Hugh MacDiarmid - Debate at Oxford Union, Dec 3, 1964

12:34AM Apr 16, 2021

Speakers:

Hugh MacDiarmid

Keywords:

people

world

extremism

won

principle

road

man

national liberation

debating

form

atom bomb

called

revolutions

social

mao

nuclear bombs

lose

bombs

art

fear

Mr Chairman and friends, I rise to speak on the floor, in support of what the first speaker said in approval of the propositions now in debate. The Pauline doctrine of moderation in all things seems to me the most abominable, antivital doctrine that has ever been promulgated in the history of mankind. I prefer to take Blake's dictum that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom and is the only road that does."

One can respect any man who, no matter how wrong he may be, acts sincerely according to his lights, but this does not apply to a man who has no lights, who deliberately chooses darkness because his deeds are evil, and he has a guilt complex, which doesn't allow him to come out into the open in his true colors. Our liberties such as they are have been hard-won, and must be continually re-won if they are to be retained, let alone extended. It is becoming not easier but more difficult to keep and extend them. And I see no reason to believe that they can be kept in any other way than they were won in the past.

There are far too few extremists. Far too immense a mass of conformist, unthinking, and indeed moronic people like a millstone 'round the neck of all progress.

Extremism is necessary to act against that deadweight of apathy, indifference and ignorance. I know no national liberation movement that has been won without a terrible struggle, without civil disobedience, violence, war or civil war. No great national movement is ever founded on caution and half-hearted measures. I do not understand at all how, in regard to any principle, it can be claimed that one can go too far. It ceases to be a principle and degenerates into a method of crass opportunism. This has always been recognized in the great utterances of human history. Let me mention one or two of them.

I'm a Scotsman, as you can hear. In the Declaration of Arbroath, way back in 1320, perhaps the greatest democratic pledge of all time, my people, the Scottish people, swore that as long as a hundred of us remained alive, they would never allow themselves to be dominated by the English. "For so long as a hundred of us remain alive, we shall never, under any conditions, submit to the domination of the English. It is not for glory or riches or honors that we fight, but only for liberty, which no good man will consent to lose but with his life." My people have done little but betray that oath ever since.

Luckily, there have been and are others of a different caliber. I agree wholeheartedly with the words of two men, though I do not share their concept of what constitutes freedom. First of all then, it is entirely fitting that the memorial stone at Runnymede should bear the inscription: "This acre of English ground was given to the United States of America by the people of Britain in memory of John F. Kennedy", followed by this quotation from his inaugural address, "Let every nation know that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, support any friend, oppose any foe, to ensure the survival and success of liberty."

I have as little regard as I have for the source of the sentences we are debating tonight: a man who, when he offered blood, toil, tears and sweat, announced his policy in these words: "It is victory, victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all the terror. Victory, however hard and long the road may be." Mr. Winston Churchill.

Extremism is a word that has been badly prejudiced, and is generally perhaps equated with violence, but it is necessary to remember, as the Independent Television Authority insisted the other day, that while conflict, the clash of persons, offices and personalities is a major element in drama, and not least in great drama, persecution, bullying, intimidation, humiliation and cruelty are forms of mental violence. And it is well to remember that the suffering thus caused may exceed that caused by physical violence though not a hand has been raised to strike. One of the main reasons for misunderstanding and failure consistently to maintain and pursue liberty and justice. In this, and other so-called civilized — and for the most part, so-called Christian — countries, is the continued confinement of the people of these countries, to a mere earthly eudemonism with Christian nuances that should a religious mental climate, which keeps our harmonies and solutions on so contemptibly narrower a level than the conflicts and tragedies which encompass our lives.

It is true that it is only an individual, or a few individuals who constitute the spearhead of the extremism I am defending. But in this connection, it is necessary to remember that all our arts and sciences, all we comprise in the term "civilization," been built up by a very small percentage of the population, a tiny percentage that has been a constant throughout historical time, and that, if that minority were destroyed, the masses of mankind could do nothing whatever to reconstitute these arts and sciences, that so-called civilization, The art no[t] o[f] compromise. The ruthlessness and egocentricity of the office, there is no limit. That is the only possible moral we can take in this matter.

