Tippett - talking about the Peace Pledge Union

Some months ago, Myrtle Solomon, armed with a tape recorder and a few problems that concerned the Peace Pledge Union today and pacifism in Britain more generally spent an afternoon with Michael Tippett, P.P.U. President and long time pacifist who was also a C.O. in World War II. Myrtle Solomon admits that by the time she left she was uncertain as to who was interviewing who and that her own views, sometimes carelessly expressed, had been sharply challenged. Here follows extracts from the conversation that took place in the most beautiful music studio after a delicious lunch punctuated by deep sighs of, she thought, exasperation rather than despair and bursts of entirely human laughter.

MT: In a sense it must be different between, say, people of an age who really got involved in a war and were involved in conscription. That brings us back to the point that it is only special for England. What do you think? Are you referring to PPU in its place in English society as we know it? What is the message to English society?

MS: My message to English society I think is: we have got a breather in this country with chaos around us and we should try to think as creative1y us possible how we could use that freedorn using tha1 time for enorrnously creative thought, and we are not!

MT: That seems just too vague a term. What does enormously creative thought mean?

MS:Just that we've got time to experiment in how to live or how we think it should be done.

MT: The moment you say, "how to live," then you have already conceded the question. I am really asking all the time what extra thing that being a pacifist in present society is... so that if I did come to say anything to the Movement in 10 minutes I would have to think about it quite a lot if I thought there was any specific thing which I cared to say, which would be of particular help. I think that now the questions are becoming so considerable that the answers are not measuring up to the question. And the question would be whether or not the whole shift of emphasis, from rejection of war, has changed so sharply ; in present-day society - one, first of all through CND because here was a concern that unless we are going to fight old-fashioned wars we are only going to be blown to , pieces, and therefore conscientious objection does not arise. But over that, it was quite clear we were going to fight, that certain people in the world are going to fight old-fashioned wars as they have been doing in Israel and the Arahian countries and Viet Nam. Therefore, the issues still exist for certain people, there's no doubt! But the other and much more complicated question as to whether we are coming to the belief that the deeper problem lies in the nature of society itself, which is a very old thing in the PPU. And this is a much more difficult question to answer. And so it comes back to a question as to what, if you join a movement like the Peace Pledge Union, what does being a pacifist add to your general concern? Say, on one side with amelioration of society and its major inequities and this very much more vague, but deeper concern, as to whether or not society is engaged in a shift of gear which will take generations. And that would be a shift of gear from an overwhelmingly technologically-bas society to a society where the values - social values - were beginning to swing another way.

MS: When and if pacifists today in this country do anything at all, they seem to campaign against something and I feel we lack inspiration and initiative in helping young pacifists to work for something.

MT: And what would this something do? If we say a non- violent society, we are only widening it. If we take non- violence to be the actual words of the Pledge, the fact that we have had since 1945 a state of virtual peace withi this island, as far as major, foreign wars is concerned, that might have been - in Dick Sheppard's mind - say, the fulfilment of the Pledge for a certain period. It certainly would not have been in Ghandi's mind, he wanted some- thing quite different. We were always skating round this question, as to whether or not there was something of concern in the word "non-violence" which related to something wider than an actual war as carried out in Viet Nam, When we use the word "non-violence", is that what you really mean by it in connection with English society'

MS: I am learning to accept the use of the word ",non- violence" and not relate it only to the extremes of war and peace but to relate it to a whole lot of things in between. Perhaps because we are not so threatened in this country, an enormous number of traditions and institutions are now labelled as violence from schools onwards and I do not altogether disagree with this. But I still think it is possible, if you do not become "against" war as the ultimate solution to conflict, that you could accept all these different trends that may lead towards the sane society and still explore war as a possibility when challenged. And that is why I think it is still important that you renounce war before you renounce other forms of violence.

MT: That again does not answer what came in an earlier statement; you were commenting, saying that the PPU was tending to be against something and not for something; but we still find that the real difficulty is, what is it we are for? I think my own view of the present day society is that we are in a state of only beginning to say "no", we dont know what it is. I feel this is universal and, like the character in a new opera. she will only say, "no no no! I know it is not that!" I don't think we know what the reverse is, because the whole society does not know what "for" is. That is to say, the religious solutions, philosophical solutions, are all now totally in question and therefore we are living in a society where, whether young, old whatever age it is, there is no certainty as to what the positive thing is, because we are searching for it. Within the process of search we may only know how we are moving at all by coming up against a blank wall and saying, "No, we can't go in that direction!" So this can take a rather depressing side because I don't think the affirmations are as easy. My work is the same process: I get very near to making some affirmation it is a desire, or dream, or a hope, but it can't be given a blueprint.

