A brilliant poem and one of my favorites. Auden was a pacifist and then increasingly became a Christian. What he saw was the ability of the state, any state and its ideology (think CCP— or Democratic Party) to insert itself between the individual and his conscience, deprive him of his moral authority, and destroy all of his personal connection with anything outside of the state. Then we become killing machines...or the killed.
We’re seeing this happening right now before our very eyes.,
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
One of my favorites too...
Our whole world now is one where we are told to mask up, get in line, say only what we are told to say in the way we are allowed to say it. They blare at us with statistics and a bullhorn, and we get in line and walk in step.
And truly all that has mass and majesty is in the hands of others, for now.
But like the Hobbits, though we are small....we will crawl back. It may take a while. But we will get our life and dignity, mass and majesty back, though it will be very costly.
In my youth I looked down upon formal poetry, considering it the wussie’s means of striking back against the established “norm” while lacking actual testicles. Now I see the subtle build of linguistic architecture and how time builds upon and backs up the message of those talented. I’m starting to appreciate opera too. May have to turn in my Man Card soon. Kill me before I host a Drag Queen library hour (LOL).
“What he (Auden) saw was the ability of the state, any state and its ideology (think CCP— or Democratic Party) to insert itself between the individual and his conscience, deprive him of his moral authority, and destroy all of his personal connection with anything outside of the state. Then we become killing machines...or the killed.”
The three brief chapters making up The Abolition of Man — “Men without Chests,” “The Way,” and “The Abolition of Man” — were originally presented as the Riddell Memorial Lectures at the University of Newcastle in February of 1943. In the most discussed lecture and the one from which the book takes its title, Lewis warns that “if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power.” Far from being freer and better humans, these new creatures will be “weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have preordained how they are to use them.”1 As a result of sophisticated biotechnology, “Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.” Lewis concludes: “The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will have been won.”
A few hundred men over millions...