Unrest

UNREST is quickly becoming the hallmark of our contemporary era. Unrest is everywhere, from the widespread rise of fatigue, burnout and exhaustion to the political disaffection and civil unrest taking increasingly material forms across the world. Unrest is at once a personal and a political phenomenon, with an etymology which may help us chart many of the changes in both language and life that have taken place across the historical record.

Unrest, in a first for this column, is formed through the use of a negative prefix (un-), and as such is construed and conceptualised in strong relation to its base word – rest. Rest, like unrest, can be interpreted as both a verb (to rest) and noun (a good rest) with senses which relate to repose or a break from activity; unlike unrest, it can also be thought of as a physical object (the thing on which something else rests), or the noun to which we assign the remaining part of something (the rest the family, or the rest of my life), among other senses (an inn, a caesura, a pause in music notation, etc). For our purposes we shall focus on the former, common meanings, which also happen to be the oldest, with evidence of their use in Old English as far back as the C8th – namely in the Vespasian Psalter, the oldest extant English translation of any portion of the Bible – and a strong relation to other Indo-European languages.

Indeed, variations of rest can be found in Sanskrit (रमते or rámate), the extinct East Germanic Gothic (𐍂𐌹𐌼𐌹𐍃 or rimis), Ancient Greek (ἐρωή or erōḗ), Welsh (araf), German (Ruhe or Rast), Swedish (rast), Dutch (rust), and more. The Proto-Germanic *rastō (interval, or period of rest) and *rōwō (quiet, rest) contribute to many of these, and certainly the Old English ræst and rō. Ro, a word no longer in use, was until the c17th often paired as a doublet with rest with a similar sense of repose or peace (think peace & quiet, rest & ro). This is evidenced in the c12th Ormulum, a work of biblical exegesis in early Middle English verse, in discussions of Christ’s resste & ro:

Forr Cristess resste & Cristess ro & Cristess swete slæpess Sinndenn, þatt witt tu wel forr soþ, I gode menness herrtess ¹

Likewise, in a passage of the Ormulum on the days of Easter and Resurrection Sunday we read:

Þe seffnde daȝȝ iss Resstedaȝȝ, [...] & tacneþþ all þatt resste & ro ²

Interesting here, of course, is the relationship between "Resstedaȝȝ" (Resurrection Day) and the idea of rest itself, the inscription of a ‘day of rest’ into a whole culture and way of life. In a similar meditation on the story of Christ’s resurrection – in a c15th Middle English poem – one reads of the promise of everlasting rest in the afterlife:

And al þe fest of þe sununday In-to þe fyrst our of monday, In reuerens þat ȝe here-fore ham pray, Þai schal haue rou and rest perpetualy. ³

And in another, the c14th Cursor Mundi, of the concept of paradise as a land of peace and rest:

Tel me man yeit wit þi lare, Quat land es paradis, and ware? Blethli sire i sal þe tell. [...] land o liue, o ro, and rest, ⁴

This latter passage begins to offer an entry point into the terms negative doublet, unrest – or unrē̆st(e in Middle English – which from the beginning (c14th) takes on a more expressly political connotation, alongside general senses of discomfort and emotional distress. For example, in John Lydgate’s C15th Siege of Thebes (itself a response to Chaucer's C14th The Canterbury Tales), we hear of the terrible Greek Eteocles:

The Theban kyng, felle Ethyocles, Rote of vnreste and causer of vnpes ⁵

Unrest here begins to take on the sense for which it has become most commonly used – as the OED have it: ‘a disturbance or turmoil resulting from dissatisfaction or anger within a society or community, typically taking the form of public demonstrations or disorder’. In Shakespeare’s C16th Richard III, for example, in a supposedly-rousing oration to his army on the battlefield shortly before his death (and the famous line ‘...my kingdom for a horse!’), King Richard cries out in opposition to the Tudor forces:

You sleeping safe, they bring to you unrest; You having lands, and bless'd with beauteous wives, They would restrain the one, distain the other. [...] Fight, gentlemen of England! Fight, bold yeomen!

And elsewhere, in John Dryden’s epic c17th translation of the work of Lucretius, we read:

O, if the foolish Race of Man, who find A weight of Cares still pressing on their mind, Cou'd find as well the Cause of this Unrest, And all this Burden lodg'd within the Breast,

Interesting in uses of unrest throughout the historical record is an ambivalence or interrelation between inner (emotional, embodied) and outer (political, social) states of disquiet. Unrest, as a word, intuits the often inarticulable way (the ‘vibe’) in which ‘burdens of the breast’ or ‘cares of the mind’ manifest as a wider form of social upheaval – perhaps akin to what the author J.G. Ballard described as the relationship between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ space, a theme explored throughout his psycho-sociological narratives.

As we move from the middle ages into the modern era – from the c16th into the c20th – we see a litany of specific unrests arise, most notably in Russia in the worker unrest (and subsequent revolutions) between 1892 and 1917. Here, in English reporting on (and translations of) the developing revolution, we read of labour, civil, and even student unrest, as in this 1901 headline in the Times of India:

Student unrest in Russia. Many exiled to the east.

And these stories would repeat across the c20th in various guises, as in reports of the American worker’s strikes of the 1910’s – here in Frederick Emory Haynes’ Social Politics:

Labor unrest, illustrated vividly by the coal and steel strikes of 1919, spread rapidly.

Or otherwise – as financial markets develop across the c20th – in reports of price movements, as in this 1946 headline from the New York Times:

Price unrest slows market's activities.

And again, in an article for the Financial Times – an insight into attitudes towards apartheid South Africa – a report on civil unrest in Johannesburg:

Damned nuisance, these civil unrests. A colleague has just arrived in Johannesburg to cover the elections.

At one time – in the 1960s–70s, and particularly in the context of higher education – such unrest was viewed as a necessary condition for social and political progress, for example in a 1970 edition of the journal Art Education we read:

The 20th century has brought about many changes, the greatest of which has occurred in the student's role in education. The unrests, protests, revolts, marches, and sit-ins are all segments of today's scene.

Today, however – in a highly-integrated neoliberal world, which spins almost exclusively on the strength of the word ‘stability’ – unrest is viewed with far more suspicion, inflected perhaps with a more explicit threat of physical violence than ever before. For example, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s Social Unrest Index or the consulting firm Maplecroft’s Civil Unrest Index seek to quantitatively render what at one time may have been the subject of a popular debate.

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

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Footnotes

1. For Christ's rest and Christ's peace / And Christ's sweet sleep, / They may know, that indeed, / in good men's hearts. ↩

2. The seventh day is Resurrection Day, [...] And signifies all that rest and peace ↩

3. And all the feast of the Sunday / Into the first hour of Monday, / In reverence that you pray for them, / They shall have peace and rest perpetually. ↩

4. Tell me, man, yet with your lore, / What land is Paradise, and where? Gladly, sir, I shall tell you. [...] / a land of life, of peace, and rest, ↩

5. The Theban king, fierce Eteocles, / Root of unrest and causer of unhappiness ↩