That is why the cultural issue today is the vital one. The elimination of human drudgery that's promised by automation, giving abundant leisure, enabling what Seán O'Casey called the sensitive extension of the world. Mao Zedong was right when he said, "What is the strength of the imperialist? It lies only in the unconsciousness of the people." The consciousness of the people is the basic question, not explosives, or weapons, or atom bombs, but the man who handles them. He is still to be educated. But he has been slowly but surely educated.

The revolutions in Korea, Cuba and Algeria succeeded. These revolutions changed the balance of world power, saved the Soviet Union from its long, capitalistic encirclement, backed the population of the socialist nations, and opened the way for national liberation movements in three continents. All these revolutions were won against an imperialism that wielded nuclear bombs and threatened many times to use them.

Would the world have been safer, more peaceful today, if China had yielded in 1952, MacArthur's atomic blackmail and let the United States Forces pass through Manchuria against the Soviet Union? If Ho Chi Minh had lifted the siege of Dien Bien Phu when Dulles twice offered the atom bomb to France? Or if Algerians had obeyed the French communist towards the peaceful road? Or if Cubans had feared to provoke the H bombs, only 90 miles away? Oh, these were perfect targets, but a bomb dropped on Havana might have lost all Latin America through United States, And bombs on populist Shanghai, or beautiful ancient Peking, or the Yellow River dikes might well have lost Asia. 20 years ago, Mao said the people of the world come against it. Is there not in this some truth? The people of our world that are only partly conscious but they know enough to hate the nuclear bombs. When they are truly conscious, they will know how to end them.

Is it not then true that the basic question is the consciousness of the people. To confuse the people's consciousness is the deadly sin. Mao once said, "Humanity is only in its infancy. When it is full grown, what will it make of our world?" I'm not arguing on humanistic humanitarian lines. J.J. Thomson said humanism won't do, now the basis for it is gone. What is needed is transformation.

Lord Brain at the Southampton Conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Sir Leon Bagrit, in his great lectures have both stressed the need for a great human mutation... a mutation is indeed in process. And the fact that we are entering today, a world with no precedent in human experience, a world which will profoundly change the whole nature of man. But I'm confident it will be a world in which the principle of which I'm contending will hold good, the principle of extremism, expressed by a Scottish poet, when he said, He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who dare not put it to the touch To win or lose it all.

The principle expression, my favorite passage from the Bible, which runs "Because thou art neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm, therefore, will I spit thee out of my mouth."

The other leg of the propositions we're debating, justice, the only decent thing that a man can stand for is in terms of the old cry, "Let there be justice though the heavens should fall."

I'm going to finish up with a quotation from a poem of my own.

It is no longer just matters of polite argument among well bred people. But the very substance and status of our life and death issues, our most crucial concerns that have become shams and unveracities. That is the appalling task that confronts us, not defying truth, that monsterous and shocking opposite of the foundations of society, scandalous in its gross unfamiliarity, only to be placed with girded loins and hearths of trebled brass dimly. We live in a world that has become intolerable as the subject of passive reflection. What is our response to the unescapable reality? Are we too like these miserable little cliques that turn because of theoretic inadequacy, from social causation from the point of positive action, and try to find form and significance in pure feeling itself, transplanted and reimagined, seeking the meaning of experience in the phenomena of experience, pure sensation, becoming an ultimate value in the neurotic and mystical attempt to give physicality and intellectual content, in the sensitizing of nerves already raw, meaningless emotion aroused automatically without satisfaction or education, as in melodrama. Man can find his own dignity, only in action now. Most people live by a social discipline become intolerably artificial, a construction whose only merit is its security, they feel that. They feel the pettiness and emptiness of a social form, repeated beyond the day of its absolute necessity. But they feel the possible peers that always threaten those who break through a form. They are right to fear it, but every creation risks being a destruction only, yet as long as there is room for creation. Creation must be risked.