the time was not only fraught with the risk of venereal disease—often unspeakably ghastly in its symptoms in both the immediate victims and any subsequent children, and effectively untreatable until the twentieth century—but also, before effective birth control, carried a major risk of death in childbirth for all fertile women from queens down. Even without complications and infection, there were no really effective anaesthetics to ease the always great and often extreme pain of childbirth.

Further, with extra-marital sexual relations, a woman without a husband to give financial support as a rule could simply not afford children, apart from the fact that she faced social ostracism—there was not the surplus wealth existing to institutionalise pensions for single mothers.

It is no wonder that so often, instead of being a matter of delight and joy and an expression of love and comfort, sexual activity became hedged with taboos and prohibitions, and even between married people was a fertile source of guilt and neurosis as well as danger. We can guess (and much surviving evidence supports that guess) that obsessions resulting from sexual frustration were very widespread. The wonder is that it was not worse. Blake famously wrote in Songs of Innocence of the Christ-like natures of a “little lamb” concluding, “Little lamb, God bless thee.” But there was no modern veterinary science to treat animal diseases or ease animal pain. Professor Mathias has said: “The elemental truth must be stressed that the characteristic of any country, before its industrial revolution and modernisation, is poverty.”

Blake hated industrialisation. Even if his famous phrase “dark satanic mills” referred to the universities of the Enlightenment rather than literal industrial mills, he constantly ranted against these latter also. Never mind that they made possible cheaper and cleaner food and clothing for the poor and liberated those who worked in them from the far worse horror of agricultural labour in an English winter (English language and society today are full of fossil traces of that annual terror).

Blake particularly hated water-powered mill-wheels. Sworder says, with evident approval:

Why should Blake suppose that … science should be so demoralising? The reason is in the image of the loom mechanically driven by water-wheels, and this reason is repeated in the account of the cogs and wheels under compulsion at the end.

These Romantics, and Blake in particular, believed machinery, science, reasoning and the whole corpus of modernity cut men off from God. Hatred of both machinery and reasoning necessarily meant hatred of physics and economics.

However, in Western history religious monasteries were the prime drivers of the harnessing of water-power. One monk wrote benignly: “How many horses’ backs have been broken, how many men’s arms wearied, by the labour from which a river, with no labour, graciously frees us!” Science-fiction writer S.M. Stirling is eloquent:

By the High Middle Ages tens of thousands of water and wind mills were scattered all over Europe. Grinding grain, eliminating the killing labour that Homer’s heroes blithely assigned to their slave-women, fulling cloth, sawing wood and stone; every groaning wooden wheel represented one less whip-mark laid on a human back.

Like water-wheels, windmills spread rapidly under the monastic system. One of their major uses, in addition to the tasks like grinding corn performed by water-wheels, was pumping, allowing much previously flooded land to be used. With the spread of water-wheels and windmills we can make out the beginning of something vast, unprecedented and utterly heroic: great cracks in the “ceiling” of ignorance on human progress which until then had every­where prevented it moving beyond animal power, slave labour and sails.

For being utterly hostile to the machinery that rescued millions from drudgery, stultification and early death, the Romantics discussed here merit no respect.

I previously mentioned the Romantics’ hatred of economics as part of their general hatred of modernity. As far as I can see, this hatred sprang largely from wilful ignorance. They irresponsibly set out to be the unacknowledged legislators of the world without troubling to find out how much of the human world really works.

In the twentieth century this attitude led at least one leading poet, Ezra Pound, into the foul and murderous paranoia of anti-Semitism. His friend and quasi-disciple T.S. Eliot was saved from following Pound too far into this mental sewer because he was a professional banker and understood money.

Herman Melville is quoted here with approval for attacking the Anglo-Saxon cultural colonisation of places like the South Seas—which, incidentally, ended cannibalism and human sacrifice. Coleridge at least understood the importance of the economic life (trade) as well as the spiritual.

The other essays in the book are all more-or-less celebrations of Luddism—an attack on machines, and therefore, once again, an attack on science and technology.

The Roman emperor Vespasian is hailed for having stopped industrialisation in its tracks by having turned down an invention for moving building columns with little labour and therefore doing workmen out of a job. But while Sworder describes them as workmen, they may well have been slaves. The difference is significant. Vespasian may be said to have thereby stopped the Roman empire in its tracks too. Its advances in agriculture, economics and technology remained glacially slow until the barbarians came calling.

Great poetry and modernity have not necessarily been enemies. Douglas Stewart called the pioneering upper-atmosphere and deep-sea explorer Auguste Piccard “Our emblem and our hero.” Alfred Noyes, a Catholic remembered by the radicals, if at all, as perhaps the most reactionary and old-fashioned English poet of the twentieth century, between 1922 and 1930 wrote The Torch-Bearers, a great epic poem in three books of several hundred pages celebrating the advance of science:

Who, when that good Dutch spectacle-maker set

Two lenses in a tube, to read the time

Upon the distant clock-tower of his church,

Could dream of this, our hundred-inch, that shows

The snow upon the polar caps of Mars

Whitening and darkening as the seasons change?

