Ralph Vaughan Williams: ‘Should Music be National?’

This essay, first published in 1934 as chapter one of ‘National Music,’ was based on a lecture Vaughan Williams gave at Bryn Mawr College in 1932. I was astonished to find it does not appear anywhere online so share it here:


Ralph Vaughan Williams


Should Music be National?


Whistler used to say that it was as ridiculous to talk about national art as national chemistry. In saying this he failed to see the difference between art and science.

Science is the pure pursuit of knowledge and thus knows no boundaries. Art, and especially the art of music, uses knowledge as a means to the evocation of personal experience in terms which will be intelligible to and command the sympathy of others. These others must clearly be primarily those who by race, tradition, and cultural experience are the nearest to him; in fact those of his own nation, or other kind of homogeneous community. In the sister arts of painting and poetry this factor of nationality is more obvious, due in poetry to the Tower of Babel and in painting to the fact that the painter naturally tends to build his visual imagination on what he normally sees around him. But unfortunately for the art of music some misguided thinker, probably first cousin to the man who invented the unfortunate phrase ‘a good European’, has described music as ‘the universal language’. It is not even true that music has an universal vocabulary, but even if it were so it is the use of the vocabulary that counts and no one supposes that French and English are the same language because they happen to use twenty-five out of twenty-six of the letters of their alphabet in common. In the same way, in spite of the fact that they have a musical alphabet in common, nobody could mistake Wagner for Verdi or Debussy for Richard Strauss. And, similarly, in spite of wide divergencies of personal style, there is a common factor in the music say of Schumann and Weber.

And this common factor is nationality. As Hubert Parry said in his inaugural address to the Folk Song Society of England, ‘True Style comes not from the individual but from the products of crowds of fellow-workers who sift and try and try again till they have found the thing that suits their native taste .... Style is ultimately national.’

I am speaking, for the moment, not of the appeal of a work of art, but of its origin. Some music may appeal only in its immediate surroundings; some may be national in its influence and some may transcend these bounds and be world-wide in its acceptance. But we may be quite sure that the composer who tries to be cosmopolitan from the outset will fail, not only with the world at large, but with his own people as well. Was anyone ever more local, or even parochial, than Shakespeare? Even when he follows the fashion and gives his characters Italian names they betray their origin at once by their language and their sentiments.

Possibly you may think this an unfair example, because a poet has not the common vocabulary of the musician, so let me take another example.

One of the three great composers of the world (personally I believe the greatest) was John Sebastian Bach. Here, you may say, is the universal musician if ever there was one; yet no one could be more local, in his origin, his life work, and his fame for nearly a hundred years after his death, than Bach. He was to outward appearance no more than one of a fraternity of town organists and ‘town pipers’ whose business it was to provide the necessary music for the great occasions in church and city. He never left his native country, seldom even his own city of Leipzig. ‘World Movements’ in art were then unheard of; moreover, it was the tradition of his own country which inspired him. True, he studied eagerly all the music of foreign composers that came his way in order to improve his craft. But is not the work of Bach built up on two great foundations, the organ music of his Teutonic predecessors and the popular hymn-tunes of his own people? Who has heard nowadays of the cosmopolitan hero Marchand, except as being the man who ran away from the Court of Dresden to avoid comparison with the local organist Bach?

In what I have up to now said I shall perhaps not have been clear unless I dispose at once of two fallacies. The first of these is that the artist invents for himself alone. No man lives or moves or could do so, even if he wanted to, for himself alone. The actual process of artistic invention, whether it be by voice, verse, or brush, presupposes an audience; someone to hear, read, or see. Of course the sincere artist cannot deliberately compose what he dislikes. But artistic inspiration is like Dryden’s angel which must be brought down from heaven to earth. A work of art is like a theophany which takes different forms to different beholders. In other words, a composer wishes to make himself intelligible. This surely is the prime motive of the act of artistic invention and to be intelligible he must clothe his inspiration in such forms as the circumstances of time, place, and subject dictate.

This should come unself-consciously to the artist, but if he consciously tries to express himself in a way which is contrary to his surroundings, and therefore to his own nature, he is evidently being, though perhaps he does not know it, insincere. It is surely as bad to be self-consciously cosmopolitan as self-consciously national.

The other fallacy is that the genius springs from nowhere, defies all rules, acknowledges no musical ancestry and is beholden to no tradition. The first thing we have to realize is that the great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to the smaller men. We can trace the musical genealogy of Beethoven, starting right back from Philipp Emanuel Bach, through Haydn and Mozart, with even such smaller fry as Cimarosa and Cherubini to lay the foundations of the edifice. Is not the mighty river of Wagner but a confluence of the smaller streams, Weber, Marschner, and Liszt?

I would define genius as the right man in the right place at the right time. We know, of course, too many instances of the time being ripe and the place being vacant and no man to fill it. But we shall never know of the numbers of ‘mute and inglorious Miltons’ who failed because the place and time were not ready for them. Was not Purcell a genius born before his time? Was not Sullivan a jewel in the wrong setting?

I read the other day in a notice by a responsible music critic that ‘it only takes one man to write a symphony’. Surely this is an entire misconception. A great work of art can only be born under the right surroundings and in the right atmosphere. Bach himself, if I may again quote him as an example, was only able to produce his fugues, his Passions, his cantatas, because there had preceded him generations of smaller composers, specimens of the despised class of ‘local musicians’ who had no other ambition than to provide worthily and with dignity the music required of them: craftsmen perhaps rather than conscious artists. Thus there spread among the quiet and unambitious people of northern Germany a habit, so to speak, of music, the desire to make it part of their daily life, and it was into this atmosphere that John Sebastian Bach was born.

The ideal thing, of course, would be for the whole community to take to music as it takes to language from its youth up, naturally, without conscious thought or specialized training; so that, just as the necessity for expressing our material wants leads us when quite young to perfect our technique of speaking so our spiritual wants should lead us to perfect our technique of emotional expression and above all that of music. But this is an age of specialization and delegation. We employ specialists to do more and more for us instead of doing it ourselves. We even get other people to play our games for us and look on shivering at a football match, instead of getting out of it for ourselves the healthy exercise and excitement which should surely be its only object.

Specialization may be all very well in purely material things. For example, we cannot make good cigars in England and it is quite right therefore that we should leave the production of that luxury to others and occupy ourselves in making somcthing which our circumstances and climate permit of. The most rabid chauvinist has never suggested that Englishmen should be forced to smoke impossible cigars merely because they are made at home. We say quite rightly that those who want that luxury and can afford it must get it from abroad.

Now there are some people who apply this ‘cigar’ theory to the arts and especially to music; to music especially, because music is not one of the ‘naturally protected’ industries like the sister arts of painting and poetry. The ‘cigar’ theory of music is then this - I am speaking of course of my own country England, but I believe it exists equally virulently in yours: that music is not an industry which flourishes naturally in our climate; that, therefore, those who want it and can afford it must hire it from abroad. This idea has been prevalent among us for generations. It began in England, I think, in the early eighteenth ccntury when the political power got into the hands of the entirely uncultured landed gentry and the practice of art was considered unworthy of a gentleman, from which it followed that you had to hire a ‘damned foreigner’ to do it for you if you wanted it, from which in its turn followed the corollary that the type of music which the foreigner brought with him was the only type worth having and that the very different type of music which was being made at home must necessarily be wrong. These ideas were fostered by the fact that we had a foreign court at St. James’s who apparently did not share the English snobbery about home-made art and so brought the music made in their own homes to England with them. So, the official music, whether it took the form of Mr. Handel to compose an oratorio, or an oboe player in a regimental band, was imported from Germany. This snobbery is equally virulent to this day. The musician indeed is not despised, but it is equally felt that music cannot be something which is native to us and when imported from abroad it must of necessity be better.

