I never actually read anything by Kipling before reading a certain article by Orwell that a fellow LWer mentioned. I must admit I don’t consume much poetry in English, yet I was bothered that I knew nothing of the man’s work and did some reading after the reference.
I have stumbled upon this poem and thought it appropriate for some of the topics discussed.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall.
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn,
That water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision, and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch.
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshiped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selective Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
* * * * * *
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began: —
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Here is the same old mistake of heartfelt but naive conservatism; assuming that the “common sense” and “old good values” of one’s day, if they seem to bring such security and are so good at shooting down other naive and dangerous ideas, will be good forever. Yet Kipling’s world with all its wisdom ended up impaled on barbed wire, choking on mustard gas and torn to pieces by its own Maxim gun.
And who led it to that hell? Socialists? Unscrupulous wheelers and dealers? Naive young men who wanted to throw out musty old books and change everything for the better? Why, none of the public Kipling used to deride had much to do with it; the gunpowder was lit by those wise old men who carried sacred traditions and led empires. I’m sure that it never even occured to Kipling that, say, Marshal Haig was far more debased, murderous and evil than any of those he railed against.
I was interpreting the poem sub specie aeternitatis rather than in the specific context it was made. To borrow from Robin Hanson, looking at history farmers embracing forager values tend to die out. The Gods of the Copybook Headings do seem to come back.
Now obviously modern technologically progressing industrial civilization seems a sui generis transition, and there are all sorts of good reasons why this time it will be different, but the outside view is Kipling’s view in this case.
And don’t think we can in principle rule out a farmer future. The often discussed Malthusian em scenario is a future where the Gods of the Market-Place finally abandon their folly and tightly embrace the teachings of the Gods of the Copybook Heading.
But this is a rather over-specific interpretation of the emotional and I would argue even rationalist core of the poem. Namely that being bored with “water will wet us” and “fire will burn” causes major problems since wishful thinking quickly works to disconnects us from viable strategies in reality.
And don’t think we can in principle rule out a farmer future. The often discussed Malthusian em scenario is a future where the Gods of the Market-Place finally abandon their folly and tightly embrace the teachings of the Gods of the Copybook Heading.
Wait, wait, wait. You are wired as a forager; the farmer culture is a fluke amidst a roaring background of change—just as Lovecraft pointed out. Don’t you want to fight? Don’t your deepest instincts say that a stagnant, limited order—even a great and proud one - is much less appealing than a chance to end evil or perish, such as trying to build a FAI? Even if we had a recipe to make a stable and conservative society with “farmer” values, would the intellectual elites of our world want such a future? That’s like leaving the Babyeaters alone to save your own colony in 3WC. Yes, mercy can kill. But I will embrace it anyway.
There is always a dialectic between “farmer” and “forager” values, but it leads in one direction only. Our common dream will either reign or destroy us.
And what about being bored with “burying the brain once the body is dead”, eh? Maybe some fundamentals do brook change, eh? Maybe we should work against them? What does your morality say—not calculation, but intuition?
To clarify when I said abandon their folly, I mean abandon their in the long term (possibly) doomed endeavour. I did not say I would approve of the total victory of farmer values.
I will however say that I have no interest at all in shifting my own values more towards farmer or forager values. So if the current of history is towards one direction I will probably work towards the other.
There is always a dialectic between “farmer” and “forager” values, but it leads in one direction only.
I have just pointed out that historically this isn’t true. Else there would have never been something to call “farmer values” in the first place. I have also given you a scenario that suggest in the future it might not be so.
And in very specific kinds of ways we have, even in modern times, been becoming more and more farmer rather than more and more forager. When it comes to violence we are still pretty clearly moving towards the domesticated farming human rather the violent wild forager (Check out this paper and Pinker’s book Better angels of our nature ). To cite another example, when it comes to our workplace we are hyper-farmer in our behaviour compared to say people from the 18th century.
Also it stands to reason that natural selection has significantly and perhaps rapidly shifted humans towards farmer values compared to humans before farming in the last 10 000 years.
Our common dream will either reign or destroy us.
Perhaps LessWrong posters basically do. But Humans do not have a common dream. Values differ.
