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A pdf version of this item is available here: https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/dm-sequel-holding-the-line.pdf
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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
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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
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Poetry, Weltschmerz, And A learning From Experience
British Library Cotton MS Nero D.IV
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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
A reprint of an autobiographical missive from 2010; lost, then forgotten, then over a decade later found again courtesy of a copy sent by a friend. I have slightly amended one of the footnotes.
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A pdf archive of my new website, as of March 2024, is available at https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/website-march-24.pdf
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After nearly twenty years with the same provider I have taken down my davidmyatt dot info website due to a change in their polices: to replace static sites like mine, with its handcrafted html, with ‘dynamic’ sites using JavaScript and php with a decorative ‘website builder’.
The new (advertisement free) website is at https://dwmyatt.net/2024/03/01/a-question-of-pathei-mathos/ and consists of a static main page with links to pdf versions of various writings.°°°
NASA:
Earth and Moon as seen from the departing Voyager 1 interplanetary spacecraft
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§ 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
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Related:
° The Numinous Way Of Pathei-Mathos
(Seventh Edition 2022)
° Religion, Empathy, and Pathei-Mathos
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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
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Some Notes On De Vita Coelitus Comparanda
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The genesis of this essay was some correspondence from a reader of my translation of Tabula Smaragdina Hermetis who enquired about the Latin text of the two illustrations from a manuscript of De Vita Coelitus Comparanda that I included. In response, I translated the relevant passages, in the process discovering some interesting connections to the Corpus Hermeticum, alchemy, and the Art (Latin Ars) of μαγικός as understood by Pliny the Elder, Ovid, and Tacitus, with Pliny in Book XXX, iii relating that Homer’s Odyssey is based upon that Art and recounts a legend that Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, and Plato, all journeyed abroad to learn that Art.
Image Credit:
Galaxy UGC 12591. NASA, ESA, Hubble Space telescope.
David Myatt 