by K. R. Bolton
The situation today has proved Fairburn correct, with the transnational corporations defining culture in terms of international marketing, breaking down national cultures in favor of a global consumer standard. This mass global consumer culture is most readily definable with the term “American.”369
Fairburn opposed state patronage of the arts, however, believing that this cut the artist off from the cycle of life, of family and work, making art contrived and forced instead. He also opposed the prostitution of the nation and culture to tourism, more than ever the great economic panacea for New Zealand, along with world trade. In a letter to the NZ Herald he laments the manner by which the Minister of Tourism wished to promote Maori culture as a tourist sales pitch to foreigners:
May I suggest that there is no surer way in the long run to destroy Maori culture than to take the more colorful aspects of it and turn them into a “tourist attraction.” If the elements of Maori culture are genuine and have any place outside of a museum, they will be kept alive by the Maori people themselves for their own cultural (not commercial) needs. The use of Maori songs and dances to tickle the pockets of passing strangers, and the encouragement of this sort of cheapjackery by the pakeha are degrading to both races. . . . And the official encouragement of Maori songs, dances, and crafts as side-shows to amuse tourists is both vulgar and harmful.370
This situation has since become endemic in New Zealand, but where once in Fairburn’s time there was the spectacle of the plastic Maori tiki made in Japan and sold in tourism shops, Maori culture has now been imposed as the “New Zealand culture” per se, as a selling point not just for tourism, but for world trade. Conversely, opening up New Zealand to the world economically has a concomitant opening up to cosmopolitanism, which usually means what is defined as “American.” And the younger generations of Maori, uprooted from the rural life of Fairburn’s time, have succumbed to alien pseudo-culture as conveyed by Hollywood and MTV. It is part of the “one world,” “internationalized commodity standard” Fairburn saw unfolding.
In discussing the question as to whether there is any such thing as “standard English,” Fairburn nonetheless affirmed his opposition to cultural standardization, including that between those of the same nationality, in favor of “personalism” and “regionalism,” distinguished from “individualism,” which in our own time we have seen in the form of a pervasive selfishness raised up as social, political, and economic doctrines. Fairburn writes:
There is, first of all, the question whether it is a desirable thing for all English-speaking people to conform to a common standard in their style of speech. My own instinct leads me to resist standardisation of human behaviour in all possible contexts. I believe in ‘personalism’ (which is not quite the same thing as individualism), in regionalism, and in organic growth rather than mechanical order. With Kipling, I “thank God for the diversity of His creatures.”371
A “mechanical order” pushing cultural standardization across the world is the present phase of capitalism, now called “globalization,” of which Fairburn was warning immediately after the Second World War.
THE DOMINION OF USURY
In 1935 Fairburn completed Dominion, his epic poem about New Zealand.372 Much of it is an attack upon greed and usury, and is reminiscent of Ezra Pound’s Canto XLV: “With Usura.”373
The Labour Party’s acquisition of power gave Fairburn little cause for optimism. Trussell writes that Fairburn’s view was that the Labour government might introduce “a new dimension in social welfare, but apart from that he felt it to be conformist.”374
Dominion begins by identifying the usurer as the lord of all:
The house of the governors, guarded by eunuchs,
and over the arch of the gate
these words enraged:
HE WHO IMPUGNS THE USURERS IMPERILS
THE STATE.375
Those who serve the governors are picked from the enslaved, well paid for their services to “keep the records of decay” with “cold hands . . . computing our ruin on scented cuffs.” For the rest of the people there is the “treadmill . . . of the grindstone god, and people look in desperation to the “shadow of a red mass” of communism”’376 Like Pound in “With Usura,”377 Fairburn saw the parasitic factor of usury as the corruptor of creativity and work, where labor becomes a necessary burden rather than a craft with a social function wider than that of profit.
For the enslaved, the treadmill;
the office and adoration
of the grindstone god;
the apotheosis of the means,
the defiling of the end;
the debasement of the host
of the living; the celebration
of the black mass that casts
the shadow of a red mass.378
And . . .
In this air the idea dies;
or spreads like plague; emotion runs
undamned, its limits vague,
its flush disastrous as the rolling floods,
the swollen river’s rush; or dries
to a thin trickle, lies
in flat pools where swarms of flies
clouding the stagnant brim
breed from thick water, clustered slime.379
The unemployed and those on relief work, as Fairburn had been when he returned to New Zealand, were witnesses “to the constriction of life” which was necessary to maintain the financial system. Nor did the countryside escape the ravages of the system. The farms are “mortgaged in bitterness . . .” to the banks. “A load of debt for the foetus” dramatizes how the debt system of usury compounds generation after generation, with each being placed further into serfdom to the banks, while the banker is lauded as an upstanding businessman, the new aristocrat of the age of decline that Spengler holds emerges in the “winter” cycle of Civilization. The city is:
a paper city built on the rock of debt,
held fast against all winds by the paperweight of debt.
