solitary way

Helen McPhail

2011-01-10T01:28:00.000-08:00

The Long Silence

Dirty and hollow-eyed, they were identifiable by their red armbands and other identifying stripes on trousers and jacket, and by an individual number-plate fixed to their cap. Their clothes wore out until they existed in a jumble of ragged and torn garments, lucky if they could find a scrap of blanket or sacking to cover their shoulders.

Girls were used for work in dangerous conditions, and a number were killed by an ammunition depot explosion. The fear of explosions caused by sabotage or carelessness brought an ingenious solution: prisoners and labour-gangs would be lodged inside the depot, at personal risk from any careless or deliberately risky activities!

Most of the men taken to work in civilian labour gangs were sent home after nine or ten months, as they became exhausted; a number of them never recovered their health and there were certainly deaths from tuberculosis and other illnesses or general debility afterwards. As soon as one batch of men was returned home another took its place, and it seems that the number of men who served in this way was not less than 100,000. The gangs returned when their tasks were finished, arriving by rail or in long grey columns of marching me, weak and ill and ashamed of their enforced slavery. Many died—succumbing to flu, the severe winter weather or ill-treatment or punishment when they tried to escape—or of electrocution when they tried to escape across the frontier in the Netherlands.

The few men who volunteered for work were treated well and shown off proudly to residents of their assigned work-place. It was perhaps fortunate for them that these volunteer groups no longer existed by the time the war ended: there seems to have been no settling of old scores on the same scale as at the end of the Second World War—in different circumstances and in a war which affected the whole country—but the wretched conditions at the time of the 1918 Armistice left little room for easy forgiveness towards those seen to have colluded with their oppressors.

How many civilians were forced to work for the Germans? It does not seem possible to answer this; sometimes the number in any one camp, on any one date, of Z.A.B. workers is known, but not the numbers elsewhere on the same date, to establish a total. There were however a great many civilian prison camps along the front line, and some held several thousand men. In the Verdun area alone, some 68 camps held only Belgian workers; another 78 camps were located between Lille and St Quentin. In December 1916 at least 4,000 men were being held in camps around Laon.

Peter Wells

2011-01-08T02:57:00.000-08:00

The Barbarians Speak

The third century A.D. is regarded as a period of crisis throughout the Roman world that included intense political struggles in Rome, the decline in the power of the Roman Senate over the affairs of the empire, and a rise in the role of the army in internal as well as external matters. Written documents of the period make clear that the power of Rome and its central administration waned, and incursions by barbarians increased in scale and frequency on many of the empire's frontiers. Germanic peoples threatened the frontiers in the west and overran them several times after A.D. 259. On the eastern frontiers, the Goths disrupted the peace in the provinces along the lower Danube, while the Persians created unstable conditions further east. Archaeological evidence also indicates important changes during this time, but it provides a different perspective from the texts left by the Roman writers.

In many regions in Roman Europe, urban centers declined in size and in importance during the third century. Archaeologically, we can see an end to major building programs and often a reduction in the inhabited and fortified portions of the towns. Few new villas were established in the countryside, and many existing ones were abandoned. Settlement systems in rural areas returned to patterns that had been characteristic during the prehistoric Iron Age.

In the frontier zone in temperate Europe, textual sources describe attacks on the limes boundary and incursions across the border by a group called the Alamanni, first mentioned in A.D. 231. According to these written documents, in the years 259 and 260 the Alamanni attacked with such force that they effectively destroyed the imperial boundary, causing Rome to give up the Agri Decumates (roughly what is now the southwest German state of Baden-Wurttemberg) and to re-create the earlier imperial border along the upper Rhine and upper Danube Rivers. This view of the Alamanni destroying the Roman limes in massive attacks of the mid-third century has dominated thinking by historians and by many archaeologists, and the collapse of the imperial border in south west Germany is often portrayed as an archetypal example of the barbarian overwhelming of Roman frontiers.

But the results of extensive recent archaeological research in southwest Germany show a different situation. Although the written sources portray the fall of the limes as a rather sudden event caused by increased attacks by the Alamanni around the middle of the third century, the archaeology shows that the Roman forsaking of the Agri Decumates was the result of a long process of cross-border interaction and migration and of frequent small-scale incursions by different groups over an extended period of time, probably many decades. Numerous excavated settlements and cemeteries west of the frontier attest to the immigration of peoples from outside, probably to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the thriving economy in the Roman provinces and to enjoy the attractions of the provincial lifestyle. Archaeological investigation of many frontier watchtowers along the limes has failed to produce evidence for widespread burning and destruction at the time of the supposed collapse of the frontier defenses. Thus the evidence now suggests a long and gradual process of change from a landscape dominated by the Roman military and administrative apparatus to one transformed through interaction with and migration by peoples from across the frontier.

Theodore Rabb

2011-01-07T02:31:00.000-08:00

The Last Days of the Renaissance

The most shattering of the blows to medieval society in the fourteenth century was the Black Death, a series of devastations that began in the 1340s. As with gunpowder, this was an external force at work, but its consequences seemed limitless. Some historians have argued that the rising population of the high Middle Ages was already straining at the limits of Europe's resources by 1300; yet there can be no doubt that the sharp reversal of centuries of expansion was primarily the result of outbreaks of famine in the early fourteenth century and then, far more destructively, of plague. However they are construed, the numbers are astounding. Even a conservative estimate would suggest that, by 1450, Europe contained at most one half, and possibly little more than one third, of the number of people who had lived there 150 years earlier. Despite a few areas that avoided the worst of the disasters, the grim legacy of loss on this scale was felt throughout the continent.

Not all the effects of declining population were adverse. Economic and social winners flourished alongside the losers: Wage-earners did well even as food sellers fared poorly. In terms of the break with the medieval past, though, the demographic cataclysm of the 1400s was one of the surest signs that an old order had been destroyed. During the next two centuries, not only did industry and commerce have to develop in new directions but so too did structures of employment, and thus the relations among social classes.

Where political relationships were concerned, changes in traditional assumptions became inevitable in the wake of the erosion of Church authority, the reorientation of warfare, and the effects of plague and economic depression. In the struggles with the papacy, kings had made claims of independent authority in the 1300s; and though they did not follow up on these claims for some time, they gave notice that they had their own justifications, rooted in divine right, secular law, precedent, and their relations with the people they ruled, for making demands on their subjects that no superior could overturn. That more aggressive stance was only strengthened by the new conditions that governed military affairs.

The feature of gunpowder that had the most far-reaching consequences, outside the battlefield, was its cost. The substance itself was fairly cheap to produce, but the new weapons and skills it required, and the defensive structures it demanded, made its application prohibitively expensive. Casting cannon and cannon balls, manufacturing hand guns and their ammunition, training soldiers in the use of these devices, and building bastions to protect city walls: All depended on financial outlays without precedent in the Middle Ages. This shift was exacerbated by the slow dissolution of the system by which medieval militias had been recruited. Increasingly, the traditional feudal levy, consisting of able-bodied men who fought with the overlord to fulfill their obligations as tenants, had been replaced by mercenaries. This 'bastard' feudalism, which substituted cash for service, was yet another signpost toward a very different future. By the late 1400s, therefore, it was clear that only princes of considerable means had the resources for the new kind of war, and that the once-redoubtable noble in his castle was helpless to resist them. The inevitable results were not long in coming: Those who could afford to equip an army began to assume new powers over their subjects, notably by imposing ever higher taxes (largely, of course, to help pay for these very guns and troops).

Demographic, economic, and social changes helped this process along. Of the many effects of the Black Death, the most revolutionary was its impact on labor, wages, and servitude. With a much smaller population to draw on, landowners, whose fields had to be tilled, animals tended, and harvests raised, were forced to find new ways to attract the manpower they needed. There was no point in insisting on feudal obligations or traditional forms of servitude if the people were unavailable. The alternative, offering wages to free laborers, not only liberated hundreds of thousands who previously had been tied to the land but also set in motion a major shift in social relations.

The freeing of western Europe's serfs was the essential prerequisite for the growth of cities and the small but important improvements in opportunities for advancement that were to benefit succeeding generations. Both developments, together with the replacement of servitude by wage labor, caused difficulties for the landed aristocracy, and in the major trading centers of northern Italy and the Netherlands their already weakened position was soon to dwindle to virtual insignificance. Even in areas that the leading landowners had traditionally controlled, the new pressures from below left them ever more vulnerable to the demands of princes from above. The struggle was to be long and hard, but by the late 1400s the balance of power within kingdoms and principalities was shifting toward the ruler at the center. The structure of politics would soon be transformed beyond recall as princes and monarch gradually imposed new demands and new assertions of supremacy on the peoples of western and northern Europe.

Even as that vast social and political transformation began, there were small but significant indications of a very different future, most notably the popular revolts that racked the fourteenth century. Across Europe, urban elites faced repeated disturbance, most dramatically in Florence in 1378, when the Ciompi, ordinary artisans and laborers, briefly took over city government. And France and England saw two major peasant uprisings, the Jacquerie in the 1350s and Jack Cade's Rebellion in the 1380s. These upheavals had little immediate effect, but they remained in the memory. If the age of expanding governmental powers was about to begin, so too was the tradition of popular resistance.

Jung Chang

2011-01-05T03:02:00.000-08:00

Jon Halliday

Mao

By mid-September 1966, the country was thoroughly terrorised and Mao felt confident enough to start stalking his real target: Party officials. On 15 September, Lin Biao instructed a Red Guards' rally on Tiananmen Square that they were to shift their target and 'focus on denouncing those power-holders inside the Party pursuing a capitalist road,' known as 'capitalist-roaders.' What Lin—and Mao—really meant was the old enforcers who had shown distaste for Mao's extremist policies. Mao aimed to get rid of them en masse, and the call went out to attack them right across China.

For this job, new groups were formed, who sometimes called themselves Red Guards but were generally known as 'Rebels,' because they were taking on their bosses. And these Rebels were mostly adults. The original Red Guard groups, most of them made up of teenagers, now fell apart, as they had been organised around the children of those same-high officials who now became targets. Mao had used the young Red Guards to terrorise society at large. Now he was moving against his real enemies, Party officials; and for this he used a broader, mainly older force.

With Mao's explicit support, Rebels denounced their bosses in wall posters and at violent rallies. But anyone who thought the Party dictatorship might be weakened had their hopes dashed fast. People who tried to get access to their own files (which the regime held on everyone) or to rehabilitate those the Party had persecuted, were instantly blocked. Orders poured out from Peking making it clear that, although Party officials were under attack, the Party's rule was not to be loosened one bit. Victims of past persecutions were banned from joining Rebel organisations.

After some months to generate momentum, in January 1967 Mao called on Rebels to 'seize power' from their Party bosses. Mao did not differentiate between disaffected officials and those who were actually totally loyal to him and had not wavered even during the famine. In fact, there was no way he could tell who was which. So he resolved to overthrow them all first, and then have them investigated by his new enforcers. The population was told that the Party had been in the hands of villains ('the black line') ever since the founding of the Communist regime. It was an index of how deeply fear had been embedded that no one dared to ask the obvious questions, like: 'In that case, why should the Party go on ruling?,' or 'Where was Mao all these seventeen years?'

The Rebels' basic assignment was to punish Party cadres, which is what Mao had been longing to do for years. Some Rebels hated their Party bosses, and jumped at the chance to take revenge. Others were hungry for power, and knew that the only way to rise was to be merciless towards 'capitalist-roaders.' There were also plenty of thugs and sadists.

Stalin had carried out his purges using an elite, the KGB, who swiftly hustled their victims out of sight to prison, the gulag or death. Mao made sure that much violence and humiliation was carried out in public, and he vastly increased the number of persecutors by getting his victims tormented and tortured by their own direct subordinates.

A British engineer who was working in Lanzhou in 1967 caught a glimpse of life in one remote corner of the northwest. Two nights after being entertained at an official dinner, he saw a corpse strung up from a lamp-post. It was his host of two nights before. Later, he saw two men being deliberately deafened into unconsciousness by loud-hailers—'so that no more reactionary remarks enter their ears,' his minder told him.

The first senior official tortured to death was the minister of coal, on 21 January 1967. Mao hated him because he had complained about the Great Leap Forward—and about Mao himself. He was exhibited in front of organised crowds, and had his arms twisted ferociously backwards in the form of torment known as being 'jet-planed.' One day he was shoved onto a bench, bleeding, shirtless in a temperature well below freezing, while thugs rushed forward to cut him with small knives. Finally, a huge iron stove was hung round his neck, dragging his head down to the cement floor, where his skull was bashed in—with heavy brass belt buckles. During all this, photographs were taken, which were later shown to Chou—and doubtless to Mao.

Photographing torture had hitherto been rare under Mab, but it was done extensively in the Cultural Revolution, especially where Mao's personal enemies were concerned. As Mao's usual practice was not to keep records for posterity, let alone proof of torture, the most likely explanation for this departure from his norm is that he took pleasure in viewing pictures of his foes in agony. Film cameras also recorded gruesome denunciation rallies, and Mao watched these displays in his villas. Selected films of this sort were shown on TV, accompanied by the soundtrack of Mme Mao's 'model shows,' and people were organised to watch. (Very few individuals had TV in those days.)

Mao was intimately acquainted with the types of ordeal visited on his former colleagues and subordinates. Vice-Premier Ji Deng-kui later recalled Mao doing an imitation for his entourage of the agonising 'jet-plane' posture which was routine at denunciation meetings, and Mao laughing heartily as Ji described what he had been through.

Eventually, after two or three years of suffering in this manner, millions of officials were exiled to de facto labour camps which went under the anodyne name of 'May 7 Cadre Schools.' These camps also housed the custodians of culture—artists, writers, scholars, actors and journalists—who had become superfluous in Mao's new order.

Christopher Clark

2011-01-04T02:30:00.000-08:00

Iron Kingdom

By the end of 1878, more than half of Prussia's Catholic bishops were in exile or in prison. More than 1,800 priests had been incarcerated or exiled and over 16 million marks' worth of ecclesiastical property seized. In the first four months of 1875 alone, 241 priests, 136 Catholic newspaper editors and 210 Catholic laymen were fined or imprisoned, 20 newspapers were confiscated, 74 Catholic houses were searched, 103 Catholic political activists were expelled or interned and 55 Catholic associations or clubs were closed down. As late as 1881, a quarter of all Prussian parishes remained without priests. This was Prussia at the height of the Kulturkampf, a 'struggle of cultures' that would shape German politics and public life for generations.

Prussia was not the only European state to see tension over confessional questions in this era. In the 1870s and 1880s, there was heightened conflict between Catholics and secular liberal movements across the European continent. But the Prussian case stands out. Nowhere else did the state proceed so systematically against Catholic institutions and personnel. Administrative reform and law were the two main instruments of discrimination. In 1871, the government abolished the 'Catholic section' in the Prussian ministry for church affairs, thereby depriving the Catholics of a separate representation within the senior echelons of the bureaucracy. The criminal code was amended to enable the authorities to prosecute priests who used the pulpit 'for political ends.' In 1872, further state measures eliminated the influence of ecclesiastical personnel over the planning and implementation of school curricula and the supervision of schools. Members of religious orders were prohibited from teaching in the state school system and the Jesuits were expelled from the German Empire. Under the May Laws of 1873, the training and appointment of clergy in Prussia were placed under state supervision. In 1874, the Prussian government introduced compulsory civil marriage, a step extended to the entire German Empire a year later. Additional legislation in 1875 abolished various allegedly suspect religious orders, choked off state subsidies to the church, and deleted religious guarantees from the Prussian constitution. As Catholic religious personnel were expelled, jailed and forced into hiding, the authorities imposed statutes permitting state-authorized agents to take charge of vacated bishoprics.

Bismarck was the driving force behind this unprecedented campaign. Why did he undertake it? The answer lies pertly in his highly confessionalized understanding of the German national question. In the 1850s, during his posting to the German Confederal authority in Frankfurt, he had come to believe that political Catholicism was the chief 'enemy of Prussia' in southern Germany. The spectacle of Catholic revivalist piety, with its demonstrative pilgrimages and public festivities, filled him with disgust, as did the increasingly Roman orientation of mid-century Catholicism. At times, indeed, he doubted whether this 'hypocritical idolatrous papism full of hate and cunning,' whose 'presumptuous dogma falsified God's revelation and nurtured idolatry as a basis for worldly domination' was a religion at all. A variety of themes were bundled together here: a fastidious Protestant contempt (accentuated by Bismarck's Pietist spirituality) for the outward display so characteristic of the Catholic revival blended with a strain of half-submerged German idealism and political apprehensions (shading into paranoia) about the church's capacity to manipulate minds and mobilize masses.

These antipathies deepened during the conflicts that brought about the unification of Germany. The German Catholics had traditionally looked to Austria for leadership in German affairs and they were unenthusiastic about the prospect of a Prussian-dominated 'small Germany' excluding the 6 million (mainly Catholic) Austrian Germans. In 1866, the news of Prussian victory triggered Catholic riots in the south, while the Catholic caucus in the Prussian Landtag opposed the government on a number of key symbolic initiatives, including the indemnity bill, the Prussian annexation programme and the proposal to reward Bismarck and the Prussian generals financially for the recent victory. In 1867-8, the Prussian minister-president—now chancellor of the North German Confederation—was infuriated by the strength of Catholic resistance in the south to a closer union with the north. Particularly alarming was the Bavarian campaign of 1869 against the pro-Prussian policies of the liberal government in Munich. The clergy played a crucial role in mobilizing support for the Catholic-particularist programme of the opposition, agitating from pulpits and collecting petitions bearing hundreds of thousands of signatures. After 1871, doubts about the political reliability of the Catholics were further reinforced by the fact that, of the three main ethnic minorities (Poles, Alsatians and Danes), whose representatives formed opposition parties in the Reichstag, two were emphatically Catholic. Bismarck was utterly persuaded of the political 'disloyalty' of the 2.5 million Catholic Poles in the Prussian East, and he suspected that the church and its networks were deeply implicated in the Polish nationalist movement.

These concerns resonated more destructively within the new nation-state than they had before. The new Bismarckian Reich was not in any sense an 'organic' or historically evolved entity—it was the highly artificial product of four years of diplomacy and war. In the 1870s, as so often in the history of the Prussian state, the successes of the monarchy seemed as fragile as they were impressive. There was an unsettling sense that what had so swiftly been put together could also be undone, that the Empire might never acquire the political or cultural cohesion to safeguard itself against fragmentation from within. These anxieties may appear absurd to us, but they felt real to many contemporaries. In this climate of uncertainty, it seemed plausible to view the Catholics as the most formidable domestic hindrance to national consolidation.

In lashing out against the Catholics, Bismarck knew that he could count on the enthusiastic support of the National Liberals, whose powerful positions in the new Reichstag and the Prussian Chamber of Deputies made them indispensable political allies. In Prussia, as in much of Germany (and Europe), anti-Catholicism was one of the defining strands of late-nineteenth-century liberalism. Liberals held up Catholicism as the diametrical negation of their own world-view. They denounced the 'absolutism' and 'slavery' of the doctrine of papal infallibility adopted by the Vatican Council in 1870 (according to which the authority of the pope is unchallengeable when he speaks ex cathedra on matters of faith or morals). Liberal journalism depicted the Catholic faithful as a servile and manipulated mass (by implied contrast with a liberal social universe centred on male tax-paying worthies with unbound consciences). A bestiary of anti-clerical stereotypes emerged: the satires in liberal journals thronged with wily, thin Jesuits and lecherous, fat priests—amenable subjects because the cartoonist's pen could make such artful play with the solid black of their garb. By vilifying the parish priest in his confessorial role or impugning the sexual propriety of nuns, they articulated through a double negative the liberal faith in the sanctity of the patriarchal nuclear family. Through their nervousness about the prominent place of women within many of the new Catholic orders and their prurient fascination with the celibacy (or not) of the priest, liberals revealed a deep-seated preoccupation with 'manliness' that was crucial (though not always explicitly) to the self-understanding of the movement. For the liberals, therefore, the campaign against the church was nothing less than a 'struggle of cultures'—the term was coined by the liberal Protestant pathologist Rudolf Virchow in a speech of February 1872 to the Prussian Chamber of Deputies.

Bismarck's campaign against the Prussian Catholics was a failure. He had hoped that an anti-Catholic crusade would help to create a broad, Protestant liberal-conservative lobby that would help him to pass legislation consolidating the new Empire. But the integrating effect of the campaign was more fleeting and fragile than he had anticipated. Anti-Catholicism could not sustain a durable platform for government action, either in Prussia or in the Empire. There were many facets to this problem. Bismarck himself was less of an extremist than many of those whose passions were aroused by his policy. He was a religious man who sought the guidance of God in his administration of state affairs (and usually, as the left liberal Ludwig Bamberger sardonically noted, found the deity agreeing with him). His religion was—in the Pietist tradition—non-sectarian and ecumenical. He was opposed to the complete separation of church and state sought by the liberals, and he did not believe that religion was a purely private affair. Bismarck did not share the left-liberal hope that religion would ultimately wither away as a social force. He was thus unnerved by the anti-clerical and secularizing energies released by the Kulturkampf.

The anti-Catholic campaign also failed because the confessional divide was cross-cut by the other fault-lines in the Prussian political landscape. As the Kulturkampf wore on, the rift between left liberals and right liberals proved in some respects even deeper than that between the liberals and the Catholics. By the mid-1870s, the left liberals had begun to oppose the campaign on the grounds that it infringed fundamental rights. The increasing radicalism of anti-church measures also prompted misgivings in many Protestants on the 'clerical' wing of German conservatism. The view gained ground that the real victim of the Kulturkampf was not the Catholic church or Catholic politics as such, but religion itself.

Stanley Rosen

2010-12-16T01:17:00.000-08:00

The Mask of Enlightenment

Nietzsche is the point of confluence of two separate but intimately related streams of modern thought, which streams are still plainly visible today in what is called 'analytical' and 'Continental' philosophy. Both those who believe themselves to be sophisticated computing machines and those who prefer the more romantic terminology of traces of 'differance' agree in their repudiation of what they call 'the myth of the given.' Both identify necessity with chance; both liberate contradiction from physical necessity and give priority to the imagination over reason; both speak incoherently of freedom and mastery (or what comes to the same thing, of the free abolition of mastery in a utopia in which everyone is a master and no one is a slave).

What stands between freedom and bondage, or more generally between enlightenment and nihilism, then, is rhetoric. As Nietzsche understands the historical situation in the second half of the nineteenth century, the rhetoric is one of scientific, political, and spiritual progress: This is the initial visage of the mask of enlightenment. But that visage is itself illusory and conceals the deeper grimace of a steady decay into impotence and vulgarity. The rank-ordering of aristocratic virility has been replaced by egalitarianism; the ruthlessness that is the necessary accompaniment of creation has evaporated into liberal sentimentality; science and technology have combined with secular or effeminate Christianity to produce a society of bourgeois philistines. The love of danger gives way to the love of comfort; the desire to overcome is replaced by the pursuit of comfortable satisfaction, both physical and spiritual.

According io Hegel, modern man prays by reading the morning newspaper; Nietzsche fixes at an early stage in his development upon the newspaper and beer as suppressors of the German spirit and later notes the destructive consequences of reading the newspaper in place of morning prayer. The newspaper is a confluence point of the industrialization of technology and the values of the average or even below-average person. When everyone votes or has a political voice, the level of political discussion is lowered, and so necessarily are the standards of general cultivation. The Christian doctrine of salvation is thus replaced by the doctrine of secular or political salvation. The link between democracy and the newspaper is expiessed as 'the general vulgarization of the European spirit.'

These references to the newspaper serve as a symbol of Nietzsche's aristocratic condemnation of the Enlightenment and will suffice for introductory purposes. From this standpoint, Nietzsche advocates the replacement of the globally degenerative consequences of the Enlightenment by a transvaluation of values that is not at all, as the more extreme rhetoric of Zurathustra would suggest, a radically new creation of the unique individual but rather a reappropriation of the aristocratic spirit of the archaic Greeks or Renaissance Italians, to give only two examples. As is guaranteed by the doctrine of eternal return, there cannot be a radically unique creation. 'Every elevation of the type "man" was previously the work of an aristocratic society—and so will it always be again.' The fundamental task is one of rank-ordering 'human types that have always occurred and will always exist.' In this context it is important to notice Nietzsche's remarks in the Notebooks of 1880 to the effect that most original thoughts are foolishness and that the Germans suffer from a rage for originality. However various the external forms, the spirit of an aristocratic rank-ordering is always the same: life enhancement or power.

These examples will suffice as indications of the diagnostic stage of Nietzsche's doctrine. They also make evident the impossibility of finding in Nietzsche a basis for democratic egalitarianism or of liberation from the so-called structures of domination of the past. The will to power liberates only in the sense of changing masters. To continue with Nietzsche's diagnosis, whether we call it decadence or nihilism, late-modern European society believes itself to be progressing on all fronts but is in fact steadily declining. Stage two of the doctrine is that this decline must be accelerated. Having exposed the grimace beneath the mask of progress, or, in his own terms, having been the first to state openly and honestly the psychological essence of all human spiritual activity, including philosophy, as well as the chaotic interior of all ostensible order and intelligibility, Nietzsche must now himself assume the mask of revolution. Otherwise put, he shifts from the open visage of historical and psychological analysis to the mask of revolutionary ideology. These are the two fundamental forms of what I called previously Nietzsche's double rhetoric. But there is a further distinction to be drawn between the destructive and creative stages of the revolutionary ideology. In order to destroy, Nietzsche must invoke nihilism; in order to create, he must overcome it.

In a notebook entry dating from 1887, Nietzsche distinguishes between active and passive nihilism. Active nihilism is the minimum of relative fbrce that functions as a 'masterful force of destruction,' namely, of the passive nihilism that is inseparable from if not identical with decadence. The most intense manifestation of active nihilism is Nietzsche himself, who has transformed the extreme decadence of his own nature into the power by which we may overcome the passive nihilism of the next two hundred years. This point must be emphasized. Nietzsche is in a position to forecast the history of the coming two hundred years because he is 'the first complete European nihilist, who has however already lived nihilism to its end in himself.' I am reminded of Hegel's observation in the preface to Lectures on the Philosophy of History that 'the whole is already known by me' and hence can be communicated to his students. Whereas Hegel describes, however, Nietzsche prescribes. 'A pessimistic mode of thought and teaching[,] an ecstatic nihilism can possibly be indispensable to the philosopher: as a mighty blow and hammer with which he breaks up denatured and dying races and out of these ways creates, (in order to) make a road for a new order of life, or in order to provide a longing for the end to that which is denatured and dying.' The purifying or active nihilism is identified by Nietzsche in a fragment from 1886/87 as the eternal return: 'The value of such a crisis is that it purifies.' And again, the eternal return is 'the most extreme form of nihilism; nothingness (the "meaningless") forever!'

