Bastille Day

This should have been posted yesterday but my server has been down for over 24 hours so it's a day late, sorry. Lionel

Yesterday the French celebrated the storming of a prison in Paris called the Bastille. It signalled the beginning of the French Revolution. A revolution that began with noble sentiments of equality, fraternity and liberty, only to subside into one of the bloodiest revolutions there has ever been.

The effects of this revolution are still being felt to this day, even though it took place in the eighteenth century. It is no exaggeration to say that the bloodthirsty events of the French Revolution caused such instability and released such powerful emotions throughout the whole of Europe, that all the conflicts which have followed, including the first and second world wars, can be traced back to it. Such a torrent of violence, class hatred and sheer bestiality was released that it has proved impossible to return public and private morality to their pre-French Revolution state, even though in Britain the Victorians tried hard to do so. The regime that was replaced by the revolution was admittedly, corrupt but its excesses were nothing compared to those of Citizen Robespierre and his colleagues. I suppose it can be said that Napoleon was the culmination of the revolution and certainly without it, he would never have risen to power. He took the European bloodlust that the revolution created, a step further forward. He is a hero to the French but Europe would be a more settled continent in my view, had he never existed.

How can it be that something which began on such a wave of popular enthusiasm, high hopes and high ideals, subsided into one of the worst tyrannies there has ever been? The answer to that illuminates the darkest corners of the human personality. The people who led the revolution and assumed command once the royal family were murdered, became corrupted, indeed they became far more morally corrupt than the royalty they replaced. The value of life became meaningless. Anyone who opposed the ruling elite was ruthlessly hunted down and killed and this did not just apply to the aristocracy whose heads became victim to ‘madame guillotine’ right from the start. Events in Moscow over a century later mirrored the events in Paris but minus the guillotine. Would the Russian revolution have gone the way it did without the French example? This is an interesting but unanswerable question.

Human beings are spirit encased in a body of flesh, flesh that has evolved over countless ages from the amoeba, through vegetable and animal to human. There are traces of our ancient physical ancestry in all of us. The spirit is pure but once it becomes subjected to the domination of the ego through our five senses, it is all too easy to strip away those thin layers of civilisation and reveal the beast beneath that drowns out the voice of reason which is the spirit. Once that happens then human morality is turned on its head and self interest is in control. Lord North was the wise man who put into words this terrible human tendency. He said memorably: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Unfortunately, few have heeded his warning and there has been no shortage of those wanting to exercise absolute power over their fellows and whose corruption has followed inevitably.

I believe we choose to live an earthly life in order to gain various spiritual benefits that are not always apparent while we are on earth. I believe one of these is the need to face and overcome the temptation to assume power and then be corrupted by it. Few set out seeking to be corrupted of course and many are the individuals who have entered politics for instance, fired with a desire to right the wrongs of generations and fight for the rights of the downtrodden. Not many recognise the pitfalls and all too soon the majority become part of the ‘establishment,’ corrupted by the privileges of power.

Is it possible to avoid such corruption? Clearly it is for the great reformers achieved their aims without falling foul of corruption. How? I believe the key is humility. Once one begins to think of one’s own indispensability and the absolute justice of one’s cause, one ceases to listen. Human beings are gregarious and we need each other. However, we do not need each other just so one can use another for his own ends, but in order to work together and be able to see a wider spectrum of events than we can possibly see alone. To achieve a worthwhile aim, we need to listen as well as to promote our own views. We need to have flexibility and to realise nothing is absolute and no individual has a monopoly on wisdom. This is true humility, it is totally divorced from spinelessness, with which it is confused by those who prefer using force rather than reasoned argument to browbeat others into submission to their ideas.

Many, when they see the ghastly results of the abuse of power, turn their faces away from it and refuse to undertake anything that might result in their being tainted by its influence. Just as shutting oneself up in a monastery or becoming a hermit is not a constructive way to deal with life’s temptations, so refusing responsibility because of its possible corrupting effects, is no way to achieve spiritual growth in this world. Only by more and more people successfully resisting the siren and corrupting voices of power can we as a species really begin to take the next step forward in our evolution. We are not only gregarious but also inter-connected and every step in evolution has resulted from one leading the way into a new development, to be closely followed by an increasing number of others, until the entire race is changed. Evolution is a spiritual as well as a physical aspect of human development and the two have to go hand in hand. Unfortunately, this has not happened and our physical evolution has proceeded apace but because it has not been subjected to proper control and supervision by the spirit, a serious imbalance has been created. This has resulted in the all too frequent lapses from what we accept as civilised behaviour.

Let us use the celebration of Bastille Day to remind ourselves of our interconnectedness, of our spiritual inheritance and of our need to successfully learn to use power constructively and not to become corrupted by it. Let us try diligently to use the power of the spirit to further humanity’s evolution. Forewarned is forearmed they say and so it is. Having the knowledge of the downside of power, we are surely better equipped to use its upside, by harnessing the light and power of the spirit to help us.