As a precocious, wordy young man Auden liked to describe his self constructed moral philosophy as 'austere humanism'. We are all a type of crude moral philosopher as children, deeply exercised by questions of fairness and truth and our place in the world. We chuck up the house that will be our life long shelter from the stuff we happen to find around us, on the foundations we are provided. It is easy enough to make minor adjustments to it, adding or subtracting bits here and there to fit our circumstances, but for anyone to change the fundamental structure is rare, since to do so is to risk its total collapse.
Auden held to his 'austere humanism' until his later years when a noxious combination of personal pain, ideological disappointment and voguish, hegemonic fin de siècle philosophy drove him towards a morally exhausted religiosity. While still labouring to keep the walls up he wrote the following in his long, tense pre-war poem, 1st September 1939:
There is no such thing as the State
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
For someone with the cataclysm of the First World War at his back, the cataclysm of the great depression all around him and an unknowable cataclysm in front, it’s a modest and sensible remark. Like it or not the mayhem in our nature is always our undoing and if love is life then love is law. After the total collapse into animal barbarity that was the Second World War, a monument to the higher law of human life, the U.N, was duly erected.
What emerged as the most horrifying aspect of Fascism was not the addled bigotry, the mawkish self pity or the sheer perversity but the mechanical disregard for the intrinsic value of human life. It’s the most deeply horrifying aspect of violent regimes, the idea that that human life can be reduced to and manipulated like numbers, that it may even be sensible to do so. This vacuous crap was at the heart of the Fascist ethos and appeal; they were modernizers, rationalists, sensible men making tough decisions without the impediment of sentimentality. It bought them tolerance at home and abroad, let them sit at the same table as the great statesmen of the day, gave them time and space to build their arsenal.
In my life time I have had it explained to me that those unable to work will eventually die off and that universal human rights are simply unrealistic. Of all the elements of fascism we have tried to suppress, lack of respect for human life is the most intransigent and common and the one we have done least to effectively combat.
In his dotage Auden amended the last line of the above stanza to read ‘we must love one another anddie’, an empty little phrase worthy of the fatuous nihilism of Michel Houellebecq or Gaspar Noé. The editors of his life’s work chose to ignore it. By this point his walls had collapsed and he made no effort to rebuild them. Why did he give up on humanity? He was assailed by anger, dishonesty, disillusionment, betrayal, stupidity, arrogance; all the weak and nasty behaviour this weak and nasty species is prone to.
You can let your humanity collapse as easily as folding a hand of cards; just stand there and watch the idiot monkeys surrounding you knock it to its foundations. We can let the higher law whimper out and go back to isolated village life, let the spaces between us grow wild and dangerous again. I’m not saying we shouldn’t and there is a chance some of us might even survive that way for a while, as long as we can get our heads together for just long enough to avoid nuclear war. It massively increases our risks, it devalues our lives and cheapens us, but if we are truly unable or unwilling to conquer our fears then perhaps it is the best we can hope for and the most we deserve.
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