Let me take an analogy from architecture. When a stranger arrives in New York he finds imitations of Florentine palaces, replicas of Gothic cathedrals, suggestions of Greek temples, buildings put up before America began to realize that she had an artistic consciousness of her own.

All these things the visitor dismiss as without interest and turns to her railway stations, her offices and shops; buildings dictated by the necessity of the case, a truly national style of architecture evolved from national surroundings. Should it not be the same with music?

As long as a country is content to take its music passively there can be no really artistic vitality in the nation. I can only speak from the experience of my own country. In England we are too apt to think of music in terms of the cosmopolitan celebrities of the Queen’s Hall and Covent Garden Opera. These are, so to speak, the crest of the wave, but behind that crest must be the driving force which makes the body of the wave. It is below the surface that we must look for the power which occasionally throws up a Schnabel, a Sibelius, or a Toscanini. What makes me hope for the musical future of any country is not the distinguished names which appear on the front page of the newspapers, but the music that is going on at home, in the schools, and in the local choral societies.

Can we expect garden flowers to grow in soil so barren that the wild flowers cannot exist there? Perhaps one day the supply of international artists will fail us and we shall turn in vain to our own country to supply their places. Will there be any source to supply it from? You remember the story of the nouveau riche who bought a plot of land and built a stately home on it, but he found that no amount of money could provide him straightaway with the spreading cedars and immemorial elms and velvet lawns which should be the accompaniment of such a home. Such things can only grow in a soil prepared by years of humble toil.

Hubert Parry in his book, The Evolution of the Art of Music, has shown how music like everything else in the world is subject to the laws of evolution, that there is no difference in kind but only in degree between Beethoven and the humblest singer of a folk-song. The principles of artistic beauty, of the relationships of design and expression, are neither trade secrets nor esoteric mysteries revealed to the few; indeed if these principles are to have any meaning to us they must be founded on what is natural to the human being. Perfection of form is equally possible in the most primitive music and in the most elaborate.

The principles which govern the composition of music are, we find, not arbitrary rules, nor as some people apparently think, barriers put up by mediocre practitioners to prevent the young genius from entering the academic grove; they are not the tricks of the trade or even the mysteries of the craft, they are founded on the very nature of human beings. Take, for example, the principle of repetition as a factor of design: either the cumulative effect of mere reiteration, such as we get in the Trio of the scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or in a cruder form in Ravelvs Bolero; or the constant repetition of a ground bass as in Bach’s organ Passacaglia or the finale of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. Travellers tell us that the primitive savage as soon as he gets as far as inventing some little rhythmical or melodic pattern will repeat inventing some little rhythmical or melodic pattern will repeat it endlessly. In all these cases we have illustrations of the fundamental principle of emphasis by repetition.

After a time the savage will get tired of his little musical phrase and will invent another and often this new phrase will be at a new pitch so as to bring into play as many new notes as possible. Why? Because his throat muscles and his perceptive faculties are wearied by the constant repetition.

Is not this exactly the principle of the second subject of the classical sonata, which is in a key which brings into play as many new sounds as possible? Then we have the principle of symmetry also found in primitive music when the singer, having got tired in turn with his new phrase, harks back to the old one.

And so I could go on showing you how Beethoven is but a later stage in the development of those principles which actuated the primitive Teuton when he desired to make himself artistically intelligible.

The greatest artist belongs inevitably to his country as much as the humblest singer in a remote village - they and all those who come between them are links in the same chain, manifestations on their different levels of the same desire for artistic expression, and, moreover, the same nature of artistic expression.

I am quite prepared for the objection that nationalism limits the scope of art, that what we want is the best, from wherever it comes. My objectors will probably quote Tennyson and tell me that ‘We needs must love the highest when we see it’ and that we should educate the young to appreciate this mysterious ‘highest’ from the beginning. Or perhaps they will tell me with Rossini that they know only two kinds of music, good and bad. So perhaps we had better digress here for a few moments and try to find out what good music is, and whether there is such a thing as absolute good music; or even if there is such an absolute good, whether it must not take different forms for different hearers. Myself, I doubt if there is this absolute standard of goodness. I think it will vary with the occasion on which it is performed, with the period at which it was composed and with the nationality of those that listen to it. Let us take examples of each of these - firstly, with regard to the occasion. The Venusberg music from Tannhauser is good music when it comes at the right dramatic moment in the opera, but it is bad music when it is played on an organ in church. I am sorry to have to tell you that this is not an imaginary experience. A waltz of Johann Strauss is good music in its proper place as an accompaniment to dancing and festivity, but it would be bad music if it were interpolated in the middle of the St. Matthew Passion. And may we not even say that Bach’s B minor Mass would be bad music if it were played in a restaurant as an accompaniment to eating and drinking?

Secondly, does not the standard of goodness vary with time? What was good for the fifteenth century is not necessarily good for the twentieth. Surely each new generation requires something different to satisfy its different ideals. Of course there is some music that seems to defy the ravages of time and to speak a new message to each successive generation. But even the greatest music is not eternal. We can still appreciate Bach and Handel or even Palestrina, but Dufay and Dunstable have little more than an historical interest for us now. But they were great men in their day and perhaps the time will come when Bach, Handel, Beethoven, and Wagner will drop out and have no message left for us. Sometimes of course the clock goes round full circle and the twentieth century comprehends what had ceased to have any meaning for the nineteenth. This is the case with the modem revival of Bach after nearly one hundred and fifty years of neglect, or the modem appreciation of Elizabethan madrigals. There may be many composers who have something genuine to say to us for a short time and for that short time their music may surely be classed as good. We all know that when an idiom is new we cannot detect the difference between the really original mind and the mere imitator. But when the idiom passes into the realm of everyday commonplace then and then only we can tell the true from the false. For example, any student at a music school can now reproduce the tricks of Debussy’s style, and therefore it is now, and only now, that we can discover whether Debussy had something genuine to say or whether when the secret of his style becomes common property the message of which that style was the vehicle will disappear.

Then there is the question of place. Is music that is good music for one country or one community necessarily good music for another? It is true that the great monuments of music, the Missa . Papae Marcelli, or the St. Matthew Passion, or the Ninth Symphony, or Die Meistersinger, have a world wide appeal, but first they must appeal to the people, and in the circumstances where they were created. It is because Palestrina and Verdi are essentially Italian and because Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner are essentially German that their message transcends their frontiers. And even so, the St. Matthew Passion, much as it is loved and admired in other countries, must mean much more to the German, who recognizes in it the consummation of all that he learnt from childhood in the great traditional chorales which are his special inheritance. Beethoven has an universal meaning, but to the German, who finds in it that same spirit exemplified in its more homely form in those Volkslieder which he learnt in his childhood, he must also have a specialized meaning.

Every composer cannot expect to have a world-wide message, but he may reasonably expect to have a special message for his own people and many young composers make the mistake of imagining they can be universal without at first having been local. Is it not reasonable to suppose that those who share our life, our history, our customs, our climate, even our food, should have some secret to impart to us which the foreign composer, though he be perhaps more imaginative, more powerful, more technically equipped, is not able to give us? This is the secret of the national composer, the secret to which he only has the key, which no foreigner can share with him and which he alone is able to tell to his fellow countrymen. But is he prepared with his secret? Must he not limit himself to a certain extent so as to give his message its full force? For after all it is the millstream forcing its way through narrow channels which gathers strength to turn the water-wheel. As long as composers persist in serving up at second-hand the externals of the music of other nations, they must not be surprised if audiences prefer the real Brahms, the real Wagner, the real Debussy, or the real Stravinsky to their pale reflections.

