Outright opposition to modernity is often dismissed as backward-looking or “reactionary” and associated with a rigidly hierarchical or aristocratic outlook. But there is another tradition of resistance to the modern world that has very different ideals and can serve as the basis of an old-new radical philosophy of natural and cosmic belonging, inspiring humanity to step away from the nightmare transhumanist slave-world into which we are today being herded. In this important series of ten essays, our contributor W.D. James, who teaches philosophy in Kentucky, USA, explores the roots and thinking of what he terms “egalitarian anti-modernism”.
Hidden somewhere ahead of us is the fair valley of Rivendell in the Last Homely House.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
In this essay, we’ll look at two imaginative works by William Morris, both of which are presented as narrating ‘dreams’. The first is A Dream of John Ball (1888), which recounts the rebel priest who played a role in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the second is his utopian romance, News From Nowhere (1890). In both, Morris plays on the double meaning of ‘dream’: as both what may happen while we sleep and as an aspiration. I’ll suggest that the first can be read as representing the aspiration for Justice and the second for Home.
The dream of justice
Little is known of the historical John Ball beyond the facts that he was an important leader of the Peasants’ Revolt and was imprisoned for heresy, possibly along the lines of the Lollards, and eventually hanged and drawn and quartered in the presence of the king. Probably the most famous line in Morris’s version is taken from an account of a sermon the historical Ball preached in Kent: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”i He went on to argue for a radical egalitarianism.
Morris’s novella is fast paced and masterful, after a fashion. It includes many observations on the architecture of medieval Kent as well as loving descriptions of the local flora and fauna. Morris in fact had a keen appreciation and understanding of nature and loved to move about England observing the regional variations and admiring the ancient churches. In the opening of the story, he takes a swipe at “the sordid utilitarianism that cares not and knows not of beauty and history.”
If the historical Ball was something like a Lollard, he was probably less mystical than he is presented as in Morris’s portrayal. The Lollards did have some egalitarian tendencies, at least in regard to the church. The main thing which seems to have gotten them in trouble though was their understanding of the eucharist. They put forward a version of the real presence (the doctrine that Christ is really present in the elements of the eucharist, bread and wine) known as consubstantiation. This teaching basically holds that the elements materially remain bread and wine, but spiritually become the body and blood of Jesus. In creating a division between the material world and spiritual world this represents a modernizing development. It is usually interpreted as a step toward Protestantism. This is in contrast to the orthodox doctrine of transubstantiation which holds that the essence of the elements changes to the blood and body of Jesus while the accidental properties remain those of the bread and wine (it has all the characteristics of bread and wine but is really the body and blood of Jesus). The Lollard doctrine is a step towards rationalizing faith while the Catholic doctrine is officially a musterion, a mystery.
However that may be, Morris places an interesting theology of solidarity into the mouth of Ball. To me, it has the ring of an authentic medieval heresy. In Chapter 4 he has Ball give this peroration:
Forsooth, ye have heard it said that ye shall do well in this world that in the world to come ye may live happily for ever; do ye well then, and have your reward both on earth and in heaven; for I say to you that earth and heaven are not two but one; and this one is that which ye know, and are each one of you a part of, to wit, the Holy Church, unless ye slay it. Forsooth, brethren, will ye murder the Church any one of you and go forth a wandering man and lonely, even as Cain did who slew his brother? Ah, my brothers, what an evil doom this is, to be an outcast from the Church, to have none to love you and to speak with you, to be without fellowship! Forsooth brothers, fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death: and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them, and the life that is in it, that ye do them, and the life that is in it, that shall live on and on for ever, and each one you a part of it, while many a man’s life upon the earth from the earth shall wane.
Morris has Ball reproduce the rhetorical pattern of Jesus in the New Testament with the structure: you have heard it said, but I say to you. Jesus does this when he is about to turn the world upside down. Contrary to the Lollard tendency, he is bringing heaven and earth closer together (probably too close to remain orthodox, hence the ring of authentic heresy). The “you have heard it said” portion is the view being attacked, basically, be obedient here on earth so that in heaven you may be rewarded.ii Ball argues that heaven and earth are one in the Church. Now, what is the Church? This turns on the meaning of ‘fellowship’. This is a prominent word used in the New Testament to describe the life of the Church. In the Greek in which the New Testament is written, it is koinonia. Interestingly, this word is also central to Aristotle but always translated differently. The opening line of Aristotle’s Politics is often translated as “As we see that every city is a society, and every society is established for some good purpose…” or ‘society’ is translated as ‘sharing’.iii However translated, the word there is koinonia. So, when the New Testament writers, and Morris’s Ball, invoke ‘fellowship’, they are making two claims: the church is a polity and the essence of polity is sharing.