The living saddled with debt.
A load of debt for the foetus . . .
And all over the hand of the usurer,
Bland angel of darkness,
Mild and triumphant and much looked up to.380
Colonization had bought here the ills of the Mother Country, and debt underscored the lot:
They divided the land,
Some for their need,
And some for sinless, customary greed . . .
Fairburn’s answer is a return to the land.
Fair earth, we have broken our idols:
and after the days of fire we shall come to you for the stones of a new temple.381
The destruction of the usurers’ economic system would result in the creation of a new order: the land freed of debt would yield the foundation for “a new temple” other than that of the usurer. Fairburn’s belief in the soil as a key ingredient to cultural renewal and freedom brought him also to the cause of farmers, then allied to Social Credit.
ORGANIC FARMING
In 1940 Fairburn began to advocate organic farming, and he became editor of Compost, the magazine of the New Zealand Humic Compost Club. Fairburn considered that the abuse of the land led to the destruction of civilization. The type of civilization that arises depends on its type of farming, he said. Food remains the basis of civilization, but industrial farming is spiritually barren.
The type of community Fairburn sought is based on farming. Industry, by contrast, gives rise to fractured, contending economic classes. Industry reduces life to a matter of economics alone.
In a lecture to the Auckland Fabian Society in 1944 Fairburn stated:
It is natural for men to be in close contact with the earth; and it is natural for them to satisfy their creative instincts by using their hands and brains. Husbandry, “the mother of all crafts,” satisfies these two needs, and for that reason should be the basic activity in our social life—the one that gives color and character to all the rest.382
In the same lecture, he spells out h
is ideal society:
The decentralization of the towns, the establishment of rural communities with a balanced economic life, the co-operative organization of marketing, of transport and of necessary drudgery, the controlled use of manufacturing processes . . .
In 1946 Fairburn elaborated again on his ideal of decentralization, regarding the corporation as soulless and the state as the biggest of corporations:
The best status for men is that of independence. The small farmer, the small tradesman, the individual craftsman working on his own—these have been the mainstay of every stable civilization in history. The tendency for large numbers of men to forsake, or to have taken from them, their independent status, and to become hangers-on of the state, has invariably been the prelude to decay.383
“The broad aspect of soil politics engaged Rex’s imagination: the consciousness that the fate of civilization and the shape of its culture depended ultimately on its style of farming,” writes Trussell.
He hankered after a community that was itself “organic” rather than broken into a meaningless series of economic functions, and as far as he could see, the community that was founded on industrialized farming was spiritually barren even though, in the short term, it could produce huge surpluses of food.384
The influence of Spengler obviously remained, as did William Blake, and the aim was clearly to return through agriculture and the defeat of “Money” via Social Credit, to the “Spring” epoch of Western Civilization; an era prior to industrialization, the “City” as a Spenglerian metaphor for intellectualism and its ruler, Money, and all the other symptoms of decay analyzed by Spengler.
However utopian, Fairburn’s vision was still vaguely possible in the New Zealand of his day. Today, the vision is inconceivable considering not only the rate of debt at every level of society, but due to a steady elimination of the independent farmer in favor of the corporation. If Fairburn were alive today he might well return to his original belief that such a revitalized society could only be implemented after a period of crisis, and via a dictatorship, as he had written in The New English Weekly in regard to Social Credit.
NEW BARBARISM—THE U.S. & THE U.S.S.R.
Fairburn feared that the victors of the Second World War, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., would usher in a new age of barbarism. In 1946, he wrote in an unpublished article for the NZ Herald:
The next decade or two we shall see American economic power and American commercial culture extended over the whole of the non-Russian world. The earth will then be nicely partitioned between two barbarisms. . . . In my more gloomy moments I find it hard to form an opinion as to which is the greater enemy to Western civilization—Russian materialism, the open enemy, or American materialism with its more insidious influence. The trouble is that we are bound to stick by America when it comes to the point, however we may dislike certain aspects of American life. For somewhere under that Mae West exterior there is a heart that is sound and a conscience that is capable of accepting guilt.385
Experience has shown that Fairburn’s “more gloomy moments” were the most realistic, for America triumphed and stands as the ultimate barbarian threatening to engulf all cultures with its materialism, hedonism, and commercialism. The Russian military threat was largely bogus, a convenient way of herding sundry nations into the American orbit. The U.S.S.R. is no more, while Imperium Americana stands supreme throughout the world, from the great cities to the dirt road towns of the Third World, where all are being remolded into the universal citizen in the manner of American tastes, habits, speech, fashions, and even humor.