What a composer has to do is to find out the real message he has to convey to the community and say it directly and without equivocation. I know there is a temptation each time a new star appears on the musical horizon to say, ‘What a fine fellow this is, let us try and do something like this at home,’ quite forgetting that the result will not sound at all the same when transplanted from its natural soil. It is all very well to catch at the prophet’s robe, but the mantle of Elijah is apt, like all second-hand clothing, to prove the worst of misfits. How is the composer to fmd himself? How is he to stimulate his imagination in a way that will lead him to voicing himself and his fellows? I think that composers are much too fond of going to concerts - I am speaking now, of course of the technically equipped composer. At the concert we hear the finished product. What the artist should be concerned with is the raw material. Have we not all about us forms of musical expression which we can take and purify and raise to the level of great art? Have we not all around us occasions crying out for music? Do not all our great pageants of human beings require music for their full expression? We must cultivate a sense of musical citizenship. Why should not the musician be the servant of the state and build national monuments like the painter, the writer, or the architect?

Come muse, migrate from Greece and Iouia,
Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings, placard ‘removed’ and ‘to let’ on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus,
Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on Jaffa’s gate and on Mount Moriah,
The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles, and Italian collections,
For know a better, fresher, busier sphere,
A wide, untried domain awaits, demands you.


Art for art’s sake has never flourished among the English-speaking nations. We are often called inartistic because our art is unconscious. Our drama and poetry have evolved by accident while we thought we were doing something else, and so it will be with our music. The composer must not shut himself up and think about art; he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community. If we seek for art we shall not find it. There are very few great composers, but there can be many sincere composers. There is nothing in the world worse than sham good music. There is no form of insincerity more subtle than that which is coupled with great earnestness of purpose and determination to do only the best and the highest, the unconscious insincerity which leads us to build up great designs which we cannot fill and to simulate emotions which we can only experience vicariously. But, you may say, are we to learn nothing from the great masters? Where are our models to come from? Of course we can learn everything from the great masters and one of the great things we can learn from them is their sureness of purpose. When we are sure of our purpose we can safely follow the advice of St. Paul ‘to prove all things and to hold to that which is good’. But it is dangerous to go about ‘proving all things’ until you have made up your mind what is good for you.

First, then, see your direction clear and then by all means go to Paris, or Berlin, or Peking if you like and study and learn everything that will help you to carry out that purpose.

We have in England today a certain number of composers who have achieved fame. In the older generation Elgar and Parry, among those of middle age Holst and Bax, and of the quite young Walton and Lambert. All these served their apprenticeship at home. There are several others who thought that their own country was not good enough for them and went off in the early stages to become little Germans or little Frenchmen. Their names I will not give to you because they are unknown even to their fellow countrymen.

I am told that when grape vines were first cultivated in California the vineyard masters used to try the experiment of importing plants from France or Italy and setting them in their own soil. The result was that the grapes acquired a peculiar individual flavour, so strong was the influence of the soil in which they were planted. I think I need hardly draw the moral of this, namely, that if the roots of your art are firmly planted in your own soil and that soil has anything individual to give you, you may still gain the whole world and not lose your own souls.

The Dispossessed Majority: The Dissolution of Art

Quotes from Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority (Howard Allen, Cape Canaveral, Fl., 1981)

See also The Cultural Clash: The Secularization of Religion and The Cultural Clash: The Atrophy of Education

The Cultural Clash: The Dissolution of Art

This chapter, the first of three to deal with minority inroads into the nation’s culture, will be concerned with the artistic phase of the struggle [the Majority-minority conflict]. In the dispossession of the Majority, it is the Majority artist who so far has been the greatest casualty.

A basic assumption of contemporary Western thought is that democracy is the political form and liberalism the political ideology most generative of art. The more there is of both, it is generally agreed, the greater will be the artistic outpouring, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The corollary assumption is that once art has been liberated from the dead weight of caste, class, and religious and racial bigotry, its horizon will become limitless.

Of all modern myths, this is one of the most misleading. If anything, art, or at least great art, seems to be contingent on two social phenomena poles apart from democracy and liberalism: (1) a dominant, homogeneous population group which has resided long enough in the land to raise up from its ranks a responsible and functioning aristocracy; (2) one or more schools of writers, painters, sculptors, architects, or composers who belong to this population group and whose creative impulses crystallize the tastes, tone, and manners of the aristocratic leadership into a radiating cultural continuity.

[…]

The mere existence of an aristocracy, of course, does not guarantee great art. It has to be a vital aristocracy with its attitudes, manners, and ways of life firmly imprinted on the society in which it functions. It need not be, in fact it should not be, too wealthy. More important is the possession of a cultural conscience, plus the leisure and will to express this conscience in the form of art. To the artist an aristocracy is of immense practical value because it provides a cultivated and discriminating audience to keep him on the creative qui vive, as well as a sense of refinement and a set of critical standards that are both a model and an incentive for the highest quality of artistic craftsmanship.

Paradoxically, relations between artist and patron are generally more ‘democratic’ in an aristocracy than in a democracy. The aristocrat, having both by birth and upbringing acquired an easy familiarity with art, is quite at home in the company of artists and generally makes a practice of seeking them out. The self-made man, on the other hand, no matter how high he climbs in politics or business, can never quite shed his native philistinism. He may take an interest in art, often surreptitiously to avoid accusations of effeminacy, but he will always have difficulty moving freely in artistic circles.

The close alliance between art and aristocracy is also advantageous to the artist in that it facilitates personal acquaintance with many of the leading men of his day. According to Aristotle, tragedy only really succeeds when it concerns the fall of a great or noble man - a theory still uncontradicted by the most valiant efforts of liberal and Marxist dramatists. History or current events may provide names and plots but only close contact with the leading public figures of his time furnishes the playwright who tackles high tragedy with the meat and sinew of believable portrayal and characterization.

That great artists must belong to the dominant population group of a nation seems to be as unassailable as the law that great art grows best in aristocratic soil. A racial and cultural background similar to that of his patron makes it possible for the artist to avoid the usual psychological and social hurdles that often slow or break down communication between members of racially and culturally differentiated human groups.

The fatal flaw which denies the minority artist a place among the artistic great is his inherent alienation. Because he does not really belong, because he is writing or painting or composing for ‘other people,’ he pushes a little too hard, raises his voice a little too high, makes his point a little too desperately. He is, inevitably, a bit outré -- in the land, but not of the land. His art seems always encumbered by an artificial dimension -- the proof of his belonging.

In a non-aristocratic, heterogeneous, fragmented society which has become an arena of contending cultures or subcultures, the minority artist may concentrate on proving his ‘non-belonging.’ Instead of adopting the host culture, he now rejects it and either sinks into nihilism or returns to the cultural traditions of his own group. In the process his art becomes a weapon. Having sacrificed his talent to immediacy and robbed it of the proportion and subtlety which make art art, the minority artist not only lowers his own artistic standards, but those of society as a whole. All that remains is the crude force of his stridency and his ‘message.’

Perhaps the clearest proof of the art-building and art-nourishing qualities of aristocracy and racial homogeneity can be found in the history of those nations which have passed through both aristocratic and democratic, homogeneous and heterogeneous cycles. It was not in the First, Second, Third, or Fourth French Republics that the cathedrals of Chartres and Rheims were constructed, but in feudal France, when there was a dominant population group (the Teutonic) and the structure of society was aristocratic. The highest flights of English genius took place in the reigns of absolute, not constitutional, monarchs and before the English were absorbed in the enlarged and more heterogeneous citizenry of Great Britain and the United Kingdom. The Rome of Augustus, who favored and protected the patricians and heaped restrictions upon plebeians, non-Romans, and slaves, produced the Golden Age of Latin literature. The Rome of Caracalla, who in A.D. 211 extended citizenship to all the free inhabitants of the Roman Empire, left little of artistic consequence. The Spain of Philip II, III, and IV, with all its religious bigotry and inquisitional zeal, was the era of Cervantes and Calderon, artists of a caliber that were not to be found in more liberal eras of Spanish history. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the culmination of Russian literary genius, flourished under the czars, not minority commissars.

