Dark Satanic Mills

Ahh, here we go on from Milton to Blake! A fitting transition, I think, since the lines Phil cites in his comment to a previous post actually come from Blake's Milton, rather than from his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.

By the way, I have a lovely videotape of my then 2 year old son Rafe reciting the first verse of one of Blake's Songs of Experience:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

I'm curious why Phil reads the Songs as a social commentary, rather than what Blake states they are--"shewing the two contrary states of the human soul." (Yes, there are those poor little chimney sweeps, who strangely are actually worse off in the songs of innocence than in the songs of experience.)

I think it must be because our cultural life has never truly recovered from the impact of the romantics of the industrial age--Marx, Engels, and a few others thrown in there with the poet Blake--who believed that industrial capitalism and life in the dark, Satanic mills was contorting the human soul. Though I believe wholeheartedly that Blake's artistic critiques have more depth of reality and persistent insight in them than the entire corpus of Marx and all his followers.

Surely the industrial age was one of tremendous social change, turmoil, and dislocation that we have yet fully to understand. Historians, along with Dickens, still tell us of the bleak houses of the working poor and the predations of the greedy capitalists. We are in need of more good revisionist scholarship to balance the scales that judge capitalism so precipitously. I, for one, don't want to live as the subject of the landed aristocracy of Augustan Britain nor as a cog in the Administrative Wheel of state socialism.

I often wonder what it is that the modern progressive, who enshrines material progress and translates moral progress as the transvaluation of values, would have us undo between the industrial age and our own? Mustn't we in truth accept and strive to understand the industrial age as that which gave rise to the world which is ours, somehow, despite the tensions of human experience and art to which Phil rightly points us--

The end result of the poems taken together is a third state, existing in the dialectical tension between the first two. Blake called that state, "achieved innocence." That would be my goal. Not to applaud the small, often self-serving and hypocritical blessings of largess, charity, faith based initiatives, thousand points of light, and Bill Bennett style moralizing, nor to merely to provide an ironic or satiric counterpoint, but to include both in a single vision, in which we still affirm the small blessings and do our best to light that one candle.

I do not suggest that we have to fall in love with the industrial age and wish to return there as if to some idyllic shore, but rather to recognize what the coming of industrial capitalism called forth from the spirit of our own ancestors--the energy of innovation and enterprise that allowed for material progress, the expanded social conscience (borne on the back of both labor and leisure) that allowed us to imagine a wider scope for human dignity and liberty. As Blake called it forth, Awake! Albion, Awake!

Blake's work on Milton is indeed a work of prophecy, and his allusion to the dark Satanic Mills, turns in the next verse to the industrialism of his own zeal to bring the new Jerusalem to life on Albion's shores. The tools of this industry, however, are those of the artist and prophet waging a "mental fight," armed with a bow of burning gold, arrows of desire, a spear to unfold the clouds, and carried forth in a Chariot of Fire. The tools of the faithful prophet choosing to call upon the Lamb, not the nihilism of the social and political reformers who in seeking the Good of All would reduce all to the valence of atoms spinning in the void of some historical determinism.

Blake toys obliquely with the odd conundrum of our freedom to choose and its resultant responsibility. In Jerusalem he writes:

Let the Indefinite be explored, and let every Man be Judged

By his own Work. Let all Indefinites be thrown into Demonstrations,

To be pounded to dust & melted in the Furnaces of Affliction.

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars:

General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite & flatterer,

For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars

And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power.

And again strangely relevant to our musings here are these lines from Milton:

He [the idiot Questioner] smiles with condescension, he talks of Benevolence and Virtue,

And those who act with Benevolence and Virtue they murder time on time.

I wonder what this observation of Blake as Milton has to do with the Song of Experience he titles The Clod and the Pebble, and what these competing views of love itself have to do with our beliefs about beneficence and philanthropy and our "doings good"...

"Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
but for another give its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."

Comments

[phil]

Wow, great post. "Mind forged manacles." Reason, or "Ratio," as the measure of all things, like the great white-beard God, Nobodaddy in the Heavens. That was the God of not only the managed state, but also of the emerging commercial classes, of book-keepers, financiers, of those who become in a later generation, the Gadgrinds of Utilitarianism and the dismal science of Economics. When we think of cubicle slaves exercising their freedom in sky high towers, in an org chart ending in one man or woman, networked with others across the landscape, across the globe, with wealth and power and control flowing upward and stinting largess flowing downard, with that too Blake would have little sympathy.