MS: I am only excited and happy that we can't be given a blueprint. If we could go out to our movement and say, don't worry that you can't be given a blueprint, but seriously consider you are in the process of creation and exploring, this would be fine. All blueprints today seem to be shortcuts, falling into all the areas of any other "ism" or grouping. It is not that I am against efficiency, but I am very glad the PPU has not got a blueprint; but I would prefer that the lack of it was due to purposeful intent rather than apathy.

MT: Yes, well, the purposeful intent would simply attempt - the words you use, are explore and so on - and some pragmatic attempt which must go on simply because people live their lives during a long period of change; if a period of change has taken generations, then you have to live and die -- and you are young, and you are old and there are different things we have to do for each other. I see nothing wrong in any form of co-operative help from one to another within a process of exploration. I wish we could give a sharper tone to the word "creative" even to the "explore". It seems to me that we are caught in two very, very old methods: a dichotomy which is as old as history. That is that you feel you can possibly create a model of a society which vou believe is more real and more based on the values which you are perceiving, and that means that you must opt out you wish to try to opt out of the society, of the major portion of society, in which you live. This leads to communes and leads you to endless experiment- ations. And there is another process, which is just as old, and that is that you cannot, in fact, come out, that the model society is not the way to proceed, that you must, as individuals, hold to the values which you are exploring, such as you know them, within the very society in which you live which may involve you in a constant dislocation with the establishment of that society. The statement that I am making, makes a much wider statement than the Peace Pledge Union (and I have a sharp feeling that this is the position and that what is happening to the whole of society is that they are now becoming much closer to what the PPU or Dick Sheppard once sharpened in terms of actual confiict in war). I would have said that in general, society of the west is already where Dick Sheppard wanted it to be. I think the general revulsion, say, against Viet Nam, both in America and everywhere else, was quite real and that this would not have taken place in 1910 or 11 or 12. We need an advocacy in which the principle of non- violence - as we understand it - can be translated into many more languages and can be dealt with in wider ranges of society. Because I take it that the Peace Pledge Union has always at least stood for not becoming itself a commune living within society by a set of values which the society does not totally adhere to. This is still what it can only be. But it tends, I feel, to get into difficulties now because in the society in England itself, the problem of conscription has gone, so that there is no conscription league. So we are forced, by the nature of the circum- stances, to find other expressions to this individual and collective set of values which we know are, at some point, exploratory, even sharply in adverse to the establishment of society of which we are a part. I still do not know how these kind of questions can find their expression in a collective movement. One wants to have an efficient propaganda machine because we are coqcerned now with the fact... the narrowness of propaganda which can seem very inadequate in time of peace, or peace in the sense that there is no particular war. So that I do not understand for the moment what we do with a propaganda machine.

MS: Most members would say that once a war started, there is very little a pacifist can do except to resist it. Therefore, the time that a pacifist can really help the future if when there is not one, nor even a threat of war, which, I suppose, roughly speaking, we could say, describes this country now. And yet when we are in that position, the argument on the causes of war (which used to be talkcd about during fhe war as something we could attend to afterwards) are not being coped with.

MT: Which puts another finger post on the difficulty of the situation. It is as old as it has ever been known in the PPU as to whether it should talk only to the soldier or potential soldier, or whether we can discover the causes. I do not think there is anything new in this. Sometimes I think we are in danger of not perhaps seeing that the political boundaries are no longer real at all. That is today, that it was true, not many years back, the major problem facing the soldier was not here but was in America...

MS: One thing that somebody wanted me to ask was: do you feel your philosophy has changed over the years in relation to your growth, in relation, in fact, to your music?

MT: May I ask what they meant by philosophy? Did they mean anything specifically in calssicism, or did they mean in general?

MS: I think they believed that your philosophy was very closely related and governed by pacifism, even if it is not a conscious relationship anymore.

MT: I think that always I realised that to be in the service of an expressive art, (which is a metaphor I have to use and which may sound pretentious but is the only way we can probably describe part of it) means that you are in the service of something I think which is wider even than pacifism and this is always the problem that has concerned aU qoeebons of political activity of any kind including pacifist activity. There are certain things which in a sense are wider than that particular piece of politics so that there- are concerns. For instance, what has grown in me over the years is a feeling that in a world torn by disasters and inhumanity, then the emotions of common humanity and compassion have become more valuable and if you have them in yourself then it is up to you to express them. Now this has already widened this a little beyond pacifism in its political sense because this could happen to people of all kinds. Now then, therefore the change, I would have said, is a deepening sense of the underground swell of a kind of nihilistic philosophy, philosophical nihilism which is I think what a lot of the younger people suffer from. What I say "suffer from" it is nothing to do with them, they can't be outside it because it is part of it. I can see that it happened right the way from 1914. Once the society which had certain Christian values in Central Europe blows itself to pieces, them something happened of such a climacteric that we are only slowly realising where it went to and that it would lead to things like the Nazi extermination camps - to Hiroshima, to Siberia, to what have you.

