Doug Henwood wrote:
> Keynes's point doesn't depend on how pervasive the practices were;
> it's about complacency in the face of imminent disaster. He was
> summarizing attitudes of the European elite on the eve of WW I. If the
> attitude is even more widespread now, you could read it as
> strengthening his point rather than undermining it.
Also, the psychology that Bush embodies - as expressed in both the neoconservatism and the Book of Revelation fundamentalism - is not an improvement over the unconsciously anchored blindness that produced both WW I and the peace settlement that contributed significantly to setting the psychological stage for WW II.
"THE power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the European family. Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin, which Germany began, by a Peace which, if it is carried into effect, must irnpair yet further, when it might have restored, the delicate, complicated organization, already shaken and broken by war, through which alone the Eurepean peoples can employ themselves and live.
"In England the outward aspect of life does not yet teach us to feel or realize in the least that an age is over. We are busy picking up the threads of our life where we dropped them, with this difference only, that many of us seem a good deal richer than we were before. Where we spent millions before the war, we have now learnt that we can spend hundreds of millions and apparently not suffer for it. Evidently we did not exploit to the utmost the possibilities of our economic life. We look, therefore, not only to a return to the comforts of 1914, but to an immense broadening and intensification of them. All classes alike thus build their plans, the rich to spend more and save less, the poor to spend more and work less.
"But perhaps it is only in England (and America) that it is possible to be so unconscions. In continental Europe the earth heaves and no one but is aware of the rumblings. There it is not just a matter of extravagance or 'labor troubles'; but of life and death, of starvation and existence, and of the fearful convulsions of a dying civilization.
"For one who spent in Paris the greater part of the six months which succeeded the Armistice an occasional visit to London was a strange experience. England still stands outside Europe. Europe's voiceless tremors do not reach her. Europe is apart and England is not of her flesh and body. But Europe is solid with herself. France, Germany, Italy, Austria and Holland, Russia and Roumania and Poland, throb together, and their structure and civilization are essentially one. They flourished together, they have rocked together in a war, which we, in spite of our enormous contributions and sacrifices (like though in a less degree than America), economically stood outside, and they may fall together. In this lies the destructive significance of the Peace of Paris. If the European Civil War is to end with France and Italy abusing their momentary victorious power to destroy Germany and Austria-Hungary now prostrate, they invite their own destruction also, being so deeply and inextricably intertwined with their victims by hidden psychic and economic bonds. At any rate an Englishman who took part in the Conference of Paris and was during those months a member of the Supreme Economic Council of the Allied Powers, was bound to become, for him a new experience, a European in his cares and outlook. There, at the nerve center of the European system, his British preoccupations must largely fall away and he must be haunted by other and more dreadful specters. Paris was a nightmare, and every one there was morbid. A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous scene; the futility and smallness of man before the great events confronting him; the mingled significance and unreality of the decisions; levity, blindness, insolence, confused cries from without, -all the elements of ancient tragedy were there. Seated indeed amid the theatrical trappings of the French Saloons of State, one could wonder if the extraordinary visages of Wilson and of Clemenceau, with their fixed hue and unchanging characterization, were really faces at all and not the tragi-comic masks of some strange drama or puppet-show.
"The proceedings of Paris all had this air of - extraordinary importance and unimportance at the same time. The decisions seemed charged with consequences to the future of human society; yet the air whispered that the word was not flesh, that it was futile, insignificant, of no effect, dissociated from events and one felt most strongly the impression, described by Tolstoy in War and Peace or by Hardy in The Dynasts, of events marching on to their fated conclusion uninfluenced and unaffected by the cerebrations of Statesmen in Council:
Spirit of the Years:
Observe that all wide sight and self-command
Deserts these throngs now driven to demonry
By the Imminent Unrecking. Nought remains
But vindictiveness here amid the strong,
And there amid the weak an impotent rage.
Spirit of the Pities:
Why prompts the Will so senseless-shaped a doing?
Spirit of the Years:
I have told thee that It works unwittingly,
As one possessed not judging."
<http://historicaltextarchive.com/books.php?op=viewbook&bookid=12&cid=1>
By the way, in contrast to Nietzsche and Heidegger, Keynes regards the "Will" that "works unwittingly, As one possessed not judging" as a "nightmare" rather than as human "authenticity." In appropriating the insightful treatment of this in "ancient tragedy," he also appropriates its claim that "the most precious of our possessions is the power to reason wisely."
Ted