The Return of the Unfashionable Gods

The American philosopher Richard Rorty argued that literature, not academic treatises, affords a truer insight into an understanding of the human condition. While professors are busy strangling everything with jargon and footnotes, novels and poems are out there doing the real work: showing us what it actually feels like to be alive.

In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), Rorty suggested that a good novel will expand one’s moral imagination far more than any philosophical tract. Literature is a better moral compass because it throws us into the vivid chaos of individual lives, instead of forcing human experience into some procrustean theoretical framework.

Sometimes a single sentence from Orwell, or Solzhenitsyn, or Camus tells us more about integrity, honour, cruelty and hope than a thousand pages of scholarly ‘analysis’ ever could.

The more I’ve written over the years — be it books, articles or essays — the more I’ve come to appreciate the wisdom of Rorty’s observation: that great literature, not academic gibbering, gets closest to the essence of human affairs. The Greeks, the Bible, the great tragedians — they all saw to the bottom of things long before we in the academy began layering insights with qualifiers, footnotes and the faint aroma of career anxiety.

In fact, much of what we do in the humanities and the (so-called) social sciences is add little more than a gloss on ancient wisdom — restating, reframing and usually complicating what was already known by sharper minds in togas. We supply the lacquer; they built the furniture.

It’s a humbling thought. Most of my own writing, I suspect, merely traces a well-worn path walked by bolder, clearer souls who didn’t need to cite Bourdieu or Foucault to know that power tends to dress itself up as virtue. As Heidegger reminded us, we are thrown into history, not perched above it. Our contributions are brief, partial and prone to error — though hopefully they still matter, at least until the next footnote arrives to disagree.

And so, paraphrasing Rorty, we often find our most reliable guides to the future not in the latest think piece or ideology-addled op-ed, but in the voices of the past — particularly those who speak with brutal clarity about the limits of human nature. Far more illuminating than your average London la-la land liberal (think LBC presenters or, indeed, any paleo-centrist on the BBC), are those writers who grasp that history is not a progressive arc, but more often a cycle of idiocies, well-intended or otherwise.

Which brings me to Rudyard Kipling’s poem, ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings‘ — a work so perceptive, so uncomfortably accurate, that one wonders why it has not received more attention, even among us jaded traditionalists.

Kipling, of course, has long been out of step with modern sensibilities, being variously dismissed as imperialist, racist or simply unfashionable. At most, we’re allowed to admire the stoic (though still hideously patriarchal) platitudes of If, while ignoring the sharper edges of his worldview.

But the real reason Kipling has been anathema, I suspect, is not his odes to empire, but his unflinching realism. He saw through the utopianism that often passes for political sophistication. And in this respect, ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’ is not just a poem — it’s a monumental smackdown of liberal delusion, a reminder that reality, however tiresome, always gets the last word.

Written in 1919, ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’ is steeped in the disillusionment of a post-World War world in which Kipling not only witnessed the collapse of Edwardian liberal optimism but also lost his own son, John, to the Great War — killed in the Battle of Loos in September 1915. The cataclysm shattered the confidence in progress and prosperity that had, until then, passed for conventional wisdom. And yet, the poem’s resonance reaches far beyond its own time, speaking just as clearly to ours — an age with a virtuoso’s gift for replaying history’s tragedies in fresh but equally ruinous ways.

Across 10 stanzas, a third-person narrator charts the perennial folly of human behaviour. He notes that the ‘Gods of the Copybook Headings’, which were stern little aphorisms printed at the top of Victorian schoolbooks, may seem banal, even faintly ridiculous, but are in fact time-tested axioms. These are not fashionable insights, but stubborn realities: dull, durable and repeatedly ignored. And yet, with ritual hubris, each epoch tries to transcend them — only to discover that reality cannot be indefinitely postponed, let alone outwitted.

The opening verse introduces us to the narrator, who has passed “through every age and race”, observing humanity’s recurring flirtation with folly. Chief among these are the ever-fashionable “Gods of the Market Place” — those seductive deities of both material comfort and ideological novelty. The marketplace here is not just commercial; it is civilisational — a place where every shiny new theory is offered at a discount and reality is sold off as surplus stock. Yet even as we lunge toward progress, the narrator perceives, “the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all”.