I think we would have told us, or opened our eyes, through his difficult, always dialetic work, that if we enter this "clock," this mechanism of logic, business plans, hierarchy, and are touched by vision, it will disslove, becoming not a Leviathan, his gills streaked with blood, his tail lashing the foam, but a harper peacefully playing by the river of living water.

Spiritual renewal, a great awakening. What he called Albion,or the Los, not the Stock Exchange, but the energies of the American Revolution.

Hey, Lenore, thank you for this post. I am writing this a bedtime from memory of Balke's writings. Thank you for quoting them in detail.

Perhaps we can through debate melt the links of our repsective "mind forged manacles," or reductive visions, and achieve a new synthesis. Blake, didn't he also write, "Without contraries is no progession?"

[Lenore Ealy]

Well, I confess to having my Portable Blake handy--surely not able to cite from memory! I'm taking my reply back up the main post, as I have a little something else to put there. Thanks! Lenore

[phil]

Portable Blake. With engravings, I hope?

[Gerry]

I often wonder what it is that the modern progressive, who enshrines material progress and translates moral progress as the transvaluation of values, would have us undo between the industrial age and our own? Mustn't we in truth accept and strive to understand the industrial age as that which gave rise to the world which is ours, somehow, despite the tensions of human experience and art to which Phil rightly points us

Why does "progressives" sound like a perjorative coming from you? If I follow you properly, you are asking why anyone would criticize capitalism, and at the same time judge all critics romantics in a dismissive tone.

Let me turn back toward the issue of freedom, in particular individual freedom. It is precisely the massive size of so many industrial organizations and the inexorable logic of profit maximizing that brings the ils that many rightly criticize. How does the individual possibly achieve freedom in a world increasingly dominated by mega-corporations?

The project of turning back the clock or even discussing "what would be done differently" really isn't that productive as it looks backward rather than forward. I can make claims that we would be much better off if the worst of industrialized capitalism were mitigated, but it changes nothing. It brings no one back to life, it makes no one's life better.

Perhaps that phase was a necessary transition, but I say that there are many with blood on their hands not because of any direct action, but because of greed and corruption. The question is whether this is individual failing or an inevitable end-state of unrestrained competition. If markets were actually allowed to function, then the Adam Smith view of the invisible hand may represent a desirable long-term model of enterprise in societies, but the acts of many industrialists make a lie of that. By acting in the exclusive interest of the capital that moves them, countless crimes of exclusion and suppression were committed upon those powerless to resist.

Capitalist theorists need to come to grips with the excesses of 19th century robber barons like Morgan, Carnage and many others as well as their modern counterparts at Enron and MCI. The exesses of these actors must be seen not as anomalies that might be irradicated with the right laws and regulatory agencies, but part and parcel of the system. They are expected results.

Now, I will leave open the possibility that a capitalist system might be freed of such parasitic systems and actors, but I don't think it can be done by tinkering with rules and laws. What is necessary is an ethical shift, but I fear that the system creates its own ethics tied only to profitability. Show me how you keep it from being a race to the bottom.

Now, let me leave the past aside and leave you with some brief remarks about what I consider the promise of the future. You may be right that the past several hundred years was a necessary transition, and though we may have made it more equitable in some ways, most of the pain was related to necessary progress.

The information revolution culminating with the global Internet turns much of the logic of the industrial revolution on its head. Globally we don't suffer from lack of resources, but rather from a lack of creativity and compasion. Growth defined by more, better, faster is the enemy as we bump up against global limits, and underdeveloped nations make the problem worse as they struggle to get on the excalator of growth. We know that when a society makes this transition their population stops growing, but the population bubble that is generated in the transition is deadly to the local environment and the bioproductive processes that depend on them.

I sort of messed the flow of my argument, but the point above was related to the claim that the current capital system feeds on growth, but growth is becoming deadly for us as a species. I don't really know the ultimate character of the road forward, but it has to involve the maximizing of the effectiveness by which we use and reuse finite resources, not the volume and/or efficiency of production/consumption. We need a model for stable, sustainable economies. The time for unrestrained growth is over.

I do know that there is economic value in what Benkler calls "commons-based peer-production" as exemplified by the Linux system and many large and small projects clustered around it. I also know that the incumbents are fighting tooth and nail to maintain their advantage, and their main tools involve either monopolistic restraint of trade or the capture of government representatives and institutions. Really, it is the same dynamic that would have left us all to live as the subject of the landed aristocracy of Augustan Britain, because entrenched capital is the modern equivalent of the landed aristocracy. I have no interest in being a cog in the Administrative Wheel of state socialism either, but are these really the only options you can think of?

In short, the free market would be a good thing if you could get it.