I have now distinguished three stages of Nietzsche's teaching. The first stage is that of honest diagnosis of the decay of the West; Nietzsche speaks here with no other mask than that of the juxtaposition of subtlety and refinement with exaggeration and bombast. The second stage, as I have just sketched it, is revolutionary and consists of two substages, one of destruction and the other of creation, or at least of the prophecy of creation. It is this stage that is characterized by a double rhetoric in which the alternation of subtlety and bombast previously employed for descriptive or analytical purposes is now directed toward persuasion. Otherwise put, Nietzsche employs the same crucial doctrines, will to power and eternal return, in an intrinsically inconsistent manner, corresponding to two distinct ends. First we must be liberated from the past by the active nihilism. Next we must be stimulated to overcome the nihilistic dimension of activism in the creative act of overcoming or transvaluation. The problem is that the second, or creative, substage is already vitiated by the destructive force of the first substage.

'My demand: to bring forth a nature that stands exalted over the total race "man": and to sacrifice to this goal myself and "those who are nearest to me."' This reference to self-sacrifice is an indication that Nietzsche understands the impossibility of the prophet's entering into the promised land. The danger of the entire enterprise is warranted, however, by the destiny into which we have already begun to dissolve. In sum: Nietzsche is the intellectual and spiritual precursor of those twentieth century forms of terrorism that justify their acts by rejecting the fatal alternative of acquiescence in a corrupt society. As such a precursor, he enlightens us with respect to the inner darkness of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche is inevitably himself a figure of the Enlightenment, but of an Enlightenment that has turned on itself, like the snake that swallows its own tail. The mask of the Enlightenment thus turns out at bottom to be the Enlightenment itself. The instruments of illumination, in the first instance mathematical physics and experimental science, are also the instruments of darkness. Despite his love of the archaic Greeks and his unique celebration of the blending of philology and psychology, Nietzsche is decisively stamped by the same scientific materialism of the nineteenth century that will produce Freud as his intellectual successor.

I want to end this section with a brief remark. It seems to me that a good part of Nietzsche's criticism of the consequences of the Enlightenment is sound. But this is not on my view a sufficient reason to disown the Enlightenment. Not the least of Nietzsche's merits is that his rhetoric serves as an ideological emetic that purifies us of the imperfections of modernity. The risk that modernity will be rejected tout court is at least mitigated by Nietzsche's constant recognition of the impossibility of arriving at the past by any route other than that of the future. The danger of Nietzsche's thought does not lie in his conservatism, as many of his most characteristic views would today (erroneously) be labeled, but in his extremely radical appropriation of the mask of enlightenment, which leads the most gifted of those who wear it into the temptation to transform society by overcoming entirely the split between theory and practice.

Frank Dikotter

2010-12-14T21:38:00.000-08:00

Mao's Great Famine

Travelling extensively through the Qing Empire in the 1870s, Baron von Richthofen reported that the entire north of the country was destitute of trees, the barren mountains and hills offering a desolate view. Securing fuel for the long, cold winters was always a problem in imperial China. Farmers raised large quantities of maize and sorghum: seeds were used for food, while the stalks served as fuel to heat the kang, a hypocaust bed which the family slept on at night and sat on during the winter when it was heated by flues built inside. In a country depleted of forests, lack of fuel was widely felt: the scarcity of wood meant that every chip, twig, root and shaving was eagerly gleaned by children or elderly women, who stripped the ground bare.

Forest destruction—for clearing, fuel and timber—was made worse after 1949 by rash interference in the natural environment. Mao viewed nature as an enemy to be overcome, an adversary to be brought to heel, an entity fundamentally separate from humans which should be reshaped and harnessed through mass mobilisation. War had to be waged against nature by people pitted against the environment in a ceaseless struggle for survival. A voluntarist philosophy held that human will and the boundless energy of the revolutionary masses could radically transform material conditions and overcome whatever difficulties were thrown in the path to a communist future. The physical world itself could be reshaped, hills erased, mountains levelled, rivers raised—bucket by bucket if necessary. Launching the Great Leap Forward, Mao declared that 'there is a new war: we should open fire on nature.'

The Great Leap Forward decimated the forests. In the drive to increase steel output, the backyard furnaces that mushroomed everywhere had to be fed, farmers fanning out into the mountains to cut down trees for fuel. In Yizhang county, Hunan, the mountains were covered in lush primeval forest. A great cutting followed, some units felling two-thirds of the trees to feed the furnaces. By 1959 nothing but bare mountains remained. In Anhua, to the west of Changsha, an entire forest was turned into a vast expanse of mud. Being driven through thick ancestral forests along the road from Yunnan to Sichuan, Soviet specialists in forestry and soil preservation noted that trees had been randomly felled, resulting in landslides. Forests were brutalised werywhere, sometimes beyond recovery.

But random logging did not stop with the end of the steel campaign. The famine was not just a matter of hunger, but rather of shortages of all essentials, fuel in particular. As farmers were desperate for firewood and timber, they reproduced habits acquired during the steel campaign, returning to the woods to cut and slash. Stealing was easier than ever before because lines of responsibility for forestry had become blurred with collectivisation: the forest belonged to the people. In Wudu county, in arid Gansu, there had been some 760 people in charge of forestry before the Great Leap Forward; by 1962 about a hundred remained. The situation was the same all over China. In 1957 Jilin province was covered in dense forests and beautiful woodlands managed by 247 forestry stations. Only eight of these survived collectivisation.

Not only were local brigades powerless to stop depredations of natural resources, but they were often complicit in them. When walking through the gates of Sihai commune in Yanqing county up in the mountains just outside Beijing, a visitor in March 1961 was met with the sight of some 180,000 stumps of trees—linden and mulberry—cut an inch or two above the ground. This was the work of a mere two units. Farmers were so desperate for warmth that they even cut down fruit trees in the middle of the winter. As the Forestry Bureau from Beijing reported, 50,000 apple, apricot and walnut trees were hacked down by one village in Changping. while a brigade used a tractor to uproot 890,000 plants and seedlings for fuel. More often than not, communes would send teams to poach from neighbours: from Huairou a hundred farmers were dispatched across the county border to Yanqing, where they cut down 180,000 trees in less than three weeks. Closer to the capitol, trees along the railway were felled, 10,000 vanishing along the line in Daxing counry. Further south even telephone poles were taken down for fuel. Far inland, in Gansu, a single brigade destroyed two-thirds of all 120,000 varnish trees, crippling the local economy, while another team managed to fell 40 per cent of the tea-oil trees on which local villages had depended for their livelihoods.

People were desperate for kindling. Some villages burned not only their furniture but even some of their houses after cutting down the trees: 'What is under the pot is more scarce even than what is in the pot,' farmers lamented. Even in Panyu, Guangdong, surrounded by subtropical vegetation, two-thirds of all households had no fuel to start a fire, some even lacking a match. Fire had to be borrowed from neighbours. Once started, it was guarded like a precious commodity as entire villages sank back into a primitive barter economy.

George Macaulay Trevelyan

2010-12-11T02:19:00.000-08:00

England Under The Stuarts

No accusation is more petulantly bandied about between rival races and rival generations than that of inhumanity. Each considers itself humane, because its anger is easily aroused against the cruelty of other places or times; yet the circumstances in every case must be carefully examined before this feeling of self-satisfied superiority can be rightly indulged. A few facts relating to our ancestors' humanity, in the sense of unwillingness to inflict physical pain and discomfort, may interest the speculator in the inexact science of comparative morals.

In the early disuse of torture as a means of extracting confession, English law and custom led the world. Torture for this purpose was unknown in our common law, and the Tower rack was regarded as the special political privilege of the Crown, whereby the Privy Council alone might extort information for want of which the State might be imperilled. Yet even the butcher's last plea of Salus Publici became obsolete in the reign of James I. The torture from which Guy Fawkes had been lifted up to die, shattered in all save his Promethean spirit, was twenty years later pronounced illegal and was not used to compel the murderer of Buckingham to incriminate the King's Parliamentary enemies. Nor in the utmost height of Royal or Roundhead despotism was it again employed. It is impossible to account for this definite change except by the growth of humanitarian sentiment.

In other lands, torture to extract evidence was an important part of the judicial system swept away by the French Revolution, and torture as an accompaniment of capital punishment held a high place in continental codes. The common criminal was broken on the wheel, the witch and the Socinian were burned alive. In Spain, the roasting of the victims of superstition, though necessarily rarer since the extinction of Protestantism, was regarded by the populace as a special delight, and by the priests as an offering to their Pantheon, among whose principal attributes were those of Moloch. But in England ordinary criminals were never put to death by torture. In the reign of James I two heretics who denied the doctrine of the Trinity closed the fiery roll of Smithfield martyrdom. These two brave men, braver than Ridley and Latimer in that no great party pitied their fate or embraced their creed, were the last persons to die for heresy in England. Our statesmanship was at once too humane and too timid to put Catholics to death for their religion even at the block, much less at the stake. 'English people,' says Sir James Stephen, 'were reckless about taking life, but they have been usually averse to the infliction of death by torture.'

When civil war at last broke out in the midst of our peaceful island, its conduct contrasted well in every point of humanity with the uncontrolled destruction that was laying waste the continent. For the English were not a military population; the state of war was rare and unpopular; the combatants were men of the same race, and the religious animosity less intense than in Holland, France, and Germany; the violence of armed Episcopalian and Puritan was as much milder than the devilries of Alva and Tilly, as tho Bishops of the High Commission Court were more mild than the Inquisitors of Spain.

But while the English, by their very insularity, drew ahead of others in their methods of conducting war, and in the disuse of torture as a means of extracting evidence or inflicting capital punishment, there were several respects in which their humanity was low. In their treatment of coloured races, and of white peoples whom they reckoned inferior in civilization, the English were no better than the Dutch and French, or, except for the Inquisition, than the Spaniard. Of the state of our prisons, and of the use of torture as a means of punishment other than capital, we have already spoken. Since corporal punishments were the only alternative to the gallows or the living death of the prison, they were perhaps less abominable for their cruelty to the victim than for their brutalizing effect on others as everyday spectacles. But while we condemn our ancestors for flocking to see the thief faint in the pillory under the shower of filthy missiles, and women suffer agonies under the lash, we must remember that we are ignorant of what proportion of the populace went to these sights and in what spirit.

But the most scandalous blot in English humanity was witch-finding. The inhabitants of continental Europe, brutalized by the continual presence of war, torture, and murder, which rival priesthoods blessed, frenzied by doubt as to the true escape from the lively vision of hell, and taught to see powers of evil in every common event, fell with maniac cruelty upon a class of persons whom old tradition pointed out as the devil's servants. In countries of either faith, old and solitary women perished by thousands amid agonies of torture. Across the guardian waters that divided England from the atmosphere of religious wars, this loathsome infection of the mind was wafted like a plague-blast; but since the material and intellectual causes were less marked, the vile panic was never here quite so horrible or so extensive. The sceptical Elizabeth, perhaps with some pity for her sex, had refused to yield when the pamphlet press called on the Government to enact fiercer laws 'not suffering a witch to live.' The outburst came with the accession of a Scottish King, who, though he rejected the best part of the spirit of Knox, was crazed beyond his English subjects with the witch-mania of Scotland and the continent. His first Parliament enacted new death-laws; at once the Judges and magistrates, the constables and the mob, began to hunt up the oldest and ugliest spinster who lived with her geese in the hut on the common, or tottered about the village street muttering the inaudible soliloquies of second childhood. Many pleaded guilty. and described the covenants they had formed with black dogs and 'goblins called Tibb': some had undoubtedly taken to what they believed to be black arts, to repel or requite the malevolence of their neighbours, or to win money and reputation from their credulity; but many were beaten or terrified into fictitious confessions, or perished denying their guilt to the last. Educated men soon perceived that not a few of these unfortunate creatures were innocent, but this acuteness of perception in no way disturbed the belief of any such observers in the general prevalence of witchcraft. This black business culminated during the civil war under the rule of Presbyterianism, when systematic though illegal tortures were successfully applied by scoundrels like Matthew Hopkins to obtain the death of scores of women. A reaction took place about the time of the rise of the independents to power, and the practice disappeared during the Rationalist movement which found refuge under the banner of the Anglican Restoration. But in its origin the witch-hunt was stirred up by no section; it arose out of a profound and universal belief. Learning, headed by the pedant King, was master of the hounds; science with Bacon, and law with Coke pointed the trail; imagination and poetry blew the horn with Shakespeare and his brother playwrights; religion blessed the chase that she had set on foot; while the discordant pack of vulgar beliefs, fears, and hatreds came yelling on their prey.

Matthew Crawford

2010-12-10T02:25:00.000-08:00

Shop Class as Soulcraft

Managers are placed in the middle of an enduring social conflict that once gave rise to street riots but is mostly silent in our times: the antagonism between labor and capital. In this position they are subject to unique hazards. The sociologist Robert Jackall spent years inhabiting their world, conducting interviews, and describes its 'peculiarly chancy and fluid' character. He shows the vulnerability of managers in their careers, and how it gives rise to a certain kind of language that they use, a highly provisional way of speaking and feeling. I believe some of the contradictions of 'knowledge work' such as I experienced at Information Access Company can be traced to an imperative of abstraction, and that this imperative in turn may be understood as a device that upper-level managers use, quite understandably, to cope with the psychic demands of their own jobs.

To begin with, Jackall finds that though the modern work-place is in many respects a bureaucracy, managers do not experience authority in an impersonal way. Rather, authority is embodied in the persons with whom one has working relationships up and down the hierarchy. One's career depends entirely on these personal relationships, in part because the criteria of evaluation are ambiguous. As a result, managers have to spend a good part of the day 'managing what other people think of them.' With a sense of being on probation that never ends, managers feel 'constantly vulnerable and anxious, acutely aware of the likelihood at any time of an organizational upheaval which could overturn their plans and possibly damage their careers fatally,' as Craig Calhoun writes in his review of Jackall's book. It is a 'prospect of more or less arbitrary disaster.'

A good part of the job, then, consists of 'a constant interpretation and reinterpretation of events that constructs a reality in which it is difficult to pin blame on anyone, especidly one-self,' according to Calhoun. This gives rise to the art of talking in circles. Mutually contradictory statements are made to cohere by sheer forcefulness of presentation, allowing a manager to 'stake out a position on every side of an issue. Or one buries what one wants done in a string of vaguely related descriptive sentences that demand textual exegesis.' The intent of this kind of language is not to deceive, it is to preserve one's interpretive latitude so that if the context changes, 'a new, more appropriate meaning can be attached to the language already used. In this sense the corporation is a place where people are not held to what they say because it is generally understood that their word is always provisional.' Nothing is set in concrete the way it typically is when one is, for example, pouring concrete.

Managers may speak very colorfully with one another, for example, when describing their weekends, or even in reference to some situation at work, but such earthy talk takes place in a parallel universe of the private. In any group setting, they have to protect their bosses' 'deniability' by using empty or abstract language to cover over problems, thereby keeping the field of subsequent interpretations as wide open as possible. '[T]he more troublesome a problem, the more desiccated and vague the public language describing it should be.'

It is in this two-tiered system of language—direct in private, empty in public—that the world of managers resembles that of Soviet bureaucrats, who had to negotiate reality without public recourse to language that could capture it, obliged to use instead language the whole point of which was to cover over reality.

When a manager's success is predicated on the manipulation of language, for the sake of avoiding responsibility, reward and blame come untethered from good faith effort. He may then come to think that those beneath him in the food chain also can't be held responsible in any but arbitrary ways. One of the features commonly observed in ancient Near Eastern courts was that eunuchs were most capricious toward other eunuchs, those further from the center of power. The prerogative of doing so was part of the compensation package, so to speak.

One might be tempted to think this is demoralizing for all involved. But we are highly adaptive creatures, and these circumstances generate their own sort of morality, one in which the fixed points of an internal moral compass must give way to a certain sensitivity and nimbleness. Managers may continue to have strong convictions, but they are obliged to check them at the door, and expect others to do the same. '[M]oral view-points threaten others within an organization by making claims on them that might impede their ability to read the drift of social situations.' As a result there is social pressure (one might say a moral demand) not to be too 'moralistic.' This pressure is rooted in the insecurity of managerial careers.

My supervisor, Carol, was herself a writer of abstracts, which made her situation as enforcer of the quota poignant. As an abstractor, she doubtless felt trapped in the same contradiction as I. She was a bookish person, so I imagine she had some love for intellectual precision. But this was likely an 'inappropriate' moral value to bring to the table when pleading the case of abstractors before her bosses (which I like to imagine she did). Such concerns can be rendered appropriate, and higher-level management support secured, only by demonstrating how they contribute to profits. Not because the higher-level managers are heartless, but because such a demonstration provides everyone needed cover. In fact, a lower-level manager may need only to put on a performance of hardheadedness before her superiors, and produce the stage props of a profit-maximizing calculation (graphs, charts, and so on). Unless she has these skills of the corporate dramatist, she is unlikely to get the official cover she needs to do the right thing by her workers.

Given the moral maze inhabited by managers, we can understand why those higher in the hierarchy must absent themselves from the details of the production process: such abstraction facilitates nonaccountability. Lower level managers can't help but think concretely, and their proximity ro the work process makes them aware also of its human character, including the damage it does.

Jack Miles

2010-12-09T20:50:00.000-08:00

Christ

In the Old Testament, the Lord describes his relationship to Israel as that of a man to, variously, an infant daughter, a female foundling, a nubile young woman, a prostitute, a bride, a wife, the mother of his children, an unfaithful wife abandoned to rape and sexual humiliation, and a divorced, elderly wife whom he has remarried and taken back into his home. There is never the shadow of a doubt, however, that these relationships are metaphorical. The Lord has no divine spouse, and he has no sexual relations with any human being. He is celibate because he is the only one of his kind. This being the case, what does John mean to suggest when he calls God Incarnate a bridegroom?

Since there is no ordinary human bride on the scene, John may mean to suggest that Jesus, like God, is a metaphorical bridegroom. 'The Father loves the Son,' Jesus says, 'and has entrusted everything to his hands' (3:35)—everything, including Israel, his metaphorical bride. Yet because Jesus is a male human being, the use of the word bridegroom cannot fail to direct attention to his sexual potency and to raise the question of whether now might not be the moment when, through Jesus, God's celibacy might end. God is a species unto himself. God Incarnate belongs as well to the human species. He has undergone an ordinary human birth. Will he now enter an ordinary human marriage?

The celibacy of the Lord God initial had less to do with his relationship to women than with his relationship, as sovereign and sole creator, with time and with history. As noted earlier, God asserted his ascendancy over recurring time by creating the sun and moon by which days, months, and years are measured. Though he does not create this kind of time, he does contain it. He asserted his ascendancy over nonrecurring time—one unrepeatable event following another in a sequence of indefinite length—by once again creating that by which such time is measured: namely, human generation. The Old Testament measures nonrecurring, historical time genealogically. The nearest equivalent in classical Hebrew to the modern word history—and it is by no means a close equivalent—is toledot, 'generations.' Just as the God who created the sun and the moon is not himself implicated in any solar system, so also the God who created humankind male and female is not himself implicated in any process of sexual generation. Men and women reproduce; God creates.

Having neither progenitors nor offspring, God has, accordingly, no toledot, no generative history, except by vicarious participation in the generative history of his creatures or by metaphorical representation of his real relationship to them. He may be metaphorically their father. He may also be metaphorically their husband (he may even, though very rarely, be their wife). In reality, however, God is his own species, or his own genus, and it is a genus that does not reproduce.

But, to repeat, now that God has become man, now that he himself belongs to the species that he has created, does his relationship to toledot not change? Matthew and Luke go so far as to give his genealogy in detail. Though John provides no genealogy, his revision of God's relationship to toledot is more radical in another way, for he seems to assume that Jesus, though divine, has received his human nature in the ordinary way from a human father as well as a human mother. If God is now irretrievably involved in the life process of the human species by his human birth, why may he not allow himself the further involvement of a human marriage?

From the very earliest moments, Christian theology praised God for subjecting himself to ordinary human birth. If he had gone on from there to consummate an ordinary human marriage, would Christian theology have withheld its praise? Surely it would not have been difficult for such an action to be accommodated in, for example, the early Christian hymn celebrating

Christ Jesus,
Who, being in the form of God,
Did not count equality with God
A thing to be clung to,
But emptied himself,
Taking the form of a slave,
Being born as men are born.
And being in every way like a man,
He humbled himself further and was obedient unto death,
Even death on a cross. (Phil. 2:5-8)

David Edmonds

2010-12-09T02:27:00.000-08:00

John Eidinow

Wittgenstein's Poker

Often Wittgenstein refused to discuss philosophy and would insist on reciting poetry—his favourite lines at this time came from the work of the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore. The crystalline purity and understated spirituality of Tagore's poetry were probably the qualities that Wittgenstein found so attractive. He preferred to read facing the wall. And, as his imprisoned audience of logicians stared at his back, trying hard not to let their impatience show, it might have begun to dawn on them that they had misinterpreted their messiah's message.

My poet's vanity dies in shame before thy sight.
O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet.
Only let me make my life simple and straight
Like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.

To the world of philosophy, one powerful appeal of the Vienna Circle stemmed from their simple, basic tenet that there were only two types of valid statement. There were those which were true or false by virtue of the meaning of their own terms: statements such as 'All bachelors are unmarried men,' equations such as '2+2=4,' and logical inferences such as 'All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal.' And there were those which were empirical and open to verification: 'Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius,' 'The world is flat' (which, being open to verification, is meaningful even if false).

All other statements were, to the Circle, literally meaningless. Thus, since it was impossible to verify whether God existed, religious pronouncements were sent smartly to the intellectual rubbish bin—where metaphysics, too, consequently belonged. In with this 'garbage' went pronouncements about aesthetics, ethics and the meaning of life. Statements such as 'Murder is wrong,' 'One should always be honest' and 'Picasso is a superior artist to Monet' could really be understood only as the expression of personal judgements: 'I disapprove of murder,' 'In my opinion people should always tell the truth,' 'I prefer Picasso to Monet.' 'Everything is accessible to man,' proclaimed the Circle's manifesto. 'Man is the measure of all things.'

The main function of philosophy, they held, was not to indulge in metaphysics but to sharpen and clarify the concepts employed by the scientist. The scientists were the all-important players on the pitch. The philosopher merely assisted the team by analysing the tactics of the game. Philosophy would always be subordinate to science.

However, things could not be that simple, even in the Circle's own terms. If statements were deemed meaningful because they were open to verification, what counted as verification? In the Circle's early days, much of its members, energy was taken up with determining that. For instance, how could the maxim 'The meaning of a proposition is the method by which it is verified' be adapted to encompass historical propositions such as 'William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings'? The Vienna Circle believed that science should generate predictions, which could be put to the test. But what verifiable predictions are made by a statement about the Norman Conquest of 1066?

One answer was that the range of tools traditionally at the historian's disposal—archives, correspondence, archaeological evidence, oral testimony, etc.—were the historian's equivalent of the scientist's Bunsen burner, tripod and test tube, supplying evidence which substantiated one theory rather than another. Moreover, historic propositions did yield predictions, in the sense that if a proposition was true, one would expect that any related evidence that subsequently turned up would corroborate it.

In years to come, the claim that historical statements gained their meaning only because they were in principle verifiable would strike many people as bizarre. To squeeze all apparently meaningful propositions into this verificationist straitjacket seemed artificial. It meant for example, weighing propositions about other minds ('Hennie has a headache') solely in terms of the evidence for and against the proposition itself ('Does Hennie request aspirin?') The alternative, common-sense, view is that a claim such as 'Every time the room is emptied of people, the furniture in the room vaporizes (to reappear when they return)' is meaningful: it makes sense, despite being impossible to verify. Even within the Circle there was growing scepticism about the verification principle, which was abandoned almost altogether by the mid-1950s. And later, when A. J. Ayer was asked about the failings of the movement he would answer, 'Well I suppose that the most important of the defects was that nearly all of it was false.'

Fritz Fischer

2010-12-05T19:09:00.000-08:00

War of Illusions

Although the creation of the Empire had produced concentration of political and economic power hitherto unknown in Germany there was a widespread feeling that German civilisation and German culture were on the decline. The outward display of strength—such, for example, was the argument of the popular Jena philosopher Rudolf Eucken—had led to an intellectual decline which showed itself in concern for material comfort and outward success. As a result the ideal, the 'real' values of life had been lost.

Parallel with the triumphant progress of industrialisation and capitalism went a cultural pessimism which admired the values of the pre-capitalist world and condemned the rational pursuit of profit, and political and economic liberalism. Although Germany's economy was capitalist and its citizens enjoyed the successes which had been achieved they did so with a bad conscience. This is one reason for the uncompromising rejection of the pacifist leanings in the Western world. They were despised and ridiculed as degenerate compared with the medieval ideal of chivalry. To contemporaries this difference was epitomised in the catch-phrase 'hawkers and heroes' (Handler und Helden).

Eucken and many others (such as his well-known colleague in Jena, the philosopher Max Wundt) therefore demanded a return to the German idealist movement which they saw as a period of flowering of everything that was best in Germany while ignoring the democratic aspirations of this period. Idealism was understood less as a philosophical system than as a way of life, a set of emotions and values, a substitute religion for the educated classes. Of Kant only the categorical imperative remained and this was reduced further to the obligation to obey the powers that be. The 'idealisation of power' was one of the main criteria of Wilhelmine Germany.

The return to a glorified past became clearest in the Fichte renaissance which was given a powerful stimulus by the centenary celebrations of the Napoleonic Wars. It was to Fichte's Deutschtumsphilosophie that Wilhelmine Germany felt indebted. According to this the Germans were 'original men, not men petrified in an arbitrary institution (democracy).' Of all the peoples it was the Germans who unmistakably possessed the seed of human perfection and to 'whom the lead in its development is committed.' This is an illustration of the tendency of the Wilhelminian age, noted by Georg Lukacs, to 'glorify Germany's social and political backwardness as a superior political and cultural form.'

Peter Gaunt

2010-12-03T02:29:00.000-08:00

Oliver Cromwell

As an active officer his military career was short, spanning barely nine years from inexperienced captain in August 1642 to all-conquering Lord General in September 1651. Probably only at Dunbar and Worcester did he have overall command in battle of armies over 10,000-strong and only in summer 1650 did he become parliamentary commander-in-chief. Nonetheless, he was the most consistently successful and conspicuously dynamic general on either side during the civil wars, a natural military genius, and his achievements, though limited to Britain and Ireland, often lead to comparisons with Marlborough, Wellington or Montgomery.