Fairburn’s attitude towards “Victory in Europe” seems to have been less than enthusiastic, seeing post-war Europe as a destitute, ruined, famished heap, yet one that might arise from the ashes in the spirit of Charlemagne and Jeanne d’Arc.
. . . Ten flattened centuries are heaped with rubble,
ten thousand vultures wheel above the plain;
honour is lost and hope is like a bubble;
life is defeated, thought itself is pain.
But the bones of Charlemagne will rise and dance,
and the spark unquenched will kindle into flame.
And the voices heard by the small maid of France
will speak yet again, and give this void a Name.386
BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVES
Fairburn regarded feminism as another product of cultural regression. In The Woman Problem387 he calls feminism an “insidious hysterical protest” contrary to biological and social imperatives. He saw the biological urge for children as central to women.
Fairburn also considered biological factors to be more important than the sociological and economic, therefore putting him well outside the orbit of any Left-wing doctrine, which reduces history and culture into a complex of economic motives.
Our public policies are for the most part anti-biological. Social security legislation concerns itself with the care of the aged long before it looks to the health and vitality of young mothers and their children. We spend vast sums of money on hospitals and little or nothing on gymnasia. We discourage our children from marrying at the right age, when desire is urgent, and the pelvic structure of the female has not begun to ossify; we applaud them when they spend the first ten years of their adult lives establishing a profitable cosmetic business or a legal practice devoted to the defense of safe breakers. The feminists must feel a sense of elation when they see an attractive young woman clinging to some pitiful job or other, and drifting toward spinsterhood, an emotion that would no doubt be shared by the geo-political experts of Asia, if they were on the spot.388
Indeed, what has feminism shown itself to be, despite its pretensions as “progressive,” other than a means of fully integrating women into the market and into production, while abortion rates soar?
It is interesting also that Fairburn makes a passing reference to the burgeoning population of Asia in comparison to New Zealand, in relation to geopolitics. The implication is that he foresaw the danger of New Zealand succumbing to Asia, which in the past few decades has indeed happened, and which proceeds with rapidity.
Fairburn saw Marxism, feminism, and Freudianism as denying the “organic nature” of man. Urbanization means the continuing devitalization of the male physically and ethically as he is pushed further into the demands of industrial and economic life. The “masculine will” requires reassertion in association with the decentralization of the cities and, “the forming of a closer link with agriculture and the more stable life of the countryside.”
The influence of Spengler’s philosophy can be seen in Fairburn’s criticism of urbanization as leading to the disintegration of culture: “Whether this will anticipate and prevent or follow in desperation upon the breakdown of Western society is a matter that is yet to be decided.”
Fairburn, along with others, especially poets such as Dennis Glover, R. A. K. Mason, Allen Curnow, and Count Potocki of Montalk, represented the great blossoming of an embryonic New Zealand culture that was starting to come into its own from out of the cultural hegemony of British colonialism. It was the type of nation-forming process that was forcefully advocated by Fairburn’s contemporary “across the ditch” in Australia, Percy Stephensen.
The Second World War cut short what Fairburn and others had hoped to achieve: the creation of a nativist New Zealand culture. Maori culture became, as Fairburn wrote, a tourist curiosity, and the arts became just as subject to international “market forces” as any other commodity. Fairburn exposed, like no other New Zealander from the cultural milieu of the Golden Age, the forces that were bending and shaping the arts, and his polemics were a reflection of what he saw as his calling to help create a “New Zealand civilization.”
Fairburn died of cancer in 1957. He continues to be recognized as a founder of New Zealand national literature—albeit one that, in this writer’s opinion, was aborted and now lies fallow awaiting refertilization.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
Februar
y 2, 2012
CHAPTER 6
COUNT POTOCKI OF MONTALK
“The course of my life is an indictment of the whole
dishonest racket which calls itself democracy.”
—Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk389
Geoffrey Potocki was one of the generation of the Golden Age of New Zealand literati, which included Potocki’s friend and fellow poet Rex Fairburn, Allen Curnow, R. A. K. Mason, D’arcy Cresswell, and others. As one would expect, most of those who were politically inclined during this inter-war period turned to Marxism. Like Ezra Pound,390 however, Rex Fairburn rejected Marxism in favor of Social Credit,391 and also like Pound he even considered fascism,392 albeit briefly.393
Potocki, on the other hand, turned unequivocally to the Right. Among bohemian eccentrics, he was surely the most noticeable in the London literary milieu in which he spent a significant amount of his life.
Potocki emerged from a New Zealand that was very much a British cultural outpost. Depression-era New Zealand afforded the country the opportunity to forge a sense of national and cultural identity that was something other than an imitation of Britain, while striving for its own level of excellence. Such was not to be the case, however, and what developed instead was a parochial form of Americanization, and consumer culture, particularly as the period following the Second World War saw the eclipse of British authority in favor of U.S. commercial banality.
