Last year I added a new type of show to the Reversing Climate Change podcast where I read some poetry or literature and discuss it literarily as well as its relevance to climate work. Today I released an episode of my reading Charlie Chaplin’s wonderful speech from the end of his film, The Great Dictator.
Reading poetry in the midst of serious climate work is not a new thing to do. Go back and read All We Can Save, the climate anthology edited by Drs. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine K. Wilkinson , and the link to poetry is in plain sight. The riff on Adrienne Rich is right there in the title:
My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. — Adrienne Rich in "Natural Resources" from The Dream of a Common Language (1978)
Ayana Johnson continues including poetry and other art in the followup anthology, What If We Get It Right? and it’s all over the Katharine Wilkinson’s new book, Climate Wayfinding. I believe this is such a wise way to mix media. It makes sense to my brain to find literary links to a topic that cannot help but produce some of the strongest feelings of faith and hope but also despair. Climate deserves its poetry and literature.1
Sometimes naivety is correct
I have loved this speech of Charlie Chaplin’s from The Great Dictator at least since my undergraduate days. I do associate its tone as being of that developmental stage. Can’t you just imagine the tie-dyed tapestry billowing from your dorm room fan? But in saying that, I undermine it and knock youth’s naivety. After being pummeled by “real life” in the post-collegiate years of one’s twenties, it becomes time to put away childish things. Noting that the world could be free and beautiful for everyone? So cringe.
But I’ve come back through the other end of that developmental loop, recognized that the “real world” has its own naiveties it nurses while it pretends to be practical, and am coaching myself and those who will listen to change and become like little children, or we will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Unsurprisingly, it’s Gospel phrasing like this that Chaplin cribs in his speech.
As the world’s situation gets more precarious, we will need spiritual wisdom to see us through to whatever we become on the other side of climate change. Reminders of this can only serve to prepare us for what will be expected of us in the years to come.
It’s a truly moving work of rhetoric. Here it is to watch in its entirety. Do that now, then come back:
I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible: Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness—not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men; cries out for universal brotherhood, for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world—millions of despairing men, women, and little children—victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me, I say: do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed; the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes! Men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives! Tell you what to do, what to think, and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men—machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
In the 17th Chapter of St. Luke it is written: “The Kingdom of God is within man”. Not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power; the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world; a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future, and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!
Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world. To do away with national barriers. To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
— Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940)
Stunning, right?
Understanding Hitler
I actually did not mean to record about an hour on World War II, political comedy, and the personality of Adolf Hitler in this episode. Most of the poetry episodes are tiny. Most of them are bonus content that I put out for the love of the game. This turned into something else entirely though.
I started off explaining my theory of what makes political comedy work, and then exploring the historical moment when this film was being made. It was before Pearl Harbor and before many of Hitler’s ideas had been enacted upon the world. And from there, it connects to so many threads: Hannah Arendt, Louis Theroux’s manosphere documentary2, Mel Brooks, Carless People, and why there’s something so clownish and adolescent about the men (and it usually is men) who rule the world and create such valuable systems of extraction.
Albert Speer’s3 book Inside the Third Reich has these stories of Hitler’s dinner parties where he would get his colleagues (and presumably people he considered “friends”, though I get the sense that he didn’t quite understand friendship), and give them repeated four-hour lectures on things they had heard from him at length many times before. They would go into the wee hours of the night and no one was much having that good of a time. Did that bother Hitler? It is unclear if he didn't notice or didn’t care, but when I imagine it, it’s always the former. It strikes me as childish and pitiful, and someone who so desperately wants to connect and be valued but is so blocked from doing so appropriately.
His closest relationships are misunderstood by him. The dinner guests mere prisoners to their boss’s Greatest Hits recollections. He is theatrically a brilliant performer—capable of ensorcelling the masses—and yet cannot break through the cage of his solitude that he may have never surfaced to consciousness.
