°°°
A pdf version of this item is available here: https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/dm-sequel-holding-the-line.pdf
°°°
In a missive written in August 2023 titled Holding The Line [1] I quoted a paragraph from a 2012 missive:“I have some forty years experience of interaction with the police, from ordinary constables and detectives, to custody sergeants, to officers from specialist branches such as SO12, SO13, and crime squads. During that time, I have known far more good police officers than bad – corrupt – ones. Furthermore, I realized that most of those I came into contact with were good individuals, motivated by the best of intentions, who were trying to do their best, often under difficult circumstances, and often to help victims of dishonourable deeds, catch those responsible for such deeds, and/or prevent such deeds.”In the matter of the British Police those four decades of mine, from the late 1960’s to the early 2000’s, provided me in retrospect with a particular insight which, combined with others, contributed to my rejection of all extremisms. Thus I have a hitherto unvoiced personal response when there is some report – as there now seems to be almost every week in the mass media – of some person or persons or of some ‘policy group’ or of some politician “losing confidence” in the Police and demanding some reform or other or that some figurehead resign.
Which response is that those who for whatever reason and from whatever motive criticize the Police or the Police response to some incident or to some crime real or alleged, is that such critics before or after they publicly voice such criticism should spent at least a month with Police officers “on the front line” and experience what such officers face almost every day with what over the past decade or more have become limited and increasingly shrinking resources and a dwindling number of officers. In many instances, these officers have only a split-second to decide what to do in a particular situation.
Would those critics then revise their opinion? For we now seem to have the all too familiar ‘those who do not know’ complaining about those who, from practical experience, do know.
To me, at least, there are lessons here for our Western societies and for their future. But who now listens to such ancient wisdom as this: τῇ δ᾽ ἐπιστήμῃ σύ μου προύχοις τάχ᾽ ἄν που, “about this, your experience has the advantage over mine,” Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, 1115. [3]
David Myatt
April 23rd 2024
[1] https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/holding-the-line.pdf
[2] The Politics and Ideology of Hate, https://davidmyattinfo.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/dm-politics-of-hate-2012.pdf
[3] https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/oedipus-tyrannus-v1.pdf
Image Credit: NASA – Earth and Moon from the departing Voyager 1 interplanetary spacecraft
°°°
While listening to JS Bach’s numinous Ascension Oratorio, in a performance conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, I began to wonder if Christianity, and all religions world-wide, had failed to change our basal human nature en masse to the extent that we humans no longer sallied forth to kill and destroy on behalf of some State entity or on behalf of some ideology or on behalf of some interpretation of a religion or because we as individuals had rejected or were not influenced by or had never known or had misinterpreted the message of such religions.
From the south of Madagascar to the inner city problems and violence in America and Europe to the current conflict in Gaza (and its consequences) to the war in Ukraine to the Rohingya in Burma and the violence and killing elsewhere, we appear to be a savage species untamed by the message of peace and non-violence which the major world religions all seemed to be trying to teach us, with for instance some Buddhists in Burma now apparently justifying the persecution of and violence against the Rohingya.
For over a decade I perhaps egoistically have believed that my own decades-long violent, suffering-causing, extremist life and my ultimate rejection of it through my weltanschauungen of pathei-mathos, might engender in some individuals an understanding of our human nature and the need for compassion, empathy, and honour. But it and so many so very many such attempts – from the poetry of TS Eliot to With The Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – seem to have made no appreciative difference whatsoever.
I have to admit I have no solution to how to now change, reform, our basal human nature so that we now no longer sally forth en masse or individually to kill and/or cause suffering to others. For it does not appear to be just a matter, as I once perhaps naively believed, of exegesis and denotata.
David Myatt
April 14th 2024
British Library Cotton MS Nero D.IV
°°°
Poetry, Weltschmerz, And A learning From Experience
British Library Cotton MS Nero D.IV
°°°
Having recently watched the documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick about the Vietnam war it seemed relevant to ask questions such as what was the horror, the suffering, the deaths, the grief of relatives of those US servicemen killed, and the trauma of so many Veterans, for; and decades on have we humans en masse learned anything?
British Library Cotton MS Nero D.IV
§ Aeschylus, A Self-Taught Hymn
§ A Slowful Learning, Perhaps
§ Such A Failure Of Understanding
§ A Perplexing Failure To Understand
§ One Hot Sunny Day, Almost Mid-July
Image Credit: Folio 196, Codex Parisinus Graecus 2327
§ Physis And Being
§ The Way Of Pathei-Mathos – A Précis
§ Glossary Of Terms
§ Appendix: Notes on Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 5, 1015α
§ Bibliography
Summary Of The Philosophy Of Pathei-Mathos
°°°
Related:
° The Numinous Way Of Pathei-Mathos
(Seventh Edition 2022)
° Religion, Empathy, and Pathei-Mathos
°°°
°°°°°°
°°°
It all seems so very sad. To watch the same mistakes being made day upon day, year after year, decade after decades. As if the lessons of our thousand of years old human culture of pathei-mathos have not been learned or not been presented or more often that so many of us are somehow in physis, in our human nature, innately immune to such a learning. For these lessons are the lessons of fairness; of empathy, of tolerance, and of compassion, voiced for example thousands of years ago in The Beatitudes.
