On Oct 27, 2009, at 3:37 AM, wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
> There's a great moment in one of Raymond Williams books, I think
> that it's
> the Country and the City, where he looks at the English
> preoccupation with
> the fantasy of a golden age. He shows how this fantasy is invariably
> connected to the England of the author's childhood, and that the
> construction invites an infinite regression
It is. It's a terrific chapter. Me, from long ago:
<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Globalization.html>
The Garden It's common in quasi-radical thinking to imagine a Golden Age with a better set of rulers, now displaced by vile usurpers. In the old days, says Korten, "rich and poor alike...shared a sense of national and community interest." So "the problem is not business or the market per se but a badly corrupted global economic system that is gyrating far beyond human control. The dynamics of this system have become so powerful and perverse that it is becoming increasingly difficult for corporate managers to manage in the public interest, no matter how strong their moral values and commitment."
When was this Golden Age? The 1960s, when GE was filling the Hudson with PCBs? The 1930s, when Chase was banking with Nazis? Or the 1890s, when Carnegie's Pinkertons shot strikers? Was it the 1850s, when British industrialists kidnapped children to work in their factories, and when the locally owned bakeries of London worked their staffs up to 20 hours a day to produce bread fortified with, in the words of a contemporary, "a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead cockroaches and putrid German yeast, not to mention alum, sand and other agreeable mineral ingredients"?
Golden Age myths belong to literature, not nonfictions, but even there they vanish on close inspection. As Raymond Williams tells it in The Country and the City, Leavis' 1930s culture lamented the loss of the "organic community" of the turn of the century; just before the century's turn, Hardy wrote of the lost England of the 1830s; the 1830s had Cobbett writing of the paradise of the 1770s...on back to Piers Plowman. In the Golden Age mode, says Williams, a feudal order is idealized as more "natural"; sure enough, one of the globalization conference panelists described the Middle Ages as a time of "real community." But, for "the uncountable thousands who grew crops and reared beasts only to be looted and burned and led away with tied wrists, this economy, even at peace, was an order of exploitation of a most thoroughgoing kind: a property in men as well as land; a reduction of most men to working animals, tied by forced tribute, forced labour, or 'bought and sold like beasts....'"