On this reckoning, ‘the Church’ = fellowship/sharing. Fellowship= heaven=life. Separation = hell = death. So, the true path (Morris’s Ball is echoing the Hebrew/Christin ‘two paths’ tradition: life vs. death) is the path of fellowship/society/sharing. This is frankly impressive theological stuff Morris is dishing out here.
To drive the message home, Morris has Ball go on:
Yea, forsooth, once again I saw as of old, the great treading down the little, and the strong beating down the weak, and cruel men fearing not, and kind men daring not and wise men caring not; and the saints in heaven forbearing and yet bidding me not to forbear; forsooth, I knew once more that he who doeth well in fellowship, and because of fellowship, shall not fail though he seem to fail to-day, but in days hereafter shall he and his work yet be alive, and men be holpen by them to strive again and yet again; and yet indeed even that was little, since, forsooth to strive was my pleasure and my life.
This entails the understanding that the ‘strong’ and ‘cruel’ are sinning against fellowship/sharing. For Morris’s Ball, it is in fellowship that the earthly and heavenly draw together.
Morris is presenting a ‘dream’ of justice. What does fellowship entail? Not oppression and the triumph of the strong over the weak. The work of justice is to seek fellowship. The strong and the great seek not fellowship but dominion. They sunder the world apart.
The dream of home
Now we turn to what is surely Morris’s most famous work, News From Nowhere. I have to confess that I do not really like this book. It doesn’t have a very sophisticated understanding of human psychology and, hence, I can’t really see any society, even a utopian one, working as Morris presents it. It just doesn’t ‘work’ or ‘hang together’ for me. Nevertheless, it does have its merits.
News is also presented as a dream had by a member returning from a Socialist League meeting. It is presented as showing what would happen on “the Morrow of the Revolution,” that is it presents a picture of a fully mature socialist society.iv It is solidly in the classical utopian tradition of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), though it is nowhere near so well crafted, funny, and interesting a book as that one. ‘Utopia’ can variously be translated as ‘good place’ or ‘no place’; Morris’s title reflects the latter. Like other literary utopias Morris presents the story from the perspective of a visitor being shown around an ideal society.
To me, there are primarily three things that stand out as noteworthy in the book. First, is its relationship to history. Usually, utopias present a hyper-modern view of life in the utopia: advanced technology, odd ‘futuristic’ clothing and architecture, etc…. Morris does just the opposite. His good society is not based on the ‘progress’ of technology, but on people seeking the good. That is a fundamental point. And, if the good is the objective, might it not be found as much in the past as in the future? Morris describes everything in his imagined society as beautiful. For him that basically meant pre-modern. So, the bridges and homes show very traditional influences, and a complete lack of modern utilitarianism, in their design. Morris describes the fashion of the first person he meets after having ‘woken up’ in the new world: “His dress was not like any modern work-a-day clothes I had seen, but would have served very well as a costume for a picture of fourteenth century life…”.v Further, there is a decrease in the amount of technology used. Only when there is some particularly hard or odious work that needs done is much technology employed. Most manufacture facilitates enjoyment of the work. It seems liberating to think we could borrow heavily from the good of the past as we build our future.
Second, Morris pays a lot of attention to nature and its beauty. As in A Dream of John Ball, he loves describing the plants and animals of the New England. It is part of his point that wildlife has bounced back and is abundant. He also enjoys describing the farming that occurs there and all the crops. Also unlike most literary utopias (but like most actual experiments in utopian community building), Morris’s society is mainly rural and agricultural. Large cities are pretty much gone, replaced by human scaled communities with human scaled buildings. Further, while utopias are by definition human engineered and constructed things, a large part of what makes Morris’s society appealing is the ever presence of nature. Morris is saying a good society would be as much about letting nature do what nature does as it is about humans actively doing things.
