When Kiples Cease Their Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

There used to be a movement in Canadian poetry called “people’s poetry.” Perhaps it still exists; I can find no trace online.

The idea was to bring poetry back to the common people.

But the group was resolutely left wing. As all official Canadian poetry has become.

This is a fatal problem, because the common people are not left wing.

In fact, the most popular poem among the UK general public is Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” Calling for personal responsibility in the manner of Jordan Peterson. But Kipling was a fellow who wrote poetry from the working class perspective; sometimes in cockney dialect.

In Canada, the only poetry readings that draw crowds are for “cowboy poetry.” Expressing a world view akin to that of country music, in the manner of Robert W. Service—the bestselling poet of all time, not just in Canada, but it the world.

And ignored or rejected by the poetry establishment, including the “people’s poetry” people. Again, the thing about Service is that he wrote from the working class perspective.

It seems that “their people,” as Hamilton is supposed to have said of Jefferson, “is a great beast.” It is an academic construct, quite unlike any people you might meet in the subway or on the 401.

Robert W. Service is perhaps rejected only for speaking for the lower class and being unforgivably accessible to people without an English degree. Despite the fact that he is, in technical terms, an exceptionally good poet. As is Kipling.

Kipling is rejected for his full-bore advocacy of empire. You could hardly be less politically correct than that today. Worst of the lot, no doubt, is “The White Man’s Burden.”

Let’s have a look:

Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

That sounds pretty offensive. Non-Europeans “half devil and half child”? “Fluttered and wild”; “caught”? These are terms to describe animals.

Yet the criticism seems to be that these non-Europeans do not raise their children properly—“breeding” is mentioned. They are wild in that sense, still children in that sense; they lack morality.

This might be true or false, but it is not racist. The Victorians believed they had reached a pinnacle of morality. This conviction was shaken then by the experience of the world wars, but there was and remains evidence behind it.

Take up the White Man's burden—
In patience to abide,
To evil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain.
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

The conventional idea today is Marxist—that the point of Empire was to exploit the foreign people for profit. Kipling sees empire as, instead, a sacrifice in financial terms, for the benefit of the colonized.

It turns out that Kipling is right. The Empire was a financial burden on Britain, and the same was true of the other European empires, with perhaps the sole exception of Leopold’s Congo, which Conrad so richly condemns in Heart of Darkness. After the Second World War, Britain could no longer afford their empire. If it were actually making money, this would not have happened. Empire is expensive; more recently, we saw the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact collapse for financial reasons.

The European empires were indeed entered into, as Kipling says, as a civilizing mission. They might have been misguided, but they were well-intentioned. They were acts of charity and of civic responsibility.

Take up the White Man's burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

“Heathen” here might make one suppose Kipling was speaking of the spread of Christianity. He cannot have been; the immediate occasion for the poem was the American acquisition of the Philippines. The Philippines had been Christian for centuries—for longer than the USA.

He seems instead to be speaking of what might loosely be called “Enlightenment ideals.” Empire brought peace, ending the endless local wars; it brought greater prosperity, it brought medical advances.

Take up the White Man's burden—
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper—
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!

Again the idea is of service: of building ports and roads for others to use.

And in this, surely, Kipling is right. The British built the rail system, the ports, of India, and then left them for the Indians. They dug the Suez Canal, and then left it to the Egyptians. The Americans built the Panama Canal, and then left. They built Aramco and the Saudi oil industry, and then left. Others generally reaped the benefits. 

Railway bridge,  British India, 1900.

Notably, the UK pulled out of the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia right when the oil industry was making the area profitable. That makes no sense if the prime motive of empire was profit. It makes more sense if the prime motive was service; at this point, the area could look after itself.

Take up the White Man's burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

The stanza seems to disprove the charge of racism, since it describes the colonized as equivalent to the Hebrews, God’s chosen people. And it implies that these “subject races” are as capable of development. The problem, then, is not genetics—race—but the bondage of cultural backwardness. 

Take up the White Man's burden—
Ye dare not stoop to less—
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.

The use of the plural, “Gods,” here, seems to preclude a Christian interpretation. If he were speaking as a Christian, he would be speaking heresy. The Gods would presumably be the values cherished by Victorian English culture: equality, democracy, discipline, duty, honesty, justice, good manners, and sound accounting principles. 

Take up the White Man's burden—
Have done with childish days—
The lightly profferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

It seems to me that Kipling escapes the charge of racism. He is being read uncharitably here because the modern left hates him for something else: for being an unbending moralist. This, of course, is the reason why they are opposed to the suggestion that any culture might be superior to another—because it implies that any moral stance might be superior to any other. Morality is an unpleasant suggestion to the immoral. 

Indian custom of suttee--widow burning.

I have no problem with Kipling’s moralism. On the other hand, I find him unpalatable because he consistently bases it on the trivial: on “the judgement of your peers,” or being “grown-up,” or “manly.” These are worldly baubles.

One ought to behave morally out of a commitment to morality, to the good, and out of love for God and one’s fellow man; not out of pride, which is to say, so that others will think well of you. Prestige. Kipling’s ethics are pre-Christian pagan ethics.

I suspect that this failure of transcendence was, in the end, what caused Europe to lose its appetite for empire. Eventually, once you eventually thought it through, it all seemed so pointless.