British Library Cotton MS Nero D.IV
°°°
Précis Of The Way Of Pathei-Mathos
°°°
What I have previously described as the ‘philosophy of pathei-mathos’ and the ‘way of pathei-mathos’ is simply my own weltanschauung, a weltanschauung developed over some years as a result of my own pathei-mathos. Thus, and despite whatever veracity it may or may not possess, it is only the personal insight of one very fallible individual, a fallibility proven by my decades of selfishness and by my decades of reprehensible extremism both political and religious. Furthermore, and according to my admittedly limited understanding and limited knowledge, this philosophy does not – in essence – express anything new. For I feel (and I use the word ‘feel’ intentionally) that I have only re-expressed what so many others, over millennia, have expressed as result of (i) their own pathei-mathos and/or (ii) their experiences/insights and/or (iii) their particular philosophical musings.
°°°
Related:
° The Numinous Way Of Pathei-Mathos
(Seventh Edition 2022)
° Religion, Empathy, and Pathei-Mathos
°°°
Image Credit:
NASA:
Earth and Moon as seen from the departing Voyager 1 interplanetary spacecraft
°°°°°°
°°°
There are few moments that I believed could surprise this somewhat world-weary man beyond his three score and ten mortal years. But some information received from a middle-Eastern contact was one of them.
Knowing my love of classical Arabic music and of how I used to (badly) play the Persian Daf, the information was regarding the Syrian Takht Ensemble [1] whose beautiful traditional music – many employing Maqam modes – and their innovations of such music, brought memories of a different plane of existence, far removed from the turmoil, the Machiavellian machinations, the egoism, the materialistic, and often godless, modern Western world.
I was back in the Sahara Desert where as I once said I wordlessly had intimations of Being, of The Acausal, of The-Unity, of The One-The Only (τὸ ἓν), of The Monas (μονάς) which ‘acausal’ Being Muslims called Allah and Christians called God. I was back in Arabic – Muslim – lands where I had travelled and stayed and learnt. I was back as a novice in a Catholic monastery, wandering outside the Abbey in the contemplative period between chanting Matins and Lauds.
Such a waste for over forty years of such experiencing, such wordless knowing. There are no excuses; for the fault, the hubris, was mine. All I have to offer in recompense, in expiation, is my wordfull weltanschauung of pathei-mathos, which compared to such wordless personal experiencing and such Arabic music is so woefully inadequate.
David Myatt
August 2023
°°°
[1] Al Jazeera documentary: https://tinyurl.com/3btd2w5v
°°°°°°
°°°
A pdf version of this item is available here: https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/holding-the-line.pdf
°°°
One of the matters often pondered upon in the past fifteen years is whether we as a species are in sufficient numbers self-aware enough to not only cease to personally cause suffering but also to contribute to our societies in such a way that we are or become vectors of a duty sufficiently honourable to prevent or to alleviate the suffering of others in some personal manner.One example of such a duty I have mentioned several times these past fifteen years is a Police officer, such as this mention from 2012:
“I have some forty years experience of interaction with the police, from ordinary constables and detectives, to custody sergeants, to officers from specialist branches such as SO12, SO13, and crime squads. During that time, I have known far more good police officers than bad – corrupt – ones. Furthermore, I realized that most of those I came into contact with were good individuals, motivated by the best of intentions, who were trying to do their best, often under difficult circumstances, and often to help victims of dishonourable deeds, catch those responsible for such deeds, and/or prevent such deeds.” The Politics and Ideology of Hate [1]Most of this interaction was the result of the suffering-causing deeds I had personally done or had incited by what I wrote, possessed as I was for some forty years by a certitude of knowing, a fanaticism, born of adhering to, believing in, some supra-personal cause, some -ism or some -ology and that extreme lack of self-awareness that such a certitude cultivates and maintains.
In many ways I was much worse than most political or religious extremists because I was, both as a National Socialist and later as a Muslim, an ideologue meaning, in the case of National Socialism, I often arrogantly spurned guidance and then manufactured new guidelines for myself and for others; and as a Muslim having given a personal pledge of loyalty to a particular person, I supported and justified his cause.