Or who could dream when Galileo watched

His moons of Jupiter, that from their eclipses

And from that change in their appointed times,

Now late, now early, as the watching earth

Farther or nearer on its orbit rolled,

The immeasurable speed of light at last

Should be reduced to measure?

Both Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman wrote poetry in praise of steam-engines.

Much of the pervasive attack of modern industrial civilisation is based on simple falsehood. To quote Paul Johnson:

Dr Mishan hails “the Britain of 1951” as a kind of golden age. “Before the car and the developer had made hideous our cities and suburbs, before TV held people in a semi-bovine state up to six hours per day … The skies in those days were not rent by shrieking aircraft, nor the air thick with car fumes. People could stroll along the street and converse without screaming at each other.” As it happens, 1951 saw the last and greatest of the London smogs, which killed 5000 people, and was a typical instance of nineteenth-century-type pollution now eliminated by growth-science.

Supermarkets have provoked the disgust of poets. For housewives they have saved endless, exhausting, life-wasting hours of queuing. Further, of course, it is the “strong arms” of Western science and technology, as Winston Churchill said in 1899, that have saved Western civilisation from the ceaseless, millennium-long assaults of Islam, with its sharia law, punitive amputations, clitorectomies, and hatred for any life of the mind beyond its own book.

It is a paradox that lovers of ancient and medieval romance and tales of heroic adventure in pre-industrial, fantastic or distant lands, and those who dream nostalgically of such times and places (of which company I count myself) can as a rule only enjoy them as a result of modern technology.

It is modern technology which allows people to escape vicariously or actually from the cloying boredom of the mundane. I have been able to lose myself in wonder standing in iron-age hill-forts, contemplating the Alfred Jewel, the Kon-Tiki in an Oslo museum, and Shackleton’s James Caird, in walking the ancient streets of Jerusalem and the battlements of Malta, and I have seen Windsor Castle, Stonehenge, the Giza Pyramids and Sphinx and Elsinore, the jungles of Timor and Malaysia, the temples and pagodas of Taiwan, Niagara Falls and the jewelled fish of the Great Barrier Reef because modern aircraft took me there.

Modern technology enables more people than ever before to actually be adventurers: mountaineers, polar explorers, yachtsmen, canoeists and speleologists. The books of The Lord of the Rings and its innumerable imitators, with their romantic, pre-industrial nostalgia (which I share) could reach a wide audience only because of modern printing processes, and the spectacular films of them exist only because of a number of advanced cinema and computer techniques and camera-carrying helicopters.

In the non-industrial world in which they and similar works are set, most people would have been illiterate and probably with little time left over from the task of feeding themselves and their families for such matters as reading. (It is interesting that pre-industrial civilisations seem to have had no word for “boredom”. Was it because the constant battle to stay alive left no time to be bored?)

It is possible to imagine a kind of reverse fantasy in which the heroes and champions of a pre-industrial (or post-industrial!) civilisation dream impossible, romantic dreams of a world made safe, comfortable and exciting by industrial technology.

But note that I say this is a paradox, not an answered problem. Considering that paradox, the words of Michael Wharton (“Peter Simple” of the Daily Telegraph) regarding a possible future Britain—or future world—are worth remembering:

in that planned, departmentalised [future] country, with its industrial areas, residential areas, leisure areas, amenity areas and all the rest, something of what Wordsworth thought of as “natural beauty” would remain. (After all, it is known to have social and educational value.) It would remain, officially certified, cold, dead and embalmed, its life and poetry gone.

An incorrigible … voice whispers: rather than that, let England be ravaged from end to end, and perish.

Michael, who was a dear friend and literary hero of mine, did admit late in his life that cataract surgery had enabled him to see the colours of the world again.

One purpose of sensible progressivism and modernity should of course be to preserve and enhance the best, but not the worst, of the past. Here sensible progressivism and sensible conservatism may come together.

It might be possible, although probably difficult, to preserve the environment and natural beauty, the awe and wonder of the creation and enjoy the benefits of scientific and technological civilisation.

But at the end of The Lord of the Rings, the Hobbits find their beautiful, rural little Shire has been polluted and spoilt by industrialising men, under the direction of an evil wizard. The good King, when restored, orders that men may not enter the Shire again and the Hobbits may enjoy it in peace with the damage undone. But this well-meant action converts the Shire from a country to a reservation, artificially maintained and existing on the sufferance of the central government. We know that when less-good kings come, it will be doomed.

No compromise seems satisfactory. Solving this paradox would have made a truly important book.