Cromwell the man of God is harder to grasp, for many of his beliefs seem far removed from our day and in some areas our knowledge is very incomplete. After his conversion, Cromwell believed that he had been chosen by God for a special duty and that thereafter God guided and generally favoured him. That did not make him a puritan kill-joy of popular image—he valued recreation, smoked a pipe, took ale, enjoyed occasional lavish banquets and appreciated singing, dancing, music and art. But it did lead him both to avoid personal sin and to encourage the extirpation of sin as part of a wider programme. During the 1640s and 1650s Cromwell came to believe that the biblical story of the Israelites was being replayed, with God freeing his chosen people, the English, from the Egyptian bondage of Stuart tyranny, leading them through the blood red sea of civil war and into the wilderness of post-war uncertainty; perhaps his role was to show the people that they were impure, convince them to reform and so propel them from the wilderness towards the Garden of Eden, winning God's love and making England a second Canaan. Thus godly reformation, the purging of sins and the creation of a more godly nation, was also a means to an end. In the early 1650s Cromwell may have believed that Christ's second coming was imminent, though this millenarianism—a belief that Christ was about to return and rule on earth for a thousand years—seems to have cooled thereafter. Cromwell also had an intense belief in divine providences, with God actively intervening in the world to shape events. This led him to interpret successes as gifts from God and signs of His favour to His worthless servant, Oliver Cromwell, but failures as rebukes from the Lord and warnings that he had strayed or sinned.

While belief in millenarianism and God's providences was common amongst the godly, Cromwell's advocacy of liberty of conscience was more unusual and distinctive. His belief that each of the new Protestant groups of the period contained an element of Godt truth led him to cherish Protestant plurality in the war and post-war years and passionately to advocate liberty for each group to worship and thrive, though he hoped that in time they might all naturally coalesce to reveal a complete mosaic of God's message. Disliking distinctive names, labels or denominations, he prayed for cooperation, congruity and mutual acceptance, 'to see union and right understanding between the godly people (Scots, English, Jews, Gentiles, Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, and all).' However, Cromwell's liberty did not extend to all. In theory Catholics and rigid episcopalians were excluded—though in practice those who were loyal to the regime and discreet in their worship were not harassed during the Protectorate—as were those whose faith strayed into blasphemy and heresy, who challenged the civil authorities or who benefited from such liberty only to attack other sects. Cromwell repeatedly bewailed the failure of sects to work peacefully together, bitterly condemning those who 'put their fingers upon their brethren's consciences, to pinch them there,' who make 'wounds in a man's side and would desire nothing more than to be groping and grovelling with his fingers in those wounds. They will be making wounds, and rending and tearing, and making them wider than they are.'

In part, Cromwell the politician and statesman was moulded by his background and his secular ideas. Never a social revolutionary he supported and praised the existing order—he referred to property as one of 'the badges of the kingdom of Christ' and told parliament 'A nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman? That is a good interest of the nation and a great one'—and he strongly opposed any group apparently agitating for social overturning or military insubordination. In some ways this conservatism was reinforced by his limited intellectual outlook, for he was not a profound or original thinker—one of his earliest biographers commented that 'It is obvious to all, he studied Men more than Books'—and down to the 1640s he had limited experience of administration and politics. During the last decade or more of his life, he was sometimes guided by, or reacted to, the initiatives of others with wider experience and sharper ideas. But far more important, Cromwell's approach to politics and statesmanship was shaped by his faith and his interpretation of God's will. In his words and actions of the 1640s and 1650s Cromwell stressed that what mattered were the ends not the means and forms of government. A regime must be seen to have God's support and be working towards God's goals, chiefly godly reformation and liberty of conscience. Once Cromwell came to believe that a regime did not have God's support or was not advancing God's cause, he not only withdrew his support but also was willing to use his power to remodel or remove it. He proclaimed that he was not 'wedded and glued to forms of Government' and that all mortal governments were but 'dross and dung in comparison of Christ.'

Thus Cromwell was willing t5o experiment with or change secular governments in order to advance God's work. He negotiated with the king in 1647 and sought a monarchical settlement, only to support regicide and the abolition of monarchy in 1648-49, in the process acquiescing in the drastic remodelling of the Long Parliament. He then supported the Rump, only to turn against it and destroy it in spring 1653. He experimented with a Nominated Assembly, only to accept its resignation in December 1653 and subsequently condemn it as a failure. Thereafter he became head of state and presided over the Protectoral regime in the hope this would advance God's cause. Consequently, Cromwell appears profoundly inconsistent, at times stressing the sovereignty of the people and their elected parliaments, at others snarling that the important thing was the people's 'good, not what pleases them,' at times stressing the sanctity of the law, at others commenting that 'if nothing should be done but what is according to law, the throat of the nation may be cut, till we send for some to make a law,' at times urging caution, telling his army colleagues they must 'consider the way' as well as the end, at others intervening impulsively and with little forward planning. His political path also led him to disappoint, break with or make enemies of successive waves of allies or potential allies—Presbyterians and conservative parliamentarians by his treatment of parliament, king and monarchy in winter 1648-49, Levellers and other radical groups by his increasing opposition to their agenda in the late 1640s and early 1650s, fervent millenarian groups and their allies by dropping them and supporting more secular forms of government in the 1650s, and republicans by his ejection of the Rump, the establishment of the Protectorate and the restoration of a single head of state during 1653.

Keith Windschuttle

2010-12-02T01:03:00.000-08:00

Van Diemen's Land

When first contacted in the eighteenth century, the Tasmanians were the most primitive human society ever discovered. One measure of this was the simplicity of their technology. The men hunted with one-piece wooden spears, wooden clubs and stones. The women used wooden digging sticks to uproot vegetables and wooden chisels to prise shellfish from rocks. They lived off kangaroos, wallabies and possums in the inland, and shellfish, birds and seals on the coast. For shelter, they sometimes stacked branches and bark to make temporary windbreaks and domed huts, but they usually slept in the open. They rarely stayed in one place more than a day or two. Settlers who came across their abandoned campsites found them strewn with the rotting remains of the animals they had eaten, and their faeces deposited close to the fires where they slept. Their most sophisticated possessions were grass ropes to climb trees and woven grass bags. Their entire catalogue of manufactured goods comprised about two dozen articles. They went about completely naked, even in the snow-covered highlands. The women slung kangaroo skins over their shoulders not for clothing but to carry their babies. For warmth, they smeared themselves with animal fat and huddled around fires at night. Until they acquired British containers, they could not boil water. The colonists were astonished to observe they could not make fire, a skill that even Neanderthal Man had mastered. They carried firebrands and coals with them on their nomadic journeys. If the fires of one family were doused by rain or flood, they had to go in search of others to ask for a light.

From excavations of some long-used campsites and caves, the archaeologist and prehistorian Rhys Jones, has concluded that several thousand years earlier, their technology had actually been more complex. They once used bone tools, barbed spears and weaving needles made of fish bone. They also had wooden boomerangs, hafted stone tools, edge-ground stone axes and tools fashioned from volcanic glass. However, these had all long been abandoned by the time Europeans arrived. Only the tribes of the west and south coasts had canoes, which they made from buoyant bark strips of the swamp tea-tree tied together with grass rope, and propelled by sticks, not blades. In the east, the Aborigines crossed rivers and off-shore channels on bundles of logs, which they swam alongside. Fish were originally an important part of their diet but the archaeological record shows they gave up eating fish, and the manufacture of fish hooks and fish spears, about 4000 years ago. Mainland Aborigines, for whom fish was a dietary staple, were amazed to find the Tasmanians refused to eat fish, even though they were abundant in the sea and the inland rivers and lakes, especially in winter when other food was limited. Instead of technological progress, the Tasmanians had experienced a technological regression. Isolated from the mainland when the waters rose 10,000 years ago, and lacking any outside source of competition or innovation, the Tasmanians suffered the consequences. Jones writes:

Like a blow above the heart, it took a long time to take effect, but slowly but surely there was a simplification in the tool kit, a diminution in the range of foods eaten, perhaps a squeezing of intellectuality.

John Bury

2010-12-01T03:12:00.000-08:00

History of the Later Roman Empire

He was not well favoured. His features, according to a Gothic historian, 'bore the stamp of his origin; and the portrait of Attila exhibited the genuine deformity of a modern Kalmuck: a large head, a swarthy complexion, small, deep-seated eyes, a flat nose, a few hairs in the place of a beard, broad shoulders, and a short square body of nervous strength though of a disproportioned form. The haughty step and demeanour of the king of the Huns expressed the consciousness of his superiority above the rest of mankind, and he had the custom of fiercely rolling his eyes as if he wished to enjoy the terror which he inspired.' He was versed in all the arts of diplomacy, but the chief aim of his policy was plunder. He was far less cruel than the great Mongolian conqueror of the thirteenth century, Chingiz Khan, with whom he has sometimes been compared; he was capable of pity and could sometimes, pardon his enemies.

Attila had some reason for his haughty disdain if he could trace his line of ancestry back for a thousand years and was directly descended from the great chieftains of the Hiung-nu, whose names have been recorded by early Chinese writers. And if we accept this descent as a genuine tradition, we can infer that he was not of pure Turkish blood. Some of his forefathers had married Chinese princesses, and there may also have been an admixture of the blood of Indo-Scythians.

At the beginning of the new reign several points of dispute which had arisen between Rugila and Theodosius were settled. The settlement was entirely to the advantage of the Huns. The Imperial government undertook to double the annual payment, which was thus raised to 700 lbs. of gold; not to receive Hun deserters; to surrender all those who had already deserted; to restore or pay a ransom for Roman prisoners who had escaped; not to form an alliance with any barbarian people at war with the Huns; and to place no restrictions on the trade between the two peoples. The prohibition of receiving fugitives from Attila's empire was particularly important, because the Roman army was largely recruited from barbarians beyond the Danube.

During the early years of his reign, from A.D. 434 to 441, he seems to have been engaged in extending his power in the east towards the Caucasian Mountains. But in A.D. 441 an irresistible opportunity offered itself for attacking the provinces of Theodosius, for in that year the Imperial armies were engaged in operations against both the Vandals and the Persians.

He condescended to allege reasons for his aggression. He complained that the tribute had not been regularly paid, and that deserters had not been restored. When the Imperial government disregarded his complaints, he appeared on the Danube and laid siege to Ratiaria. Here Roman ambassadors arrived to remonstrate with him for breaking the peace. He replied by alleging that the bishop of Margus had entered the
land of the Huns and robbed treasures from the tombs of their kings, and he demanded the surrender of these treasures as well as of deserters. The negotiations broke down, and, having captured and plundered Ratiaria, the Hunnic horsemen rode up the course of the Danube to take the great towns on its banks. Viminacium and Singidunum itself were overwhelmed in the onslaught. Margus, which faces Constantia on the opposite side of the river, fell by treachery; the same bishop whom Attila accused as a grave-robber betrayed a Roman town and its Christian inhabitants to the cruelty of the heathen destroyer. Advancing up the valley of the Margus, the invaders halted before the walls of Naissus, and though the inhabitants made a brave defence, the place yielded to the machines of Attila and the missiles of a countless host. Then the marauders rode south-eastward and approached Constantinople. He did not venture to attack the capital, but he took Philippopolis and Arcadiopolis and the fort of Athyras.

Charles Hill

2010-11-20T03:16:00.000-08:00

Grand Strategies

The larger, underlying theme is the migration of the empire from Rome to Constantinople, to the East, leaving 'the ghosts of the deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.' This is, of course, going the wrong way. The translatio imperii, the transfer of imperial power, is supposed to go from east to west. For Gibbon, the conversion to Christianity of the Emperor Constantine in 312 pulled the cultural and political center of gravity of Rome eastward toward the luxurious civilizations of Asia.

Christianity was an oriental religion in the process of becoming an oriental monarchy. 'The simplicity of Roman manners was insensibly corrupted by the stately affectation of the courts of Asia.' Byzantium was an oriental despotism at the other end of the political spectrum from the mixed constitution of Republican Rome. The empire sickens and shrinks until, at the end, the Byzantine empire has contracted to the limits of one city—Constantinople, threatened by the armies of Islam.

Enlightenment philosophes expressed their anticlericalism by presenting the Prophet Muhammad as a great legislator (recall Rousseau's Social Contract) whose objectives had been liberty, tolerance, social justice, and enlightened statecraft. Gibbon's chapter 50, on the life of Muhammad, is written in such elegant and inspiring prose that it might itself serve as a sacred text of the faith. His praise for the character of Islam and the Prophet serves as an oblique attack on Christian belief and practice, although much of this praise would not be accepted by Muslims.

If any religion can be admired by an Enlightenment savant, Gibbon seems to say, it is Islam, which is rooted in reason:

The creed of Mahomet is free from suspicion or ambiguity; and the Koran is a glorious testimony to the unity of God. The prophet of Mecca rejected the worship of idols and men, of stars and planets, on the rational principle that whatever rises must set, that whatever is born must die, that whatever is corruptible must decay and perish. In the Author of the universe his rational enthusiasm confessed and adored an infinite and eternal being, without form or place, without issue or similitude, present to our most secret thoughts, existing by the necessity of his own nature, and deriving from himself all moral and intellectual perfection. These sublime truths, thus announced in the language of the prophet, are firmly held by his disciples, and defined with metaphysical precision by the interpreters of the Koran. A philosophic theist might subscribe to the popular creed of the Mohammedans: a creed too sublime perhaps for our present faculties.

Islam is the admirable counterexample to Gibbon's indictment of Christianity, and he uses 'Mahomet' to represent the Muslim state. Here was a religion with a human founder, without monks or priests, that demanded simplicity and resisted complication, organizationally loose, so that human progress would not be obstructed as the Christian church had done. Islam was to Gibbon 'a model of that judicious blend between rationally demonstrable verity and socially useful prejudice which is the best that can be hoped for in a religion.'

Gibbon's appreciation of Muhammad and Islam is praiseworthy at a time when Catholics and Protestants were vying to demonize Christianity's nearest alternative faith. But Gibbon's exalted prose masks his use of Islam merely as a foil in his anti-Christian polemic. He certainly had great success in debunking Christianity in the Europe of today, but his picture of a non-'priest-ridden' Islam is no longer recognizable in the Imam-, Mullah-, and Ayatollah-ruled Muslim world. Something in the practices of that world has turned out to 'obstruct human progress' more effectively than Gibbon ever accused Christianity of doing.

Like Thucydides, Gibbon considers his epic 'a possession for all time.' To Gibbon, his project is greater because it takes on the two great Western intellectual traditions: classical and biblical. Gibbon tries to out-strip his classical model by engaging the empire greatest in power and extent—Rome—and to supersede his foremost religious model, Milton's Paradise Lost. If the First Fall was that of Lucifer and the Second that of Adam and Eve, Gibbon is writing of the Third Fall. The Fall of Rome, yes, but the Fall of Christianity as well.

The cause of both biblical falls was pride. Gibbon makes it clear that the fall of the Roman Empire was likewise caused by pride—Christian pride. Religion left society unable to defend itself, weakening the empire and allowing barbarism to triumph. As Gibbon put it, 'the clergy successfully preached the doctrine of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister.'

Winston Churchill

2010-11-11T01:21:00.000-08:00

The Great Democracies

If everyone used the same trains and the same schools, or even the same roads, it was argued, how could caste survive? Indian monarchs were apprehensive and resentful of the recent annexations. Hatred smouldered at the repression of Suttee. Unfounded stories spread that the Government intended to convert India forcibly to Christianity. The disasters in Afghanistan and the slaughter of the Sikh wars cast doubt on the invincibility of British arms. Many of the sepoys, or Indian soldiers, considered themselves equal or superior to European troops. Thus a legacy of troubles confronted Dalhousie's successor, Lord Canning. He had been in India little more than a year when the introduction of a new type of ammunition provided a spark and focus for the mass of discontent.

In the yea of the centenary of Plassey rumours began to flow that the cartridges for the new Enfield rifle were greased with the fat of pigs and cows, animals which Moslem and Hindu respectively were forbidden to eat. The cartridges had to be bitten before they could be inserted in the muzzle. Thus sepoys of both religions would be defiled. There was some truth in the story, for beef-fat had been used in the London arsenal at Woolwich though it was never used at the Indian factory at Dum-Dum, and as soon as the complaints began no tainted missiles were issued. Nevertheless the tale ran through the regiments in the spring of 1857 and there was much unrest. In April some cavalry troopers at Meerut were court-martialled and imprisoned for refusing to touch the cartridges, and on May 9 they were publicly stripped of their uniforms. An Indian officer told his superiors that the sepoys were planning to break open the jail and release the prisoners. His warning was disbelieved. Next night three regiments mutinied, captured the prison, killed their British officers, and marched on Delhi.

There was nothing at hand to stop them. South of the Punjab fewer than eleven full-strength battalions and ancillary forces, comprising in all about forty thousand British soldiers, were scattered across the vast peninsula, and even these were not on a war footing. The Indian troops outnumbered them by five to one and had most of the artillery. The hot weather had started, distances were great, transport was scarce, the authorities were unprepared. Nevertheless, when the British power was so weak, and India might have been plunged once again into the anarchy and bloodshed from which she had been gradually and painfully rescued, most of the populace remained aloof and at peace, and none of the leading Indian rulers joined the revolt. Of the three armies maintained by the Company only one, that of Bengal, was affected. Gurkhas from Nepal helped to quell the rising. The Punjab remained loyal, and its Sikhs and Moslems respected the colours and disarmed wavering regiments. The valley of the Ganges was the centre of the turmoil.

But at first all went with a rush. The magazine at Delhi was guarded by two British officers and six soldiers. They fought to the last, and when resistance was hopeless they blew it up. The mutineers killed every European in sight, seized the aged King of Delhi, now living in retirement as the Company's pensioner, and proclaimed him Moghul Emperor. The appeal failed and few Moslems rose to support it. For three weeks there was a pause, and then the mutiny spread. British officers would not believe in the disloyalty of their troops and many were murdered. At Cawnpore, on the borders of Oudh, the garrison left the citadel to guard the road. They trusted to the loyalty of the Nana Sahib, the dispossessed adopted son of an Indian ruler, but still a powerful figure. They were mistaken, and a terrible fate was soon to befall them. At Lucknow, the capital, Henry Lawrence prepared the Residency for what was to be a long and glorious defence. Meanwhile, rightly perceiving that the key to the revolt lay in Delhi, the British mustered such forces as they could and seized the ridge overlooking the city. They were too few to make an assault, and for weeks in the height of summer three thousand troops, most of whom were British, held the fifty-foot eminence against an enemy twenty or thirty times their number. Early in August Nicholson arrived with reinforcements from the Punjab, having marched nearly thirty miles a day for three weeks. Thus animated, the British attacked on September 14, and after six days' street-fighting, in which Nicholson was killed, the city fell. The poor King was sent to Burma. His two sons were taken prisoners, and summarily shot after an attempt had been made to rescue them. This created a fresh grievance in Indian eyes.

At Cawnpore there was a horrible massacre. For twenty-one days nine hundred British and loyal Indians, nearly half of them women and children, were besieged and attacked by three thousand sepoys with the Nana Sahib at their head. At length, on June 26, they were granted safe-conduct. As they were leaving by boat they were fired upon, and all the men were killed. Such women and children as survived were cast into prison. On the night of July 15 a relieving force under Sir Henry Havelock, a veteran of Indian warfare, was barely twenty miles away. The Nana Sahib ordered his sepoys to kill the prisoners. They refused. Five assassins then cut the captives to death with knives and threw the bodies into a well. Two days later Havelock arrived. 'Had any Christian bishop visited that scene of butchery when I saw it,' wrote an eye-witness long afterwards, 'I verily believe that he would have buckled on his sword.' Here and elsewhere the British troops took horrible vengeance. Mutineers were blown from the mouths of cannon, sometimes alive, or their bodies sewn up in the skins of cows and swine.

The rebels turned on Lucknow. Here also there was a desperate struggle. Seventeen hundred troops, nearly half of them loyal sepoys, held the Residency, under Henry Lawrence, against sixty-thousand rebels, for in Oudh, unlike most of India, the population joined the revolt. Food was short and there was much disease. On September 25 Havelock and Outram fought their way in, but were beset in their turn, Havelock dying of exhaustion a few days later. In November the siege was raised by Sir Colin Campbell, the new Commander-in-Chief appointed by Lord Palmerston. Campbell had seen service against Napoleon and had a distinguished record in the Crimean War. A fresh threat to Cawnpore compelled him to move on. Outram, reinforced, continued to holdout, and Lucknow was not fully liberated till the following March. No one knows what happened to the Nana Sahib. He disappeared for ever into the Himalayan jungle.

Elsewhere the uprising was mote speedily crushed. The recapture of Delhi had destroyed all semblance and pretence that the mutiny was a national revolt. Fighting, sporadic but often fierce, continued in the Central Provinces until the end of 1858, but on November 1 the Governor-General, 'Clemency' Canning, derisively so called for his mercifulness, proclaimed with truth that Queen Victoria was now sovereign of all India. The first Viceroy, as Canning became, was a son of the renowned Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister. The rule of the East India Company, which had long ceased to be a trading business in India, was abolished. This was the work of the short Conservative Government of Derby and Disraeli. Thus, after almost exactly a century the advice which Clive had given to Pitt was accepted by the British Government. Henceforward there were to be no more annexations, no subsidiary treaties, no mote civil wars. Religious toleration and equality before the law were promised to all. Indians for a generation and more were to look back on the Queen's Proclamation of 1858 as a Magna Carta.

The scale of the Indian Mutiny should not be exaggerated. Three-quarters of the troops remained loyal; barely a third of British territory was affected; there had been risings and revolts among the soldiery before; the brunt of the outbreak was suppressed in the space of a few weeks. It was in no sense a national movement, or, as some later Indian writers have suggested, a patriotic struggle for freedom or a war of independence. The idea and ideal of the inhabitants of the sub-continent forming a single people and state was not to emerge for many years. But terrible atrocities had been committed by both sides. From now on there was an increasing gulf between the rulers and the ruled. The easy-going days of the eighteenth century were gone for ever, and so were the missionary fervour and reforming zeal of the early Victorians and their predecessors.

Lance Banning

2010-11-07T02:54:00.000-08:00

The Sacred Fire of Liberty

Among the rights that Madison believed could be protected more completely in republics, none was literally more sacred than the liberty of conscience. He first involved himself in local politics, in 1773, in order to protest the persecution of dissenters in neighboring Culpeper County. When shaky health defeated his determination to defend the cause of liberty in arms, the gratitude of Baptist neighbors may have helped him win election to the state convention of 1776, which framed one of the earliest, most widely imitated revolutionary constitutions. Here, despite his modesty and youth, he made his next important contribution to a lifelong battle for religious freedom, standing on a set of principles that placed him from the start among the most advanced reformers of his age. Ten years later, the renewal of this battle became perhaps the single greatest test of his original convictions and the single most important catalyst for the distinctive insights that revitalized his revolutionary faith.

When the Virginia constitution came to the convention from committee, George Mason's draft of a Declaration of Rights contained a generous, though basically conventional, protection for dissenters:

That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore, that all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the magistrate unless, under color of religion, any man disturb the peace, the happiness, or safety of society. And that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.

Madison was not content. The language of the article, like the language of the preface to the Declaration, suggested the enormous influence of John Locke, whose famous Letter Concerning Toleration grounded freedom of religious conscience on the character of human understanding and the separate origins and purposes of church and state, yet listed several opinions that the magistrates should punish. On his copy of the printed draft of the religious article, Madison prepared a change that pressed Locke's premises to logical conclusions from which Locke himself had shied. In place of Mason's 'all men should enjoy the fullest toleration,' Madison's amendment, which was introduced by Patrick Henry, said:

All men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of [their religion] according to the dictates of conscience; and therefore that no man or class of men ought, on account of religion, to be invested with peculiar emoluments or privileges; nor subjected to any penalties or disabilities unless, under color of religion, any man disturb the peace, the happiness, or safety of society.

Someone asked if Henry really meant to disestablish the Anglican Church. He denied it, the amendment failed, and Madison wrote out a substitute, this time asking Edmund Pendleton to introduce it. The new proposal altered Mason's 'All men should enjoy the fullest toleration...unpunished and unrestrained by the magistrate' to 'All men are equally entitled to enjoy the free exercise of religion unless the preservation of equal liberty and the existence of the state are manifestly endangered.' As approved by the convention, Article 16 incorporated Madison's replacement of the reference to 'toleration' with recognition of an equal right and simply dropped the clause referring to the state's authority to keep the peace.

Momentous implications were contained in what might seem a minor change of wording. However broadly it extended, Madison perceived, 'toleration' was a privilege permitted by the state, and it implied a state authority to set a standard from which some degree of deviation, but perhaps no more, might be allowed. An equal right, not just to hold, but also to express and freely exercise the differing demands of conscience, placed religious freedom on entirely different grounds. Although the failure of his first amendment left the question of a state establishment unsettled, the logic of his second still demanded equal treatment for competing faiths and urged withdrawal of the state from the entirety of the distinctive sphere which Locke had carefully defined but not consistently defended. In its final phrasing, Article 16 erected an ideal that no society had ever written into law and spurred the commonwealth at once toward its achievement. Dissenters seized on it immediately to call for equal treatment. Among Virginia's legislative leaders, it identified the shy, young representative from Orange as one from whom extraordinary deeds might be expected.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

2010-11-05T02:49:00.000-07:00

Young Stalin

The Famous Soso was the champion of armed resistance, founding, arming and commanding the Red Battle Squads, half-partisans, half-terrorists, across Georgia. 'We must devote serious attention to setting up the Battle Squads,' wrote Stalin, a superb military and terrorist organizer—but the experience gave him not just the taste for military command, but the delusion that he had a gift for it.

Even the Mensheviks were arming, appointing Stalin's rival Ramishvili to organize their Military Technical Commission and their bomb factories. By mid-1905, these militias were ruling the streets and villages of Georgia—in between raids by Cossacks. Sometimes Stalin and the Bolsheviks co-operated with the Mensheviks, sometimes not.

In Chiatura, Stalin armed miners and local gangsters, appointing Vano Kiasashvili as commander. 'Comrade Soso used to arrive to give his orders and we launched the Red Squad,' says Kiasashvili, who trained his partisans, stole guns and smuggled in ammunition over the hills. At Chiatura Station, Chavichvili watched Stalin giving orders to his other Battle Squad chieftain, Tsintsadze, the dashing, red-haired daredevil who recruited as gangsters a handful of female students, most of them in love with him. Tsintsadze's and Stalin's gunmen disarmed Russian troops, ambushed hated Cossacks, raided banks and murdered spooks and policemen 'until nearly the whole province was in our hands.' Chiatura, boasted Tsintsadze, 'became a kind of preparatory military camp.'

Soso was constantly in and out of Chiatura to oversee this guerrilla war. Oddly, when he was there, the aristocratic manganese-mining tycoons hid and protected him. First he stayed at the mansion of Bartholome Kekelidze, then with the grander Prince Ivan Abashidze, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Manganese Industrialists, related to Princes Shervashidze, Amilakhvari and Prince David alias Black Spot, the Seminary teacher. (Prince Abashidze was also the great-grandfather of the present President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili.) What was going on?

Alt the revolutionaries were funded at least partly by big business and the middle class, many of whom were alienated by the Tsarist regime and in any case excluded from any influence. In Russia itself, the plutocrats, such as the textile tycoon Sawa Morozov, were the biggest Bolshevik contributors, while among lawyers, managers and accountants 'it was a status symbol to give to the revolutionary parties.' This was especially true in Georgia.