“In truth they, those officers, as one of them once said to me, were guided by what ‘was laid down’ and did not presume to or tried hard not to overstep their authority; guided as they were by the law, that accumulated received wisdom of what was and is good in society; a law which (at least in Britain and so far as I know) saught to embody a respect for what was fair and which concept of fairness was and always has been (again, at least in Britain and so far as I know) untainted, uncorrupted, by any political ideology.In regard to part of the initial question of whether there are sufficient numbers of sufficient honourable individuals to prevent or able to alleviate the suffering of others in some personal manner, my fallible answer is that there seems to be just enough to ‘hold the line’ enabling modern societies in the West to maintain societies which currently just about function despite enduring problems such as poverty, homelessness, social disorder, crime, and corrupt politicians one of whose mottos is “do as we say not as we do” as evident for example by a certain British Prime Minister and his cronies during the Covid pandemic.Now I know, I understand, I appreciate, that for that reason – of so being mindful of the limits of their authority, of being guided by what had been laid down over decades – those people, those police officers, were far better individuals than the arrogant, the hubriatic, extremist I was; an arrogant extremist who by and for himself presumed ‘to know’ what was right, who presumed to understand, who presumed he possessed the ability, the authority, and the right to judge everyone and everything, and who because of such arrogance, such hubris, most certainly continued to contribute to the cycle of suffering, ignoring thus for so long as he in his unbalance did the wisdom that Aeschylus gave to us in The Oresteia.” [1]
But for how long will, or can, this line be held? I do not know but – as I listen to Kyrie Orbis Factor as performed by Ensemble Organum – I sadly intuit that our current Western societies are following the natural pattern of decline that all other societies in our human history have undergone mostly as a result of our selfish primitive nature unchanged in our majority as we still seem to be by our own pathei-mathos and by that knowledge which resides in our thousands of years-old human culture of pathei-mathos.
I myself through my extremist decades have contributed to this decline. Too little and too late my own pathei-mathos, drowned out, publicly smothered, as it now seems to me to be, by those who cannot forget or cannot forgive the extremism of my past and who with their hubriatic certitude of knowing about me and others perpetuate the cycle of suffering. Whether they know this or not is yet another question, but I am inclined to believe that they do not know such is their hubris and just as I in my hubris did not know for decades.
David Myatt
August 2023
[1] Some Notes on The Politics and Ideology of Hate: https://davidmyattinfo.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/dm-politics-of-hate-2012.pdf
Image Credit:
NASA: Earth and Moon as seen from the departing Voyager 1 interplanetary spacecraft
°°°
Question:
Some of your former political opponents do not believe what one
socialist called your “change of heart”. [1]
Hence they claim you are still a neo-nazi; that what you write and
have written since 2010 such as your autobiography should be treated
with suspicion and not taken seriously; that unless you come out in
public to attend some sort of ‘media circus’ and directly answer
their questions, they will never believe you; and that you are so
concerned about your reputation that you continually search ‘social
media’ sites and anonymously try to not only engage with them but
try to cover-up your past.
How do you react to such claims?
Reply:
φημὶ ἐγώ, Μαθεῖν θέλω τὰ ὄντα καὶ νοῆσαι τὴν τούτων φύσιν καὶ γνῶναι τὸν θεόν· [2]
Such a seeking to apprehend such things is what now and for the past twenty or so years has occupied me. As for trying to cover-up my past almost everything I wrote during my neo-nazi decades and my decade as a Muslim is archived somewhere. In the case of my neo-nazi decades by what used to be called ‘Special Branch’ as I learned following my arrest by them in 1998, and also archived on the ‘world-wide web’. In the case of my decade as a Muslim an archive of my Muslim writings also exists on the ‘world-wide web’.
Therefore, any attempt by me or by anyone to ‘cover-up’ my past would be pointless. In addition, I have no desire whatsoever to do so since what exists documents my mistakes, failings, extremism, and arrogance which I want those who may be interested to know, and which acknowledgment of my past by me led to that ‘change of heart’. One person has used such archives to document my extremism and the weltanschauung I developed after my rejection of that extremism. [3]
As for what they or others claim or believe about me now and the past, it is their burden howsoever brought-into-being, howsoever nurtured and howsoever it might be described by them or by others. Occupied by the aforementioned seeking, I am now too near death, too wearied by my own hubris and acknowledgment of it, too saddened by how so much suffering is still caused despite our human culture of pathei-mathos, to be concerned about what others claim or believe about me let alone try to change anyone’s beliefs or attitudes by engaging with them in whatever way.
[1] 2012 article: Myatt Has A Change of Heart
[2] Poemandres, 3. “I answered that I seek to learn what is real, to apprehend the physis of beings, and to have knowledge of theos.” Myatt, Corpus Hermeticum: Eight Tractates.
[3] A National-Socialist Ideologue.
°°°
Image Credit:
NASA: Earth and Moon as seen from the departing Voyager interplanetary spacecraft
David Myatt 