Liberal dogma to the contrary, such popular goals as universal literacy are not necessarily conducive to great literature. The England of Shakespeare, apart from a much smaller population, had a much higher illiteracy rate than present-day Britain. Neither does universal suffrage seem to raise the quality of artistic output. When Bach was Konzertmeister in Weimar and composing a new cantata every month, no one could vote. Some 220 years later in the Weimar Republic there were tens of millions of voters, but no Bachs.

Great drama, which usually incorporates great poetry, is the rarest form of great art. Art critics and historians have been at some loss to explain why great plays have appeared so infrequently in history and then only in clusters - fifth-century (B.C.) Athens, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, seventeenth-century Spain and France. The answer may be that conditions for great drama are only ripe when artist and audience are in biological as well as linguistic rapport. Such rapport, unfortunately, is bound to be short-lived because the era of great drama is usually accompanied by large-scale economic and material advances which tend to soften national character, sharpen class divisions, and attract extraneous racial and cultural elements from abroad. To the great playwright a heterogeneous or divided audience is no audience at all.

Not only great art but all art seems to stagnate in an environment of brawling minorities, diverse religions, clashing traditions, and contrasting habits. This is probably why, in spite of their vast wealth and power, such world cities as Alexandria and Antioch in ancient times and New York City and Rio de Janeiro in modern times have produced nothing that can compare to the art of municipalities a fraction of their size. The artist needs an audience which understands him - an audience of his own people. The artist needs an audience to write up to, paint up to, and compose up to - an aristocracy of his own people. These seem to be the two sine qua nons of great art. Whenever they are absent great art is absent.

How else can the timeless art of the ‘benighted’ Middle Ages and the already dated art of the ‘advanced’ twentieth century be explained? Why is it that all the cultural resources of a dernier cri superpower like the United States cannot produce one single musical work that can compare with a minor composition of Mozart? Why is it that perhaps the greatest contribution to twentieth-century English literature has been made not by the English, Americans, Australians, or Canadians, but by the Irish - the most nationalistic, most tribal, most religious and most racially minded of all present-day English-speaking peoples. Modern England may have had its D. H. Lawrence and the United States its Faulkner. But only Ireland in recent times has assembled such a formidable literary array as Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Joyce, O’Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, Paul Vincent Carroll, Joyce Carey, and James Stephens. If, as modern opinion holds, liberal democracy, internationalism, and cultural pluralism enrich the soil of art, then these Irish artists bloomed in a very unlikely garden.

The historical sequence of large states seems to be race-building, nation-building, art-building, and empire-building. As the nation moves closer to imperialism, the people move farther apart. The binding forces of state are weakened by war, civil strife, and entropy, as the cultural shell is penetrated by outsiders. The aristocracy withdraws into an isolated decadence, its place taken by a plutocracy. Members of the once dominant population group mix with the newcomers and in order to compete are forced to adopt many of their attitudes and habits. Art becomes multiracial, multinational, multidirectional, and multifarious.

Much of Western art, particularly in the United States, is now in such a stage of dissolution. The surrealist painters, atonal jazz musicologists, prosaic poets, emetic novelists, crypto-pornographers, and revanchist pamphleteers say they are searching for new forms because the old forms are exhausted. Actually, they are exhuming the most ancient forms of all - simple geometric shapes, color blobs, drum beats, genitalia, four-letter words, and four-word sentences. The old forms are not exhausted. The minority artist simply has no feeling for them because they are not his forms. Since style is not a commodity that can be bought or invented, the avant-garde, having no style of its own, can only retreat to a styleless primitivism.

The dissolution of art is characterized by the emergence of the fake artist - the man without talent and training who becomes an artist by self-proclamation. He thrives in a fissiparous culture because it is child’s play to bemuse the artistic sensibilities of the motley nouveaux riches, assorted culture vultures, sexually ambivalent art critics, and minority art agents who dictate the levels of modern taste. It is not so easy to deceive those whose standards of taste were developed in the course of generations.

In a homogeneous society the artist has to contend with fewer sets of prejudices. He does not have to weigh and balance his art in order to be ‘fair.’ He need not be mortally afraid of wounding the religious and racial feelings of others. Though his instincts, opinions, and judgments often add up to bias, to the artist himself they may be the driving forces of his creativity. What really limit and devitalize art are not the artist’s prejudices but his audience’s prejudices, of which in a vast heterogeneous society like the United States there is an almost infinite variety. The artist has trouble enough with one censor. When he has twenty, his art becomes a day-to-day accommodation.

Aristocracies have been sharply criticized for freezing commoners into castes and classes. Yet the artist certainly stands a better chance in a state directed by a cultivated nobility than in one directed by a convention of Babbitts. By no means to the manor born, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Dostoyevsky managed to acquire enough social mobility in aristocratic societies to climb to the summit of artistic perfection. How many of these geniuses would have been flattened by the leveling pressures of present-day America is an open question.

Aristocracies have also been attacked for stultifying art, even though artists working in or believing in tradition-oriented societies have made many more artistic breakthroughs than soi-disant liberal or progressive artists. Aristophanes, who revolutionized comedy, Wagner, who revolutionized music, Dostoyevsky, who revolutionized the novel, and T. S. Eliot, who revolutionized modern poetry, were certainly not liberals. The proletarian or Marxist artist, on the other hand, hardly goes beyond photographic naturalism or childish doodling - the mandatory tractor art of the Soviet Union and the op art, pop art, and spray-paint art of the ‘free world.’

No great art ever emerged from isolation and no great artists ever sprang full-blown from the forehead of Zeus. Great artists are the products of schools of art, and their works are the peaks rising above a high cultural plateau. ‘First families,’ whose attitudes and tastes have been shaped by centuries of participation in national life, are not merely content to collect old art. They keep the schools busy elaborating and improving on what has been done before - the surest approach to artistic evolution. Conversely, the present-day ragtag collection of semiliterate millionaires, who speculate in art as they would in copper futures, spend their money on old masters and ‘name’ artists whose works can be resold at a handsome profit or given away at a handsome tax deduction. With no more demand for continuity in art, schools of artists disappear, to be replaced by artistic cliques. The arbiter of taste is no longer the art lover, but the art dealer. Art is transformed into artiness.

The patterns of artistic growth and decline outlined in the preceding paragraphs have already blacked out most of the creativity of the Majority artist. Today the Jewish American writes of the Jew and his heritage, the Negro American of the Negro, the Italian American of the Italian, and so on. But of whom does the American American, the Majority writer, write? Of Nordics and Anglo-Saxons? If he did and if he portrayed them as fair-haired heroes, he would be laughed out of modern literature. Consciousness of one’s people, one of the great emotional reserves, one of the great artistic stimulants, is denied the Majority artist at the very moment the minority artist feeds upon it so ravenously. Besides its other psychological handicaps, this one-sided, selective censorship obviously builds a high wall of frustration around the free play of the imagination.

Aware or unaware of the forces working against them, many Majority artists have fled abroad to seek the cultural kinship they miss at home. Eliot became a British citizen. Robert Frost was first discovered and published while living in England. Pound, who probably exercised more influence on modern literature than any other poet, settled down in Rapallo, and dabbled in European right-wing politics. Hemingway moved to France, Italy, Spain, Africa, Cuba, and eventually committed suicide. Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald spent many of their most creative years abroad and returned to gypsy-like, coast-to-coast peregrinations and an early death that was either helped along or brought about by alcohol poisoning.

