High Tory Platonism, pt. 1

Mark Smith-Square

“As chairman of the board of Internal Revenue in 1892-1897, Milner drew up Sir William Harcourt's budget, which inaugurated the inheritance tax…”

— Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment

The art and letters of the interwar decades are full of premonitions of war. Of these, Pound’s first canto stands out for its prescience. The source material is Homer, but the suggestion is biblical: the great flood, the evacuation on the ark. Civilisation itself is being evacuated, culture is marching two-by-two up the gangplank: the courtly and the demotic, the ancient and the modern, Europa and Hellas, so on and so forth in an endless string of binary. The period’s eschatological tenor echoes in the mood of our own time; in the eddying of crisp packets on sidewalks overflowing with pedestrians and in the thinning crowds outside the Westminster Arms that each drop in the temperature brings, in the old Yoruba medicine woman summoning up the spirits of bygone MI6 chiefs “for a chat”; the transactions in and out of a Montenegrin bank account printed and passed to a senior editor; the not unpleasant sense of something ineluctably passing into nothing that the morning chill carries into a poorly insulated suburban tenement. The tragedy plays out somewhere outside of time, neither here nor there; then and now.

But one man knows what to do. When the water is so many feet high, you call in a classicist. From deep within his Palladian Kaaba on St. James Square, Arnold J. Toynbee, director of studies at Chatham House, plans out the evacuation in a colossal, twelve-volume history of the world modestly titled A Study of History. Universal history is really a quite new discipline; only once European adventurers had traversed the length and breadth of the globe and excavated the sunken civilisations in far foreign lands could the act of synthesis begin. In the end, its practitioners more often than not arrived at the conclusion that the mystery of man’s being in the world was already laid out in elements already to hand when the white man first set out on the Atlantic waves. For universal history is invariably the record of correspondence between the two outstanding civilisations that mankind has produced — western modernity and classical antiquity — with emphasis placed on particular periods and themes according to the author’s predilections. For Spengler, as for all Germans, from whose clutches one senses that Toynbee is trying to liberate the genre and make it safe for democracy, the nature of this correspondence is a mysterious dance to the beat of mathematics and music. For Toynbee, the tune is politics, and the partners are Athens and London. But for both, universal history is their name for the intuition of the end.

There is time, but only just. Unlike the obscure maths teacher Spengler, Toynbee has friends in high places. At Chatham House, he philosophises under a royal charter. During the war, it functions as the Foreign Office’s in-house think tank. Yet Toynbee was not some airy Ben Judah parachuted in to provide “strategic comms” for the bumbling bureaucrats, but — as we know from recent archival research by latter-day Toynbee aspirant John Bew, who for some unfathomable reason opens with a LaRouche quote — bore the lion’s share in shaping H.M. Government’s overarching strategy towards postwar world order, doing so on the principles elucidated in his historico-philosophical writings. These principles were not entirely new, but an evolution of the worldview of an influential intellectual circle in which Toynbee’s uncle, also called Arnold, had played a leading role. The ups and downs of this “Milner Group” — so called after its convenor, Alfred, Lord Milner — have been told before; the story will be known to the discerning reader of Quigley’s Anglo-American Establishment, but since fanciful later interpreters have coloured the record both as to its beliefs and its actual, much-overstated ability to shape events, a brief survey of the group’s worldview is required in order that we might understand Toynbee’s plans to defer apocalypse.

What Quigley calls the Milner Group was a convergence of several different milieux. These included Lord Milner’s associates during his days as a colonial administrator in South Africa, a handful of Oxford college, and a few of Lord Salisbury’s dodgy Tory mates, although the latter were, for the most part, the group’s political sponsors rather than its intellectual core. The Milnerites were the scions of ancient bloodlines and middle-class scholarship boys; earnest young men who had benefited from the established order, but sought to reform it in ways consistent with its own Social Christian principles. As “white revolutionaries” of a vaguely Hegelian disposition, Milner’s set saw in the British Empire the pure idea of freedom unfolding within history, and regarded it as their purpose to guide the empire’s development in a manner that would bring this idea to the fullest expression.