Yet there is more to this than just hospitality and philanthropy. Stalin had probably learned the lucrative art of protection-racketeering and extortion from his criminal acquaintances and from his dealings in Baku and Batumi. Now he offered security in return for money. If the tycoons did not pay, their mines might be blown up, their managers murdered; if they did pay, Stalin protected them.

Two of his fighters recall, in unpublished memoirs, how Stalin kept his side of the bargain, showing that he could really deal with the devil. When the tycoons were robbed, reports G. Vashadze, 'it was not local citizens who organized the search for the "criminals" but J. V Stalin.' Some 'thieves robbed the manager of a German manganese company and stole 11,000 roubles,' says N. Rukhadze. 'Comrade Stalin commanded us to find the money and get it back. We did so.'

It is not surprising that the tycoons preferred to have Stalin on their side: Chiatura crackled with assassinations. 'The capitalists,' wrote Tsintsadze, 'were so afraid it didn't take them long to cough up.' As for any policemen or spooks, 'the Chiatura organization decided to get rid of them.' They were hit one by one. Stalin, with his brigands riding shotgun through the hills, his newspapers pumping out his own articles, and his surprisingly impressive performances at mass meetings, became the king of the mountain. 'Comrade Koba and [Prince] Sasha Tsulukidze,' wrote a rich young Bolshevik lawyer, Baron Bibeneishvili, 'were our big guns.' But the Mensheviks were winning in the rest of the Caucasus.

Johan Norberg

2010-11-03T02:02:00.000-07:00

In Defence of Global Capitalism

The developing countries would be the principal beneficiaries of increased global free trade in manufactures. One study estimated that the world economy would gain about US$70 billion ayear from a 40% tariff reduction, and that some 75% of the total gains would be harvested by the developing countries. That would equal the total amount of international development assistance to the developing countries, and it is almost three times the monthly income of all the world's absolutely poor taken together. The absence of a real breakthrough in WTO talks is a tragedy for the people of those countries.

The most startling protectionism on the part of the affluent countries concerns agricultural produce. World trade in agriculture is growing far more slowly than trade in other commodities, and this too is due to the policy of the affluent countries. Most of them are determined at all costs to maintain a large-scale agricultural industry of their own, even if they have no comparative advantages in this sector. They therefore subsidise their own farmers and exclude those of other countries by means of trade barriers. There is no easier way of squandering money than through an advanced agricultural policy. Affluent countries are drenching farmers with money through protectionism, subsidies, and export grants. The total cost of agricultural policy in the 29 affluent OECD countries burdens taxpayers and consumers with a staggering US$360 billion. For that money you could fly the 56 million cows in these countries once around the world every year—business class—with plenty of change left over. If they're willing to fly coach, the cows could also be given US$2,800 each in pocket money to spend in tax-free shops during their stopovers in the United States, the EU, and Asia.

The European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) involves quotas on foodstuffs, and tariffs of about 100% on things like sugar and dairy products. Here again, the EU wishes to exclude processed products that can compare with European ones. Tariffs on basic foodstuffs average only half of those on upgraded foodstuffs. Coffee and cocoa, which European countries don't produce themselves, can slip in without any serious customs markups. Meanwhile EU tariffs on meat are several hundred percent. The hollowness of self-appointed solidarity movements like the French ATTAC is exposed by their defence of such tariffs against the Third World.

Not only is the EU excluding foreign products, but production and transport by European farmers are being subsidised to a fantastic degree, by nearly half the EU budget. The average cow receives US$2.50 support daily, at the same time that nearly three billion of the world's human inhabitants have less than US$2.00 a day to live on. Because those grants are paid according to acreage and head of livestock, they are mainly a subsidy for the wealthiest large-scale operations—it is rumoured that the biggest beneficiary is the British royal family. OECD figures show the wealthiest 20% of farmers receiving something like 80% of the grants. In other words, nearly 40% of the entire EU budget goes to less than one percent of the EU's population.

The grants give rise to a huge surplus of foodstuffs, which has to be disposed of. One way that the EU does this is by paying farmers not to grow anything. Worse still, through export subsidies the EU dumps its surplus on the world market, so that poor countries are unable to compete. That means that the CAP not only prevents Third World farms from selling to Europeans, it also knocks them out of business in their own countries.

For consumers in the developed world, as was previously argued, export subsidies in other countries area gift: the artificially low cost of goods is paid by foreign taxpayers, and the savings can be diverted to other sectors. But for the developing world, the North's agricultural policy is a different story. It is a deliberate and systematic means of undermining the very type of industry in which the developing countries do have comparative advantages. The poor countries don't get a stable supply of specific goods; rather, one year the EU dumps one product that is being overproduced then, but the next year it dumps a totally different product, thus undermining any attempt by producers in the poor country to specialise. It is one thing for imports to spur farmers to produce more competitively, but subsidies guarantee that farmers in the developed world cannot compete, even when they are more efficient. These countries are so poor that there are few other sectors in which to invest: most of them must expand agriculture before other sectors can be developed. The CAP is estimated to cause the developing countries a welfare loss in the region of US$20 billion annually, which is twice Kenya's entire GDP.

The EU's trade policy is irrational and shameful. It protects a small circle of lobbyists and farmers who ignore the fact that their walls are condemning people in other continents to poverty and death. That is a moral disaster. The cynicism of the policy is made all the more apparent by the realisation that the EU as a whole gains nothing by it either. The Swedish government's calculations suggest that a Swedish household with no children could gain about US$250 a year by being spared the EU's duties on garments, and no less than US$1,200 a year if all agricultural policy were abolished. European taxpayers pay millions of dollars in taxes every year so that their shops can have a smaller selection of food at higher prices. EU governments subsidise agriculture to the tune of about US$90 billion a year and the manufacture of basic industrial products by about the same amount. All cracks through which goods from the developing countries could sneak in are promptly plugged with antidumping tariffs and technical stipulations, concerning, for example, packaging and hygiene—stipulations exclusively tailored to EU enterprises.

On the basis of statistics from the European Commission, the French economist Patrick Messerlin has estimated the cost of all EU trade barriers, including tariffs, quotas, export subsidies, antidumping measures, and the like. His findings indicate a total annual loss of 5-7% of the EU's GDP. In other words, completely free trade would mean that the EU could add the equivalent of nearly three Swedens to its prosperity every year. Messerlin maintains that roughly 3% of the jobs in the sectors he has investigated have been rescued by protectionism. Each job costs about US$200,000 per year, which is roughly ten times the average wage in these industries. For that money every tariff-protected worker could receive an annual Rolls Royce instead; it would not cost us more, and it would not be done at the expense of the world's poor. 'Either a branch of enterprise is profitable, in which case it needs no tariff protection; or else it is unprofitable, in which case it deserves no tariff protection,' as economist Eli F. Heckscher once put it. With tariff protection and subsidies, manpower and capital that could have developed the EU's competitive strength linger on in sectors where there is no comparative advantage. Thus the EU ties the developing countries to poverry, not for the benefit of the European people, but for the sake of a narrow, vociferous vested interest.

Gary Sheffield

2010-11-01T00:41:00.000-07:00

Forgotten Victory

Generally speaking, before 1914 the army was recruited from the top and bottom of society. For many years, 'respectable' working class families looked down on the type of man who filled the ranks of the army. The officer corps was recruited from a fairly narrow socially elite group, defined by money, education and birth. While it was possible for a working class ranker to be commissioned—famously, 'Wully' Robertson went from private to field marshal—it was difficult. There was little room for the middle classes, although many were to be found in the ranks and officers' messes of the Territorial Force. So Kitchener's expansion of the army in autumn 1914 brought into the ranks many men who in peacetime would never have dreamed of joining the army. In the 16th Manchesters (1st Manchester Pals) 'all classes mingled in the ranks. The packer from the basement and the commissionaire from the door were, as often as not, put in command of their seniors in the warehouse.'

Upper class ex-public schoolboys have come to symbolise the British army in the First World War. In reality the social base of the British officer corps began to broaden from the very beginning of the war, as Kitchener reached far beyond the traditional officer-producing classes to find leaders for his New Armies. By the mid-war period a rough meritocracy had emerged, in which rankers who had demonstrated leadership potential on the battlefield were sent for officer training more or less regardless of social background. From 1916 onwards almost every officer candidate passed through Officer Cadet Battalions, often based in Oxbridge colleges or similar places. Such men were given crash courses in officership, which included passing on the paternalistic ethos of the pre-war officer corps. Only about 2 per cent of those commissioned in 1913 had passed through the ranks, while about 38 per cent of officers demobilised at the end of the war had working class or lower middle class occupations.

In the course of the Great War 22.11 per cent of the United Kingdom's male population served in the British army, yet this did not represent a true 'cross-section' of society. Some geographic areas produced far more recruits than others. A battalion raised in a relatively thinly populated area, 9th Devons, included only about 80 natives of the county and had to be brought up to strength with men from London and Birmingham.

Peter Hessler

2010-10-27T02:51:00.000-07:00

Oracle Bones

In China, the curriculum of all schools, both public and private, was standardized and strictly regulated. Certain courses and texts were mandatory, and all students took standardized exams at the end of middle school and high school. A private institution could hire instructors and attract pupils from the open market, but they were required to teach and study the theories of the Communist Party.

After the founding of the Educating Talents School, the institution distinguished itself by starting the English curriculum in the first grade instead of the third grade. Local public schools eventually followed suit, teaching English to first-graders, but the private school had found its niche. They started courses early, and then they crammed in as many hours as possible. One of the school's selling points was that preexamination students had class every day of the week, including Sundays. Eighth-graders attended seventy-five weekly class periods—nearly double that of the average Chinese public school (forty-five). Essentially, they had applied the Wenzhou Model to education: it was the intellectual equivalent of squeezing out a profit on low-margin commodities. Instead of innovating the curriculum or improving texts, they simply taught the same stuff at a higher volume.

The private school thrived until 1998, when the local government founded a new public school. From the beginning, the public school's headmaster declared openly that he intended to drive the Educating Talents School into bankruptcy. After throwing down the gauntlet, his first tactic was to hire the best teachers that money could buy. He scouted the region for experienced instructors who had been distinguished as 'first-rate teachers' by the educational authorities. The teachers arrived with awards and certificates, and they failed miserably. English instructors couldn't speak English; math teachers couldn't teach math. Students did poorly; parents became furious. Many suspected that the awards and certificates were jiade—you could buy that stuff anywhere. Regardless, the value of experience was basically nil, given how rapidly things changed in China. After a year, the new public school fired its instructors and began to hire only young teachers.

The competition grew more intense every year. This was particularly true with regard to exam preparation, which involved two distinct competitive strategies. The first strategy was based on a simple faith: by studying systematically, efficiently, and diligently, students could improve their odds of success. But the odds were even more in their favor if they knew the examination questions in advance. This was the second competitive strategy, and it was already well developed by the time Willy and Nancy arrived. Each year, teachers and administrators cultivated relationships with powerful people who might leak information about the exams.

One official in the Wenzhou city education bureau was notorious for his subtle hints. Schools across the region invited him to give lectures to their instructors, and he accepted only the ones that made it worth his while. Willy and the other English teachers made an annual ritual of going to downtown Wenzhou and listening to the man speak. Once, Willy described the scene:

'Our principal invited the man to give a lecture, to give so-called information about the high-school entrance examination. The speech was vague. The teachers wanted to get some useful information from him, but sometimes he keeps silent. For two hours we tried to ask some questions. We asked him what would be in the examination. He just said, maybe this will be involved, maybe that. For example, he said that this year maybe your students will be asked to fill in two words, to make a sentence complete, instead of just one word.

'After that, the school invited him to go to the Red Sun Hotel, in Wenzhou. It's a very good hotel, and about fifteen-teachers had dinner with him. After that, the school gave him two thousand yuan. Later, they invited him to karaoke with a xiaojie. She's prostitute, I think. A double room for them-what will happen? You can guess. I think this guy is very segui, very lecherous. He is fifty years old. One of his sons went abroad, to U.S.A.'

The man often gave accurate information to the public schools, but his speeches were never helpful to Willy and his colleagues. Nevertheless, the Educating Talents School performed the ritual every year. When I asked Willy why they continued to pay for useless tips, he said, 'But what if one year it's right?'

Chris Wickham

2010-10-14T03:56:00.000-07:00

Early medieval Italy

Feud was not regarded by the inhabitants of early medieval Europe, even by kings, as the disruptive process that has at times been castigated by modern historians. It has rules, and a built-in tendency towards the re-establishment of peace, in that people who are willy-nilly involved in a feud, often with links to both sides, do not usually wish to spend most of their time fighting. In all societies, the famous long-lasting feuds are by definition atypical, for they attract people's attention precisely because they are unsolved. This is usually only possible in cases of exceptional antagonism and gravity, and usually also where the participants live for enough away from each other to be able to avoid social contact, or in places of some social complexity such as cities; the great Italian feuds have nearly all been urban (one thinks of the Montagues and the Capulets). Feud is a possibility in many traditional and small-scale communities, and the Mediterranean has always been one of its strongholds. The potential outbreak of feud underlies all the traditional peasant concern for family solidarity and peace.

The Lombard kings valued peace, too. They did not, however, regard violence, except inside the king's court, as offensive to the principles of civil society. They tried to limit the occurrence of feud, to prevent it breaking out over trivia. Rothari made feud compensation greater, to make its acceptance more honourable, thus increasing the chances for the settlement of feud. But feud was part of Lombard custom, and the basic rights of any Lombard to engage in it could not be undermined. We have seen that Liutprand retained the duel (which is itself, very largely, a ritualised and restricted variant of feud), despite his suspicions of its justice (see above, p.44), and the Carolingians even slightly extended its scope. It is, however, an ironic fact that it is from royal legislation guiding and limiting the procedures of feud that we learn almost all we know about it. Our narrative texts are sparse, and apart from the occasional tale of revenge in Paul the Deacon, Liutprand of Cremona, or especially the Chronicon Salernitanum, we have no accounts of major feuds until the chronicles of the communal period and beyond. Its presence and legitimacy is assumed by all the sources that mention it, however.

The structure of the kin group in Lombard society was made up almost exclusively through male-line, so-called 'agnatic' or 'patrilineal' links. When a man's daughter married, she married into a different family (Liutprand warned against marriage into a family one is feuding with) and elaborate safeguards had to be worked out to avoid her exploitation. If she sold land after her marriage, her own kin had to testify that she did this of her own free will, and was not coerced by her husband and his kin; charters showing this requirement are common into the eleventh century. This male-line kin system helped the definition of families, for a man or woman could only be a member of one family group. It was closely linked to inheritance. When a man needed his kin to swear for him in an oath-helping ceremony, he had to present them in order of inheritance, fetching them from all over the kingdom if necessary. In feud, too, the only man entitled to avenge a dead man was his son, though if he had no children or only daughters the obligation fell to a less closely-defined group of propinqui or proximi parentes, close relatives. Feud, being by its nature a more spontaneous business, could not be controlled as strictly as the ritual of oath-helping.

These were Lombard rules, for they were part of Lombard law. The Romans had patrilineal lineages, too, but the law of the Empire did not recognise such private remedies as feud. There are hints, however, that Romans at least felt the need to exact revenge for the death of kinsmen. The seventh-century Italian legal handbook, the Summa Perusina, states baldly 'if you have avenged the death of a kinsman, you will become his heir.' This text probably reflects the practice in Rome under the Exarchate. In Lombard Italy, all we can do is guess.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

2010-10-12T02:57:00.000-07:00

The Tudor Church Militant

These six years reshaped the culture which the union of the English, Scots and Irish crowns later exported to the rest of the world. They saw the first officially backed moves to turn English maritime strength to ventures of world exploration, as expeditions set off for Africa and Muscovy. They also began with a spirited attempt by the first Edwardian government to unite the whole British archipelago under one crown: different initiatives were undertaken in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, which bore contrasting fruit. Somerset's regime invaded and devastated Scotland in order to secure the marriage of the boy Edward and the even younger Mary Queen of Scots, but it also sought to charm the people of Scotland into a union, using a newly coined rhetoric of British identity. The effort was inept and in the short term a spectacular failure, but it had a lasting effect. By 1603, a union of crowns seemed a natural outgrowth of the religious links set up in the Edwardian era, instead of the bizarre mismatch of ancient enemies which it would have been a century before. In Ireland, it was Edward's government which first planned the fatal policy of planting settlers from overseas in colonies, and Britain still struggles with the consequences of that scheme. In Wales, the first faltering efforts were made to establish a Welsh evangelical culture which began achieving notable results in the reign of Elizabeth, and which later became central to Welsh identity.

The English returned to the Edwardian evangelical adventure when, in 1558, Queen Mary's stomach cancer brought a very different religious experiment to a premature end. Now, under Queen Elizabeth, the kingdom began an uninterrupted journey into a Protestant national experience. Yet Edwardian government decisions moulded the church settlement restored in 1559, equally in liturgy, theological confession and church polity. Elizabeth I put Edwardian structures to rather different uses to those originally intended, but even so, the Church of England is the Church of Edward VI more than it likes to admit. Thomas Cranmer, that editorial genius, bequeathed Elizabeth the Book of Common Prayer, which (perhaps against her personal inclinations) she restored in its more radical version of 1552, virtually unaltered. This was the prose sequence (only slightly modified by revision in 1662) most regularly given public performances in England and Wales over the next three centuries. It was used more relentlessly even than particular passages of the Bible, and at least up to the Stuart Civil Wars of the 1640s, it was complemented by regular use of the official homilies pioneered in Edwardian England.

Unlike all other key books of the English Reformation down to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, one heard and spoke the Prayer Book and the homilies, rather than read them. They were experienced from an early age primarily through the ear, not through the eye, and so only the Bible heard in the household from infancy exceeded their influence in shaping the English language. For three centuries the Prayer Book was supplemented by another dramatic public performance, the singing of metrical psalms—the songs of King David turned into Tudor rhyming verse—which were first championed by the Edwardian Church, which were said to be particular favourites of the young King Edward and which were perhaps the single most effective weapon which the English Reformers possessed. In this universally performed theatre, the Edwardian Reformation lived on, in uneasy relationship to the more urbane impulse of a later Anglican tradition. If we neglect it or misunderstand it, we will miss a vital stage in the fashioning of a nation and a culture.

The dramas of the Edwardian Reformations were biblical in more senses than one. The rebuilt Church was evangelical in essence. The assignment for evangelicals was a treasure hunt for the evangelion, the good news to be found in the New Testament, and the excavators were impatient of the centuries of church experience which overlay it. Yet spokesmen for the Edwardian revolution were also drawn to the Old Testament, where they could view other kingdoms battling against great odds to hear the message of God. Henry VIII had already enjoyed posing as one or other of the two great success stories in Israelite politics, David and Solomon. However, in the turbulence of his son's revolution, other kings of Israel and Judah entered the stage, because they were more urgently scripted to act as warning or encouragement.

Ralph Matlaw

2010-10-10T04:21:00.000-07:00

Fathers and Sons

They long for a reality—and strive toward it, as former Romantics did toward the ideal. In reality they seek not poetry—that is ludicrous for them—but something grand and meaningful; and that's nonsense: real life is prosaic and should be so. They are unhappy, distorted, and torment themselves with this very distortion as something completely inappropriate to their work. Moreover, their appearance—possible only in Russia, always with a sermonizing or educational aspect-is necessary and useful: they are preachers and prophets in their own way, but complete prophets, contained and defined in themselves. Preaching is an illness, a hunger, a desire; a healthy person cannot be a prophet or even a preacher. Therefore I put something of that romanticism in Bazarov too, but only Pisarev noticed it.

The two problems of youth and anger, or maturity and acceptance, come to a head in Bazarov's involvement with Odintsov, the central episode in the novel, which also serves as a kind of structural dividing line between the political (or social) and the psychological. The discussions of nihilism and contemporary politics, that phase of the battle between the generations dominates the opening of the novel but is practically concluded when Bazarov and Arkady leave Odintsov in Chapter Nineteen. From this point on an opposite movement assumes primary importance: Bazarov's and Arkady's liberation from involvement with theories and the turn toward life itself, that is, toward those people and things in the characters' immediate existence. It entails a shift from scenes and formulations essentially intellectual to others that are more ruminative, inwardly speculative, communicating psychological states and feelings rather than ideas. With it, Bazarov's views and behavior assume a different cast, far more personal, more indicative of his real needs and dissatisfactions. His speeches about necessary reforms now turn into expressions of desire ('I felt such a hatred for this poorest peasant, this Philip or Sidor, for whom I'm to be ready to jump out of my skin, and who won't even thank me for it'), his rigorous materialism into the purely Pascalian speech on man's insignificance as a point in time and space. His brusqueness and former contempt for decorum now are so tempered that he accepts a challenge to a duel, has a frock coat easily accessible as he returns to Odintsov, and practices elaborate politeness as she visits him on his deathbed. The end with Bazarov's disquisition on strength, life, and necessity strike the reader as rather mawkish and hollow, for the words now have if not a false, at least a commonplace ring. Indeed, the great effect of the ending is achieved not through Bazarov's speeches but by communicating the despair of his parents.

In the final analysis Turgenev could neither condemn nor yet wholly redeem Bazarov without falsifying or diminishing the portrait. On the last page of the novel he instead implies the reconciliation of the character with a larger, permanent order of things, expressed in terms of the touchstone and overriding image of the novel—nature. The concluding words '[the flowers] tell us, too, of eternal reconciliation and of life without end' do not at all tend toward mysticism, as Herzen claimed and Turgenev denied, but affirm that 'the passionate, sinning, and rebellious heart' buried beneath the ground has finally come to terms with permanent reality. The passage is secular rather than religious: life is 'without end' not 'eternal'; it is life on earth, not in the hereafter.

Samuel Hynes

2010-10-08T04:08:00.000-07:00

The Auden Generation

'The duty of the artist,' Spender writes in his opening paragraph, 'is to remain true to standards which he can discover only within himself.' In his art he will seek to analyze modern life, and if he is a true realist, and an artist, that analysis will be revolutionary, because it will reveal the sickness of society. But the artist himself may be a reactionary (Spender takes admiring note of Rilke, Yeats, Eliot, and Lawrence). 'What is important is the analysis, and not the means of achieving the change, which is not the primary concern of art.'

The analysis need not, then, be socialist. It cannot be proletarian, for there are no proletarian writers, and will be none until there is a working-class audience and a working-class tradition. In the meantime, bourgeois writers will have to go on analyzing what they know, that is, their own bourgeois world. On this point Spender attacks Caudwell, who had written in Illusion and Reality that the writer's only hope was to join the communist movement and identify himself with the interests of the working class. Spender rejects this notion entirely, and in so doing rejects the entire left-wing political commitment of his generation, including his own; the passage reads like a farewell to the hopes and illusions of the mid-decade, the years when action seemed possible:

Writers who have attempted to throw off their bourgeois environment to enter a revolutionary one, have only succeeded in uprooting themselves, in getting killed, or in ceasing to be writers and becoming politicians. Ashamed of the environment to which they are accustomed, they have not been able to acquire a convincing knowledge ofany other. This is particularly true of those who have not been able to take the final plunge, but have merery immersed thernselves in every kind of committee meeting and agitation. They have sacrificed a life of which they did after all know something, and entered a whirlwind where nothing is tangible.

Caudwell appears again a few pages later, as the antagonist in another, related argument. In Studies in a Dying Culture he had called writers like Shaw and Wells pathetic becuause, though they were disillusioned with bourgeois culture, they were unable to wish for something better. Spender responds with a defence of such divided men:

The fundamental weakness of Caudwell's position is in assuming that the writer who is in a divided position is not in a position to portray historic truth. Surely, the fact that he derides, the 'illusionment' that makes these writers 'pathetic,' is precisely that thing in their historic situation which makes them interesting and valuable. The divisions between their interests is a fact, and one of the most significant facts in the history of our time.

The point is the one that Spender had arready made: that the artist's function is not to change the world, but to analyze and understand it. But in personal terms it means that the artist accepts his inability to alter reality, and makes that inability his subject. It is, therefore, another aspect of that view of life which starts from the sense of human limitation—that is, the tragic view.

This separation of art from action is, like so many of Spender's utterances, a personal as well as a theoretical statement: it is a renunciation of his militant years, a confession of the failure of such effort. But it is also, more positively, a renewed commitment to art, not as an instrument, of political change, but as a human value. This confessional note is especially clear in the final paragraph of the essay, in which Spender pleads for a new kind of criticism which would judge writers by the truth of their anarysis rather than by their stated opinions.

It would follow from such a critical approach that we judged writers by the amount of life felt in their works, rather than by their political actions and opinions. In practical affairs this would mean that instead of appearing on political platforms and writing about aspects of life of which they know nothing, writers would write about the kind of life they knew best, learning as much about it as possible and saying what they believe to be true of it, without airing too much their opinions. Far too many writers and artists have been driven away from the centre of their real interest towards some outer rim of half creating, half agitation. A great deal is said about saving culture, but the really important thing is to have a culture to save.

Spender called this position 'The New Realism,' but it was not new for him; it was rather a return to the position that he had taken in 'Poetry and Revolution' in 1933. And so this later essay seems a judgment, at the decade's end, of all the activist effort of the intervening years; poetically speaking, it had all been a mistake, a wasteful diversion of energies from the creative centre of his life to the political rim.

That image of centre and perimeter appears also in The Still Centre, the book of poems that Spender published in the same month in which The New Realism appeared. It was Spender's first collection since Poems in 1934, and he put into it all the work that he wished to preserve from the intervening five years; it therefore amounts to a record of Spender's ideas and concerns through those years, and is a parallel in poetry to the account of his career that he gives in The New Realism. The book is divided into four parts, which are roughly chronological: Part One contains the earliest poems, continuous in manner with Poems—emotional, high-pitched, full of unspecified feeling; Parts Two and Three are the occasional poems of the political years, including poems concerned with the Spanish War. Coming after these poems, the fourth part makes a dramatic contrast, a contrast which Spender was at pains to emphasize in his manifesto-like Foreword:

I think that there is a certain pressure of external events on poets today, making them tend to write about what is outside their own limited experience. The violence of the times we are living in, the necessity of sweeping and general and immediate action, tend to dwarf the experience of the individual, and to make his immediate environment and occupations perhaps something that he is even ashamed of. For this reason, in my most recent poems, I have deliberately turned back to a kind of writing which is more personal, and I have included within my subjects weakness and fantasy and illusion.

He had chosen, as a conscious alternative to the earlier, more public, committed poetry, to write the kind of poetry that he had defended against Caudwell—the poetry of the divided man.

The first poem of this final section, 'Darkness and Light,' is about this choice; it begins:

To break out of the chaos of my darkness
Into a lucid day is all my will;

but continues in the second stanza:

Yet, equally, to avoid that lucid day
And to preserve my darkness, is all my will.