[…]

All Majority artists necessarily experience the wrenching depression that comes from enforced cultural homelessness. Less than any other person is the artist capable of working in a vacuum. Prevented from exercising his own ‘peoplehood,’ the Majority artist looks for substitutes in minority racism, in exotic religions and Oriental cults, in harebrained exploits of civil disobedience, in African and pre-Columbian art, psychoanalysis, narcotics, and homosexuality.

The ban on displays of Majority ethnocentrism in art - a ban written in stone in present-day American culture - also reaches back to the Majority cultural past. Chaucer and Shakespeare have been cut and blue-penciled and some of their work put on the minority index. The motion picture of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist had a hard time being released in the United States because of the recognizably Jewish traits of Fagin. The masterpiece of American silent films, The Birth of a Nation, can no longer be shown publicly without the threat of picket lines, while Jewish-produced black ‘sexploitation’ films like Mandingo (1975), replete with the crudest racial slurs against whites, are shown everywhere. Huckleberry Finn was removed from the library - of all places - of the Mark Twain Intermediate School in Virginia.

Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn was attacked by millionaire novelist Leon Uris as ‘anti-Semitic.’ Southern high-school and college bands have been forbidden to play ‘Dixie’ at public gatherings. Even nursery rhymes and Stephen Foster are being rewritten and bowdlerized. A private school in Chicago actually changed the title of the theatrical performance of Snow White to Princess of the Woods for fear of being accused of racism. Meanwhile a tireless, clandestine literary vendetta is being waged against such towering modern writers, composers, and scholars, both American and European, as Eliot, Dreiser, Pound, Toynbee, Ernst Jünger, D. H. Lawrence, Céline, Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Kipling, Hamsun, Franz Lehar, and Richard Strauss. Their crime has been to have let slip some chance remark, written some poem, novel or essay, joined, or at least not opposed, some political movement offensive to one or more minorities. There is, of course, no countervendetta of Majority literary critics against artists who indulge in minority racism.

The power and sustenance that an artist derives from being part of a racially and culturally homogeneous community helps explain the success of William Faulkner, the one first-rate Majority writer who survived both as an individual and as an artist the nationwide uprooting of his cultural heritage. Faulkner was born, lived, flourished, and is buried in Mississippi, adjudged to be the fourth most illiterate state. Because they totally ignore the communal nature of art, liberals and Marxists can only treat Faulkner as a paradox. Environmentalist logic can no more explain why a supposedly backward state in the Deep South should produce America’s greatest twentieth-century novelist than why the most literate nation in Europe succumbed to Hitler.

Outside the South, American art has been overwhelmed by members of minorities. To lend substance to the allegation that the basic tone of American creative intellectual life has become Jewish; one has only to unroll the almost endless roster of artists, of Jewish or part-Jewish origin. The contingent of Negro and other minority artists, writers, and composers, though it cannot compare to the Jewish aggregate, grows larger every day.

The minority domination of the contemporary art scene is complicated by the presence of another, as yet unmentioned minority, unique in that it is composed of both Majority and minority members. This is the homosexual cult. Homosexuals, as is well known, are one of the two principal props of the American theater, the second being Jews. Jews own almost all the theater houses, comprise most of the producers and almost half the directors, and furnish half of the audience and playwrights. The other playwrights are mostly well-known Majority homosexuals. Combine these two ingredients, add the payroll padding, kickbacks, ticket scalping, and union featherbedding which plague all Broadway producers, and it is readily understandable why in New York, still the radiating nucleus of the American theater, the greatest of all art forms has degenerated into homosexual or heterosexual pornography, leftist and Marxist message plays, foreign imports, and blaring, clockwork musical comedies. It is doubtful if a new Aeschylus, Shakespeare, or Pirandello could survive for one minute on the Broadway of today.

The minority penetration of the communications media shores up minority cultural domination because the press, magazines, and TV are the transmission belts of art and, as such, its supreme arbiter. By praising, condemning, featuring, underplaying, or ignoring books, paintings, sculpture, music, and other artistic works the media decide, in effect, what will be distributed (and become known) and what will not be distributed (and remain unknown). A book not reviewed favorably or not reviewed at all in the influential, opinion-shaping columns of the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, Time, and a few ‘higher-brow’ weeklies and monthlies has little or no chance of getting into libraries or the better bookstores.

This effective winnowing process also extends to advertising. Books promoting minority racism are acceptable for advertising in most newspapers and magazines. Books promoting Majority racism are not. Not only would no major newspaper or magazine review The Dispossessed Majority, no weekly news magazine would run paid advertising for it. Press-agentry in the form of praise from columnists and television personalities is another tested means of lending a helping hand to minority artists or Majority artists who specialize in minority themes. Perhaps the most banal example of minority mutual admiration in the arts is the practice adopted by the New York Times Book Review of permitting books espousing Negro racism to be reviewed by Negro racists. For example, Die Nxxxxr Die! by H. Rap Brown, a fugitive from justice rearrested after holding up a New York saloon, received a generally favorable review, although Brown wrote that he ‘saw no sense in reading Shakespeare,’ who was a ‘racist’ and a ‘faggot.’

Throughout his life and career the minority-conscious artist identifies with one group of Americans - his group. In so doing he inevitably attacks the Majority and Northern European cultural tradition because Majority America is not his America. The Puritans are reduced to witch-hunters, reactionary pietists, and holier-than-thou bigots. The antebellum and postbellum South is turned into a vast concentration camp. The giants of industry are described as robber barons. The earliest pioneers and settlers are typecast as specialists in genocide. The police are ‘pigs.’ Majority members are ‘goys, rednecks, honkies,’ or just plain ‘beasts.’

To accommodate the minority Kulturkampf, a Broadway play transforms Indians into a race of virtuous higher beings, while whites are portrayed as ignoble savages, and the quondam heroic figure of Custer struts about the stage as a second-rate gangster. A Hollywood film shows U.S. cavalrymen raping and mutilating Indian maidens. A television play set in the depression years of the 1930s puts the blame for America’s ills squarely on the Majority and ends with a specific tirade against ‘Anglo-Saxons.’

But it goes far beyond this. A principal theme of modern Negro writing is the rape or violation of Majority women. In his bestselling Soul on Ice, which is required reading in the English curriculum of hundreds of colleges, Negro militant Eldridge Cleaver, a bail-jumping black leader who after a stay in Cuba and Algiers returned home and instead of going to jail started working the born-again Christian circuit, tells how he feels about ‘consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically’ despoiling white women. ‘It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law … that I was defiling his women ... I felt I was getting … revenge … I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race.’

On the same page Cleaver quotes approvingly some lines from a poem by Negro writer LeRoi Jones: ‘Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. Cut their mothers’ throats.’ Intercourse with Majority females, although on a more sedate and controlled scale, is a theme that also appears frequently in the so-called Jewish literary renaissance. The heroes of Jewish fiction often seek out Gentile girls because ‘there is less need for respect, and thus more possibility ... to do things that could not be done with a person one has to respect.’

Contemporary white artistic efforts are dismissed as ‘pimp art’ by LeRoi Jones on the front page (second section) of the Sunday New York Times. One Jewish author states, ‘The family is American fascism.’ A Jewish literary critic calls the late Thomas Wolfe, who had twice the talent of any minority novelist yet to appear in American literature, a ‘professional hillbilly.’ A leading Negro writer labels America, ‘the Fourth Reich.’ As mentioned previously, a literary Jewess describes the white race as ‘the cancer of human history.’