In practical terms, freedom meant self-government for the dominions and colonies, to be realised through some form of imperial federation, which would ideally transcend the empire and encompass the entire earth. This is the original idea behind the Commonwealth of Nations, a now rather silly entity. It is also the worldview of Locksley Hall; a poem about a love as pure as it is impracticable, redeemed in a prophetic dream of 20th century international order. Anyway, there were various schools of thoughts within the group as to what federation meant, and Milner’s service with Cecil Rhodes in South Africa has led many a later scholar (including no less an authority than Niall Ferguson in The Square and the Tower) to conflate the group’s worldview with the latter’s dream of worldwide white commonwealth. In fact, resistance towards federalism within the dominions led the Milnerites to abandon such visions sometime around the outbreak of the Great War, and, combined with the group’s natural bent towards a romantic, platonist Christianity, turned the project down increasingly mystical avenues.

Long before Toynbee arrived on the scene, the Milner Group was planning out the reorganisation of the British Empire as a Universal Church, a notion which would occupy a central position in the Chatham House historian’s thought. The earliest expression of this idea in recognisably Milnerian form is the tract Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ, published anonymously in 1865 — a year, as we shall see, most unpropitious for Britain’s imperial prospects — by the historian J.R. Seeley, whom veterans of lockdown-era right-wing twitter in its bookish, rhodesposting phase, before the stoats’ and weasels’ arrival at Toad Hall made the whole thing too cringeworthy to be associated with, will remember for his The Expansion of England (1885). Seeley’s Christ is a man confronted by the geopolitical exigencies of British Empire: endowed with superhuman intellectual powers, he is called upon to shape a new political order that will validate the traditions of his people while making them fit for modern times.

While Seeley is given to dismiss report of Christ’s miraculous deeds as attempts by his superstitious followers to explain feats of moral or intellectual brilliance in supernatural terms, his allegory of empire nonetheless paradoxically requires that Christ did indeed possess supernatural powers and faced the temptation to discharge his obligations to humanity by use of overwhelming force. Yet Christ does not resort to violence. This is the essential fact of his life. In the desert, “he deliberately determines to adopt another course, to found his empire upon the consent and not the fears of mankind, to trust himself with his royal claims and his terrible purity and superiority defenceless among mankind” — to sublate his worldly power into a world-spanning “divine society“ of the spirit in which men freely accepted his kingship. It is Christ’s reluctance to employ his sublime power that gave his teaching its unrivalled spiritual potency in the eyes of his contemporaries; his readiness to forego temporal kingship that caused the temporary kings of the world to first persecute, then yield to, the Nazarene carpenter’s son.

Seeley’s Christ is first and foremost a statesman. He is the “son of God” only in the sense that, for the ancient Jews, this was another title of kingship like “Margrave of Moravia“, “Duke of Auschwitz and Zator”, or, indeed, “King of Jerusalem” was to the Austrian emperor. Christ’s transcendence is that of the king who cognises the whole affairs of state against his subjects who glean but their own part in the great tragedy (“what kind of god art thou, that suffer’st more / Of mortal griefs, than do thy worshippers?”); he is a Surkovian political technologist whose achievement is to sublate the ancient Jews’ material relationship to God into a spiritual one; a new politics played out in the realm of the mind, or the soul. Christ’s church was not wholly his own, but “sprang from a movement which was not begun by Christ” — Seeley was an enlightened 19th century man who could not but admit the pre-Christian origins of certain Christian doctrines (indeed, there is an implicit platonist undercurrent to his intellectualised Christianity), thus the Christianity that interested him was not the religious tradition that emerged in the Near East at the beginning of the common era, but the archetype of the universal church governed by a transcendent king. This tragic philosophy of kingship, as Quigley utterly failed to notice, is the hidden thread in Milnerite thought that would spring full flower in Toynbee, but before picking it up, we must turn to the spiritual and political conditions which made it seem so attractive to these Edwardian meritocrats.