Third, while he uses some of the same devices as other writers of utopias to show the shift in values (for instance, gold is valued only as a good and beautiful metal to use in crafts, not as a commodity, whereas More had actually had it used for bathroom fixtures, which is just funnier), he does make some sharp observations on the importance of this. In a discussion of love and sex, the person explaining these matters to the visitor explains: “You must understand once for all that we have changed these matters; or rather, that our way of looking at them has changed, as we have changed within the last two hundred years.”vi He recounts how love and sex were entangled with property in the former times. Hence, there were divorce courts which were “lunatic affairs.”vii In the comment above, he first suggested that love and sex had changed, but then corrected himself to say how they are thought of has changed. With the removal of private property, they are freed to be what they actually are and this can more clearly be seen from the new, socialist, perspective. So, be removing encumbrances and distortions caused by forms of domination, people can see and know the world more clearly.
Ultimately, the world of Nowhere is ‘home’ manifesting itself. Things are natural, not contrived. Beauty is attended to instead of calculation. Love, sex, and fellowship are allowed to develop naturally and form the focus of life together. Work is done as part of the natural rhythm of things in a way that is humanly pleasing.
The politics of home
J.R.R. Tolkien was a big admirer of Morris, especially his fantasy novels which we have not looked at, such as The Well at the World’s End and The House of the Wolfings. He paid homage by borrowing the names of some of Morris’s characters for use in his own fiction, including the name Gandolf from the former book.
Tolkien too focuses on the theme of ‘home’. The entire Shire of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is an exploration of a people who value home. They have tidy, and, most importantly, comfortable Hobbit holes in which to dwell. They focus on the homely arts of cuisine and socializing. The whole drama of the Lord of the Rings trilogy can be seen as a meditation on home and home under threat (by evil, by technology, by tyranny).
Tolkien’s politics are sometimes referred to as ‘anarcho-monarchism.’ He basically thought some form of government was needed, but the medieval monarchs provided the best example by not governing very much. Below a symbolic unifying figure, there was not much government at all. He observed:
…the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men…. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. At least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediaevals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari [literally, I do not wish to be bishoped] as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Grant me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you dare call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that—after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world—is that it works and has only worked when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way . . . . There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.viii
Figuring how to get along “in the good old inefficient human way” may be the pursuit most relevant to our times.
Liberty and the young
I was struck last year when having a discussion with a group of my students on personal liberty. It seemed to be their consensus, minus one libertarian law student and one traditionalist Catholic, that personal liberty was not a big issue. They accepted that they were heavily surveilled by tech companies and the government. This was the cost of the government keeping them ‘safe.’ As long as government upheld its end of the bargain, they were fine with it. Safety über alles.
At least since the rise of the modern administrative state we have probably been less free than we imagined. However, as an American, I was more used to people being jealous of their liberties. ‘Don’t tread on me!’ My students are what we could properly think of as the COVID generation: they were in their high school and early college years during the period of lockdowns, mask mandates, and all of that. I tend to think that they are actually not so much enamored of totalitarian safety regimes as they would just like the world to be a bit more normal and they are trying to plug along (a very percentage also seem to suffer from anxiety).
I’m not sure that people naturally value liberty. Or, at the least, any natural inclination in that direction can be diminished with proper education, propaganda, and conditioning. Of course, most regimes usually go to the trouble to try to disguise their tyranny; to disguise the chains or at least cover them with velvet. I think that if we want young people to value liberty it would be best to educate them to value it. People like Morris and Tolkien could be very useful in that regard. Morris is trying to carry out the tasks of classical education dating back to Plato and Aristotle: to awaken and cultivate a love of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. It is in the pursuit of these that liberty is essential and gains its positive value. An education in liberty would have at least three components: love of goods worthy of pursuit, a critical understanding of the structure put in place to hinder that pursuit, an understanding of the practices of liberty. First resistance, then creation.
i William Morris, A Dream of John Ball. My edition lacks publishing information and page numbers, so I will just note quotes using quotation marks or offsets.
ii I have no idea if this is the basis of the song, The Preacher and the Slave, by the Catholic anarchist and Wobby Joe Hill, but the idea is exactly the same. A nice version of the song can be listened to here: The Preacher and the Slave by Joe Hill – YouTube
iii Aristotle, Politics, Translated by William Ellis, Graphyco, 2022, p. 10.
iv William Morris, News From Nowhere, Dover, 2004, p. 1.
v Ibid, p. 5.
vi Ibid, p. 50.
vii Ibid, p. 49.
viii Quoted by David Bently Hart in “Anarcho-Monarchism,’ First Things, 2010, Anarcho-Monarchism | David Bentley Hart | First Things
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