From Jenni Diski's spirited 32(21)
LRB (4 Nov 2010) review of
Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World (Blue Door 2010) by HRH the Prince of Wales, Tony Juniper & Ian Skelly -
Since the late 19th century a particular kind of nature spirituality has been dear to the hearts of the half-educated, or angry, or ineffectual (if only in their own heads) English and Anglo-Irish upper classes and landed gentry. It derives in part from Neoplatonism mixed with naturalistic pantheism and more than a dollop of Jungian spiritus mundi; also in part from a general feeling that the lovely world into which they were born entitled has been spoiled by, well, too many people and machines, and life being made warmer and easier, and all that sort of unpleasant thing. From the 1890s onwards there was the Rosicrucians-Golden-Dawn-Hermetic mob, picked up by Yeats and friends, Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy, and various ladylike adaptations of Eastern philosophies; later the pro-Fascist Jorian Jenks joined Lady Eve Balfour's Soil Association as well as Kinship in Husbandry, started by the enthusiast for early Nazism Rolf Gardiner; Kathleen Raine converted from a modernist poet to found the Temenos Academy (current patron the Prince of Wales), with its Ten Basic Principles: 'Acknowledgment of Divinity', 'Spiritual Vision, as the life-breath of civilisation' etc. In the 1970s the wealthy businessmen and members of the Clermont Club Teddy Goldsmith and John Aspinall (the latter more concerned for his captive tigers than their keepers who were occasionally killed by them, and for nanny murderers than the murdered nanny) started the Ecologist magazine, supported by Laurens van der Post (spiritual mentor to the Prince of Wales), which suggested in its first issue that it might be an idea to offer the public 'a bounty for submitting to sterilisation'.
What makes me think of this darker side of the history of English ecology and nature-loving is partly the Prince of Wales's own frequent references to some of those organisations, people and ideas (the Emerald Tablet of Hermes and the (apocryphal) Gospel of Mary Magdalene get super-large-print quotes, along with Fritz Schumacher, Gandhi and St Augustine), but also his repeated use of phrases like 'ancient wisdom', 'the golden thread', 'integrated medicine' and his insistence that the world has been going to rack and ruin ever since Galileo was so stubborn about the planets and that awful Francis Bacon wrote The New Organon to usher in the Enlightenment with its terrible materialism. Only 400 years after this disaster, along came modernism, which HRH identifies exclusively with brutalism and quotes as its exemplar, not just Le Corbusier, but more importantly in his view, Marinetti (more Futurist, I think, than Modernist). And with all this unnatural badness, and the Industrial Revolution too, the ancient wisdom handed down by 'the people' has just plain disappeared. Except for a knowing few, the masses have lost the golden thread, stopped listening to the harmony of the spheres, rejected beauty and love ('no brain-scanner has ever managed to photograph a thought, nor a piece of love for that matter') and forgotten how to live according to the natural all-controlling rhythm of the planet. ...
This ancient wisdom stuff is ineffably silly. When and where was it taken seriously? Most of 'ancient' history consists of small populations making a subsistence living in the only way they could with the technology available to them. There never was a non-materialist time, except in the world of magic and the kind of religion and social organisation that made sure the peasants provided a tithe to keep the priestly authorities free to think up theology, and the worldly elite capable of protecting and grabbing land for themselves. Good stories are essential to people, of course, but everyone lives (and always has) within their means when they have to, and beyond them (think potlatch as well as credit cards) when they can. For all the talk of the good, spirit and Nature Herself, I suspect that what HRH is really missing is feudalism. And here's an awful thought for those who are taken with treading Nature's path: if as the natural beings we are, we have developed technologies that allow us to fulfil material wishes that might cause the planet to give up the ghost, then are we not just doing the work of Nature Herself?
As readers of this blog might suspect, Mr Windsor has received the thumbs up from quantum holism guru Ervin Laszlo -
A remarkable vision of a Prince with a remarkable and timely vision of his own — a book to read both by those who take an interest in the life and work of the Prince of Wales, and those who take an interest in, and a measure of responsibility for, our common future.