Day and darkness, the objective world and the self, are also imaged as the centre and circumference of a circle—the antithetical impulses toward and away from subjectivism, which are equally part of human identity. The resolution of the poem is an acceptance of both in the whole circle of the self:

The world, my body, binds the dark and light
Together, reconciles and separates
In lucid day the chaos of my darkness.

The relation of this poem to Spender's expressed intention is obviously very close; it is a programmatic poem, a demonstration of his turn back to the personal.

'Darkness and Light,' and the poems that follow it, are most interesting for what they exclude: there are no suffering poor here, no exiles, no heroes, and no politics. Spender takes his body as the world, and self as the whole subject. There are poems of chitdhood and of lost love, and introspective self-examinations, and even a poem entitled 'The Human situation' is entirely concerned with subjective experience.

David Landes

2010-10-06T17:34:00.000-07:00

The Unbound Prometheus

In the eighteenth century, a series of inventions transformed the manufacture of cotton in England and gave rise to a new mode of production—the factory system. During these years, other branches of industry effected comparable advances, and all these together, mutually reinforcing one another, made possible further gains on an ever-widening front. The abundance and variety of these innovations almost defy compilation, but they may be subsumed under three principles: the substitution of machines—rapid, regular, precise, tireless—for human skill and effort; the substitution of inanimate for animate sources of power, in particular, the introduction of engines for converting heat into work, thereby opening to man a new and almost unlimited supply of energy; the use of new and far more abundant raw materials, in particular, the substitution of mineral for vegetable or animal substances.

These improvements constitute the Industrial Revolution. They yielded an unprecedented increase in man's productivity and, with it, a substantial rise in income per head. Moreover, this rapid growth was self-sustaining. Where previously, an amelioration of the conditions of existence, hence of survival, and an increase in economic opportunity had always been followed by a rise in population that eventually consumed the gains achieved, now for the first time in history, both the economy and knowledge were growing fast enough to generate a continuing flow of investment and technological innovation, a flow that lifted beyond visible limits the ceiling of Malthus's positive checks. The Industrial Revolution thereby opened a new age of promise. It also transformed the balance of political power, within nations, between nations, and between civilizations; revolutionized the social order; and as much changed man's way of thinking as his way of doing.

In 1760 Britain imported some 2 1/2 million pounds of raw cotton to feed an industry dispersed for the most part through the countryside of Lancashire and existing in conjunction with the linen manufacture, which supplied it with the tough warp yarn it had not yet learned to produce. All of its work was done by hand, usually (excluding dyeing and finishing) in the homes of the workers, occasionally in the small shops of the master weavers. A generation later, in 1787, the consumption of raw cotton was up to 22 million pounds; the cotton manufacture was second only to wool in numbers employed and value of product; most of the fibre consumed was being cleaned, carded, and spun on machines, some driven by water in large mills, some by hand in smaller shops or even in cottages. A half-century later, consumption had increased to 366 million pounds; the cotton manufacture was the most important in the kingdom in value of product, capital invested, and numbers employed; almost all of its employees, except for the still large number of hand-loom weavers, worked in mills under factory discipline. The price of yarn had fallen to perhaps one twentieth of what it had been, and the cheapest Hindu labour could not compete in either quality or quantity with Lancashire's mules and throstles. British cotton goods sold everywhere in the world: exports, a third larger than home consumption, were worth four times those of woollens and worsteds. The cotton mill was the symbol of Britain's industrial greatness; the cotton hand, of her greatest social problem-the rise of an industrial proletariat.

Why did this revolution in the techniques and organization of manufacture occur first in Britain? A few theoretical considerations may help us to organize the argument. Technological change is never automatic. It means the displacement of established methods, damage to vested interests, often serious human dislocations. Under the circumstances, there usually must be a combination of considerations to call forth such a departure and make it possible: (I) an opportunity for improvement due to inadequacy of prevailing techniques, or a need for improvement created by autonomous increases in factor costs; and (2) a degree of superiority such that the new methods pay sufficiently to cover the costs of the change. Implicit in the latter is the assumption that, however much the users of older, less efficient methods may attempt to survive by compressing the costs of the human factors of production, entrepreneurial or labour, the new techniques are enough of an improvement to enable progressive producers to outprice them and displace them.

The technological changes that we denote as the 'Industrial Revolution' implied a far more drastic break with the past than anything since the invention of the wheel. On the entrepreneurial side, they necessitated a sharp redistribution of investment and a concomitant revision of the concept of risk. Where before, almost all the costs of manufacture had been variable—raw materials and labour primarily—more and more would now have to be sunk in fixed plant. The flexibility of the older system had been very advantageous to the entrepreneur: in time of depression, he was able to halt production at little cost, resuming work only when and in so far as conditions made advisable. Now he was to be a prisoner of his investment, a situation that many of the traditional merchant-manufacturers found very hard, even impossible, to accept.

For the worker, the transformation was even more fundamental, for not only his occupational role, but his very way of life was at stake. For many—though by no means for all—the introduction of machinery implied for the first time a complete separation from the means of production; the worker became a 'hand.' On almost all, however, the machine imposed a new discipline. No longer could the spinner turn her wheel and the weaver throw his shuttle at home, free of supervision, both in their own good time. Now the work had to be done in a factory, at a pace set by tireless, inanimate equipment, as part of a large team that had to begin, pause, and stop in unison—all under the close eye of overseers, enforcing assiduity by moral, pecuniary, occasionally even physical means of compulsion. The factory was a new kind of prison; the clock a new kind of jailer.

In short, only the strongest incentives could have persuaded entrepreneurs to undertake and accept these changes; and only major advances could have overcome the dogged resistance of labour to the very principle of mechanization.

The origins of the entrepreneurial interest in machines and factory production must be sought in the growing inadequacy of the older modes of production, an inadequacy rooted in internal contradictions, themselves aggravated by external forces.

Of these pre-factory forms of organization, the oldest was the independent craft shop, with master often assisted by one or more journeymen or apprentices. Fairly early, however—as far back as the thirteenth century—this independence broke down in many areas, and the artisan found himself bound to the merchant who supplied his raw materials and sold his finished work. This subordination of the producer to the intermediary (or, less often, of weak producers to strong ones) was a consequence of the growth of the market. Where once the artisan worked for a local clientele, a small but fairly stable group that was bound to him personally as well as by pecuniary interest, he now came to depend on sales through a middleman in distant, competitive markets. He was ill-equipped to cope with the fluctuations inherent in this arrangement. In bad times he might be completely idle, with no one to sell to; and when business improved, he usually had to borrow from his merchant the materials needed to get started again. Once caught on a treadmill of debt—his finished work mortgaged in advance to his creditor—the craftsman rarely regained his independence; his work sufficed to support him—no more—and he was in fact if not in principle a proletarian, selling not a commodity, but labour.

Aside from his pecuniary difficulties, the local artisan was in no position to know and exploit the needs of distant consumers. Only the merchant could respond to the ebb and flow of demand, calling for changes in the nature of the final product to meet consumer tastes, recruiting additional labour when necessary, supplying tools as well as materials to potential artisans. It was largely in this way that the rural population was drawn into the productive circuit. Very early, urban merchants came to realize that the countryside was a reservoir of cheap labour: peasants eager to eke out the meagre income of the land by working in the off-season, wives and children with free time to prepare the man's work and assist him in his task. And though the country weaver, nail-maker, or cutler was less skilled than the guildsman or journeyman of the town, he was less expensive, for the marginal utility of his free time was, initially at least, low, and his agricultural resources, however modest, enabled him to get by on that much less additional income. Furthermore, rural putting-out was free of guild restrictions on the nature of the product, the techniques of manufacture, and the size of enterprise.

The above description of a long and complex historical process inevitably oversimplifies. If it seems reasonable to assert that, taking Europe as a whole, most putters-out came from the mercantile side, it is important to note the many exceptions: the weavers who became clothiers by hiring their less enterprising neighbours; the fullers and dyers who had accumulated capital in the finishing processes and integrated backwards by contracting directly for yarn and cloth. In some areas, most notably the region around Leeds in the West Riding of Yorkshire, rural artisans organized their own small weaving sheds, joined when necessary to create common facilities, and sold their pieces as independent clothiers in the weekly cloth halls. But even in Yorkshire, this fragmentation of enterprise was characteristic primarily of the woollen trade; in the worsted manufacture, where capital requirements were greater, the productive unit was larger and the merchant putter-out more important.

The English textile industry built its fortune in the late medieval and early modern periods on rural manufacture. No centre of production, except perhaps Flanders, was so quick to turn from the towns to the countryside; it is estimated that as early as 1400 over half the output of wool cloth was accounted for in this manner. The trend continued: by the mid-eighteenth century, the great preponderance of the British wool manufacture was cottage industry; of all the towns immemorially associated with the wool trade, only Norwich remained as an important urban centre, and it was rapidly declining in relative importance. Allowing for such regional variations, moreover, and for occasional pauses, the industry as a whole had prospered impressively. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, at a time when the Italian manufacture was a shadow of its former self, when Dutch cloth output was shrinking steadily, and when France was in the throes of a prolonged depression, British consumption of raw wool was growing at the rate of about 8 per cent a decade; and from about 1740 to 1770, the decennial increase was 13 or 14 per cent.

This growth merits detailed attention, for it was the principal precipitant of the changes we denote by the Industrial Revolution, and understanding it may help us understand the reasons for British precedence in technological and economic development. In part the wool industry grew because of favourable conditions of production. Thus no country had so abundant a supply of raw wool, particularly the long wool required for the lighter, harder, worsted fabrics. And rural manufacture, largely unhampered by guild restrictions or government regulation, was in a position to make the most of this resource advantage by suiting its product to demand and changes in demand. In particular, it was free to develop cheaper fabrics, perhaps less sturdy than the traditional broadcloths and stuffs, but usable and often more comfortable. This freedom to adjust and innovate is particularly important in light industry, where resources and similar material considerations often are less important as locational factors than entrepreneurship. A good example from within the British wool industry is the rapid growth of the Yorkshire worsted trade, to the point where it passed the older centre of East Anglia in the course of the eighteenth century; compare Clapham's explanation: 'the ordinary case of a pushing, hardworking locality with certain slight advantages, attacking the lower grades of an expanding industry.' We shall have occasion to remark comparable examples of the advantages of entrepreneurial freedom when we turn to the continental countries. In the meantime, we may note that the British wool manufacture profited the more from its liberty because some of its most dangerous competitors across the Channel were being subjected in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to increasing regulation and control.

Finally, one should cite the relative freedom of British industry from the disturbance and destruction of war, the uneven but long and often rich inflow of skilled foreign artisans, and the access of the producing centres to water transport, hence distant markets—all factors conducive to lower costs of manufacture and distribution.

On the demand side, the British wool manufacture was comparably favoured. The population of the kingdom was not large, but it was growing, faster probably by the middle of the eighteenth century than that of any of the countries across the Channel. From not quite 6 millions around 1700, it rose to almost 9 millions in 1800; 70-90 per cent of the gain came in the second half of the period. What is more, the absence of internal customs barriers or feudal tolls created in Britain the largest coherent market in Europe. This political unity was confirmed by the geography of the island: the land mass was small; the topography, easy; the coastline, deeply indented. By contrast, a country like France, with more than three times as many people, was cut up by internal customs barriers into three major trade areas, and by informal custom, obsolete tolls and charges, and, above all, poor communications into a mosaic of semi-autarkic cells.

Moreover, what nature bestowed, man improved. From the midseventeenth century on, there was a continuous and growing investment of both public and private resources in the extension of the river system and the construction of new roads and bridges. By 1750 there were over a thousand miles of navigable streams in Britain; and Parliament had been passing turnpike acts at the rate of eight a year for half a century. Impressive as this development was, it was inadequate to the needs of the economy, and the pace of investment increased markedly in the fifties and sixties. These years saw the first canals (Sankey Navigation, 1755-9; Duke of Bridgewater's canal, 1759-61) and turnpike acts at the rate of forty a year. In two decades (1760-80), navigable water and solid roads linked the major industrial centres of the North to those of the Midlands, the Midlands to London, and London to the Severn basin and the Atlantic.

Within the market of Britain, purchasing power per head and standard of living were significantly higher than on the Continent. We have no precise measures of national income for the eighteenth century, but there is an abundance of impressionistic testimony by travellers from both sides of the Channel to the greater equality of wealth, higher wages, and greater abundance to be found in Britain. Thus one of the best signs of comfort in Europe is the consumption of white bread; in the nineteenth century, one can almost follow the rise in per capita income and the diffusion of higher living standards among the poorer sections of the population, into rural areas, and into central and eastern Europe by the wheat frontier. In the eighteenth century England was known as the country of the wheaten loaf. This was an exaggeration: in large areas, particularly in the Midlands and North, rye and barley were the staple grains, especially in the early part of the century. Even there, however, the bread grew whiter over the years, and nowhere was there anything like the reliance one found across the Channel on coarser cereals like buckwheat and oats. Similarly, there was much myth in the image of John Bull, beefeater. Yet when Arthur Young sat down to soup in the Pays Basque—'what we should call the farmer's ordinary' —he received 'ample provision of cabbage, grease, and water, and about as much meat for some scores of people, as half a dozen English farmers would have eaten, and grumbled at their host for short commons.' Even workhouse menus, hardly designed to make life agreeable for the residents, provided for meat daily or at least several times a week.

The English labourer not only ate better; he spent less of his income on food than his continental counterpart, and in most areas this portion was shrinking, whereas across the Channel it may well have risen during much of the eighteenth century. As a result, he had more to spare for other things, including manufactures. The Englishman was reputed for wearing leather shoes where the Fleming or Frenchman wore clogs. He was dressed in wool where the French or German peasant often shivered in linen, a noble fabric for table or bed, but a poor shield against the European winter.

Robin Dunbar

2010-10-02T01:15:00.000-07:00

Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language

These groups do not have a specific function: in one society they may be used for one purpose, in another society for a different purpose. Rather, they are a consequence of the fact that the human brain cannot sustain more than a certain number of relationships of a given strength at any one time. The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it's the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.

Thus it seems that, even in large-scale societies, the extent of our social networks is not much greater than that typical of the hunter-gatherer's world. We may live in the centre of enormous modern conurbations like New York or Karachi, but we still know only about the same number of people as our long-distant ancestors did when they roamed the plains of the American Midwest or the savannahs of eastern Africa. Psychologically speaking, we are Pleistocene hunter-gatherers locked into a twentieth-century political economy.

All this raises an interesting puzzle. Grooming seems to be the main mechanism for bonding primate groups together. We cannot be sure exactly how it works, but we do know that its frequency increases roughly in proportion to the size of the group: bigger groups seem to require individuals to spend more time servicing their relationships.

If this is so, then we have a problem. The largest typical group size (that is, the average for a species) is the 50-55 characteristic of baboons and chimpanzees, and they seem to be pushing at the limits of the amount of time that can be devoted to grooming without digging disastrously into ecologically more important components of the time budget (such as feeding and travelling time). If modern humans tried to use grooming as the sole means of reinforcing their social bonds, as other primates do, then the equation for monkeys and apes suggests we would have to devote around 40 per cent of our day to mutual mauling. Quite a thought—an almost continuous opiate high.

But no species that has to earn its living in the real world (as opposed to nipping down to the corner supermarket for the week's shopping) could possibly sustain such a heavy investment of time in grooming. It would starve in the process. And this raises an interesting thought about the way we establish and service our relationships. Our ancestors must have faced a terrible dilemma: on the one hand there was the relentless ecological pressure to increase group size, while on the other time-budgeting placed a severe upper limit on the size of groups they could maintain. It seems that somehow they managed to square the circle.

The obvious way, of course, is by using language. We do seem to use language in establishing and servicing our relationships. Could it be that language evolved as a kind of vocal grooming to allow us to bond larger groups than was possible using the conventional primate mechanism of physical grooming?

Language does have two key features that would allow it to function in this way. One is that we can talk to several people at the same time, thereby increasing the rate at which we interact with them. If conversation serves the same function as grooming, then modern humans can at least 'groom' with several others simultaneously. A second is that language allows us to exchange information over a wider network of individuals than is possible for monkeys and apes. If the main function of grooming for monkeys and apes is to build up trust and personal knowledge of allies, then language has an added advantage. It allows you to say a great deal about yourself, your likes and dislikes, the kind of person you are; it also allows you to convey in numerous subtle ways something about your reliability as an ally or friend.

Bonding is a tricky business, because you are committing yourself to a relationship with no guarantee that your partner will reciprocate. You are vulnerable to being cheated by free-riders, who exploit your good nature and then abandon you just at the moment when you most need their help. Being able to assess the reliability of a prospective ally becomes all-important in the eternal battle of wits. Subtle clues provided by what you say about yourself—perhaps even how you say it—may be very important in enabling individuals to assess your desirability as a friend. We get to know the sort of people who say certain kinds of things, recognizing them as the sort of people we warm to-or run a mile from.

Language has an additional benefit invaluable in these circumstances. It allows us to exchange information about other people, so short-circuiting the laborious process of finding out how they behave. For monkeys and apes, all this has to be done by direct observation. I may never know that you are unreliable until I see you in action with an ally, and that opportunity is likely to occur only rarely. But a mutual acquaintance may be able to report on his or her experiences of you, and so warn me against you—especially if they share a common interest with me. Friends and relations will not want to see their allies being exploited by other individuals, since a cost borne by an ally is ultimately a cost borne by them too. If I die helping out a scoundrel, my friends and relations lose an ally, as well as everything they have invested in me over the years. Language thus seems ideally suited in various ways to being a cheap and ultra-efficient form of grooming.

The conventional view is that language evolved to enable males to do things like co-ordinate hunts more effectively. This is the 'there's a herd of bison down by the lake' view of language. An alternative view might be that language evolved to enable the exchange of highfalutin stories about the supernatural or the tribe's origins. The hypothesis I am proposing is diametrically opposed to ideas like these, which formally or informally have dominated everyone's thinking in disciplines from anthropology to linguistics and palaeontology. In a nutshell, I am suggesting that language evolved to allow us to gossip.

Trevor Wilson

2010-09-28T19:03:00.000-07:00

The Myriad Faces of War

On this day, a Sunday, Labour was holding a mass anti-war rally in Trafalgar Square, and it was evident that many Liberal and Irish back-benchers were of the same persuasion. 'I suppose,' Asquith wrote to his confidante Venetia Stanley that day, 'a good 3/4 of our own party in the H. of Commons are for absolute non-interference at any price. It will be a shocking thing if at such a moment we break up—with no one to take our place' (by which he presumably meant no one tolerable to himself as an alternative Government). If Asquith was using the expression 'absolute non-interference at any price' in its literal sense, then he was plainly misrepresenting the attitudes of his parliamentary followers. With negligible exceptions, they all believed in war for certain vital interests.

For example, they would rather fight than tolerate a German war plan that, however benevolently, involved a military occupation of British territory or a naval occupation of the Channel. The problem—and, despite his hyperbole, Asquith doubtless recognized this—was the magnitude of the price that non-interference in war would exact. If it were sufficiently low, involving expansion of German influence in the Balkans but not elsewhere, then Asquith could hold his party and Government together in refusing to be drawn in. Churchill, for example, was happy to offer assurances that Balkan quarrels were no business of Britain's. Alternatively, if the price were sufficiently high, such as the Channel's being turned into a German lake, then again Asquith's task would be easy. Only a negligible group among his followers would resist going to war in such circumstances. The problem was what would happen if the issue were not so clear-cut: if the war were not confined to Eastern and South-Eastern Europe but spread to Western Europe as well, and yet still did not involve vital British concerns with blinding clarity. That was the situation confronting Asquith on 2 August.

Two incompatible views promptly manifested themselves. One was that of the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. As a number of testimonies bear out, Grey during these days was in a profound state of shock. He had been aware since the Sarajevo murders that Europe had entered a dangerous phase. He had also imagined that he knew how it would be resolved: by Germany's and Britain's imposition of a negotiated settlement on the Balkan disputants. The discovery that the German Government had no intention of maintaining the peace in the Balkans, and was actively encouraging Austria-Hungary into war at whatever risk, shook him to the core. A Cabinet colleague, Herbert Samuel, reported of Grey: 'He is outraged by the way in which Germany and Austria have played with the most vital interests of civilisation, have put aside all attempts at accommodation made by himself and others, and, while continuing to negotiate, have marched steadily to war.' For Grey the corollary was plain. If Germany was prepared to impose war on all Europe, Britain must resist German expansion in the West.

This attitude proved 'unacceptable' to a majority of the Cabinet, including Samuel. In his view, 'we were not entitled to carry England into the war for the sake of our goodwill for France, or for the sake of maintaining the strength of France and Russia against that of Germany and Austria. This opinion is shared by the majority of the Cabinet with various degrees of emphasis on the several parts of it.' Samuel would intervene only for certain specific reasons: first, to preserve the Channel and the Channel ports from attack and occupation by the German fleet and army; and, secondly, to maintain the independence of Belgium, 'which we were bound by treaty to protect and which again we could not afford to see subordinated to Germany.' That is, Samuel was not prepared to go to war to maintain the balance of power, only to resist so glaring a manifestation of its destruction as the termination of Belgian independence or a German domination of the Channel. In expressing this view he was not speaking as one of the Cabinet's more extreme anti-war members. Asquith placed Samuel among 'a moderating intermediate body,' as distinct from the group whose intransigence was most likely to disrupt the Cabinet—the group that included, if it was not led by, Lloyd George. Yet between Samuel's views and those of this latter group there was no essential difference.

Shortly before the Cabinet met on the morning of 2 August, a number of Ministers gathered at Lloyd George's official residence. Their conclusion was: 'all agreed we were not prepared to go into war now, but that in certain events we might reconsider [the] position, such as the invasion wholesale of Belgium.' After the Cabinet meeting this group reassembled for lunch, with a few additional individuals, including Samuel. The latter found 'general agreement' with his views. During the rest of the day, which included another Cabinet meeting, 'we remained solid.' His conclusion last thing at night was that if the question of war and peace had come to an issue during the day, all but a handful of the Cabinet would have been against war.

It is usual to portray Asquith as handling his colleagues with consummate mastery at this juncture. To prevent a rupture, he allowed decisions to be made only on those aspects of the situation concerning which there was general agreement. For example, there was near-unanimity that the German navy should not be allowed to use the Channel to wage war against the French. On the crucial issue of Britain's involvement in a Franco-Germen war on land he forestalled discussion until he was ready to carry an undivided Cabinet into the struggle.

This is a glamorized view. Certainly, Asquith avoided a decision and played for time. But this was all he could do if he was to escape a situation in which his Cabinet would fall apart at a time when his own position was hopelessly self-contradictory. For Asquith occupied no coherent place at this point. By common consent, he meant to stand by Grey if the intransigence of the Cabinet caused the Foreign Secretary to resign. Yet in the several accounts Asquith gave of how he viewed the actual issues he came down not with Grey but with Samuel—and so, essentially, with Lloyd George. When he claimed that he was prepared to leave office along with Grey, it was in opposition to those, among whom he included Lloyd George, who opposed intervention 'in any event.' This was an obtuse statement. Lloyd George was not against intervention 'in any event.' And Grey was prepared to resign for reasons with which Asquith apparently did not concur.

Writing privately on 2 August, Asquith said that he was quite clear in his mind about the right and wrong of the situation. Britain had a long-standing friendship with France and an interest to prevent it from losing its great-power status. But Britain was under no obligation to aid France or Russia militarily or navally. In so far as he chose between these positions, it was by concluding that there was no question at that moment of Britain's dispatching a military force to France. There was only one obligation requiring British military action. This was with regard to Belgium, which must not be 'utilized and absorbed by Germany.' In so saying Asquith was adopting virtually Samuel's position. What course, then, lay open to the Prime Minister on 2 August? He could not lead his party into the war that was threatening on that day because there seemed no likelihood that it would consent. Nor, in terms of his reiterated position, did he have any grounds for resigning along with Grey and forming a war Government that had shed most Liberal Ministers. Well might he play for time, avoid decision, and hope that events would somehow clarify the issue one way or the other.

Julius Carlebach

2010-09-26T21:02:00.000-07:00

Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism

Sombart's essay could be seen as an attempt to restate the Marxian thesis in sociological terms. 'What Sombart seeks to provide are the historical and anthropological proofs to substantiate the Marxian claim that Judaism was 'the spirit of capitalism.' Methodologically he followed Weber—in fact, copied him—but he lacked the capacity to formulate theoretical principles and the distance from his subject to explain those aspects of Jewish history which went against his basic suppositions. In the first part of his book, he set out to show the dominant influence of Jews in the development of modern capitalism in Europe: 'Israel passes over Europe like the sun: at its corning, new life bursts forth; at its going all falls into decay.' In Sombart's view, the importance of the Jews for the economic development of Europe was twofold: 'they influenced the outward form of capitalism [and] gave expression to its inward spirit.' Like Marx, he regarded the colonisation of America as a direct transfer of 'the Jewish spirit' to the new world, Jews 'swarmed' there as soon as settlement began and filled it 'to the brim with the Jewish spirit,' so that Americanism is nothing other than 'the Jewish spirit distilled.' Like Roscher, Sombart claimed that Jews contributed, indeed invented, important instruments of finance, e.g. securities, which made it possible to progress from personal to impersonal moneylending. Sombart strongly disagreed with Weber about the economic role of the Jew. 'Not his "usury" differentiated [the Jew] from the Christian, not that he sought gain, not that he amassed wealth; only that he did all this openly, not thinking it wrong, that he scrupulously and mercilessly looked after his business interests.' The difference between Sombart and Weber then was that Weber regarded the Jewish pariah status as a product of the Jews' own in-group/out-group ethic, whereas Sombart inclined to the view that pariah status was imposed on the Jew by tradition-bound Christian society. The Jew therefore felt free to reject accepted Christian ethical standards which regulated commercial life and to adopt instead the dominance of market factors to order his business. He thus became the innovator par excellence in a conformist environment. The contrast was not between Christian honesty and Jewish legality, but between Christian traditional ethic and 'capitalistic spirit.' The Jews thus disregarded barriers between industries, states and prevailing codes of etiquette, introduced modern advertising, founded the cheap press and created demands for goods. They introduced new business methods such as marketing cheap goods, accepting the idea of small profits with large turnovers, gimmick selling and credit buying. They introduced waste-product trades, the 'general store' and payment by instalments. In short, the Jew was 'modern' and created modern commercial practices. Sombart dismissed the question of Jews' disabilities and their persecution because 'they were of no moment whatever for the economic growth of Jewry.' Nor did he recognise that the problems created by legal restrictions on Jews did not affect so much their economic growth (which was in any event always distorted by the emergence of a small number of exceptionally wealthy families) as their economic structure which, by concentrating them in commerce and finance, misled him (and many others) into regarding this enforced occupational structure as a racial characteristic. Like Bauer and Marx, Sombart argued that the legally disadvantaged Jew compensated for his inferior position by acquiring wealth: the Jews 'became lords of money and through it lords of the world.'

