Rudyard Kipling’s wisdom — lessons we keep ignoring: Adrian Wooldridge

Key topics:Kipling contrasts fleeting “marketplace gods” with timeless moral wisdom.Ignoring lessons like pride, roots, and virtue risks societal collapse.Modern extremes—tech, elites, politics—echo warnings from 1919..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Adrian Wooldridge.Rudyard Kipling has gone far out of fashion. Born in Bombay, in British India, in 1865, he was an unapologetic imperialist; he even coined the phrase “take up the white man’s burden” to mark the symbolic passage of global power from Britain to the US. Yet his 1919 poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” should be compulsory reading today because it goes to the heart of our contemporary troubles — and suggests a way out.Kipling wrote “The Gods” in 1919, after a war that had killed as many as 22 million people (including his only son, John) and amid a pandemic that eventually claimed at least another 50 million. The poem contrasts the “gods of the marketplace” — faddish ideas that periodically grip the public — with the “gods of the copybook headings” — pieces of popular wisdom that were printed on the top line of every page in school exercise books. Children were expected to copy them out, learning basic moral lessons while they improved their handwriting..Read more:.One word for ‘Ancient Japanese wisdom’: It’s bulldust: Gearoid Reidy.The end of the Great War released a flock of optimistic ideas about ending war forever, abolishing private property and downgrading nation-states. The Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsar in 1917, and Western policymakers birthed the League of Nations in 1920. Kipling thought that such naive optimism would lead not just to disappointment but to the destruction of civilization. The poem concludes by contrasting humanity’s weakness for self-deception with the stern truths of the copybook headings: As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of ManThere are only four things that are 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 wabbling back to the Fire;And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world beginsWhen all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return! The end of the Cold War gave flight to another flock of optimistic ideas on the world. Many of them, like the ones that infuriated Kipling, came from the left. University departments devoted themselves to presenting Western capitalism as a racist project. (Kipling himself has been “cancelled” in many literature departments.) Progressive NGOs made the case for universal basic income or giving drug addicts free drugs. But a significant difference between our time and Kipling’s is that many of the most naïve ideas have come from the right. Neoliberals argued for linking CEO pay to their company’s stock price, or for abolishing borders or reducing inheritance tax, all in the name of market efficiency. The tech titans waxed lyrical about abolishing death, colonizing Mars and discovering “superintelligence.”The “gods of the marketplace” all have clever arguments on their side. Derrick Bell, one of the founders of identitarian thinking, rightly pointed out that different forms of disadvantage compound each other. Michael Jensen, one of the founders of “agency theory,” produced elegant arguments about how CEOs (“agents”) will work harder for their “principals” (shareholders) if they have a share in the upside of success (share options). Tech titans such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are, in purely IQ terms, some of the planet’s cleverest people. Yet all this cleverness is as nothing compared with the common wisdom of the copybook headings.Consider three generic maxims and the price that we have paid for ignoring them:First: Pride comes before a fall. This is best expressed in the story of Icarus, the young Greek who straps on a pair of wings, flies toward the sun and then, when the heat melts the wax holding his wings in place, falls back to earth with a crash. Silicon Valley is full of Icaruses strapping on wings in the confident belief that the wax will hold (Musk regularly sends rockets into outer space). The tech industry is betting hundreds of billions of dollars on AI. Fertility companies are selling genetic interventions to increase your odds of having a problem-free, high-IQ child.Each one of these ventures contains huge risks. The AI bubble may burst, like the railway bubble before it, with devastating consequences; and an AI-driven future may produce terrible social dislocation. Eugenics has an infamous history that should provoke horror not emulation. Taken together they may spell doom.Second: A tree without roots cannot thrive. Left-wing academia’s addiction to painting our collective history, the history of the West, as growing from poisoned roots is not only one-sided. It has demoralized the mainstream, empowered our critics in China and Russia, and infuriated the right. The West has certainly committed some grave sins, not least imperialism and slavery, but it is hardly unique in this. Any reasonable accounting must balance these sins against achievements such as liberal political regimes (the limitation of powers, individual rights and toleration) and sustained economic growth.Third: No civilization can survive without virtue. Both progressives and neoliberals have made the case for reducing self-restraint — progressives on the grounds that sexual repression is unhealthy and neoliberals on the grounds that pursuing self-interest leads to the common good. The Epstein scandal is a historic moment because it demonstrates where this double liberation can lead: to a group of rich and entitled men exploiting young and vulnerable girls. But we should not let the terrible details of this affair blind us to the wider problems that it reveals: the formation of a hereditary caste of the super-rich at the pinnacle of society and the breakdown of basic social institutions such as the family at the bottom.Political theorists from the ancient Greeks onward have emphasized that self-restraint is particularly important in democracies. Plato argued that too much popular self-indulgence leads inexorably to demand for a dictator who can restore order. The Founding Fathers believed that “parchment” barriers to tyranny would fail if the people lacked character. Joseph Schumpeter and Daniel Bell warned that the greatest danger to capitalism comes not from without but from within, from a failure to control the appetites that it generates.It is tempting to share Kipling’s pessimism in his 1919 masterpiece. The world’s most powerful CEOs have added paying court to Donald Trump to their list of sins. The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York suggests that Trump’s extremism is empowering the left of the Democratic Party. But there are nevertheless reasons for hope..Read more:.Beat modern populism by learning from the 17th century: Adrian Wooldridge.The Epstein scandal is so toxic that it is likely to discredit not just the people who moved in his circles but a wider culture of entitlement. A growing number of universities, particularly in the American South, are establishing courses on Western civilization and civic virtue. And a growing number of young people, exhausted by digital distraction, are looking for meaning in great books or traditional culture. There is even a revival of old-fashioned religion in secular Britain. Kipling warned that, if we neglected the gods of the copybook headings, they would return with terror and slaughter. We still have time to appease them with moderation and wisdom..© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

Rudyard Kipling’s wisdom — lessons we keep ignoring: Adrian Wooldridge

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