The Heavenly Council, Part V

(Lytton Strachey was next to speak up.)

Strachey

André, let me begin by saying that you are one of my heroes, and what you and your colleagues tried to do—well, “inspiring” is too weak a word for it. “Colossal” comes a lot closer. But to all of you who are thinking about injecting vibrancy into a corpse, I have to say that this would be a useless endeavor. What we need to do instead is to take our vibrancy somewhere else. I’m thinking of Gandhi’s exhortation, that what is required is that we live the change that we want to see happening in the larger world. This was the formula of the Bloomsbury Circle, of which I was proud to be a part.

However, as in the case of the Surrealists, when the dust settled, the corpse was still the reigning reality. In Antonio’s terms, its hegemonic power was too great to unseat. England is still a capitalist, hierarchical nation, and I would argue that it is much worse now than it was in my time. Liz Truss, essentially a moron, lasted a total of forty-four days in office. Her successor, Rishi Sunak, had no ideas at all. England’s politicians are little more than clowns, and truth be told, it’s a failed society with nowhere to go. Other nations may pay lip service to it, on the basis of its former glory; but in reality it is a shadow of its former self. It certainly has no real power on the world stage. So the question I’d like to address is, In the face of all this, what did the Bloomsbury Circle accomplish, and was it enough?

Our motivation came out of a disgust with the hypocrisy of Victorian society, the endless posturing and dishonesty at the expense of our true repressed inner lives. Plus, it was a society that led to the deaths of many thousands of our young men in the Great War, the cause of which remains unclear to this day. All of us, including G.E. Moore, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot—felt that there simply had to be a better way. And I have to say that for a small group, our influence was greatly out of proportion to our size. Millions of Brits saw what we had, what we were advocating—authenticity—and they wanted it for themselves. In this way, the BC changed the sensibility of England to a fairly large extent. It became a freer society, a more relaxed one, and certainly a more honest one. We were, à la Gandhi, and as a tiny subset of the larger society, living the change we wished to bring about.

And I venture to say that there have been many such subsets, of people living meaningful lives as opposed to lives based on what was socially acceptable. But as I just indicated, England writ large remained the same during our lifetimes, and a century later, it is much worse. In concrete terms, our achievement was quite small. I still believe what we did was worth doing, but it is important to retain some perspective on the BC and its influence. In short, if I’m going to be honest, I have to agree with Wystan: substantive change doesn’t come about by example; it comes about by force.

Where is that force today, that tectonic shift? One member of the BC who I wish was with us today is John Maynard Keynes. He and I were lovers for a time, as many of you probably know. Keynesian economics, which is a modified form of capitalism, kept us afloat for many years, because its notion of government intervention kept the self-contradictory aspects of capitalism somewhat in check. The second factor keeping us from the abyss was the support of the United States in the postwar era. But in both England and America today, Keynesian economics has gone by the wayside, and as far as American support goes, England can hardly count on it any longer, inasmuch as the US has entered a period of economic, social, and political madness. Suicide, some have argued. That suicide, in my opinion, is in fact a big part of the tectonic shift, the Hegelian force that is pushing us over the edge. What awaits us now, of course, is completely unclear. As for the actions we might undertake, I agree with Andrei, that the best we can do is to act as spokesmen for lability, for alternative possibilities.

(Cries of “Bravo!” from the group. Tolstoy then takes the stage.)

Tolstoy

I have to confess, I am chastened by what I heard today. As all of you know, my own solution to the human condition is an enlightened Christianity, one based on love rather than on punishment and a perverse doctrine of original sin. I admit that it is a utopian vision, one not likely to come about any time soon. And I also have to admit that those of you who believe that real change comes about by force, are probably right. The problem is that on that basis, in the long run nothing really changes. We just go from force to force, which means that those of us arguing for a different sensibility—changes in the superstructure, in effect—are going to be marginalized, as André and Lytton have noted. But it is religion that touches people at the core of their being—living religion, not mechanical, organized religion. And because living religion addresses our emotional center, so to speak, it is the only activity, or way of life, that can significantly move things around. The problem, of course, is that when it comes to religion, 99 percent of the human race opts for the organized variety, which is just more “corpse,” as far as I’m concerned. As you can see, I wasn’t excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church for nothing. Kierkegaard put it very well: the problem, he said, is that it is almost impossible to find a true Christian within Christendom. A propos of that, we should probably have invited St. Francis of Assisi to this forum, inasmuch as he qualifies as a true Christian, as far as I can make out. And if his vision of the good society will probably forever remain a utopian ideal, it is nevertheless an ideal we can’t live without. In that sense, it is not part of the superstructure, but rather the very ground of our being. But the realization of this ideal cannot come about until force finally exhausts itself, and I fear that is going to take a while.

But I can’t rest easy, ending on a pessimistic note, no matter how realistic it might be. As a Russian, I’d like to return to the point my countryman Mikhail was making about the significance of the peasant-folkloric-shamanic-nonrational tradition as an alternate reality—but with a twist. The twist is that Russia does not have a monopoly on that tradition, and perhaps an exploration of it might contribute to our liberation, offer a way out, as it were. I cannot say for sure. But I want you all to consider the following text, from a Canaanite (Ugaritic) tablet, that dates from the third millennium B.C. As you all know, it was from the Canaanite people that the Jewish people eventually emerged. Ugaritic is very close to Hebrew, and many of the Psalms are literal translations of Ugaritic poetry into the Hebrew language. In any case, the Canaanites were polytheistic; the Israelites, centuries later, were monotheistic, worshipping Yahweh. The speaker here is Baal, the Canaanite god of fertility, and storms. He is addressing another deity. It reads as follows:

“I have a word to tell you, a message to recount to you: the word of the tree and the whisper of the stone, the murmur of the heavens to the earth, of the seas to the stars. I understand the lightning that the heavens do not know, the word that people do not know, and earth's masses cannot understand. Come, and I will reveal it.”

I read this as a call for us to return to the natural world, to put our faith in “the word of the tree and the whisper of the stone.” For doesn’t that world transcend all of the issues we have discussed today? Isn’t it obvious that only by saving nature, up to now badly abused, that we can save ourselves? That is the message I would like to leave with you today. Thank you for listening, my friends. Spasibo.

©Morris Berman, 2025