Christianity is a doctrine that draws its potency from Christ’s abnegation of worldly power. It takes under its wing those sensitive to transience; who, knowing themselves not long for the day, seek to preserve what is good in the world in a kind of universal memory; as an eternal idea in a transcendent realm whence it might one day be recalled. What perhaps made the Milner Group’s secularised Christian idealism so attractive to a certain type of middle-class Oxbridge graduate, if he is indeed as similar to me as I flatter myself to think, was a consciousness of the race’s dwindling might at precisely the moment when British preeminence appeared to vindicate Britain’s ancient institutions and the progressive spirit they embodied. Belgravia has its own mono no aware in the progeny of Scotch war chieftains who dissipate into louche Karl Böhm Respektors, Oxford layabouts in immaculately tailored plus-size suits who fritter away an inheritance declaiming against international finance capital at Simpson’s on the Strand on the twelfth year of their DPhil theology, Clubland bores transmuting the priceless gold of a classical education into port-fuelled disquisitions on property schemes in Kenya, Brompton Oratory regulars — anyone with a passing acquaintance with the British upper classes has seen the glory of the world thus pass. A recurrent theme of Toynbee’s Study of History is that the powers of the “creative minority” that builds civilisations are inevitably stretched beyond their limits, and der hohen Thaten Ruhm degenerates into so many chemsex parties in the basement of Number Four Matthew Parker Street, although in his day the forms of decay were perhaps more graceful than in our own. Perhaps not.

But before that, Toynbee warns us, comes a more dangerous phase; a phase in which the minority can no longer create, but can still assert its paramountcy through force. When, in a magnificent supernova of ultraviolence that the historian calls a “time of troubles”, it musters up its strength and gathers the entire civilisation into a “universal state” held together by the methods of Rory Stewart’s father, as the Roman Empire did the moribund Hellenic civilisation. With the kto/kogo resolved, whatever new creative impulse emerges can only do so on the spiritual/intellectual plane and in opposition to the old civilisation-cum-universal-state, and the form it takes is that of a “universal church”, from which, maintained Toynbee, a new civilisation may emerge. So Christ’s universal church; so the New Jerusalem that the Milnerites were to build on the ruins of empire’s dark satanic mills.

The Milnerites knew what to do. “Can [England] bear to lose her life, as she knows it, to find in a Commonwealth, wide as the world itself, a life greater and nobler than before?” wrote Lionel Curtis, founder of Chatham House and Milner’s secretary in South Africa, in his 1916 The Problem of the Commonwealth, “Will she fail at this second and last crisis of her fate, as she failed at the first, like Athens and Prussia, forsaking freedom for power, thinking the shadow more real than the light, and esteeming the muckrake more than the crown?” Britain was to dissolve itself into international society; to forego the temptations of the flesh to “give what it could” to the world, in order that it might win it forever. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it is because it is the first draft of the heady internationalist brew that animates, under so many different names, the British establishment today. It is none other than the programme of Gus O’Donnell (who, you may not remember, for he came before your time, interpreted his task as head of the civil service as “maximising global welfare, not national welfare”), William MacAskill, and indeed Chatham House today, only that here it withers on the vine whereas there it was still fresh and young and ripened by the darkness’ seductive glow; “yang passing into yin” as Toynbee will later call it. So clearly do we perceive the outline of Curtis’ mystical vision in the present international order that we have good reason to believe his original design might even have worked, were it not for certain miscalculations that instead brought to where we are today, but these need not concern us for the moment.

Christ’s church preaches a message of love. “Lionel is right. You can’t dam a world current. There is, I am convinced, ‘purpose’ under such things. All that we can do is to try to turn the flood into the best channel […] Love — call it, if you like, by a longer name — is the only thing that can make our post-war world go round,” wrote the editor of the Milner Group’s journal, John Dove, in a 1919 letter to fellow old South Africa hand. The Bible tells us love is God; Alfred Zimmern, in his Milnerian Grundtext The Greek Commonwealth (1911), considers it the high, unrealised ideal of Athenian statecraft. One old boy from Milner’s alma mater, who Zimmern doubtless had read, says that love is the metaphysical principle of separation and reconciliation at a higher level of unity. Like the divine providence working in the discrete and opposing plans of men, Curtis’ commonwealth of love would move through all parties; a many-limbed god capable of juggling Mandela in the one hand and the Monday Club in the other. If I am swerving too abruptly between the Milnerites’ day and our own, it is because, as I have said, this tragedy unfolds beyond time.