Fisher Ames

2010-09-26T01:19:00.000-07:00

American Literature

It is no reproach to the genius of America if it does not produce ordinarily such men as were deemed the prodigies of the ancient world. Nature has provided for the propagation of men—giants are rare, and it is forbidden by her laws that there should be races of them.

If the genius of men could have stretched to the giant's size, there was every thing in Greece to nourish its growth and invigorate its force. After the time of Homer, the Olympic and other games were established. All Greece, assembled by its deputies, beheld the contests of wit and valour, and saw statues and crowns adjudged to the victors, who contended for the glory of their native cities as well as for their own. To us it may seem that a handful of laurel leaves was a despicable prize. But what were the agonies, what the raptures of the contending parties, we may read, but we cannot conceive. That reward, which writers are now little excited to merit because it is doubtful and distant, 'the estate which wits inherit after death,' was in Greece a present possession. That public so terrible by its censure, so much more terrible by its neglect, was then assembled in person, and the happy genius who was crowned victor was ready to expire with the transports of his joy.

There is reason to believe that poetry was more cultivated in those early ages than it ever has been since. The great celebrity of the only two epic poems of antiquity was owing to the peculiar circumstances of the ages in which Homer and Virgil lived, and without the concurrence of those circumstances their reputation would have been confined to the closets of scholars, without reaching the hearts and kindling the fervid enthusiasm of the multitude. Homer wrote of war to heroes and their followers, to men, who felt the military passion stronger than the love of life; Virgil, with art at least equal to his genius, addressed his poem to Romans, who loved their country with sentiment, with passion, with fanaticism. It is scarcely possible, that a modern epic poet should find a subject that would take such hold of the heart, for no such subject worthy of poetry exists. Commerce has supplanted war, as the passion of the multitude, and the arts have divided and contracted the objects of pursuit. Societies are no longer under the power of single passions that once flashed enthusiasm through them all at once like electricity. Now the propensities of mankind balance and neutralize each other and, of course, narrow the range in which poetry used to move. Its coruscations are confined, like the northern light, to the polar circle of trade and politics or, like a transitory meteor, blaze in a pamphlet or magazine.

Thomas West

2010-09-25T23:43:00.000-07:00

Plato's Apology of Socrates

Any community, in order to be a community, presupposes something shared by its members. A political community in particular depends for its unity and ultimately for its survival upon opinions and traditions held in common. Socrates' demand for the truth questions and corrodes Athenian beliefs about nobility and beauty without providing an alternative accessible to the citizens. If the Athenians were to follow Socrates and forsake their political and poetic tradition, they would have to entrust themselves to a sea whose farther shore might remain forever unattainable to them. If, having cast themselves off from the firm land, they could find no time for extended reflection, were deficient in intellectual capacity, or lacked the firm desire to improve their ignorant state—if, in other words, they were like most men most of the time—they would be left adrift, for the publicly recognized standards of nobility and justice would no longer grant them any guidance. The city's justice is embodied in the public laws and customs, while its nobility is seen in the visible reputation, honor, and beauty of the outstanding public men, the heroes of the poetic tradition, and the gods as they appear in sculpture and stories. without such public justice and nobility, the city's unity cannot rest upon anything except the mutual competition of self-interested factions or the outright rule of force. And the alternative is conquest by one's inevitable foreign enemies. The invisible truth by itself furnishes no foundation on which to build a public trust in shared institutions and paradigms of excellence. Is Socrates, then, as an obscure but persistent tradition maintains, 'opposed to nature and to the preservation of civilization and of the human race'? Was the comic poet Aristophanes right when he portrayed the outcome of Socrates' teaching to be the destruction of the family order and the city's laws?

Of course, the Proem only alludes to such complications. But the distance between Socrates and Athens—a distance which this defense must try to overcome—can be grasped from the outset. He appears to speak the truth baldly, without order or ornament. He teaches that truth is beautiful, but not in the usual and traditional sense. His defense would succeed, and the men of Athens would listen to him, if truth appeared as beautiful to them as it does to himself. But it manifestly does not, and probably cannot, for its beauty is too subtle and refined to reveal itself to common men. What is the result? When Socrates says he will tell the whole truth, yet refuses to give that truth an outward order and attractiveness, he guarantees that the jurors will not believe it. Consequently, his claims to beauty and nobility, instead of winning him sympathy, alienate his audience, who must look upon him as an arrogant boaster. For the jury can see no evident reasons for his pretensions to superiority. Socrates' pride, whatever the hidden justice of its grounds, must appear arrogant hybris to these Greeks nourished on noble poetry and a memory of great politics. Just as Socrates' old and ugly body wholly conceal his inner beauty, so also the naked, unadorned truth looks simply ugly to men not capable of penetrating thought. Only after Plato has turned the trial into a drama does Socrates' defense attain an external splendor. Plato gives Socrates' speech order and arrangement by showing it to be an integral part of a noble action that culminates in Socrates' death.

Moreover, if the truth by itself is unpersuasive, and if Socrates will not use the appropriate means to persuade the jurymen to reach a just judgment, then is he himself not the cause of injustice—namely of his own unjust condemnation? And does he not advocate a way of speech that leaves not only himself but all other good men at the mercy of the unscrupulous, who are willing to say and do anything?

Wolfgang Schivelbusch

2010-09-25T01:07:00.000-07:00

The Culture of Defeat

Like the established world powers England and France, Germany required a 'universally appealing ideology,' as Paul Rohrbach put it. Friedrich Naumann wrote: 'We Germans must come up with something as our world-historical mission that no other people can achieve as well as we can, indeed, that will remain unachieved if we do not carry it out. We need a national calling in the great assembly of humanity so that we can pursue our independent path with purpose and passion.'

Prior to the war, Rohrbach was the most active advocate of what he termed 'ethical imperialism.' In his 1912 book Der deutsche Gedanke (The German Way of Thinking), he argued for 'the essential moral core of Germanness as the determining force on current and future world events' and specified the mission of ethical imperialism as 'the peaceful penetration of the non-German world with elements of our spiritual and material culture.' Culture and power did not merely reinforce each other; as the example of England showed, a self-confident imperial culture was the prerequisite for global power. The liberal imperialists perennially complained about Germany's ignorance and incompetence in this area. Rohrbach wrote of 'our weak capability as a moral conqueror' and of a Prussian-German 'abrasiveness' that elicited not admiration but alienation and mistrust in international public opinion.

These isolated voices of the prewar era came together after the German defeat in a great chorus of national self-criticism. Even a figure as strongly identified with political saber rattling as former minister Karl Helfferich joined in. 'It was not clever,' he wrote, 'to talk incessantly about the sword, thus enabling our foreign enemies to portray the most peaceful people and monarch on earth as being obsessed by war. In this way, we unintentionally promoted the myth of our warlike intentions and helped produce an international mood that provided the coalition against us with the necessary mass-psychological underpinning.' Many others offered similar judgments. Sociologist Johann Plenge wrote: 'Because in our so-called Realpolitik we failed to grasp the very real power of propaganda, suggestions from the politics of ideas were ruthlessly kicked aside by jackbooted technicians.'

Simon Baron Cohen

2010-09-24T06:08:00.001-07:00

The Essential Difference

In each case, the systemizer explores how a particular input produces a particular output following a particular operation. This provides us with more or less useful if-then rules. You use a narrower canoe, it goes faster. You prune your roses in March, they grow stronger next season. you fly above a cloud, you experience less turbulence. You swing the golf club higher, the ball travels along a steeper trajectory. You focus on the jaws of the crocodiles, the reptile classification changes. You divide some numbers by others, they leave no remainder. The outcome is noted and stored as a possible underlying rule or regularity governing the system. The rules are nothing more than input-operation-output relations.

Behaviorist psychologists of the early twentieth century called this kind of learning 'association' learning, which is a partial description of systemizing. Typically in association learning (in other words, classical or operant conditioning) we extract the rule because there is sufficient reward or punishment. For example, a child learns that touching a hot radiator leads to pain, or a motorist discovers that a particular parking meter takes his money and credits him with twice the expected amount of time. In these examples the motivation for learning is an external reward (x) or punishment (y).

Systemizing is different from classical or operant conditioning, in that the motivation is not external but intrinsic-to understand the system itself. The buzz is not derived from some tangible reward (such as a food pellet when you press a lever, or a salary when you do a job). Rather, the buzz is in discovering the causes of things, not because you want to collect causal information for the sake of it, but because discovering causes gives you control over the world.

And a second big difference between association learning and systemizing is that the former is within the capability of most organisms with a nervous system, from a worm to an American president, whereas the latter may be a uniquely human or higher primate capability. This needs to be investigated in a range of species, but one conclusion is that causal cognition is rarely, if ever, seen outside of humans.

Philosophers worry about whether such correlation-based observations could ever distinguish between 'common cause' (where two things appear to be causally related, but in reality they are both caused by a third, common factor) and 'causation' proper. My guess is that this is a nicety that in practice the brain ignores, because even mistaking a common cause for causation gives you valuable leverage over events in the world. It allows you to begin designing systems or intervening in nature, to get control in the world.

So the big pay-off of systemizing is control. If you want to harness energy with a water wheel or a windmill, you had better understand how water or wind pressure causes your technical system to move. If you can figure out what controls what, you can build any machine to do anything for you: a spear that flies straight, or a rocket that can get to the moon. The principles—systemizing—are the same, but the list of if-then rules gets longer as the system becomes more complex.

Systemizing is an inductive process. You watch what happens each time you click that mouse, and after a series of reliably predictable results, you form your rule. Systemizing is also an empirical process. You need a keen eye and an orderly mind. An exact mind. Without them, essential variables or parameters, and the pattern of their effects, will be missed, or the rules will not have been carefully checked and tested. If one exception occurs which violates the rule, the systemizer notes it, rechecks the rule, and refines or revises it. If he or she has identified the rule governing the system correctly, the system works. The test is repeatability. Of course, this only works with events which repeat or are repeatable, and where the output can change.

Simon Heffer

2010-09-10T18:46:00.003-07:00

Like the Roman

Conservatives in 1955 would have been more incredulous than indignant had anyone told them that, in seven years' time, their political platform would consist of national economic planning, regional economic planning, planning of incomes ('incomes policy'), rationalisation of industries by state intervention, more subsidised housing, and higher public expenditure generally. Those whom these policies shocked could be heard to say that Harold Macmillan had 'debauched the Tory Party.' Debauch or not, he certainly performed one of the largest mass baptisms in history.

Over the next twenty years Powell would be much in demand by literary editors to review memoirs by and biographies of Macmillan, and, if anything, he became more vicious as the memories faded. Noting, in 1982, Nigel Fisher's observation in his life of Macmillan that there was 'no truth' in the claim that he had married Lady Dorothy simply because she was the daughter of a duke, Powell added, 'One envies the ability to be so sure—and so innocent.'

He moved back into the economic field. In a speech in his constituency on 6 September he advised the trade unions, meeting for their annual conference at Blackpool, that any moves by the Government to force them to acquiesce in a pay freeze would be illegal. The Prices and Incomes Act, which would have made such compulsion legal, had been enacted but had not come into force; and Powell told the unions that until the Government had the courage to invoke this controversial measure, they should seek whatever rises they wanted. Then, on 8 September, he published a second edition of Saving in a Free Society, in which he once again questioned the point of the National Savings movement. As in 1960, his view was that the movement encouraged no additional saving, but merely redirected a level of saving that would have been made anyway. He also called on the Government to stop trying to influence the interest rate, an unspeakably radical doctrine for the 1960s.

The director of National Savings, Sir Miles Thomas, was incensed by Powell's thesis, describing his conclusion as 'absurd.' Hoping to land a killer punch, Thomas quoted Powell's address to a National Savings assembly 'a few years ago' in which he had spoken warmly of the benefits of individuals participating in the scheme. Powell replied to Thomas immediately, saying that he had made the speech as Financial Secretary in 1957, and had undertaken his research into the question of savings in 1959-60, before writing the first edition of his work: 'Which seems to show that even politicians sometimes learn.'

On 24 September, addressing Young Conservatives at Blackpool, Powell sought to destroy the notion that the economic problems were a moral question. At least, he said, they were not a question of personal morality, rather the morality of the Government ministers executing the policy. He denounced the 'moralising sermons' being preached at the British public, rebuking them for 'idleness, fecklessness, inefficiency, greed and selfishness.' His attack on politicians cited actions by Labour ministers, but did not exclude Conservatives who shared the consensus view. He condemned Wilson for allowing public expenditure to grow at 4 per cent a year—twice the rate of the increase in national income—thereby causing inflation; to blame it on workers, employers and manufacturers was simply dishonest. 'The individual citizen cannot help himself,' he said. 'The flood of rising demand which the Government has fed and maintained left no option to customer and supplier, to employer and employee. The prices and incomes policy and the prices and incomes freeze are cynical manoeuvres designed to transfer blame from the guilty to the guiltless, by pretending that inflation happens because people are 'greedy' and put up prices, or 'selfish' and obtain more wages.' He added that the Government had spent £354 million more than it had earned in 1965, all of it borrowed abroad and subject to interest payments. That was not the fault of the workers either.

Then, at Bristol on 29 September, Powell condemned both employers and employees for boosting state socialism by participating in the incomes policy. He lambasted the 'trooping off to Whitehall' by workers' and managers' representatives 'to work out with a socialist Government the principles on which the prices of people and things are to be controlled in a socialist Britain. The people had been made to feel guilty about the inflation, which had really been caused by the Government, and in order to assuage their guilt made themselves quite willing to co-operate with the socialist plan of control. The next day, at Bridgwater, he ridiculed the recent National Productivity Conference, saying there was no point striving to produce with maximum efficiency things no one wanted to buy. 'Look after profits,' he said, 'and productivity will take care of itself.' However, all the Government manipulation and regulation of the economy in the preceding two years had made profits difficult to achieve and profitability an apparently unhealthy concept.

Powell's conference speech was more low-key than the previous year's. He confined himself to two main precepts: that expenditure on defence had to be related to returns in terms of security; and that only military obligations that could and should be performed should be undertaken. He pledged the Opposition to watch that the Government honoured its NATO commitments, on which 40 per cent of the defence budget was spent. There was one hint at a return to his speech of 1965, when he warned against Britain's taking on more than she could successfully manage in the East. Capabilities there, he said, had to be looked at 'realistically.' In a nod to his colleagues, however, he did specify that just because Britain's physical presence in the world might be shrinking, that did not mean her influence had to shrink too.

He saved his most controversial outburst for the evening the conference closed, when he spoke at Lancaster. He returned to his point that the prices and incomes policy was still being implemented on a voluntary basis, the Act of Parliament that would have enforced it still not having been invoked. He urged the country to wake up to this, and to stop rolling over whenever urged to reverse some act deemed contrary to the policy—as the directors of Great Universal Stores had done the previous week when told by the Treasury, without any right in law, to rescind a dividend. It was a speech made in the knowledge that many Conservatives, inside and outside the parliamentary party, still saw little wrong with the policy.

John Hirst

2010-09-10T18:46:00.001-07:00

Looking For Australia

Menzies' solution to the hung parliament of 1940 had been that a national government should be formed, as had been done in Britain. But it was a Labor principle not to cooperate in office with any other party. Curtin gave voice to the party's view: 'I refuse to desert the great body of Labor to prop up political parties of reaction and capitalism.' But Curtin himself was more responsible and did not believe that Labor should never cooperate with the class enemy, even at the expense of the nation's war effort. He proposed to Menzies that an advisory war council be established, composed of the leading men of both parties. Menzies agreed and so before he became prime minister Curtin had been privy to the diplomatic cables flowing between Australia and Britain concerning the war in the Middle East and the preparations, or lack of them, for the likely war against Japan.

Curtin distinguished himself on the council by his close concern for the defence of Singapore and his urgings that Britain send a fleet as it had promised to do. This seems odd for a man who was notorious as a critic of the Singapore strategy, but it was the government's policy that had been followed and not his own. It is more puzzling that when Churchill said in September 1941 that there would be a force of capital ships placed in the Indian Ocean before the end of the year, Curtin immediately assumed that it would happen and that it would work as a deterrent to the Japanese. He recommended a reduction in the number of men called up into the militia and the period of their training. Men taken out of the army could make munitions. Curtin was never happier than when it seemed Australia's role in the war was to grow food and make munitions.

Curtin was so desperate to protect Australia and to have other people do the fighting that he could lose all judgment. While still Opposition leader he tried to negotiate a deal with the Japanese envoy: in the coming war, Japan would spare Australia in return for Australia supplying it with iron ore. (To appease was not unusual; a separate peace for Australia was.) As prime minister after the war with Japan had begun, Curtin urged Churchill to encourage Russia to attack Japan by agreeing to all Stalin's territorial claims in Eastern Europe, Iran and the Far East. Churchill reminded him that the forcible transfer of people was against the principles of the Atlantic Charter.

Against Admiralty advice, Churchill did send to Singapore, not a fleet, but two capital ships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. Sadly the aircraft carrier that was to protect them did not come too. Three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes sank them from the air. That ended Singapore's career as a naval base, but Curtin and his ministers sent more Australian troops there and redoubled their efforts to get Churchill to reinforce it, though its function was now symbolic only. Churchill sent the Eighteenth British Division, which he would rather have sent to Burma. The convoy carrying them was attacked by the Japanese from the air—so much was this a lost cause. Then the Australian government learnt from Earle Page, its minister in London, that there was talk of evacuating soldiers from Singapore, as the Japanese drive down the Malayan peninsula could not be halted. The Australian government was incensed and replied that this would be 'an inexcusable betrayal.' These words came from Evatt, the foreign minister, not Curtin. The prime minister, as often happened in a crisis, had become ill and had retreated to his home in Perth. Churchill switched tack and gave the order that Singapore must be defended. He was worried about giving up the fight when the Americans were defending to the last in the Philippines and because the Australians were pressing him to stay, but in his words, 'There is no doubt what a purely military decision should have been.' So thousands of British and Australian soldiers went into captivity.

Curtin is credited with being prescient about the fall of Singapore, but when the event was in prospect he showed no sign of independent thought. Churchill considered getting the troops out so that they could fight another day; Curtin could not. When the Singapore strategy had failed (as he had predicted), Curtin wanted the British to stick to it because that is what they had promised—and so he helped make the disaster more complete. This is not to say that any other Australian leader would have reacted differently. They had all been involved in pressing Britain to defend Singapore and had a huge emotional commitment to its survival. It is to say that Curtin had no more thrown off the mind-set of colonial entitlement than the rest. He suffered deeply for it; the fate of the prisoners of war was always in his mind.

With the fall of Singapore Curtin announced that the 'Battle for Australia' was about to begin. The recurring nightmare of an enraged yellow nation taking vengeance on white Australia was about to be realised. Except that the Japanese were not intending to invade Australia. They wanted the rubber, tin and oil in South-East Asia. It was hard for Curtin and his ministers to accept that Australia was not the goal despite Churchill, Roosevelt and MacArthur telling them it was most unlikely. Of course, if there was a doubt they could not lay the prospect aside, but this fear was beyond the reach of military appraisals.

The Japanese advanced so quickly through South-East Asia that, briefly, elements in their navy advocated an invasion of Australia. The army quickly had this plan rejected; bogged down in its war in China, it did not want another difficult campaign. The strategy remained to isolate and harass Australia but not invade it. The advance along the Kokoda Track in the direction of Port Moresby was not intended as an advance into Australia, which is how it was popularly seen at the time and since. It was to extend and secure the southern perimeter of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The official war historian Lionel Wigmore says the leaders of the Australian army were not thrown by the collapse of Singapore because this is what they had predicted. But the situation at the fall of Singapore was very different from the scenarios they had entertained. When Japan moved south, it had another war on its hands in China, where most of its army remained. When the British failed at Singapore, Australia was not alone. The United States was in the war; it had already been planning joint operations with the British for twelve months and Roosevelt was pledged to the defence of Australia. All this they knew; they could not know at first that the Japanese were not intent on invasion, but even if that was the aim, the other factors in play made that threat very different from what they had envisaged. Australians fighting alone on their own soil against the yellow hordes was an image not readily erased. The view of army leaders is important, for the army chief of staff, Vernon Sturdee, was advising Curtin in the first months after Pearl Harbor.

The myths about Curtin are so strong that it might still be believed that he had to fight Churchill to get the soldiers of the AIF returned from the Middle East to defend Australia against the Japanese. Churchill himself proposed the move; two divisions, the sixth and seventh, left the Middle East early in 1942, with Curtin agreeing that the Ninth Division could remain. The dispute was over where best the returning divisions could be deployed against the Japanese. On its way across the Indian ocean, Churchill proposed that the Seventh Division could best be used to defend Rangoon in Burma. With all the outer defences of Australia falling, Sturdee urged that the troops must come home and threatened to resign if they did not: Curtin was happy to follow the advice; it chimed with his own view that the defence of Australia was his first duty and, after another near mental collapse, he told Churchill that the men must come to Australia. Roosevelt, at Churchill's urging, put pressure on Curtin to change his mind. The president offered to send American troops to Australia in place of those diverted to Burma and tried to calm Curtin by saying that despite the rapid Japanese advance the vital centres of Australia were not
in danger.

Churchill and Roosevelt regarded the war as one and since finding ships to move troops was always a problem, the troops, of whatever nation, nearest to the action should do the job. The reason they were so keen to prevent a Japanese takeover in Burma was that the so-called Burma Road could then be kept open, by which the allies were supplying China with the materials of war.

The dispute went on for days and was referred to the Advisory War Council, where Menzies and Fadden urged that Churchill's request be granted. Curtin stood firm. Meanwhile Churchill, assuming that Curtin could not resist the pressure, ordered the ships to sail to Rangoon. All the Australian leaders were properly outraged at this and when Curtin insisted, Churchill of course complied—and became more deeply hostile to the Australians who had pushed him the wrong way on Singapore.

Today the Museum of Australian Democracy in Canberra stages re-enactments of this dispute in the Cabinet Room at Old Parliament House and visitors then decide who was in the right. Museum staff report that Australians always take Curtin's part. This is not surprising since even such an eminent historian as Geoffrey Serle, who wrote the entry on Curtin in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, didnot understand the issues at stake. He conceives the dispute as between British imperial and Australian interests. British imperial!—when the United States' president was urging Curtin to agree. And not in Australian interests!—what country had a greater interest than Australia in keeping China in the war and so reducing the capacity of Japan to move south?

Richard Wrangham

2010-09-05T19:51:00.000-07:00

Catching Fire

If the first cooks were temperamentally like chimpanzees, life would have been absurdly difficult for females or low-status males trying to cook a meal. Cooked food would have been intensely valuable. Even the act of gathering creates value merely by assembling raw foods into a pile. Cooking only increases its attraction. Subordinate individuals cooking their own meals would have been vulnerable to petty theft or worse. If several hungry dominants were present, the weak or unprotected would have lost much or all of the food. Females would have been the losers, just as they are among chimpanzees. There are no indications that human females or their ancestors have ever been prone to forming the kinds of physical fighting alliances with one another that protect bonobo females from being bullied by males.

Consider the possibility that small groups of tough males could search for signs of a campfire as a way to feed themselves. They would be able to descend on an undefended cook and take his or her food at will—after waiting, perhaps, for the cooking to be done. If this ploy were regularly successful, the males could become professional food pirates, which in turn would mean they would not bother to feed themselves or prepare their own food, adding to their desperation to steal it. Male lions come close to doing this, regularly taking whatever meat they want from kills made by females. This scenario suggests that unless cooks somehow established a peaceful environment in which to work, cooking might not have been a viable method of preparing food at all.

Even humans steal readily in various circumstances, so our species is not inherently uncompetitive. The nervous child with a lunch box in the schoolyard knows the problem as well as the anxious late-night stroller with cash in his pocket. People who have the chance to take from members of a different social network have few qualms about doing so. Farmers living next to hunter-gatherers routinely complain of being robbed. Stealing, cheating, and bullying were prevalent among the troubled Ik in the uplands of northern Uganda observed by cultural anthropologist Colin Turnbull, whose book about them, The Mountain People, was said by writer Robert Ardrey to record a society without morality. The Ik were a hunting people who had been kept from their traditional hunting grounds. The result was starvation, disease, and mutual exploitation. Turnbull described an almost complete evaporation of their community spirit: 'They place the individual good above all else and almost demand that each get away with as much as he can without his fellows knowing.' Turnbull's description shows just how savage people can become when social networks break down and life is tough.

Ethnographers sometimes report cases of theft within stable hunter-gatherer communities. Turnbull described how Pepei, an Mbuti Pygmy, had to cook for himself because he was a bachelor with no female kin. As a result, he was often hungry. Several times he was caught stealing small quantities of food from another cooking pot or someone else's hut, mostly from an old woman who had no husband to protect her. His punishment was public ridicule, receiving food fit only for animals, or a thrashing with a thorny branch. Pepei was forgiven after he ended up in tears.

Since hunter-gatherers are often hungry, one might imagine that food theft would be a daily problem. Like other people living in small-scale egalitarian societies, they have no police or any other kind of authority. A hunter-gatherer woman returns to camp in the middle of the day carrying the raw foods she has obtained. She then prepares and cooks them for the evening meal at her own individual fire. Men might return to camp at any time, alone or in a small group. Many of the foods a woman cooks are edible raw, so they could be eaten before, during, or after the cooking process. If a man returns from the bush feeling hungry and has no one to cook for him, he might be tempted to ask a woman for some food—or even simply take it—rather than doing his own cooking. He can also sneak about the camp at any other time, including night.

Yet such tactics are rare. The relaxed atmosphere Lorna et Marshall described for the !Kung is due to a system that keeps the peace at mealtimes among hunter-gatherers and other small-scale societies. The system consists of strong cultural norms. Married women must provide food to their husbands, and they must cook it themselves, though other family members may help. Social anthropologists Jane Collier and Michelle Rosaldo surveyed small-scale societies worldwide. 'In all cases,' they found, 'a woman is obliged to provide daily food for her family.' That is why married men can count on an evening meal. As a result, they have little reason to take food from women who are not their wives.

The obligation of wives to cook for their husbands occurs regardless of how much other work each of them do, or how much food they give each other. Sometimes men produce much more than women, as among traditional Inuit of the high Arctic, where the almost wholly animal diet of sea mammals, caribou, and fish was produced entirely by men. A man would hunt all day and would come home to a dinner his wife cooked. Cooking was slow over a seal-oil lamp, and women often had to spend much of the afternoon on the task. Sometimes the whole family went hunting together, but the wife had to return early to have everything ready when her husband and others returned to camp. Even when the time of her husband's return was uncertain, she risked punishment if there was no food available for him. But at least a wife's obligation to cook for a husband was matched by his providing all the food.