So that there is a deepening awareness of the breakdown of one side of, say, the humanitarian values and the sense that I have had to face up to, that the humanist values are equally ineffective; that you may be as cultured as you like and read Goethe and listen to Beethoven, and all the great figures of the eighteenth century and believe their affirmations and be moved by them when you hear the Ninth Symphony. Yet such people, who could actually go to a performance of the Ninth Symphony and yet could do the things that they did in Dachau or, alternatively, do the things they did in Vladivostock. This means that we have a growing awareness of the nature of this curious thing that we are; that we can at one moment be a beast and at another moment, apparently, have God-like ideas even if it is only on Sunday. So that this faces one - if you go very far down one - with a despair and many artists have gone over the edge, and in fact some of the greatest people, and Alvarez is one of them, said that the only thing the artist should do is commit suicide. That is not unreal, that is actually a feeling that exists and overwhelms people and can overwhelm many at a time. So what? Against this, are other things which are more difficult to place because you don't seem to be able to go back to the standard values, unless you have the luck of the thing. You may still be able to put yourself inside a Christian city or in some kind of Judaic view, etc., etc.

And yet underneath there is the contrary thing, there is this ache to go away and find your own place where it'a all right, or else this ache to find the paradise that is lost, or the ache that your children should have a better time. These are just as powerful too, so in expression of musical business, this has already widened itself and, because it demands energies, because the struggle to keep these polarities in some relation so that a work of art could appear which would not deny the tiger but would permit the dream of the lamb (as Blake would have put it), this takes me personally, naturally, into the position where it can appear as if the stricter political things are not my job but I would never go so far as they are not somebody's job...

MS: I think it would be true to say about you that although clearly there is no time for them to be your job, they have been and remain your concern. Other artists and composers who also have not committed suicide, haue shut themse1ves away. There are very few subjects about which I assume "Oh, he won*t know anything about that, he won't have been reading the papers, or whatever, "and he, Michael, does know about them, so that somewhere you have decided to remember these things.

MT: The question which is fair to ask is how anybody is reasonably understanding and has sensibilities such as I have as reading papers and all the rest, and can still stand. This is the real issue. What is this about? What is the nature of this affirmation, if it has any at all? I must come back to what I was saying before; it is very difficult to put any precision to it but the tempo (or temper) in which you do it is still something and, to my mind, to put it in its negative sense, there will not be universal suicide. People will be born again, children will he born, people will conceive and have children, there will be youth, you will fall in love - all these things are still going to go on. That is the only absolute about humanity, that it goes on. So that once it goes on, all the old problems which we thought were no longer in existence, will return every one of them - they all return. This is absolutely so! And so it doesn't matter - whoever despairs only despairs personally - this is a very ground bottom thing - we still know very little about how to stimulate the feeling of affirmation because we are lost.

MS: So how does the concerned person cope with the incredibly grim things that are going on in our world today?

MT: I don't want to specify. There is again a polarity all the time between the fact that we are possibiy the most brutal age that we have ever known but we are also, curiously enough, possibly the most compassionate... It will come to you, sometimes it will come on a national basis, but sometimes it will come only on a personal basis. You have to do it as it comes to you. There is no shortcut of any kind. You cannot say we should not see all the television we see. If you say all right, let's shut all our - ears up, we don't want to hear all about it, that would be impossible, because our compassion is not insatiable, but it is a necessity too, we have got to live like that whether we like it or not. You personally can say all right. I have had enough of it for the time being, I must go away. I mean this is a personal matter but it won't alter the situation, it is what our society is. As I see it, we are still in need in this polarity, of more compassion and not more cruelty.

MS: In the context of nipping things in the bud, do you think this country is becoming more militaristic and more dominated by things where we are not quite sure what is happening or who is directing them?

MT: No, no, not at all. W,ell that's up to us, I don't think so because I'm not myself afraid. If it star ted, I sbould do like I did before, go out on the streets. I think it is something which you could be concerned about, and if you were concerned you might have to take active operation, you might have to sit down and not let the juggernaut lorries come over you. But I think that the turbulence in the country, from the Trades Unions downwards, is a vital, valuable thing and I am all for it.

MS: I know fhat the PPU and its Headquarters have not cornmunicated with you as much as they used to. Do you ever sit here now and think "I wish the PPU was doing such and such?