But the ultimate objective goes well beyond the destruction or denigration of Majority culture. There is an increasing frequency in minority writing of subtle and not so subtle appeals for the physical molestation and even the outright massacre of whites. Such was the message of LeRoi Jones’s play, Slave Ship. With the same vitriolic splash, Eldridge Cleaver writes approvingly of ‘young blacks out there right now who are slitting white throats.’ A black poetess, Nikki Giovanni, has a poem in a popular black anthology which contains these lines: ‘Can you kill/Can you run a Protestant down with your/’68 El Dorado/ .... Can you [obscenity] on a blond head/Can you cut it off.’ Julius Lester, another much applauded Negro writer, may have identified the minority artist’s real grudge - the radiant Western artistry that seems forever beyond his reach. Ranging as far afield as Paris, he calls for the destruction of Notre Dame ‘because it separated man from himself.’

The communications media and principal academic forums being closed to him, the Majority artist has no adequate defense against the blistering minority assault on his culture. He must avoid praising his own people as a people - and he also must avoid castigating other peoples, particularly the more dynamic minorities. The minority artist, on the other hand, wears no such straitjacket. He freely praises whom he likes and freely damns whom he dislikes, both as individuals and as groups. The Majority artist, with a narrower choice of heroes and villains, has a narrower choice of theme. Lacking the drive and brute force of minority racism, Majority art tends to become bland, innocuous, emotionless, sterile, and boring. Forbidden to explore the text and context of his collective consciousness, the Majority artist retreats to surrealism, science fiction, murder mysteries, fantasy, travel guides, and pornography. In the process he becomes the punching bag of the minority activist, who sees ‘man’s essential struggle as social, against other men, rather than the moral one against himself.’

Many potential Majority artists probably sense well in advance the roadblocks in the way of a successful artistic career and turn to science, where their creativity is less hampered. Similar situations in the past may illustrate why in the life span of nations the artistic efflorescence has generally preceded the scientific -- why Sophocles came before Archimedes, Dante before Galileo, Shakespeare before Newton and Faraday, Goethe before Planck. Mathematics, physics, and chemistry, but not the life sciences, are less controversial than art and in a divided, pluralistic society may be the last refuge of free expression and free inquiry. It has been said by Ortega y Gasset that ‘people read to pronounce judgment.’ The aphorism might be extended by saying that as nations become older and more divergent in politics, religion, class, and race, people read to soothe or excite their prejudices.

The glimmering of a great artistic era appeared in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth-century. In New England, New York, Philadelphia, and the South, a native American aristocracy was evolving out of generations of landowners, shipping magnates, army and navy officers, and government, church, and educational leaders. At the same time, schools of Majority artists were emerging, their growth rate synchronized with that of the budding aristocracy. It was perhaps no coincidence that the Hudson River Valley, the stamping ground of the first American aristocrats, produced the first great American writer, Washington Irving, the greatest American writer, Herman Melville, and the first American school of painting. The Dutch patroons of New Amsterdam had carved out their riverine estates decades before the founding of the Virginia plantations and while Boston was still a log-cabin theocracy.

The traumatic experience of the Civil War was not entirely responsible for putting an end to America’s great artistic promise. There was the overbrimming social fluidity which followed the war and made possible the settlement of the West. There were fortunes to be made - in commerce, in industry, in mining, in land - and as plutocracy waxed, art waned. There was also the New Immigration, which played havoc with the normal, organic processes of artistic evolution.

In the last moment of the Republic, when Roman culture was displaying signs of rigor mortis, Augustus stopped the dissolution of Roman art by halting the dispossession of the Roman Majority. The outcome was the Golden Age of Latin literature. It was not until Rome’s decline properly began - according to Gibbon, with the accession of Commodus in A.D. 180 - that the demise of Roman art and the Roman Majority could be considered official.

For the sake of the American Majority and of American art, it is to be hoped that the United States is now in its pre-Augustan, not its pre-Commodian era.

Amish self-reliance

I read this article several years ago and saved a copy. It doesn't appear to be free-to-read anywhere online at the moment so here it is:

Plain Independent: What the Amish Can Teach Other Americans about Reducing Reliance on Government

by Hannah Lapp; The American Enterprise, Vol. 8, November-December 1997

“I don't know what there is to talk about” said Lydia. “I can put it in five words: We don’t take government handouts.” Standing at the door of her kitchen in a calf-length blue dress and white apron, she studied my notebook uncomprehendingly.

I was visiting the home of the young Amish mother in hopes of gathering information on how the Amish people sustain themselves independent of government programs, even in times of crisis. While Lydia wasn’t averse to my visit, sitting down in the middle of the afternoon was obviously not her habit. “It doesn't seem I’ve done anything all day!” she exclaimed as she ushered me to a chair on the front porch. “I washed the laundry and sewed a few things. I canned some zucchini and string beans.”

Lydia’s mother, Mary Ann, and father, Jacob, had agreed to gather at her home in Clymer, New York, for my interview. Her small daughter Lena and son Myron rushed at their grandparents as they arrived and pounded on Jacob’s legs with shouts of “Grandpa, Grandpa!”

It was Jacob who was able to provide me with specifics on how the Amish have through three centuries managed their affairs from cradle to grave without making use of government aid programs. In between blowing up balloons for his grandchildren and listening to their breathless tales, the elderly Amishman described his people’s tradition of mutual aid.

Staunch self-sufficiency has been a way of life for the Old Order Amish since 1693, when Jacob Ammon founded the group as an offshoot of the Swiss Reformation movement. In those days Europe was dominated by church-state alliances intolerant of religious dissenters; so the Amish fled to North America during the 1700s, settling mostly in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Today, Amish congregations with a total population of about 150,000 are found in 22 states.

The Amish, who sometimes describe their way of life as “Plain,” have been remarkably successful at maintaining their religious and cultural identity inside America’s melting pot. The faster the world around them changes, the more strongly they seem to stand as a people apart. Amish religious ordinances which require, among many other things, plain, modest dress and reliance on manual labor and horsepower--have much to do with this. The most important distinctions in the Amish way of life--“earning our bread by the sweat of our brow” and “taking care of our own,” as one Amishman put it--capture individual initiative and harmonize it with community interests in a cycle that endlessly sustains both.

While the rest of the world haggles over capitalism versus socialism, Amish society simply turns its back on every welfare program in the book, from public education to Medicaid, and yet provides for its needy in a manner enviable anywhere. The Amish scorn modern thinking on topics like self-esteem and women’s liberation, yet turn out men, women, and children who possess the very sense of identity and purpose so wistfully sought by modern people. All this the Amish accomplish without compulsion and without a national leadership.

I can understand why it’s tempting for outsiders to view the Amish as mysterious, and to portray them as either leading idyllic lives or, on the other hand, laboring under deep, dark secrets. My own family associations with the Amish convince me there is nothing mystical about them. They contend with all the maladies common to human existence and in so doing have a great deal to teach the rest of us. But because propagating their beliefs abroad is not the Amish way, only through observation can we learn from them.

On the evening I visited Lydia’s home in Clymer, in the southwest corner of upstate New York, the family had just received word of the death of a well-known and loved elder in their church. Lydia’s husband, Andy, took a break from farm chores to gather on the front porch with his family and parents-in-law as they exchanged bits of news on how Manass Troyer had succumbed to brain cancer. Lydia and her mother, Mary Ann, reminisced on how well Manass had been just three and a half months earlier, working a sawmill job full-time at age 71. The illness struck suddenly, and by the time it was discovered was too far advanced to treat. Week after week, relatives, neighbors, and acquaintances had nursed the cancer patient in his own home and surrounded him with affection. Family members were getting worn out, Mary Ann admitted, so church friends, including herself and her husband Jacob, pitched in.

Mary Ann told me that just getting tests at the hospital had cost the Troyer family $18,000, and more medical bills followed. Their savings took care of only part of the expenses; fellow church members chipped in the rest. Since the Amish shun not only Medicare and Medicaid, but health insurance in general, medical expenses constitute the single greatest financial burden. Lydia’s family had its share as she grew up; Mary Ann needed gall bladder surgery, and Jacob was ill and off work at one time. Also, Lydia’s two youngest sisters are learning-impaired, one of them with Down’s Syndrome.
How, I asked, do other church members know when a family can’t handle its bills on its own? Do they go to the minister to ask for aid? And where does the money come from? “It’s very seldom that anyone has to ask,” Lydia replied. “Someone they know usually sees they have a hard time handling things and tells the deacon.”

