“God needs no faint hearts for his ambassadors.” ~ Margaret Thatcher in The Crown Season 4, Episode 2 1
The Poem
In the second episode of Netflix’s The Crown 2, Margaret Thatcher recites a poem to the Queen, named ‘No Enemies’ by Charles Mackay. This was in response to the Queen saying that Thatcher is making a lot of enemies. Thatcher replies that it is inevitable to make enemies. She says, “If you’ve not made enemies, you’ve been a coward in the fight.” Gillian Anderson plays the role of Thatcher to perfection, and this scene was exceptional. I felt compelled to immediately Google this poem and read it. Here is the poem.
No Enemies by Charles Mackay 2
YOU have no enemies, you say?
Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;
He who has mingled in the fray
Of duty, that the brave endure,
Must have made foes! If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done.
You’ve hit no traitor on the hip,
You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip,
You’ve never turned the wrong to right,
You’ve been a coward in the fight.
It reminded me of poems like Invictus by Henley and If by Kipling. Definitely should add this to my list of Favorite Poems.
Reflections
The poem set me thinking about whether it is truly inevitable to make enemies. It is probably part of the human condition to deal with virtues as well as the vices of people around us. Some could be kind to us during our struggles, some could see it as an opportunity to crush us further, some could be happy at our success, some could be jealous, and so on. As civilization progresses, there are more resources available, a lesser percentage of people go hungry, and fewer percentages live below the poverty line. So it probably does mean that there is less strife than before. Lesser number of wars and unnecessary killings. Books like “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” and Rosling - Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, clearly show the decline of violence over the years and the progress in humanity. So I think more people can now afford to live relatively peaceful lives without having any real enemies.
But even though the percentage is less, there is still a lot of strife, violence, bigotry, oppression, and injustice in the world. One can make a conscious choice to take up a cause and fight for a section of the oppressed. While some people have to make a conscious choice to get out of being a spectator, some are thrust into it. They are mostly the people who are in the affected group or people who are moved by the plight of the oppressed. During her time, Thatcher fought not only against the aristocracy but also prejudice against women. There are so many such examples of people who have faced insurmountable odds and prevailed. They are the heroes that we can always learn from every time we need to stand up for something we think is right.
Charles Mackay
I didn’t know about Charles Mackay before I went in search of this poem after watching this episode. He was an extraordinary person. He was a Scottish poet, journalist, author, anthologist, novelist, and songwriter 3. He was famous for the songs he wrote and for this book titled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds 4.
The title of the book was so engaging that I thought I would read about it. Quite an interesting book. The book was published in three volumes: “National Delusions”, “Peculiar Follies”, and “Philosophical Delusions”, and he debunks popular beliefs on alchemy, crusades, economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, magnetizers, prophecies, tulip mania, witch mania, etc.
I feel like I should read this book at some point in time, even though a lot of it is historical and not relevant now. I also think that a book such as this should be published every decade. New fads keep coming up, and people seem to follow them in droves. At the present time, it seems like the Internet, especially social media, is filled with misinformation despite the best intentions of big companies to use their resources to filter them out. Maybe it is not humanly possible to even consolidate all the delusions out there today. Hence relying on AI or systems that can crunch large amounts of data and make sense out of them is probably the only option. But what if the AI itself is biased. I guess if the human species has been self-correcting over the course of time, one can be optimistic that even AI can.
Image Credit - NASA HQ PHOTO - Mars 2020 Perseverance Launch via Flickr (https://flic.kr/p/2jrgXJa)