Five Years

I had intended to continue releasing excerpts from my upcoming book for the next few weeks, but this idea has been derailed since I’ve had to do a fairly significant re-write of the opening chapters on account of the fact that the book refused to end in the manner which I expected. Given this will be my ninth innings, I really should know by now that a book is not over until the fat lady sings, and she has a habit of belting out a different tune to the one in my head. In any case, this is a very good problem to have since even I wasn’t aware how deep the rabbit hole went in the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner. It’s one hell of a story.

I’ve always loved studying the 19th century because so much of the modern world was created at that time, and yet so many of the issues that have now been decided were still up for grabs back then. As research for the book, I’ve had to go back and revisit a number of Wagner’s operas, and that made me realise something about the Covid debacle that I hadn’t fully appreciated.

By coincidence, it is almost exactly five years since I wrote my very first Coronapocalypse post. That series of posts would give rise to my two books on the subject, The Plague Story and The Devouring Mother. The combination of those two ideas has spearheaded all my thinking over the five-year period since then and has led directly to the book on Nietzsche and Wagner, which is all about the power of stories and archetypes. So, I guess I was predisposed to see connections between two seemingly unrelated topics.

What on earth can a Wagner opera tell us about the Covid debacle? Well, let’s talk about the Ring Cycle. Wagner wrote the libretto for the whole series of operas in 1851-52 (there are four operas in total). This was in the immediate aftermath of his expulsion from Germany after the failed Dresden uprising. Even though the Ring is couched in mythical and archetypal terms, it has a fairly obvious political theme that relates to what was going on in continental Europe at that time.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Napoleon had blown away the Potemkin façade of the Holy Roman Empire, which was a structure that had been in place for the best part of one thousand years and which unified the lands of central Europe. In the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat, both Prussia and Austria set about a long period of harsh repression to ensure that any revolutionary spark still remaining among the general public would not again light into a revolutionary conflagration. It was the Prussians who put down the Dresden uprising.

After his exile, Wagner gave up any active involvement in politics and channelled his revolutionary spirit into his art. The Ring Cycle was the first thing he wrote.

The figure of Wotan is fairly obviously a symbol of the kings of Europe since Europe had followed the divine right of kings for about a thousand years, and the collocation of king and god was implied for most of that time. Therefore, among other things, Wagner was making a statement about the powerlessness of kings in the 19th century.

Hitler was an unemployed, homeless man who spent years living in poverty before rising to power out of nowhere. Stalin was born into similar poverty. Mao was a peasant whose father disowned him because he refused an arranged marriage in order to run off to university. The story of Pol Pot is almost identical. The worst butchers of the 20th century were all power-mad in exactly the way that Wagner characterises the Nibelungen in the Ring Cycle, and they all deposed kings in order to take power. The only exception is Hitler, who didn’t need to get rid of a king since Wilhelm II had abdicated 15 years beforehand.

Nowadays, we live in a post-king world, and it’s tempting to think that the message of Wagner’s opera is no longer relevant. But, actually, the exact opposite is the case. Why had Wotan become weak and powerless? It was not because of any infirmity in himself. It was because he had bound himself by agreements and treaties that removed his freedom of action. That’s why he can’t stop the bad guys.

It’s not a coincidence that Wagner would portray a king in this role because that’s the way many people thought about it in the 19th century. They saw not just the kings but the entire aristocracy as being weak and ineffectual.

The trouble for Wagner’s story was that he had set up a dichotomy between Siegfried and the Nibelungen. Unlike Frodo Baggins, Siegfried knows how to wield power, as seen by his use of violence in the story. Therefore, any would-be dictator was always going to associate himself with Siegfried rather than the pathetic, miserable Nibelungen. In fact, a would-be dictator could easily accuse his enemies of being pathetic, miserable Nibelungen and use that as an excuse to kill them, all the while thinking of himself as Siegfried.

(Wagner could argue that his story had nothing to do with politics and was really about love and freedom. That might be true but, when it came down to it, he did little to dissociate himself from politics. This was the main source of the falling out between him and Nietzsche).

In theory, we have now gotten rid of not just kings but also dictators, and so everything should be rosy, right? Well, not if we understand that the cause of Wotan’s problems was all those rules and treaties. If that is the source of weakness, then we are now in far worse shape than the 19th century ever was. Just like Wotan, we are bound by rules, treaties, and agreements, and it is increasingly these that are the source of all of our problems.

Why can’t Australia solve our absurd housing problem? Because we signed up to the neoliberal economic and financial treaties that allow free movement of people and capital, and we have to allow foreign money to buy our assets so that we can get cheap consumer goods in exchange. Why can’t Europe solve its people-smuggling problem? Because it’s bound by the rules that were set up after WW2 to prevent the effects of statelessness on large populations. Why can’t the US solve its debt problem? Because it runs the global reserve currency, and it’s the backstop that keeps the whole system up and running.

World War 1 was started not because of kings but because a web of treaties meant that when one country declared war on another, others would come to its aid. The whole point of those treaties was to avoid war, and yet all they did was lead to a massive global conflict. The exact same thing happened with Covid. Every country was a signatory to the WHO for the purposes of avoiding a pandemic. When the threat of a pandemic appeared, the treaties kicked into action to give us lockdowns, masks, forced vaccines and all the rest of it. It was all executed through the vast bureaucratic machine that runs on rules, agreements, and treaties.

Wagner implied that if we could just get rid of kings, then we would have freedom. What he never saw coming was the rise of the technocrat and that technocrats love rules more than any monarch ever did. No surprise, then, that five years after the covid debacle began, the technocrats have decided that we need even more rules. Of the 11 countries that abstained from the new pandemic agreement, Russia and the US are the two most notable. Apparently, everybody else is happy to sign away even more freedom.

What would Wotan say?