Jacob explained that “there is no fund layin’ around doing nothing.” During their Sunday worship service, which is held in a member’s home and attended by the 25 to 35 families that make up a “church district,” the deacon stands to announce hardship cases. If there was a $30,000 hospital bill, for example, the cost would be divided up between a hundred districts. The deacon would then announce his church district’s share of $300, and each member would come forward with a donation fitting his financial ability. Jacob noted that the donations often add up to a little more than is needed.

“You never tell anyone else how much you gave,” Mary Ann added. “You just give what you can.” If the donations are anonymous, I challenged, how does the deacon know each member will give enough? The women didn’t see that as a problem. “You’d always rather give than be the one who needs it,” they answered in unison.

Reciprocal intergenerational bonds are in evidence whenever you visit Amish homes and communities. John A. Hostetler, a prominent author on Amish culture, notes that child nurture is considered the society’s most important adult activity. Children, in turn, are expected to nurture others as soon and as much as their capabilities allow. Practically as soon as he can walk and talk, the Amish child is helping with chores in the home, looking after younger siblings, and following older family members around to learn skills. Giving of oneself is so deeply associated with self-importance that Amish youth are strongly work-oriented and proficient in a vast array of jobs. As one Amishman told me, “By the time they are 14, 99 percent of our young people almost can’t wait to get out of school and get to work.”

Whether young, handicapped, or old, each Amish person seems to have something to contribute to the community. I asked Mary Ann about her youngest daughters, aged 28 and 26, who are disabled and still living at home. It wasn’t too hard raising them, she said; in many ways they were a help rather than a burden. Lydia chimed in that her youngest sister was a really good worker--Lydia had even had her over as a maid when Lydia’s baby was born.

Jacob cited his 86-year-old mother as an example of how their society provides for old age. The house that belonged to the old folks was bought by Jacob’s brother, who built an addition onto it for his widowed mother. “How do you decide which of the children or grandchildren is responsible for their parents’ care?” I asked. “I don’t know if anybody really decides,” said Jacob thoughtfully. “I took care of her for a while. Then my brother bought the house; so he was responsible.”

The Amish believe the elderly, when in decline, should remain among kin if at all possible, to reap the satisfaction due them for a lifetime of service, as well as to continue contributing to their families in ways they can, such as overseeing children. This experience implants in Amish children an acceptance of the path of aging and dying.

In an era of astronomical medical costs, dealing with extended illness without Social Security benefits can be a test of faith. The largest doctor bills require help from more than the usual hundred church districts, Jacob told me. Fund-raising campaigns--such as quilt sales, which can draw in contributions from the non-Amish--are sometimes organized. The Budget, a weekly newspaper published in Sugarcreek, Ohio, and read in Plain communities across the nation, regularly advertises showers and benefit auctions for hardship cases.

With a circulation of 20,000, The Budget is an important link in an Amish-Mennonite network of self-help, education, and mutual aid. Most Mennonite groups share with the Amish a disdain for public assistance. Unlike the Amish, however, they actively engage in mission and charity projects beyond Plain circles. Page after page of The Budget lists first-person updates by Mennonites stationed in these projects, ranging from disaster recovery efforts in the U.S. to anti-poverty missions in South America and Romania. Amish readers thus garner information on affairs around the world. “Scribes,” as contributors are called, may simply wish to update their cousins on church news, births, deaths--every imaginable event. In the “Information Please” column, readers ask about things like locating lost poems or acquiring replacement parts for kerosene lamps. Tips are shared on topics ranging from food processing to home remedies to planting by the moon.

The Amish insistence on drawing from their own resources rather than outside institutions has been questioned in recent years by the media. In one instance, described as “the first documented murder by a person born and bred Amish,” a Pennsylvania father hacked his wife to death. The man, known to be mentally ill, was being cared for at home by his family.

In the Lancaster, Pennsylvania area, an Amish family and state officials clashed in 1995 over treatment of a child with leukemia. The five-year-old girl was seized from her father’s arms by state troopers and child-protective case workers and placed in foster care so doctors could carry out chemotherapy against the parents’ wishes. The parents regarded chemotherapy as more threatening than the disease, and they had chosen a less invasive treatment from a Canadian doctor. The outcome was that the child was brutally traumatized by the state’s intervention and died, chemotherapy notwithstanding.

The Amish do not shun modern medicine as a whole. They often use chemotherapy, organ transplants, and life-support intervention when these do not simply prolong a vegetative or terminal condition. Many Amish donate blood to the Red Cross. In The Amish and the State, contributor Gertrude Huntington writes that most court cases involving Amish health care result from differing opinions about the best care for a sick child. The Amish believe parents and the church bear the first responsibility for child-rearing, and in a number of instances they have stood on these beliefs when challenged. “Neither state officials nor medical personnel take kindly to this apparent challenge to professional authority,” Huntington notes.

A recent ABC News “20/20” report, “The Secret Life of the Amish,” drew on the tales of disgruntled former members to sensationalize the “strict” and “isolated” aspect of Amish life. It claimed the “mysterious world” of the Amish hides untold stories of rigid control and abuse. Anchorwoman Deborah Roberts worried that Amish victims often did not have access to the “safety” of public social services.

Better-informed researchers report that while the Amish creed of independence, self-discipline, non-violence, and nurture is not foolproof, the Amish are remarkably little affected by our larger society’s most serious social ills. That drug abuse, domestic violence, teen pregnancy, divorce, and juvenile crime scarcely exist in Amish circles speaks well for the quality of life enjoyed by Amish youth. When Amish teenagers do act out, it’s usually through rowdy socializing, going to movies, playing music, or similar forbidden activities. At worst, this leads to drinking and petty vandalism--or leaving the faith.

The Amish respect the larger society’s “powers that be” in functions such as controlling crime, but they refrain from litigation and political activities. When state powers intrude in ways their faith forbids, the Amish throughout their history in America have taken the position their forefathers did in Europe: Accept the consequences rather than yield. “We are taught to mind our own business and obey the government, but when the chips are down and the government interferes with our way of life, we can balk like a stubborn mule,” notes one Amishman.

A study of Amish history in the U.S. bears out the saying that freedom is never free. Individuals, from deacons to the lowliest housewife, have been tested in church-state confrontations on issues such as military conscription, Social Security taxation, and public education. The willingness of many individuals to face punishment rather than surrender their beliefs has helped secure for their people an enviable degree of autonomy. In the mid-1900s, a number of Amish parents went to jail rather than send their teenagers to public high schools. A decades-long trouble spot between the Amish and education officials was finally resolved in 1973 after an outsider took their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. In Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Amish won the right to educate their children largely according to church tradition rather than state mandates.

Jacob and Mary Ann have been asked by many people whether they pay taxes. “We pay all our taxes except Social Security taxes,” Jacob said, explaining that the Amish cannot conscientiously participate in a worldly insurance system like Social Security. If they receive income tax refunds after filing, Jacob said, they rip up the check and throw it away. He and Mary Ann have refused hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars because, in Jacob’s words, “We don't want government handouts.”

The Amish pay taxes for public education like anyone else, and then pay again to school their own children. In Pennsylvania, parents who do not use the public school system are now given a refund toward an approved choice for their children’s education. Jacob told me the Amish refused any efforts by the government to help their schools fearing they’d give officials reason to tell them how to run them.