What does your morality say—not calculation, but intuition?
My moral intuitions are frustrated by the mere addition paradox. They are fundamentally broken. Robin Hanson is I think right that a Malthusian em world would be glorious. It is not the best of worlds by a long shot, yet neither is it the worst of worlds, it is a possible outcome and it is a better outcome than most uFAIs.
EY and RH claim to have done this, but differ in their result. To RH this is a possible future we should be pretty much ok with, while EY thinks he should invest superhuman effort to avoid it. I think we would all be better off if more people on LW thought long and hard about this.
Thanks for the answer. You’re certainly wiser than me. Damn, I have so many posts in the pipeline right now; the one with the Warhammer 40k communist eutopia; the one about how “democracy” as in “the rule of the People” is, while being quite real and attainable, a primarily economical and partly cultural matter and has nothing to do with surface ideology and political window-dressing; the one about how I’ll likely end up choosing partial wireheading as an answer to whatever tomorrow throws at me… unfortunately, there are real life concerns in the way, but I promise I’ll deliver someday.
And what about being bored with “burying the brain once the body is dead”, eh? Maybe some fundamentals do brook change, eh?
Of course they do. But again:
But this is a rather over-specific interpretation of the emotional and I would argue even rationalist core of the poem. Namely that being bored with “water will wet us” and “fire will burn” causes major problems since wishful thinking quickly works to disconnects us from viable strategies in reality.
We are significantly and systematically biased in how we evaluate if the fundamentals have changed.
This quote by Thomas Carlyle also carries a message that is basically the same as that of the poem:
“Great is Bankruptcy: the great bottomless gulf into which all Falsehoods, public and private, do sink, disappearing; whither, from the first origin of them, they were all doomed. For Nature is true and not a lie. No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature’s Reality, and be presented there for payment, - with the answer, No effects.
Pity only that it often had so long a circulation: that the original forger were so seldom he who bore the final smart of it! Lies, and the burden of evil they bring, are passed on; shifted from back to back, and from rank to rank; and so land ultimately on the dumb lowest rank, who with spade and mattock, with sore heart and empty wallet, daily come in contact with reality, and can pass the cheat no further.
[...]
But with a Fortunatus’ Purse in his pocket, through what length of time might not almost any Falsehood last! Your Society, your Household, practical or spiritual Arrangement, is untrue, unjust, offensive to the eye of God and man. Nevertheless its hearth is warm, its larder well replenished: the innumerable Swiss of Heaven, with a kind of Natural loyalty, gather round it; will prove, by pamphleteering, musketeering, that it is a truth; or if not an unmixed (unearthly, impossible) Truth, then better, a wholesomely attempered one, (as wind is to the shorn lamb), and works well.
Changed outlook, however, when purse and larder grow empty! Was your Arrangement so true, so accordant to Nature’s ways, then how, in the name of wonder, has Nature, with her infinite bounty, come to leave it famishing there? To all men, to all women and all children, it is now indubitable that your Arrangement was false. Honour to Bankruptcy; ever righteous on the great scale, though in detail it is so cruel! Under all Falsehoods it works, unweariedly mining. No Falsehood, did it rise heaven-high and cover the world, but Bankruptcy, one day, will sweep it down, and make us free of it.”
Kipling’s son died in the war. And he wrote a multi-volume history “The Irish Guards in The Great War”. I think he had ample opportunity to reflect on Haig as a human being. My impression, from Kipling’s postwar writing, is that he thought that the war was necessary to restrain the Germans.
And I wouldn’t be quite so quick to talk about “Kipling’s world...being torn to pieces.” It’s easy, in retrospect, to see the War as a sharp cataclysm. But it might not have looked quite so drastic at the time. The empire didn’t start shedding territory for another twenty or thirty years—and not until after another world war.
I think it’s a mistake to cast Kipling as a stuffy Colonel Blimp. He was quite interested in technology and progress. He was aware that there were other societies, that disagreed with Victorian England about many things. He wasn’t particularly a believer in the Church. He had enough detachment from his surroundings to make his perspective distinctive and interesting.