On the other hand, in some societies women brought home almost all the food. This happened among the Tiwi hunter-gatherers of northern Australia, a polygynous people who lived in households of up to twenty wives and one man. Women foraged for long hours and still returned in the evening to cook the one meal of the day. There were few animals to hunt. Men mostly contributed occasional small animals, such as goanna lizards, and brought in such little food that they needed women's food production for their own welfare. As one Tiwi husband said, 'If I had only one or two wives, I would starve.' Men relied on their wives not only for their own food but also to feed others. The possession of surplus food was the most concrete symbol of a Tiwi man's success, allowing him to host feasts and promote his political agenda. Women's high food contribution did not sway the balance of power in their marriages. Despite their economic independence and key role in their husbands' status, they were 'as frequently and as brutally beaten by their husbands as wives in any other savage society.'

Among the Inuit, Tiwi, and all other small-scale societies on record, fairness in distributing labor among women and men was not the issue. Whether or not wives wanted to do so, they cooked for their husbands. As a result, married men were guaranteed adequate food whether they returned late, tired, and hungry from a day's hunting or came home relaxed and early from discussing politics with a neighbor. The man might have eaten in a courteous manner and have had a friendly or even loving interaction with his wife, but the formal structure of their eating relationship was that he could count on her labor and take a large portion of her food—typically, it seems, the best part. Peace in the camp is further cemented by the principle that unless a husband gave his blessing, a wife could feed no other man except her close kin. This rule applied to cooked food around the campfire, as well as to the raw food she gathered. Other than her kin and husband, no one else had any right to ask for a share, so she could trudge back to camp secure in the knowledge that she would be able to cook all the food she had obtained. In Western society, we take the principle of ownership for granted. But among hunter-gatherers, this manifestation of private ownership is noteworthy because it lies in remarkable contrast to the obligatory sharing of men's foods in particular, and more generally to a strong ethos of communitywide cooperation.

Nigel Lawson

2010-09-03T01:28:00.001-07:00

An Appeal to Reason

It will be recalled that the report's best estimates of the likely warming of the planet over the next hundred years range from a rise of 1.8°C/3.2°F to one of 4°C/7.2°F above the estimated 1980-1999 average temperature, depending on the emissions scenario (or 'story line') chosen. The report then takes the upper end of the range—a 4°C/7.2°F warming—and claims that overall, this would mean a loss, by the end of the 21st century, of anything between 1% and 5% of global gross domestic product. It adds that this is the global average figure, and that developing countries will experience larger percentage losses.

Given that this conclusion derives from the top end of the range, and given that the IPCC insists that all its scenarios are of equal validity, it is clear that, on the basis of the IPCC's own methodology, there may be no net cost at all from global warming over the next hundred years: it may even be beneficial. But let us err on the side of caution, and take not only the top end of the IPCC's warming range—a rise of 4°C/7.2°F over the next hundred years—but also the top end of its projection of the net damages, a loss of 5% of world GDP.

A loss of 5% of world GDP would undoubtedly be a very significant loss indeed, but to put it in perspective we need to do some simple arithmetic. Heeding the IPCC's very proper warning that the loss will be greater than 5% for the developing countries (and thus less than 5% for the developed world), I shall make the calculations on the assumptions of a 10% loss of GDP in the developing world and a 3% loss in the developed world.

Again, to err on the side of caution, let us look at the gloomiest of the IPCC's six scenarios (that which, the reader will recall, the Stern Review arbitrarily chooses as its business-as-usual base case), even though it is not the scenario which generates the 4°C/7.2°F temperature rise, but one of 3.4°C/6.1°F. This is the scenario which has the lowest rise in living standards, partly because it has the lowest rate of technological advance, but more particularly because, by a long way, it has the highest projected growth of world population—to more than 15 billion by 2100, or no less than 65yo higher than the United Nations' 'medium' population forecast for that year, and almost half as much again as UN's highest projection.

According to this scenario, living standards (measured in the conventional way as gross domestic product per person) would rise, in the absence of global warming, by 1% a year in the developed world, and by 2.3% a year in the developing world (these and subsequent assumptions are taken directly from the IPCC's Special Report on Emissions Scenarios). It can readily be calculated—using, to repeat, a cost of global warming of 3% of GDP in the developed world and as much as 10% in the developing world—that the disaster facing the planet is that our great-grandchildren in the developed world would, in a hundred years time, be only 2.6 times as well off as we are today, instead of 2.7 times, and that their contemporaries in the developing world would be 'only' 8.5 times as well off as people in the developing world are today, instead of 9.5 times as well off.

If we were to take the most optimistic of the IPCC's growth scenarios, which is after all the only scenario where the 'best estimate' is warming of as much as 4°C/7.2°F, in which living standards rise by 1.6% a year in the developed world and by 4% a year in the developing world (heroic, but think of China and India), the results are even more startling. To be precise, the great disaster facing the world from the prospect of global warming is that our own great-grandchildren would, instead of being slightly more than 4.8 times as well off as we are, be only some 4.7 times as well off. And as for their contemporaries in the developing world, instead of being 50 times as well off as the population of the developing world is today, they would 'only' be 45 times as well off.

Such are the ravages of global warming. This is the bottom line. This is the existential threat facing the globe. This is the disaster from which we are told we have to save the planet. This is the greatest threat facing the people of the world today. If only it were.

Of course, if it were a real threat, and one that could readily be avoided, it would certainly be worth avoiding it. But even if (and it is a big 'if') global warming could realistically be averted by cutting back drastically on carbon dioxide emissions, that is very far from costless. So we need to reflect long and hard on how big a sacrifice the present generation and their children should be asked to make in order to make it more likely that the generation a hundred years hence, instead of being many times as well off as we are today, will be even better off. And if we are fearful of appearing selfish, we can look at it the other way round. How great a sacrifice do we think the (very much poorer) people of Victorian England should have made to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions (for that was when it all began) at the birth of the industrial revolution?

Indeed, perhaps in hindsight the industrial revolution was all a ghastly mistake, and perhaps at any moment we will find our political leaders, who are as ready to apologize for the errors of their predecessors as they are unready to apologize for their own, apologizing for the industrial revolution, too.

There will no doubt be some who feel that to analyse the alleged threat of global warming in economic terms—that is, in terms of living standards—is profoundly mistaken, not to say immoral (despite the fact, incidentally, that the Stern Review, for example, is an attempt to do just that). Are not human lives themselves at stake? It is a fair question, but one that is not difficult to answer.

In the first place, natural disasters such as hurricanes, monsoons, droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis, and even pandemics (the vogue word for what used to be known as plagues), have always occurred, and no doubt always will; to attribute them to global warming is not science but political propaganda.

In the second place, where there is a clear link between human life and temperature, such as deaths from either extreme heat or extreme cold, we find that a wanner world would probably, on balance, save lives. Even more important in this context, if the proposed remedy is to attempt to cut back drastically on carbon dioxide emissions by abandoning cheap, carbon-based energy, the cost in terms of slower economic growth would itself cost lives, in terms both of a slower conquest of poverty (despite, incidentally, the global commitment to this) and the reduced resources available for, among other things, the battle against disease.

And in the third place, in no area of public policy do we in practice regard the saving of human life, important though it is, as paramount at all costs, irrespective of all other considerations. If we did, then (for example) we would impose a speed limit on the roads of probably not more than 10 miles an hour.

Helmut Smith

2010-08-25T04:27:00.001-07:00

German Nationalism and Religious Conflict

The nationalist dream of spiritual unity, evidently frustrated by the reality of cultural heterogeneity within the national state, could be achieved only by severing the fetters of Germany's feudal and particularist past. Here German nationalists insisted that naivete vis-a-vis the power of the Roman church would have a deleterious effect on the young empire. Roman Catholicism, they believed, threatened a unified German identity with an institutionally supported web of cultural attachments opposed, in so many ways at once, to a progressive and modern and therefore Protestant conception of that identity. Though partly a matter of images and representation, of literary canons and historical traditions, this was also an issue of high politics. In order to combat the influence of ultramontanism on German culture, nationalist intellectuals considered it necessary to destroy church power, especially in the schools but also in parliament, in social life, and in the press.

In the struggle against this religious culture, for which nationalist intellectuals had little understanding and even less patience, the interventionist state, and not the people, constituted the most reliable ally. Treitschke observed: 'For us the state is not, as it is for the Americans, a power to be contained so that the will of the individual may remain uninhibited, but rather a cultural power from which we expect positive achievements in all areas of national life.' Heinrich von Sybel also urged state intervention. The 'most essential tasks in the struggle against the clerical system could be mastered,' he argued, 'only through the positive influence of state power.' Although Treitschke and Sybel both tended to the conservative side of the Liberal party, it would be a mistake to consider these views as somehow in opposition to a more principled German liberalism. Eugen Richter, the leader of the Progressive party, much to the left of Sybel and Treitschke, and considerably more suspicious of the state, also realized that 'it was not possible for the state to liberate itself from clerical domination without interfering in the course of the events.'

To German liberals, of both the left and the right, the state represented, at least in its potential, an agent of modernization; the church, by contrast, a bulwark of backwardness. But German liberals, whose relation to the vox populi had always been equivocal, did not necessarily equate a more modern with a more democratic polity. Indeed, German liberals worried deeply about the implications of a democratically mobilized Catholic dissent. Treitschke feared that universal suffrage, 'which grants to the powers of custom and stupidity such an unfair superiority' would be 'an invaluable weapon of the Jesuits,' while von Sybel argued that Catholics did not simply constitute a minority religion but rather 'a militarily organized corporation which in Germany contains more than 30,000 agents sworn to absolute obedience.' Democracy, far from hindering the malicious influence of the church, fortified Catholic power anew. 'The more democratic the current of the times,' Sybel thought, 'the more important will be the party that controls one and a half million voters with military command.' The very existence of a large religious culture that did not necessarily share the values of the new national state posed a dilemma to the democratic sentiments of German liberals-even to those whose commitment to the parliament and to constitutionalism was otherwise unimpeachable. Rudolf Virchow, the left-liberal pathologist, in every sense a bearer of enlightened values and civic responsibility, pondered the necessity of a 'dictatorship of ministers' to combat Catholic resistance to the Kulturkampf.

It is typically assumed that the German-liberal appeal to state power represented a distortion of true liberal values, that in the universal conflict between force and freedom German liberals exalted the former at the expense of the latter. But, in fact, many did not perceive the tension. Force, argued Treitschke, would be harnessed in the service of freedom. Indeed, given the spiritual poverty of the people (as they actually existed), force was necessary in order to create a common high culture, the precondition for the development of liberal values. 'Many precious benefits of freedom are given to peoples only through state coercion,' Treitschke maintained. Freedom from clerical bondage constituted one such benefit. Constantin Rossler argued that should the clergy continue to resist the Kulturkampf measures of the state, then 'the state will have no choice but to deny its citizens, regardless of confession [sic!], the guidance of the Roman clergy.' The school issue, mercury by which one could measure the intensity of the conflict between nationalist intellectuals and ultramontane Catholics, provided another example of what liberals imagined as a happy marriage between force and freedom. Compulsory education in secular, confessionally mixed schools was, they believed, the best means by which to integrate the confessions while recasting an ignorant and apathetic populace into a respectable, responsible citizenry. But Catholics, mired in their own backwardness, feared such schools as institutions that taught children to criticize their traditional beliefs, that exposed them to blasphemous works, and that indoctrinated them in the materialist beliefs of an increasingly godless age. The resistance of Catholics to compulsory education was particularly tenacious in the countryside and in small towns, where, especially during harvest season, school alarms rarely rang in consonance with time marked out by the requirements of rural life. Nevertheless, argued German liberals, the age demanded change. 'The German State,' declared Treitschke, 'forces parents to have their children educated; it does not give them 'the right to their Catholic stupidity.'

Not freedom from state coercion, but rather the creation of a national state in which culture and values were shared, in which there was a common commitment to a common destiny, constituted the precondition for a truly, not just a formally, free polity. The state, which 'fights on the side of freedom,' was to carve out the cultural contours of the new empire, to give form to an emerging national consensus of values. Here too national intellectuals across the liberal spectrum shared common assumptions. Both Treitschke and the public-minded pathologist Rudolf Virchow expected the state to give shape to the 'incomplete form of our young German empire.' The emerging profile, both men hoped, would be progressive and modern—free of particularism, parochialism, feudal privilege, and fanatical religion. It is with this vision in mind that German liberals pursued the Kulturkampf with a sense of newfound idealism.

John Bossy

2010-08-25T04:26:00.001-07:00

Christianity in the West

In defining the doctrine in a steadily more explicit form, as it did in the Councils of Lyon (1274), Florence (1439) and Trent, the Church seems to have been as much following as determining the simple deductions of lay instinct and speculation. Dante's Divine Comedy, which had after 1320 put purgatory indelibly on the map of Western consciousness, was a monument to both its learned and its instinctual sources. This did not mean that the average person now had a clear view of the kind of place, or rather state, that purgatory was. The idea, not recognised by Dante but favoured by the Church on quasi-scriptural grounds, that the agent of purgation was fire and purgatory a sort of cave from which, in the end, souls would fly up to heaven does not seem to have impinged much on the general consciousness until the fifteenth century. Thereafter, encouraged by the indulgence preachers, it made a great deal of headway.

Meanwhile the common-sense view was that the souls of the dead would naturally be more or less where their bodies were, in the churchyard, and suffering rather from cold and wet than from excessive heat. The conviction transpires from the discussions of the subject which occurred in Montaillou, from a vast corpus of folk-tales, and indeed from a certain amount of respectable liturgical practice. The falling back on purgatory as the immediate destination of the dead made it possible to envisage death as a passage into a collectivity whose location was the churchyard, and which therefore possessed its own proper segment of the common territory, as the living possessed theirs. The medieval churchyard, as Aries bas explained, was a social institution of distinctive character. The early Christians, conforming to the pattern still expressed in the liturgy, had buried their dead ad sanctos, close to the tombs of the martyrs and outside inhabited places. With regional exceptions, like Ireland, the medieval burial-place was commonly in the middle of the dwelling-places of the living, in a churchyard which was also a centre of social activity, a place for festivity and trade. Consecrated, a holy place, it was an area of inviolability, a sanctuary or Friedhof which would be polluted by the shedding of blood or seed and require reconsecration. In passing into the community of the dead one was passing into a region of compulsory peace, and it was in this way that the detachment of the dying from their relationships among the living could be understood and to a degree accepted. The churchyard was a collective place: individual burial-places were not marked or remembered, snd when the flah had rotted the bones were, commonly, like Yorick's, dug up and added to the anonymous mass in the charnel-house.

During the fifteenth century, representations of the community of the dead as a model for the community of the living achieved a memorable form in the danse macabre, Totentanz or dance of the dead (not 'dance of death' until the theme was taken up by sixteenth-century artists who did not quite see the point). Painted on the cloister wall of a number of celebrated churchyards, notably of the Cimetiere des Innocents in Paris, it portrayed a circle where the dead alternate, holding hands, with the living, and lead them in a dance around the graves. The skeletal dead, an undifferentiated community of equals, dance keenly, the living reluctantly: weighed down by robes, possessions and thoughts about status, they have to be dragged in by the dead, polite but firm. The grave in the fifteenth century was not a private but a public place and embracing, of a sort, compulsory.

The dead as a model for the living, and death as a passage into collective existence, impinged on the life of communities at at least two moments. When John Donne advised his Jacobean hearers not to ask for whom the bell tolled, since it tolled for them, he was invoking a complex of formal practice and customary behaviour which affirmed that when an individual died the normal distinctions within a community were suspended at the tolling of the bell the neighbourhood was encouraged to drop what it was doing and follow the priest to the bedside, or at least to say a prayer for the soul of the dying; indulgences were granted for attendance at death-bed and funeral procession. By the fifteenth century it was very likely that the business of carrying the body to church, of seeing to its burial, even of watching by the body in the house, would be in the hands of a parish fraternity dedicated, like lifeboat-men, to that charitable purpose. The general responsiveness to these invitations to collective piety is evident from a variety of customs exemplifying what has been called the 'truce of death.' Since the confession and, if relevant, will of the dying had to include a granting of forgiveness to offenders and a seeking for forgiveness for offences, it was possible for those at enmity with the dying to appear at death-bed and burial rites; the stereotype of the death-bed reconciliation is something more than a cliche. There was also the rule, widely observed later, that the nuntius mortis, the person who would go round to give formal notice of the death, must not be related to, or even friends with, the dead person. Such obligatory togetherness has ended, in modern times, with the funeral feast after burial. It existed also in the general feast of All Souls, which was one of the great festivals of traditional Christianity, drawing its strength from an increasing concern in the church and among the pious about the release from purgatory of those who had no or insufficient living 'friends' to pray or have masses said for them.

Pascal Bruckner

2010-08-25T04:25:00.001-07:00

The Tyranny of Guilt

Nothing authorizes us to divide humanity into the guilty and the innocent, for innocence is the lot of children, but also that of idiots and slaves. A people that is never held accountable for its acts has lost all the qualities that make it possible to treat it as an equal. Thus we must enlarge the circle of repentance, open it to all continents, and not confine it to Northern Hemisphere countries alone.

Christianity, Islam: two imperialist religions, persuaded that they know the truth and prepared to save people in spite of themselves, by the sword, by fire, by auto-da-fe. But Christianity, worn out by four centuries of violent opposition in Europe, has had to give ground and admit the principle of secularism, which is, moreover, inscribed in the Gospels. Many crimes can be imputed to the Catholic Church: for instance, having ordered the first genocide in the history of Europe with the massacre of the Albigensians launched in 1209 by Pope Innocent III, in the name of the principle 'Kill them all, God will recognize his own'; having invented with the Inquisition institutional torture, and state racism with the Catholic queen Isabella's demand for 'purity of blood' (pureza de sangre); having had all the theological arguments to condemn slavery but having instead justified or at least tolerated it until the beginning of the nineteenth century in order to support the temporal interests of the papacy; having too often spoken in favor of ignorance, madness, and superstition; having killed, eliminated, and persecuted heretics, witches, pagans, and Muslims in the name of love and the true faith. We can also reproach it for the Vatican's indulgent attitude toward the Third Reich when so many German Catholics paid with their lives for their opposition to Hitler's regime. At least Christianity has begun the modernization represented for Catholics by the Vatican II Council 1962-1965). The solemn apologies then made by John Paul II to the Jewish community, the Indians of South America, Orthodox Christians, Protestants, and Africans on the island of Goree in Senegal, the recognition of the papacy's error in evaluating the main scientific discoveries since Galileo, the condemnation of the Crusades, and the renunciation of forced proselytizing have all marked the culmination of this unprecedented process. And although there remain many dark areas in its history, Rome, like most of the Protestant and Orthodox churches, has begun a courageous critical inventory to bring itself into conformity with the spirit of the New Testament. There are mosques in Rome, but are there Christian churches in Mecca, Jeddah, or Riyadh? Isn't it better to be a Muslim in Dusseldorf or Paris than a Christian in Cairo or Karachi? One would like the various European Communist parties, little Leninist groups, Trotskyites, alter-globalists, and ecologists to take a look at themselves and engage in introspection with the same intransigence. But it is always from Christianity and from it alone that repentance is expected,ra because it invented repentance in its modern forms. In other words, the Catholic Church has simultaneously betrayed and transmitted the spirit of the Gospels. Its long and painful story greatly resembles the moral and political story of the West: the interminable adjustment of reality to principles, which are themselves constantly violated and always reaffirmed. The progress made by reason has been slow but incontestable, even if it has sometimes led to horrible regressions. Decency and dignity have advanced side by side with savagery, the best alongside the worst. Freedom is triumphing, but long after its reign was proclaimed and still only in a few places on the globe. Whatever those disillusioned with progress may think, the collective education of the human race, as it was conceived in the eighteenth century by the German dramatist Lessing, is not an empty expression. It has taken, and will continue to take, the patient labor of history, resistances to be overcome, relapses into tyranny, the awakening of consciousnesses.

This process of questioning remains to be carried out by Islam, which is convinced that it is the last revealed religion and hence the only authentic one, with its book directly dictated by God to his Prophet. It considers itself not the heir of earlier faiths but rather a successor that invalidates them forever. The day when its highest authorities recognize the conquering, aggressive nature of their faith, when they ask to be pardoned for the holy wars waged in the name of the Qur'an and for the infamies committed against infidels, apostates, unbelievers, and women, when they apologize for the terrorist attacks that profane the name of God—that will be a day of progress and will help dissipate the suspicion that many people legitimately harbor regarding this sacrificial monotheism. Criticizing Islam, far from being reactionary, constitutes on the contrary the only progressive attitude at a time when millions of Muslims, reformers or liberals, aspire to practice their religion in peace without being subjected to the dictates of bearded doctrinaires. Banning barbarous customs such as lapidation, repudiation, polygamy, and clitoridectomy, subjecting the Qur'an to hermeneutic reason, doing away with objectionable verses about Jews, Christians, and gays and appeals for the murder of apostates and infidels, daring to resume the Enlightenment movement that arose among Muslim elites at the end of the nineteenth century in the Middle East—that is the immense political, philosophical, and theological construction project that is opening up. Intellectuals, professors, and Arab Muslim clerics have begun to undertake this work (in France, notably Fetih Benslam, Malek Chebel, Latifa Ben Mansour, Mohammed Arkoun, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Fadela Amara), some of them thereby risking their lives, especially when they are women in revolt against their status (to mention only the most emblematic, the Syrian American Wafa Sultan, the Canadian of Pakistani origin Irshad Manji, the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, the German Turk lawyer Seyran Ates, the Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali).

Susanne Fusso

2010-08-25T04:23:00.001-07:00

Designing Dead Souls

The townspeople are compared to a schoolboy whom his mischievous friends have awakened by sruffing a paper filled with snuff—a 'hussar'—up his nose. The schoolboy's awakening and momentary confusion is followed by a flash of heightened perception. This perception is at first limited to his immediate surroundings but gradually takes in such a detailed view from the window that he would seem to be endowed with a temporary clairvoyance, only to return to the most immediate and intimate location, his own nose:

He can't understand where he is, who he is, what has happened to him, and only after a moment does he begin to make out the walls lit up by the slanting rays of the sun, the laughter of his comrades, who have hidden themselves in the corners, and the new morning looking in the window, with the awakened forest resounding with thousands of bird voices, and the illuminated creek, which here and there disappears in twists and turns between the slender reeds and is strewn with bare little boys, who beckon their friends to come swimming, and only then does he finally feel that a hussar is sitting in his nose. (6: 189)

A version of this sequence (unconsciousness—heightened consciousness—self-consciousness) is reflected in the reception of the dead-souls mystery of the townspeople, who are awakened out of their sleep of moral complacency. In the course of their quest for meaning, their vague, buried guilt for past misdeeds becomes actively disturbing, if still strangely ephemeral: 'Everyone suddenly found in himself such sins as had never even existed' (6: 193).

Like Chichikov's 'dead souls,' Gogol's Dead Souls presents a surface of normality. The novel seemed to its original audience, and has continued to seem, like a representation of everyday life. The kaleidoscope of names and details, combined with the narrator's assertions about the universality of the character types he describes, gives a surface impression of a faithfully observed world. The distortions and exaggerations in style, character, and plot, however, soon set the reader adrift from the mundane and familiar. One of Gogol's contemporaries expressed the sense of chronological disorientation: 'Sometimes you think he is describing some distant past, known to us in legends; but meanwhile a conversation about 1812, [an allusion to] the governor-general, and other passages show that he wanted to depict Russia in its present-day aspect.' The narrator anticipates that the ambiguity of his hero will produce in the reader the same reaction that 'dead souls' produced in the townspeople: an urgent desire for a final, simple solution, 'a conclusive definition by a single feature' ('zakliuchitel'noe opredelenie odnoi chertoiu'; 6: 241). This he refuses to give; instead we are offered another parable, the virtually uninterpretable tale of Kifa Mokievich and Mokii Kifovich, followed by a troika speeding off into the distance, taking our desire for completion with it.

The narrator of Dead Souls insists that his readers find themselves in his parable: 'Now the current generation sees everything clearly; it is amazed at the errors, laughs at the folly, of its ancestors, not perceiving that this chronicle has been inscribed by heavenly fire, that each letter in it cries out that from every quarter a piercing finger is pointed at it, at it, at the current generation' (6: 211). Jesus, too, ties the fulfillment of his prophecy to its contemporary audience: 'Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled' (Luke 21: 32). In both cases, the effect of the pointed finger is not to isolate the message in time but to render it timeless; each successive generation of readers is intended to include itself among the current generation. For the parable to be turned inward upon its hearers, it must remain enigmatic. There are mysterious hints throughout Dead Souls that Chichikov, the inveterate con man, will be redeemed. These hints necessarily provoke the question How could he possibly be redeemed? Because he is not alone in his crimes but is constantly portrayed as a member of a collective, the question becomes How can they be redeemed? and, ultimately, How can we?

The promissory closure of Dead Souls protects the status of the text as a parable or riddle that eternally escapes the last word.

Geoff Dyer

2010-08-24T04:47:00.000-07:00

Out of Sheer Rage

What Lawrence's life demonstrates so powerfully is that it actually takes a daily effort to be free. To be free is not the result of a moment's decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed. More than anything else, freedom requires tenaciousness. There are intervals of repose but there will never come a state of definitive rest where you can give up because you have turned freedom into a permanent condition. Freedom is always precarious. That is what Rilke, who dogs these pages like a shadow, meant when he wrote of falling back into a life we never wanted. Lawrence warned John Middleton Murry of the same thing: 'Either you go on wheeling a wheelbarrow and lecturing at Cambridge and going softer and softer inside, or you make a hard fight with your. self, pull yourself up, harden yourself, throw your feelings down the drain and face the world as a fighter.—You won't though.' And now I won't either.

'Freedom is a gift inside one's soul,' Lawrence declared. 'You can't have it if it isn't in you.' A gift it may be but it is not there for the taking. To realise this capacity in yourself is a struggle. Of what, then, did Lawrence's hard-won freedom consist?

Catherine Carswell applauded Lawrence for the way 'he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did.' Accused, in his poem 'The Life with a Hole,' of living up to the second half of Carswell's claim—'you've always done what you want'—Larkin grumbles that he has succeeded only in living down to the first: 'what the old ratbags mean/ Is I've never done what I don't.' For his part, Lawrence felt there had to be more to freedom than doing what one wanted—but how could one be free if one could not do as one wanted? He gnawed away at this constantly, resolving it by elevating the idea of what one wanted not just to a determining principle but to an obligation to one's self. 'Elevating' is perhaps not the right word for this meant fathoming one's deepest desires—and remaining faithful to them.

One of Lawrence's most eloquent declarations of personal liberty is expressed in terms of a vehemently indifferent retort: 'My wife and I have lived on 37 dollars a month before now: and always with sang froid. I doubt if I make more than 400 per annum now—and knock about Europe as I like, and spit in the face of anybody who tries to insult me.' To take on the world like this is also to test oneself: that, for Lawrence, is the challenge of freedom.

