The Northern Star
Polaris or Alpha Ursae Minoris, the brightest star in the Ursa Minor constellation, is the name of the celestial body which we have come to know as the North Star or Pole Star. As such it enjoys the “pole” position at the axis of the heavens. To some it seems to be the center of the universe since all the other stars appear to rotate around it. Of course this is just an illusion as so many things in the world of man. That world is a function of an earth circling its own axis with just one star positioned at the apex that creates a fixed point as viewed from earth by man. Even early man understood the value of a fixed point of reference in knowing where one was in relation to the world around him. The Northern Star became the centerpiece of celestial navigation, with which all manner of migration on land and sea became possible. If there ever were a natural guiding light in the firmament, it was Polaris.
What brought this all to mind was catching a whim this afternoon to watch the 1975 classic Sean Connery and Michael Caine film The Man Who Would Be King, based on the Rudyard Kipling short story of the same name. In the movie, Kipling is played by Christopher Plumber, a far cry from his role as Captain Von Trapp from a decade before, but a Nobel laureate no less. Kipling is a correspondent in India for the British newspaper, The Northern Star. In the story he plays the important role of the chronicler of the amazing travels and deeds of two British Army imperialist Sergeants who have stayed on in the sub-continent to seek their fortunes. They travel north across the Punjab and northern Pakistan and Afghanistan into the Hindu Kush. They are classic adventurers of the nineteenth century who encounter all manner of wonders in the pursuit of greatness and riches. Peachy (Caine) is the instigator and the idea man and Danny (Connery) is the muscle who goes along for the ride.
Both Peachy and Danny are Freemasons. Their connection to Rudyard Kipling is through their Freemasonry. In fact, it is Danny’s Freemason pendant, exposed when the high priests in the mountainous citadel of the Kafir or Kalash try to slit his throat that saves him. The high priests reveal the reasons they are impressed by the square and compass symbol of the Freemasons. It was left behind in stone by a prior and memorable king, Alexander the Great, the Macedonian youth who conquered eastward from Greece through western and middle Asia along what we now call the Silk Road. Alexander’s time was in the fourth century before Christ and there is no clear evidence that Freemasonry existed before the Protestant Reformation, or in regions as far east as the Hindu Kush mountain range. But Rudyard Kipling was nothing if not a romantic. His portrayal of Colonial life in India was romanticized in his short stories.
The first of his well-known short stories and poems is The Man Who Would Be King, which almost fantasizes the colonial warriors. Then came Gunga Din, the poem that glorifies the honor of the indigenous military water bearer, who gives his life for the Colonial soldier battling his very countrymen. Then came the eponymous The Jungle Book, with Mowgli and the glorification of the natural and supernatural flora and fauna of the jungles in India. But from there Kipling published The White Man’s Burden about the American presence in the Philippines and Kipling’s perception that America should exert its manifest destiny to impose its colonial will on what he considered the needy Filipinos. This solidified Kipling’s historical image as a pro-colonialist that longed for a continuation of the era of Victorian empire.
I was disappointed to learn this about Kipling, who had always just been a beautiful poet to me. I love the grandeur and exotic story of the Hindu Kush that, while depicting the exploitation of a sort of the indigenous population, is a fanciful adventure story that has a righteous ending that speaks to the redemption that must be found in pain of colonial oppression. The Gunga Din and The Jungle Book gave me hope for Kipling that he understood the plight of the oppressed and appreciated their situation. But seeing him progress to the tragedy of his Philippine story and seeing the depth of his conviction since it cannot be blamed on an abundance of patriotism or the history of a misspent upbringing, makes me more inclined to agree with a popular sentiment that caused him to turn down the designation of Poet Laureate and several Knighthoods. I’m not sure one can say that Kipling died disgraced, but he surely had a controversial image to say the least.
I am struck by the imagery of today’s state of the world versus that of the Victorian era. As misguided as it was, at least Victorian empirical paternalism had some good intentions on behalf of the local population. It is far harder to find the goodness in much of the current thinking from that portion of the world that is prone to nationalism. We all know that this is not just about Trump and his minions, as much as he is the cartoonish symbol of that disappointing line of thought. There are, of course, the authoritarian regimes of China, Russia, North Korea, Myanmar, Indonesia and Thailand (I can’t bring myself to include Singapore even though I probably should). There are the religiously zealous and equally authoritarian regimes of Iran, Afghanistan and perhaps even Israel under Netanyahu. And then the emerging nationalists like Brazil and Italy. The world is in a fine mess as it enters an even greater mess called the Coronavirus pandemic and the economic consequences thereof.
The Northern Star has guided us for millennia and we need that guidance now more than ever. We are quickly finding ourselves in the midst of the World War III that we feared between the superpowers for years. The good news is that is not us currently fighting among ourselves, but that will only stay that way if we remember that we all do better as a global community than we do as individual nations. We have progressed so far from the Victorian age and while it took several world wars to get us here, what a shame to throw away all the hard-won gains from almost two hundred years of human evolution. Let us try to take the best lessons from Rudyard Kipling and remember that Gunga Din is a water bearer that can save us and is worthy of our respect and support and that the man who would be king always falls from grace in the end into the chasm of a lonely death. Let us follow the best of the Northern Star.