It was an enormous, game-changing shock to European mentality; the events of the 30s and 40s would’ve hardly been possible without it—in any form, Fascism or no Fascism. See e.g. The First World War by Martin Gilbert, a popular history I, personally speaking, liked a huge lot.
As for Britain, it partly wrecked and partly transformed a generation of young men, and dealt a massive psychological blow, from which stemmed the motive for Appearsement twenty years later, and the general slow acceptance that maybe the days of the globe painted red were over. It was time to hunker down, step off the stage, and with good reason; over the next few years, all of Europe began to realize that God would not stop anything man does, or anything that could be done to man.
That latter fact is exactly what Orwell writes about in the essay too, at the point where he quotes “Recessional” to illustrate how Kipling was behind the times in not learning the new age’s awful lessons.
Nationalism was not yet a conservative position at that point. At least not in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.You are in fact forgetting that nationalism in the third world was not a conservative position even just a few decades ago!
Toppling the old Empires in order to enable self-determination of nations, was a radical idea and indeed a push for global change.
Also note that I’m talking about conservatives here, not right wingers. I don’t know why you seem to think otherwise but the right wing has had plenty of people one could describe as:
Naive young men who wanted to throw out musty old books and change everything for the better?
I never actually read anything by Kipling before reading a certain article by Orwell that a fellow LWer mentioned. I must admit I don’t consume much poetry in English, yet I was bothered that I knew nothing of the man’s work and did some reading after the reference.
I have stumbled upon this poem and thought it appropriate for some of the topics discussed.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Here is the same old mistake of heartfelt but naive conservatism; assuming that the “common sense” and “old good values” of one’s day, if they seem to bring such security and are so good at shooting down other naive and dangerous ideas, will be good forever. Yet Kipling’s world with all its wisdom ended up impaled on barbed wire, choking on mustard gas and torn to pieces by its own Maxim gun.
And who led it to that hell? Socialists? Unscrupulous wheelers and dealers? Naive young men who wanted to throw out musty old books and change everything for the better? Why, none of the public Kipling used to deride had much to do with it; the gunpowder was lit by those wise old men who carried sacred traditions and led empires. I’m sure that it never even occured to Kipling that, say, Marshal Haig was far more debased, murderous and evil than any of those he railed against.
I was interpreting the poem sub specie aeternitatis rather than in the specific context it was made. To borrow from Robin Hanson, looking at history farmers embracing forager values tend to die out. The Gods of the Copybook Headings do seem to come back.
Now obviously modern technologically progressing industrial civilization seems a sui generis transition, and there are all sorts of good reasons why this time it will be different, but the outside view is Kipling’s view in this case.
And don’t think we can in principle rule out a farmer future. The often discussed Malthusian em scenario is a future where the Gods of the Market-Place finally abandon their folly and tightly embrace the teachings of the Gods of the Copybook Heading.
But this is a rather over-specific interpretation of the emotional and I would argue even rationalist core of the poem. Namely that being bored with “water will wet us” and “fire will burn” causes major problems since wishful thinking quickly works to disconnects us from viable strategies in reality.
Wait, wait, wait. You are wired as a forager; the farmer culture is a fluke amidst a roaring background of change—just as Lovecraft pointed out. Don’t you want to fight? Don’t your deepest instincts say that a stagnant, limited order—even a great and proud one - is much less appealing than a chance to end evil or perish, such as trying to build a FAI? Even if we had a recipe to make a stable and conservative society with “farmer” values, would the intellectual elites of our world want such a future? That’s like leaving the Babyeaters alone to save your own colony in 3WC. Yes, mercy can kill. But I will embrace it anyway.
There is always a dialectic between “farmer” and “forager” values, but it leads in one direction only. Our common dream will either reign or destroy us.
And what about being bored with “burying the brain once the body is dead”, eh? Maybe some fundamentals do brook change, eh? Maybe we should work against them? What does your morality say—not calculation, but intuition?
To clarify when I said abandon their folly, I mean abandon their in the long term (possibly) doomed endeavour. I did not say I would approve of the total victory of farmer values.
I will however say that I have no interest at all in shifting my own values more towards farmer or forager values. So if the current of history is towards one direction I will probably work towards the other.