Last year an Amish sawmill in Centerville, Pennsylvania, was raided by U.S. Labor Department officials and heavily fined for employing youths under 18. The owner, Bill Burkholder, was also the employer of Manass Troyer at the time he fell ill from cancer. When I visited the Burkholder home in early August, Bill and his wife, Mary, spoke of keeping tender company with Manass during his final days.

Bill wore all the appearance of the Amish working class--the highest class to which an Amishman aspires. His hair was plastered to his brow with sweat, and his homespun shirt and denim pants bore evidence of a day of hands-on labor. Beneath this humble appearance, however, I sensed a man of extraordinary intelligence and business acumen. He has twice built a prosperous lumber operation up from bare soil.

Three years ago the Burkholder family business, which includes two of his sons, lost everything to fire. The fire broke out on a Sunday afternoon. By Wednesday Bill had re-commenced sawing lumber with the help of his community, beginning with the boards they needed to construct a new mill. The sawmill grew to employ as many as 40 people, and the Labor Department’s crackdown on Bill’s young Amish workers struck Amish consciousness across the nation. If the state can remove the young from what the Amish view as constructive, educational job experience, how can they hold together their culture?

In January of this year, the Labor Department sent a representative to meet with Bill and a couple of other Amish businessmen about labor regulations. Arriving at the sawmill, the official was instead greeted by a throng of Amishmen, 500 strong, who had come to listen and express concern about the state’s encroachment upon their way of life. Such displays of fervent albeit non-violent solidarity often induce public officials to think twice before overstepping their bounds with the Amish. In the Burkholder case, the outcome is not yet known. Bill has appealed the fines, and Amish leaders nationwide are negotiating with lawmakers for tolerance.

In talking about the Amish practice of pulling together in crisis, Bill explained that every couple of years each Amish household evaluates all its belongings, from clothes to china cabinets to horses and buggies. The value of these possessions, combined with the assessed value of their property, creates a monetary figure from which one to three dollars per hundred is “taxed” whenever a fire occurs. Bill said the same figure is also used in calculating a fire’s property damage. Assessors from a number of neighboring church districts converge upon the scene quickly to view the damage and speak to the owner. A collection for relief is then launched, based on the figure arrived at by these assessors.

Though church positions such as deacon and preacher are entirely unpaid, Amish schoolteachers receive wages. Mary Burkholder, who had five years’ experience as a school teacher, told me teachers’ wages range from $20 to $30 a day, plus reimbursement if it’s necessary to hire a driver to get to school. Each family with children in the school pays an equal percentage of the teacher’s pay, whether the family has eight children in school or one. School materials, wood for its stove, and the cost of the building whenever a new one is needed come from a general school fund for which the whole district is responsible.

An Amish-elected school board oversees the school’s needs in everything from finances to teacher-parent tensions. By law, the Amish must adhere to certain rules, such as keeping attendance records and fulfilling the same number of days in school as other students. Otherwise, the state has little control over their education system. The Wisconsin v. Yoder ruling grants them the right to graduate their children from textbook to hands-on occupational education when they complete eighth grade.
The Amish peoples’ struggle to retain parental and church prerogatives in educating their children is a continual one. They are keenly aware, however, that no guarantees protect a minority group like theirs, which lacks political muscle. Societal attitudes or political tides can at any moment swing a public official’s pen against what they hold dear. It is here that their courage stands out--and their faith in themselves, in the goodness of God, and in the ability of human beings to resolve problems among themselves rather than depending on distant legal channels.

And it is here, perhaps, that the dominant American culture seems farthest from the Amish ideal. The very concept of a coercive universal tax for public welfare is built on the premise that each of us cannot be trusted to care about our neighbor’s needs. We have not realized how much this idea rends the thread of human-to-human reciprocation that weaves a community’s fabric. Indeed, we have yet to see the full outcome of the modern experiment of controlling deeds of charity from a pedestal of power rather than arousing each individual’s sense of duty.

The Amish do not claim to offer a blueprint for the welfare of our nation. They do, however, offer us a refreshing vision of what can be accomplished by the voluntary pooling of human resources. Their example challenges the idea of central planning and control as the answer to society’s ills. In observing them in their home, I could not help but see a link between independence from state controls and free-flowing human goodwill.

Adorno and Horkheimer’s planned pro-war propaganda

In a 1943 memo to Leon Lewis, the Los Angeles lawyer of the Institute of Social Research, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer described their ideas for a film which they hoped to interest Hollywood in making:

Since it is the general idea underlying this plan to counteract the apathy of a large part of the population, it might be advisable to take this very apathy as the point of departure. While it must be made plain that no average American wants to have anything to do with Nazism or Fascism, their aversion to “atrocity propaganda” should be made equally clear. Some of the deeper psychological mechanisms underlying their attitudes should be brought to the fore, e.g., the reasoning: “these things are so horrible that one cannot believe them, and therefore they are untrue” (self protection), or: “people who have been treated this way must have brought it on themselves.”

These snatches of conversation finally reach some very prominent Americans who believe in probing things to the quick. They should be public figures whose reputation is unimpeachable like outstanding Congressmen, representatives of commerce and industry. They should not be played by actors but the personalities themselves should appear in the motion picture. They decide that people should learn the full, unbiased truth about what Nazism means to its victims and what it would mean to Americans in the case of a Hitler victory… The skeptics shown at the beginning are present making embarrassing remarks, when they interrupt the narrators they should be answered quietly and firmly. The climax is reached when one of the hecklers asks: “Where are your eyewitnesses?” The answer is: “there are none.” Then a cemetery with a fresh Massengrab (mass-grave) flashes on the screen. We see how the skeptics of the beginning eventually are brought to the conviction: “Those devils must pay.” They are shown, their numbers increasing, finally merging with a symbolic picture of the whole American nation, marching united against the Axis.

Memorandum on a motion picture project, April 27, 1943, Max Horkheimer-Archiv, II, 10, 397

Home Schooling for Nationalists

Preliminary research.

Current rules on Home-schooling in England are mercifully lenient. Any parent at any time and for any reason may decide to home-school his child. In the government publication Elective Home Education Guidelines for Local Authorities it is stated:

The responsibility for a child’s education rests with their parents. In England,
education is compulsory, but school is not.

Parents may choose home education for a variety of reasons. The local authority’s primary interest should lie in the suitability of parents’ education provision and not their reason for doing so. The following reasons for home educating are common, but by no means exhaustive:

• distance or access to a local school
• religious or cultural beliefs
• philosophical or ideological views
• dissatisfaction with the system

So, even if a parent’s decision to home-school his child relates to politically incorrect views, the state is not likely to interfere unless gifted the excuse of curriculum-based concerns. Such hazard is easily avoided, instilling pride in our children for their heritage does not require us to use ideas that are easily characterised as “hate-speech” by the real haters, for example.

The booklet continues:

Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 provides that:

“The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive
efficient full-time education suitable –

(a) to his age, ability and aptitude, and
(b) to any special educational needs he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.”

An “efficient” and “suitable” education is not defined in the Education Act 1996 but “efficient” has been broadly described in case law [1] as an education that “achieves that which it sets out to achieve”, and a “suitable” education is one that “primarily
equips a child for life within the community of which he is a member, rather than the way of life in the country as a whole, as long as it does not foreclose the child’s options in later years to adopt some other form of life if he wishes to do so”.

1 Mr Justice Woolf in the case of R v Secretary of State for Education and Science, ex parte Talmud Torah Machzikei Hadass School Trust (12 April 1985)

Multiculturalism to the rescue! Although principally a tool for destroying the old social order, it does at least formally provide for every group – even the majority – the ‘right’ to maintain its distinctiveness. And the qualification would not be a problem for most nationalist-minded parents. It is the state’s desire to engender self-hatred in the English which needs be coercive, not our hope to pass on to our children a healthy and natural self-respect.