'What Discord Follows!'

One of the little-noted blessings of the internet is its role as a supplementary, off-site memory. Often scraps of poetry or song lyrics enter my head without context. They float unattached like particulate matter in a windless sky. Sometimes I can’t even remember the author or singer. In the past that meant rummaging until the proper combination of synapses fired. Now I can plug in the free-floating words and, usually after a single search, come up with the source. This week it was “Take [but] degree away.” In memory I had deleted the adverb. I associated the line with the notion of small changes resulting in big effects. It implies the interconnectedness of things and the delicacy of balance that links them.

The search engine took me to the source: Ulysses’ great speech in Act I, Scene 3 of Troilus and Cressida. The lines in question are “Take but degree away, untune that string, / And, hark, what discord follows!” The musical metaphor is apt. It takes one clam to ruin a performance. Shakespeare uses “degree” seven times. The speech is essentially conservative in the Oakeshottian sense. Change for its own sake can be dangerous. The balance – in nature, in the social world, among men and women – is finely tuned and easily upset.   

I’m reminded of something Evelyn Waugh wrote after visiting Mexico for two months in 1938. The following year he published Robbery Under Law. The Roman Catholic Church was officially outlawed at the time in Mexico, and priests were subject to execution. Waugh subtitled his book The Mexican Object-Lesson, meaning we might learn something from the chaos and butchery in that country. The real slaughter was just getting underway in Europe and Asia. Here’s what Waugh wrote on the final page:

“Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given it from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilised man to keep going at all. There are criminal ideas and a criminal class in every nation and the first action of every revolution, figuratively and literally, is to open the prisons. Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come from merely habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of energy left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on.”