I have just pointed out that historically this isn’t true. Else there would have never been something to call “farmer values” in the first place. I have also given you a scenario that suggest in the future it might not be so.
And in very specific kinds of ways we have, even in modern times, been becoming more and more farmer rather than more and more forager. When it comes to violence we are still pretty clearly moving towards the domesticated farming human rather the violent wild forager (Check out this paper and Pinker’s book Better angels of our nature ). To cite another example, when it comes to our workplace we are hyper-farmer in our behaviour compared to say people from the 18th century.
Also it stands to reason that natural selection has significantly and perhaps rapidly shifted humans towards farmer values compared to humans before farming in the last 10 000 years.
Perhaps LessWrong posters basically do. But Humans do not have a common dream. Values differ.
My moral intuitions are frustrated by the mere addition paradox. They are fundamentally broken. Robin Hanson is I think right that a Malthusian em world would be glorious. It is not the best of worlds by a long shot, yet neither is it the worst of worlds, it is a possible outcome and it is a better outcome than most uFAIs.
What if we just shut up and calculate?
EY and RH claim to have done this, but differ in their result. To RH this is a possible future we should be pretty much ok with, while EY thinks he should invest superhuman effort to avoid it. I think we would all be better off if more people on LW thought long and hard about this.
Thanks for the answer. You’re certainly wiser than me. Damn, I have so many posts in the pipeline right now; the one with the Warhammer 40k communist eutopia; the one about how “democracy” as in “the rule of the People” is, while being quite real and attainable, a primarily economical and partly cultural matter and has nothing to do with surface ideology and political window-dressing; the one about how I’ll likely end up choosing partial wireheading as an answer to whatever tomorrow throws at me… unfortunately, there are real life concerns in the way, but I promise I’ll deliver someday.
Of course they do. But again:
We are significantly and systematically biased in how we evaluate if the fundamentals have changed.
This is the point of the poem as I read it.
This quote by Thomas Carlyle also carries a message that is basically the same as that of the poem:
Kipling’s son died in the war. And he wrote a multi-volume history “The Irish Guards in The Great War”. I think he had ample opportunity to reflect on Haig as a human being. My impression, from Kipling’s postwar writing, is that he thought that the war was necessary to restrain the Germans.
And I wouldn’t be quite so quick to talk about “Kipling’s world...being torn to pieces.” It’s easy, in retrospect, to see the War as a sharp cataclysm. But it might not have looked quite so drastic at the time. The empire didn’t start shedding territory for another twenty or thirty years—and not until after another world war.
I think it’s a mistake to cast Kipling as a stuffy Colonel Blimp. He was quite interested in technology and progress. He was aware that there were other societies, that disagreed with Victorian England about many things. He wasn’t particularly a believer in the Church. He had enough detachment from his surroundings to make his perspective distinctive and interesting.
It was an enormous, game-changing shock to European mentality; the events of the 30s and 40s would’ve hardly been possible without it—in any form, Fascism or no Fascism. See e.g. The First World War by Martin Gilbert, a popular history I, personally speaking, liked a huge lot.
As for Britain, it partly wrecked and partly transformed a generation of young men, and dealt a massive psychological blow, from which stemmed the motive for Appearsement twenty years later, and the general slow acceptance that maybe the days of the globe painted red were over. It was time to hunker down, step off the stage, and with good reason; over the next few years, all of Europe began to realize that God would not stop anything man does, or anything that could be done to man.
That latter fact is exactly what Orwell writes about in the essay too, at the point where he quotes “Recessional” to illustrate how Kipling was behind the times in not learning the new age’s awful lessons.
Actually, technically yes.
Princip hardly desired any global change; he was a plain old nationalist belonging to a quite right-wing organization.
Nationalism was not yet a conservative position at that point. At least not in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.You are in fact forgetting that nationalism in the third world was not a conservative position even just a few decades ago!
Toppling the old Empires in order to enable self-determination of nations, was a radical idea and indeed a push for global change.
Also note that I’m talking about conservatives here, not right wingers. I don’t know why you seem to think otherwise but the right wing has had plenty of people one could describe as:
Fascists for a start.