This was not a new role for Britain. For British policy has long operated through informal channels like freemasonry and finance, while even in Milner’s time, the country could count perhaps the world’s oldest and most distinguished intelligence service at its disposal. But because it meant the sublation of the British state, of British land and British arms and British blood, there was only one institution in England, one which had been there before that state and still gazed down upon it with a calculated ambivalence, which was able to discharge the work of universal love that the Milner Group had planned. Christ’s kingship, its political mission elucidated by Seeley, would be the model for the Crown’s kingship in a “commonwealth of nations” mirroring Christ’s “divine society”.

The Milnerites drew their ideal of a commonwealth as the political form of after-empire not from Jerusalem, but Athens. While Quigley notes its usage in older Victorian sources, it was Zimmern’s book that inspired the Milnerites’ use of the term. Zimmern’s is the tale of a jolly mercantile polity that, through the unconscious work of diligent hands, suddenly finds itself in control of an empire constituted on sea power; in Toynbee’s Greek, a thassalocracy. To Athens was it given to either be “an education to Greece” as per Pericles’ funeral oration; to bless all the people of Greece with the Athenian ideal of freedom and to inaugurate a rule of universal love, or to merely rule. The Athenian dilemma was the same faced by Seeley’s Christ; to choose between the purity of ideas and the corruption of force. Unlike Christ, Athens opted for the latter, and that which of the Athenian lifeworld lives on in memory was put to words only after the city’s imperial ambitions had been thwarted. The creation of an imperial idea was to be the work of romantics and philosophers; the practical men of Pericles’ generation were too busy building an empire, and their philistery was what Zimmern and his fellow humanities bluffers on Lord Milner’s staff aimed not to repeat. At the dead centre of his book, in a chapter called “Happiness, or the Rule of Love” — a term whose meaning for the author, if he indeed assigns it any, is nowhere to be found but in the absence of a definition — Zimmern, placing his reader in the agora as Pericles is giving his funeral oration, poses this question:

“It is time for us to depart too, Let us follow the mourners as they disperse to their separate homes, and watch them as they resume the even tenour of their lives. There is more of tragedy for us there than among the graves of the soldiers. These lived happy and died happy, fighting the enemies of Athena. But in the contest which we are going to watch fighting will bring no joy and victory no triumph. For the battle which Athens has now to face is not against the Lacedaemonians or any hosts of armoured men, but against the foe in her own household, the desires and ambitions she herself has nurtured. Shall she welcome them in their fulness and seek to furnish them with all they need? Or shall she try to put them from her, lest they corrupt her and wreck her peace? Or, while she is seeking a middle course, will they lay her glory in the dust?”

This was the Milnerites’ analysis of the situation. Britain, in spreading her ideals and institutions to the far-flung corners of the earth, had nurtured desires and ambitions in the peoples of the world that her tutelage would soon no longer satiate. In practical terms, there was some difference of opinion within the group on how this commonwealth was to look, and, if we are to believe Quigley, the Milnerites were frequently disappointed with the instantiation of their projects. We need not survey these here, since our interest in Milner’s circle is only a prolegomenon to Toynbee’s thought, but need only say that the commonwealth the Milnerites imagined was to be a rules-based international order organised, in a spirit of mutual respect, on the basis of national self-determination — in other words, the world of the Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter and thus, in a superficial sense, the one we have now. Milner and his associates nevertheless recognised that Britain’s higher degree of civilisation had not fully penetrated the souls of its subjects, and that while this justified London’s continued rule over the colonies in the short term, it imposed on it the moral obligation to educate those populations that had fallen under her wing in self-government. While the exact timeline of this was vague, during the Great War the realisation dawned that it would have to be arranged very quickly, sooner than anyone had anticipated or wanted, because the sun was starting to set.