Tempting Godwin’s Law
At this point we have such great visibility into the leaders of our world since they post their thoughts often and they believe and do so many bizarre things. And it reads very similarly to me. Donald Trump is the obvious example. He is cruel and seemingly enjoys the process of throwing his weight around for its own sake, and is absolutely not a serious person. Of the many examples that could be chosen, have you been following the sage by which engineering reviews are being done to see if the island on aircraft carriers can be moved so they look cooler? Or that they can switch from modern electromagnetic devices to launch planes back to the older steam technology for the idiosyncratic preferences of the commander-in-chief? What about the basic public relations point of, “hey, everyone is watching the sailor of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Maybe don’t make a bunch of strange comments about aircraft carriers now and let the story die down.” But no, that would be far too sensible and something about power includes the power to behave as both a tyrant and a clown.
It’s hard not to read and watch Mark Zuckerberg talk about anything and not think he is a dork who seemingly barely understands what it means to connect to another human, but he got rich designing a social network ostensibly for that purpose. Careless People has a story which alleges Mark always won at Settlers of Catan, and that his opponents got into the habit of letting him win. When Sarah Wynn-Williams pointed this out, she claims she was met with Zuckerberg’s incredulity. Of course they weren’t letting him win. He’s so smart that he wins a game with variance (impossible for the best player to always win due to the randomness introduced by dice-rolling) every single time. Mark Zuckerberg should almost certainly should be nowhere near the possibility of Artificial General Intelligence.
Robert Moses (podcast forthcoming on the Robert Caro books…) presumably thought that he was helping New Yorkers by building his parkways and roads and parks. Even when the people who lived in these neighborhoods tried to tell him he misunderstood their needs or that they wanted to minorly adapt the plans to improve their use of it based upon local knowledge, he would basically say “take it or leave it.” He would serve these foolish citizens whether they liked it or not and only as he saw fit.
Many of these people strike me as petty. Hitler (and other leaders) sometimes have such a strong Governor Lepetomane quality to them. It both tyrannizes and feels just straight up silly. Somehow, behavior from leaders can simultaneously be both terrifying and goofy.
And other times, they’re just boring in the same horrifying way that Hannah Arendt documents Adolf Eichmann’s banality of evil. He wasn’t some serial killer who did his work with pleasure. He was just a very effective functionary who kept the trains moving on time. And isn’t that more terrifying, how absolutely dull his monstrosity is?
It rhymes with Hitler’s dreadful repeat speeches at his dinners that Speer notes. Monstrosity has some sort of potential overlap with being absolutely boring and being a clown. It isn’t just the viciousness of Hitler’s antisemitism. It’s the true lack of accurate self-understanding that propels these leaders, that causes them to believe in their own greatness, while also isolating themselves from the feedback they would need to moderate their own overreach. But if they had that humility, they may not seek to do these things and be these people in the first place. Is it actually a requirement, and not an accident?
This is not the end
I’m going to keep returning to these themes, so be sure to subscribe below. They impact so much of the world around us, how decisions get made, and what insulates our leaders from the kindness and gentleness we will need to carry us through this century. The wisdom we need in charge will not come from whatever set of incentives puts these men in such high places.
I will continue investigating this link between the lack of self-awareness and those who climb the heights of history in subsequent posts.
Thanks for reading! I appreciate you.
Sincerely,
Ross Kenyon
So far, I’ve done episodes on Moby-Dick, Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, and John McCrae. A listener sent in a reading from Rudyard Kipling (which you are welcome to do as well!) I didn’t mean for it to be demographically so static, not least of which because I love Mary Oliver as much as everyone else.
I tried to find the clip I discuss in the podcast where Louis Theroux asks hstikkytokky about why he says antisemitic things and he basically says the algorithm pays him too. This clip is similar.
I just realized that Speer has such a similar and surely a version of “Speirs” from Band of Brothers, which I discuss in the podcast.