In the second stanza, the narrator recalls how these Gods — representatives of basic, unyielding truths — have been with us since the dawn of time, reminding us constantly that “Water will certainly wet us, as Fire will certainly burn”. This, of course, is exactly the sort of unfashionable literalism that modern ideologues find terribly inconvenient. Such truths, Kipling writes with ironic understatement, we found “lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind” — aspirations that resonate in the mission statement of almost any modern NGO, DEI office or progressive think tank that piously proclaims it is seeking to ‘make the world a better place’.

So we turned instead to “the Hopes that our world is built on” — the sort of hopes that, in our own age, insist nations don’t need borders, energy can be sourced from moral purity alone and biological reality is a question of vibes. The poem ridicules these aberrations: “They denied that Wishes were Horses: they denied that a Pig had Wings / So we worshipped the Gods of the Market, Who promised these beautiful things.”

Those same Market Gods, he goes on, promise us peace if only we disarm — just as they promised abundance without cost, and harmony without consequence. And so we did disarm. We trusted. We believed. And then, to no one’s surprise except our own, “they sold us and delivered us bound to our foe”. At which point the Gods of the Copybook Headings, shrugging with weary wisdom, simply remarked: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

Kipling’s prescience rings throughout each verse, revealing an almost eerie foresight into the corrosive effects of materialism, welfarism and excessive social progressivism. Long before the post-1945 order promised us “the Fuller Life” – which, as Kipling’s narrator dryly discerns, “started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife” — he anticipated the moral and civilisational entropy that follows when illusion outpaces reality. By the end, “the women had no more children / and the men lost reason and faith”, and the old Gods return, unsmiling, to intone: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

The poem could just as easily be describing our own economic order: one that lives chronically beyond its means, burdens its producers, inflates its promises and drowns itself in debt under the deception of boundless, unearned opulence. Kipling captures this in a single line: the promise of “abundance for all / by robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul”.

But, as always, the bill eventually arrives. The incentives warp; birth rates decline; common sense becomes a casualty; moral seriousness evaporates. And as inflation erodes savings, and the working and middle-classes edge into precarity, people refrain from forming families — because, “though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy”. The final word from the ancient Gods of the Copybook Headings comes grim and unyielding: “If you don’t work, you die.”

And yet, despite every attempt to transcend these ancient verities — however naïve, or hubristic — the Gods of the Copybook Headings ploughed on, never altering their pace, “being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place”. Kipling’s poem is a prophecy carved in granite: those who mock the old truths are, in time, destined to be devoured by them.

The scandals of our own age bear this out. Consider the rape gang cover-ups in England — what the historian Tom Holland, in a widely-derided flourish of liberal delicacy, described as driven by “noble” motives to avoid accusations of racism and preserve the fragile illusion of communal harmony. Holland, to be clear, was not excusing these crimes. Yet he seemed to ascribe moral purpose to people whose conduct was at best craven silence and at worst collusive. It was a generous explanation of institutional cowardice. It brings to mind a copybook maxim Kipling didn’t include but surely would have: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

And with misguided intentions wreaking havoc — as we see in the disintegration all around us: economic mismanagement, bureaucratic bloat (see Birmingham Council for instant validation), the corrosive effects of unconstrained migration, and the hallucinations of multiculturalism — every seam of the social fabric is beginning to tear. Talk of dislocation, unrest, even civil conflict — once confined to the margins — is becoming harder to dismiss. All of this — foreseen, repeated and unheeded — is written into Kipling’s verse.

“Dear elites, the consequences of your actions have arrived.” So said Professor David Betz, on Andrew Gold’s Heretics podcast in July this year — a warning he’s been issuing for years as Britain’s social order has slowly fractured beneath the weight of its own contradictions.

David, my former colleague, and one of the most principled and serious-minded scholars I’ve worked with, would be the first to insist that his insights are not intrinsically new. He is channelling an older wisdom — how civilisations rise, decay and fall. In a manner not dissimilar to Rorty’s reflections on literature, he turns to poetry when theory falters, often citing Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, also written in 1919 with similar resonances to Kipling’s lament:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

And now that anarchy is indeed loosed — economically, socially and morally. But if Yeats caught the mood, it was Kipling who named the mechanism. Civilisations that forget the hard-won truths of the past do not transcend them — they break against them. Cause and effect do not disappear. They wait — until the fantasy collapses and the reckoning begins.

And when it all collapses, the Copybook Gods — who never truly left — return, “limping up to explain it once more”. What they explain, in tones carved from millennia of experience, is that nothing changes:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire.

And so, when the “brave new world begins / When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins”, there is no false comfort. It all ends not with reform, nor revolution, but with inevitability:

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Michael Rainsborough is a writer and academic based in Australia.