'The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself,' he declared, and in the midst of this struggle a man gained a sense of his 'his inner destiny.' In practice this meant a great deal of chopping and changing, deciding and undeciding—so much so that Lawrence's own surges and reversals of intent sometimes left him mystified. 'We had almost booked our passage to America, when suddenly it came over me I must go to Ceylon.'

Chandak Sengoopta

2010-08-13T03:56:00.001-07:00

Imprint of the Raj

The doctor mumbled that there was nothing irregular about his actions, since he was an independent witness, and the judge quipped: 'An absolutely untrustworthy one, I should think.' Garson averred that his evidence would not have differed whatever side he was on and the defence counsel battled on valiantly, denouncing fingerprint evidence as a dubious French import incompatible with British justice. The judge delivered a fair summing-up, pointing out that the cash-box print was made by perspiration—a 'latent' in modern jargon—and not an inked print like the one it was being compared to. The jury should not rely only on the evidence of the print, although the resemblances between the two were marked and should be counted as corroborative evidence against Alfred Stratton. After two hours of deliberation, the jury pronounced against the brothers, both of whom were sentenced to death.

Garson was not the only expert on the defence team. Although he did not appear on the witness stand, Henry Faulds had advised the defence and was present at the trial. Later, he argued in his Guide to Finger-Print identification that the mark found on the cash box was so indistinct that it differed from the thumbprint of Alfred Stratton on at least as many points as it resembled it. If, as Scotland Yard seemed to think, four points of congruence were enough to pronounce a pair of prints as identical, then would the presence of 'four successive disagreements of pattern' permit a declaration of non-identity? 'A smudge of this quality,' he concluded, 'should not be presented in court as evidence. The results are necessarily ambiguous or equivocal. It would be quite easy to find thousands of innocent men in whose finger patterns a few apparent coincidences could be read into such a hazy smudge.'

It was, in fact, the confession of one of the brothers in prison that finally reassured people that the technique was valid. Nevertheless, the guilty verdict robbed the already marginal Faulds of any significant audience. The trial of Harry Jackson had brought out all the strengths of the fingerprint system but it had not, of course, been sensational enough to grab public attention. The trial of the Deptford murderers, however, was tailor-made for publicity and fingerprints were now part of the national vocabulary. Without even mentioning the trial, which had taken place less than three months previously, the Daily Express began a 'finger-print competition' that ran weekly from July to September 1905. It was a murder mystery serial, specially written for the paper, each instalment of which was illustrated with the fingerprints of the characters.

The reader who successfully identified the murderer—who had obligingly left a print on the scene of crime, reproduced in the first instalment of the story—would win £100. (In order to guide its readers on the new technique, the newspaper commissioned a long article explaining the nature of fingerprint evidence in untechnical language from an expert 'who was most eminent among British authorities' and had 'long been identified with the science of identification by finger-prints.' This authority on fingerprinting was the recently humiliated Dr John Garson.) The final legal battle for the validity of fingerprint identification was won with the 1909 Castleton case, when the Criminal Appeal Court ruled that the court or a jury might accept 'the evidence of finger-prints though it be the sole ground of identification.' Fingerprinting was now home and dry.

The most piquant irony of this story is that from the north Bengal case onward, the history of fingerprinting followed a path first marked out—and partly explored—by Henry Faulds, the one man who had been completely excluded from the official history. It was Herschel, Galton and Henry who now formed what the historian George Wilton would later mockingly describe as the Fingerprint Triumvirate. At one level, this was simply because the history of fingerprinting was first authoritatively recounted by Francis Galton and no subsequent historical outline moved far beyond that account, except for George Wilton's revisionist account of 1938, which argued passionately that it was Faulds who should be honoured as the founder of fingerprint identification. Until the end of his long life—he was to die at the age of 101—the pugnacious Wilton kept up his battle with Scotland Yard and the government to win posthumous recognition for Faulds and a pension for his daughters but none of his efforts was to bear much fruit.

Why was Faulds marginalized? For Galton, it was not only Herschel's august lineage but also the unrivalled collection of evidence that were crucial. Faulds may have foreseen the future of fingerprinting far more clearly than Herschel or even Galton, but at no point in the early history of the technique did he publish sufficient evidence to demonstrate the persistence of fingerprint patterns through life—his experimental shaving-off of the ridges, only to watch them grow again was rightly dismissed by Galton, Herschel and others as insufficient in comparison with Herschel's collection of prints of the same individuals over decades. Secondly, Faulds could not produce a satisfactory classification scheme—although he claimed to have one—before the turn of the century, and by then the Henry system was already of and running.

Most of the factors that militated against Faulds were ultimately related to the Empire. Herschel's introduction of fingerprinting into the Registration Department and the jail at Hooghly was to provide Galton with some of his most valuable evidence. Faulds, a lone individual in Tokyo and then in England, simply never had that kind of administrative opportunity to try out the procedure; nor does he seem to have collected and preserved fingerprint specimens as extensively and meticulously as Herschel. A usable classification, of course, could have been evolved anywhere, at least in theory, but it so happened that it, too, was evolved at the heart of the Empire and had to be imported with its originator.

James Landale

2010-08-13T03:55:00.001-07:00

Duel

What was once a privilege for a narrow class of aristocrats and gentlemen became common practice among lower orders. The duel, wrote one historian, had become 'vulgarly popular.' The first blow was struck by technology. The newfangled pistol replaced the sword and instantly allowed anyone to be a duellist. In the past, a man would have required the years of training in swordplay. Now anyone, of any class, could stroll into a gun shop, buy a pair of percussion pistols, and shoot his opponent dead in the morning. Editors fought to defend their columns, doctors to defend their procedures, judges to defend their decisions. Another assault on duelling's elitism came from the youthful middle classes themselves. They loved to duel, not least because they thought it made them posh. Duelling was seen as a vehicle for social aspiration and its greatest drivers were snobbish soldiers. Thousands of middle-class officers, who had spent the years fighting Napoleon aping their aristocratic betters, returned after the peace in 1815 and duelled like men possessed. At the same time the professional middle classes—the lawyers, the vicars, the journalists, the civil servants—had a constant injection of new dueiling blood from the second and third sons of aristocrats who were forced to earn a crust by the unrelenting laws of primogeniture. In 1877, Abraham Bosquett wrote that 'no country is at present more addicted to duelling.'

This apparent democratisation of duelling had the curious effect of preparing the way for its decline. The upper classes were horrified to see what had once been their privilege become common practice. As a result, one of the strongest codes of duelling, namely that a gentleman could not refuse a challenge without risk of ostracism, began to weaken. Men no longer considered themselves automatically obliged to accept a challenge if so many of their potential opponents were not of the same class. The duel was no longer in itself a definition of gentle rank and thus the upper classes duelled less.

The older, established members of the industrialised middle classes were as horrified as their aristocratic counterparts. They had been quite content for the landed classes to shoot each other occasionally. But the prospect of young middle-class men getting involved was much more serious. Duelling suddenly became a threat to everything their class represented. The middle classes saw duelling as a dangerous and destabilising antithesis of their bourgeois values of restraint, reliability, and rule of law. Duelling was a threat to profit, prosperity and the public peace. 'There was a world of difference between throwing away your life and saving for a rainy day,' wrote the historian Kevin McAleer. A dedicated capitalist could not afford to risk a duel every time he was involved in a business dispute. Such disorderly public behaviour was an anathema to him, a symbol of the excesses of the last century. More than that, a genuine bourgeois would naturally put his business and family before some spurious and anachronistic concept of personal honour. According to Antony Simpson, the middle classes believed that 'as duelling became more pervasive, it became less manageable and therefore more of a social threat.' As a consequence it was vital for the state to take responsibility for arbitrating between individuals in dispute.

The concern felt among the industrial middle classes spread. Where once the press had gloried in the notoriety and excitement of duelling, the public prints now began to mock. In the wake of the ridiculous duel in 1940 between the Earl of Cardigan and captain Tuckett, The Times was unstinting in its condemnation: 'What the effect upon society in general must be of letting it be understood that there is a crime which must not, or cannot, be restrained or punished because peers and "gentlemen" think proper to commit it while the law declares it to be a felony, we leave those to judge who know the power of example and the aptness of the lower orders to learn evil from their betters. We are firmly convinced that no more pernicious or anarchical principle than that of the defenders of duelling was ever broached by chartism or even Socialism itself.' Strong stuff and note the inverted commas. In the cheekier popular press, duelling was lampooned in cartoons, a once solemn act rendered ridiculous by scrutiny. Fake duellists were exposed and mocked for fighting with pistols charged only with powder or bogus bullets made out of paper or mercury. Notorious duellists were ragged in the street. On the day Lord Cardigan was acquitted by the House of Lords, he attempted to attend a play in Drury Lane but a riot broke out: 'Yells, hisses, shrieks, groans made it impossible for the performance to begin; it being feared that the Earl would be attacked, he was taken out of the theatre by a side door.' Groups and societies were set up to oppose duelling. The most influential, the Anti-Duelling Association, was set up in 1843 'consisting of 326 members, so many of whom were of the two services, or noblemen, baronets and members of parliament.' They denounced duelling 'as contrary to the laws of God and man and eminently irrational as well as sinful.' One of the outspoken anti-duelling activists was an Irishman called Joseph Hamilton who called for stringent new laws. All seconds, he declared, should be fined £1,000 and forced to surrender half their Property to the poor. And as for the duellists: 'Let the body of the deceased be soldered up in a leaden coffin to prevent an offensive smell; let it be drawn on every anniversary of the death for one hour upon a sledge through the most public parts of the town or city next to the scene of action, accompanied by the survivor.' Not surprisingly, Hamilton's ideas did not trouble the parliamentary draftsmen.

Some of these changing views began to filter further down the social chain and opposition grew among ordinary, labouring folk. Above all they resented what they saw as a privilege of aristocracy. Why, they asked, should a gentleman killer escape the law when a thieving peasant could be strung up at the gallows without a moment's thought? Why should there be one law for the rich and one for the poor?

Robert Zaretsky

2010-08-13T03:54:00.000-07:00

Albert Camus

Commentators have long recognized Camus's debt to the ancient historian's description of the plague that swept through Athens shortly after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. The parallels are many and striking: the swings between hope and despair in Athens, the gradual collapse of traditions and institutions, the festering of superstition and resentment, even the author's claims of objectivity. In all these respects, Camus closely follows Thucydides.

It is telling that just months after France's defeat, Camus committed himself to a course of study: 'The Greeks. History—Literature—Art—Philosophy.' These various genres, while they differed in form, offered the same urgent wisdom. Camus made this clear when he created a fictional character, Stephan, in early sketches for The Plague Stephan is a classics teacher trapped in an unnamed, plague-ridden city. 'He realizes,' Camus observed, 'that he had not understood Thucydides and Lucretius until then.'

Until 1940, neither had Camus. Only now did he see that he and Thucydides had many things in common, beginning with the experiences of exile and defeat. Thucydides started to write his history after being expelled from his native city of Athens (his fellow citizens were unfairly angry over Thucydides' command of a failed naval battle). As for Camus, he undertook The Plague only after the authorities in Algiers closed his newspaper, forcing him to move to France for employment. In both cases, exile provided physical and emotional distance to reflect on events.

More intriguing is the common claim to objectivity of Thucydides and Camus. No doubt Camus was attracted to the traditional understanding of objectivity as an ideal. Shortly after the war, he told a friend: 'One thing seems to me greater than justice: if not truth itself, at least the effort toward truthfulness.' But Camus also used objectivity as a narrative technique-the rhetoric of antirhetoric. If objectivity is a strategy, not just a goal, Camus could find no better model than Thucydides. Through the simple juxtaposition of events, Thucydides forces us to consider what we otherwise might have overlooked. Early in his account, he re-creates Pericles' funeral oration, in which the Athenian leader praises the power of human reason to foresee all eventualities. An outbreak of plague immediately follows—an unforeseen disaster, Thucydides notes, that claimed Pericles as one of its victims. By combining the events, he makes clear what pages of emotive prose never could: the hubris of Pericles' claims on behalf of reason. The case against hubris also arises for Rieux's opponent, Dr. Richard. After long denying the plague's reality Richard finally and grudgingly acknowledges it. He nevertheless predicts its demise based on statistical trends. Hours before a meeting with city officials where he plans to deliver his optimistic assessment, however, he too is 'carried off by the plague.'

Equally important, both narratives remind us of the limits of narrative. Before he launches into his account of the plague, Thucydides hesitates: 'Words indeed fail when one tries to give a general picture of this disease.' Rieux is equally diffident like his Greek predecessor, he dislikes the sort of writing that sways emotions but distorts the truth. Instead, he will use 'conventional language' though it was 'incapable of describing' the experience of the plague. Yet neither Thucydides nor Camus was satisfied with this initial paradox: both of them double the knot. Confronting an angry city after the plague strikes, Pericles defends himself he had
'at least as much ability as anyone else to see what ought to be done and to explain what he sees. A man who has the knowledge but lacks the power clearly to express it is no better off than if he never had any ideas at all.'

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

2010-08-02T04:18:00.000-07:00

Infidel

It often fell to my mother to accompany us to school and back-different schools, because Mahad was a boy-returning alone. She hated having to go out without a man, hated being hissed at by men on the street, stared at with insolence. All the Somalis told stories about women who had been accosted on the street, driven away, dumped on the roadside hours later, or simply never seen again. To be a woman out on her own was bad enough. To be a foreigner, and moreover a black foreigner, meant you were barely human, unprotected: fair game.

When my mother went shopping without a male driver or spouse to act as guardian, grocers wouldn't attend to her. Even when she took Mahad along, some shop assistants wouldn't speak to her. She would collect tomatoes and fruit and spices and ask loudly, 'Flow much?' When she received no reply she'd put the money down and say 'Take it or leave it' and walk out. The next day she would have to go back to the same grocer. Mahad saw it all and couldn't really help her; he was only ten.

My mother never saw her tribulations as in any way the fault of the Saudis. She just wanted my father to do the shopping and the outdoor work, like all the Saudi men did. None of the Saudi women we knew went out in the street alone. They couldn't: their husbands locked their front doors when they left their houses. All the neighborhood women pitied my mother, having to walk on her own. It was humiliating; it was low.

My mother felt my father had failed her in many ways. He made her take on responsibilities she felt should rightly have been his. Somali culture didn't make it any easier. To my father, it was natural to waltz in with an extra eight or ten men he'd invited for lunch. He never told her where he was going or when he'd be back. If the atmosphere became less than congenial at home, he would go to the mosque in the morning and turn up a day or two later. My mother had to wash every little sock and headscarf by hand. She was alone.

I think there were times when she was happy: cooking in the evenings, her family around her. But how many of those evenings did she have? Sometimes, at night, I would hear my parents talking, my mother listing all the ways my father had failed her, her voice tense with rage. Abeh would tell her, 'Asha, I am working to give us a future in our own country.' Or he would say, 'These things wouldn't happen if we were living in a normal country.' Abeh never liked Saudi Arabia and always wanted us to move to Ethiopia with him. But my mother wouldn't do it: Ethiopians were unbelievers.

A few months after our move, my grandmother arrived to help my mother with the household. She didn't like the way Ma talked about Abeh either. 'When you're born a woman, you must live as a woman,' she used to say, quoting a proverb. 'The quicker you understand that, the easier it will be to accept.'

Some time after we moved to Riyadh we started school, real school, in the morning, with Quran school in the afternoon. But real school in Saudi Arabia was just like madrassah. We studied only Arabic, math, and the Quran, and the Quran must have taken up four-fifths of our time. Quran study was divided into a reciting class, a class on meaning, a class on the hadith, which are the holy verses written after the Quran, a class on the sirat, the traditional biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, and a class on fiqh, Islamic law. We learned to recite the ninety-nine names of Allah, and we learned how good Muslim girls should behave: what to say when we sneezed; on which side we should begin to sleep, and to what position it was permissible to move during sleep; with which foot to step into the toilet, and in what posture to sit. The teacher was an Egyptian woman, and she used to beat me. I was sure she picked on me because I was the only black child. When she hit me with a ruler she called me Aswad Abda: black slave-girl. I hated Saudi Arabia.

Jon Krakauer

2010-08-01T04:17:00.000-07:00

Into The Wild

On weekends, when his high school pals were attending 'keggers' and trying to sneak into Georgetown bars, McCandless would wander the seedier quarters of Washington, chatting with prostitutes and homeless people, buyrng them meals, earnestly suggesting ways they might improve their lives.

'Chris didn't understand how people could possibly be allowed to go hungry, especially in this country,' says Billie. 'He would rave about that kind of thing for hours.'

On one occasion Chris picked up a homeless man from the streets of D.C., brought him home to leafy, affluent Annandale, and secretly set the guy up in the Airstream trailer his parents parked beside the garage. Walt and Billie never knew they were hosting a vagrant.

On another occasion Chris drove over to Hathaway's house and announced they were going downtown. 'Cool!' Hathaway remembers thinking. 'It was a Friday night, and I assumed we were headed to Georgetown to party. Instead, Chris parked down on Fourteenth Street, which at the time was a real bad part of town. Then he said, 'You know, Eric, you can read about this stuff, but you can't understand it until you live it. Tonight that's what we're going to do.' We spent the next few hours hanging out in creepy places, talking with pimps and hookers and lowlife. I was, like, scared.

'Toward the end of the evening, Chris asked me how much money I had. I said five dollars. He had ten. "OK, you buy the gas," he told me; "I'm going to get some food." So he spent the ten bucks on a big bag of hamburgers, and we drove around handing them out to smelly guys sleeping on grates. It was the weirdest Friday night of my life. But Chris did that kind of thing a lot.'

Early in his senior year at Woodson, Chris informed his parents that he had no intention of going to college. When Walt and Billie suggested that he needed a college degree to attain a fulfilling career Chris answered that careers were demeaning 'twentieth-century inventions,' more of a liability than an asset, and that he would do fine without one, thank you.

'That put us into kind of a tizzy,' Walt admits. 'Both Billie and I come from blue-collar families. I college degree is something we don't take lightly, OK, and we worked hard to be able to afford to send our kids to good schools; So Billie sat him down and said, "Chris, if you really want to make a difference in the world, if you really want to help people who are less fortunate, get yourself some leverage first. Go to college, get a law degree, and then you'll be able to have a real impact."'

'Chris brought home good grades,' says Hathaway. 'He didn't get into trouble, he was a high achiever, he did what he was supposed to. His parents didn't really have grounds to complain. But they got on his case about going to college; and whatever they said to him, it must have worked. Because he ended up going to Emory even though he thought it was pointless, a waste of time and money.'

It's somewhat surprising that Chris ceded to pressure from Walt and Billie about attending college when he refused to listen to them about so many other things. But there was never a shortage of apparent contradictions in the relationship between Chris and his parents. When Chris visited with Kris Gillmer, he frequently railed against Walt and Billie, portraying them as unreasonable tyrants. Yet to his male buddies—Hathaway, Cucullu, and another track star, Andy Horowitz, he scarcely complained at all. 'My impression was that his parents were very nice people,' says Hathaway, 'no different, really, than my parents or anyone's parents. Chris just didn't like being told what to do. I think he would have been unhappy with any parents; he had trouble with the whole idea of parents.'

Jonathan Spence

2010-07-28T01:18:00.003-07:00

The Search for Modern China

Although there was no historical precedent for China's taking an active role in global events far from its shores, it fell to Duan to inaugurate a new era of overseas involvement. He and his advisers were intrigued by the possibilities of joining France and Britain in their fight against Germany, arguing that if Germany were defeated, then the strategically important German concession areas in Shandong province around Qingdao could be reclaimed by China. Duan was further pressured toward an anti-German declaration from two directions. One was from the United States, which in early 1917 was preparing to enter the war in response to German submarine attacks against neutral shipping in the Atlantic; the other was from the Japanese, who had abandoned various attempts to encourage separatist regimes in Manchuria, Mongolia, and southern China, and had decided to try to bribe Duan Qirui's regime into recognizing Japan's standing in north China at Germany's expense.

China's military strength was trivial compared to that of the European belligerents or of the United States, which had entered the war on the side of Britain and France in April 1917, but China had one crucial resource that the Allies lacked—namely, manpower. The slaughter in the European battlefields had been terrible: the British and French had lost over 600,000 men at the Battle of the Somme alone in 1916, and the following year the British lost 250,000 more at the Battle of Ypres. In constant need of new men for the front, the Allies realized that if Chinese laborers could be used on the docks and on construction projects in Western Europe, it would free more European males for active combat.

Pursuing this harsh but accurate line of reasoning, the British and French had begun to negotiate with the Chinese as early as the summer of 1916. Well before the Chinese declaration of war, the result was the establishment of a processing plant for Chinese laborers in Shandong province, near the British naval base of Weihaiwei, with a second one added later at the port of Qingdao. Sarcastically referred to by the British as their 'sausage machine,' the processing system worked swiftly and smoothly. There were tens of thousands of Chinese volunteers, driven by the poverty of the region and China's political uncertainties, and lured by the generosity of the wages offered by the British. Each volunteer received an embarkation fee of 20 Chinese dollars, followed by l0 dollars a month to be paid over to his family in China; the volunteers were provided with clothing and meals as well. The Chinese were given medical examinations and checked specifically for trachoma (a contagious viral disease of the eyelids, especially common in Shandong), tuberculosis, and venereal disease. If accepted—and about 100,000 made it through the screening—they were issued dog tags with serial numbers, which were sealed with metal rivets on bands around their wrists. Then they were sprayed from head to foot with disinfectant and urged to remove their queues, which many had chosen to keep despite the revolution in 1911.

An initial boatload of Chinese laborers, traveling across the Indian ocean and through the Suez Canal in 1916 on contract to the French government, had been sunk by German submarines in the Mediterranean; 543 Chinese lives were lost. New recruits were thereafter shipped over the Pacific to Canada, across Canada by train, and then reshipped in fleets accompanied by antisubmarine patrols for the final journey across the Atlantic. Although their employment had been protested by many French and British, particularly by labor-union members, the Chinese were soon at work, most of them in northern France. They were given such tasks as unloading military cargoes at the docks, building barracks and hospitals, digging trenches, and handling ammunition in the railway marshaling yards. They worked ten-hour days, seven days a week, with some time off allowed at the traditional Chinese festivals. The Chinese laborers remained nonbelligerents even after China's declaration of war, since there was no way Duan's regime could finance an army in Europe.

The presence of so many Chinese men in France—54,000 by late 1917, 96,000 by late 1918—brought both dangers and opportunities. Some of their camps were bombed by German planes or shelled, and on occasion they retaliated for their dead comrades by killing German prisoners of war. Some Chinese were blown up by unexploded mines or shells when cleaning battlefields or digging trenches. Many fell ill from the strange diet and the intense damp and cold, and on occasion they mutinied against their French and British employers or ransacked local restaurants in search of food. Sample sentences from a Chinese phrase book prepared by the British army for use by its staff in the camps hint at the levels of irritation or discrimination the Chinese labor corps experienced: 'I want eight men to go over there quickly.' 'Why don't you eat this food?' 'The inside of this tent is not very clean.' 'You must have a bath tomorrow.' 'This latrine is reserved for Europeans and is not available to Chinese.'

The most significant response to the bleak conditions came from representatives of the YMCA, who saw here a major opportunity for service. They focused especially on recreational activities and on problems of public education among the Chinese, designing special vocabularies and teaching techniques to spread literacy among the workers. Astonishingly, with the aid of such educated Chinese staff, as many as 50,000 letters a month were mailed from France to China, where they were read and reread aloud to the villagers. Brief, simple in vocabulary, and censored for military secrets by the Allies, these letters are nevertheless important signs of the growing literacy becoming possible for Chinese workers. One surviving letter ran as follows:

For the inspection of my elder brother. I have come many ten thousand li since I saw you. I am doing well and you need not have anxiety about me. I am earning three francs per day, but as living is expensive I cannot send many home yet. As to my quarrelling with you, that day at Yaowan, before I left, forget it! I did unworthily. Please take care of our parents and when I return in three or five years, I will bring enough money to help support them the rest of their days.

The Chinese contribution to the war was not without its cost. In addition to the 543 lost at sea, almost 2,000 Chinese workers died in France and Flanders, and were laid to rest in a number of special cemeteries. There the long lines of gravestones, each neatly incised with the characters of their Chinese names and the serial numbers given to them by their Western employers, still bear mute testimony to China's first involvement in such a global conflict. More complex was the legacy of the tens of thousands of workers when they returned to China, literate and wise in the ways of the world, often with a decent balance of cash stored up safely with their families. They would be in a position to play a new kind of active role in Chinese politics, as some Chinese socialists observed.

After the armistice of November 11, 1918, ended the war with Germany's defeat, anticipation in China ran high. There were triumphant parades in Peking, and an exuberant crowd demolished the memorial that the Qing had been forced to raise in honor of the Germans killed by the Boxers. The Peking government was now headed by yet another Beiyang-faction president and premier; Duan Qirui had resigned in October 1918, but before doing so had used the huge Japanese loans to enhance his own military power and had continued to build a network of secret deals with the Japanese. The Chinese delegation to the postwar treaty negotiations at Versailles, sixty-two members strong, was headed by five capable diplomats who had never been fully briefed on what to expect. They were greeted at Versailles by the shattering announcement of the chief Japanese delegate that early in 1917, in return for Japanese naval assistance against the Germans, Great Britain, France, and Italy had signed a secret treaty ensuring 'support [of] Japan's claims in regard to the disposal of Germany's rights in Shandong' after the war.

Richard Pipes

2010-07-27T00:48:00.000-07:00

Communism

According to Marxist doctrine, the state is nothing more than the servant of the class that owns the means of production; it has no interests of its own. This belief showed remarkable ignorance of political history since there exists a great deal of evidence that, from the time of the pharaohs, state officials looked after themselves and formed an interest group in many instances more influential than the propertied class. Lenin was appalled by the rapid growth of the Soviet bureaucracy, which his own policies had necessitated. For as the Communist Party, through the state, took charge of the entire organized life of the country, nationalizing large and small industries, retail and wholesale trade, transport and services, educational and other institutions, the officialdom that replaced the private owners and their managers expanded by leaps and bounds. Suffice it to say that the organization in charge of the country's industry, the Supreme Council of the National Economy, employed in 1921 nearly one quarter of a million officials, and this at a time when industrial productivity had dropped to below one-fifth of its 1913 level. By 1928, the party and state bureaucracy came to number 4 million.

The great majority of those who had joined the ranks of Soviet functionaries—many of them holdovers from the old regime—did so because a government job assured them a modicum of security and livelihood. Before long they came to constitute a caste that placed its collective interests above not only those of the population at large but those of the Communist cause that they nominally served.

The first to realize the potential uses of the Soviet bureaucracy as an instrument for shoring up his personal position in the party was Joseph Stalin. A semieducated Georgian who in his youth had dropped out of religious seminary and joined the Bolsheviks, he had gained Lenin's confidence by his devotion to him as well as by displaying outstanding administrative talents. Unlike Trotsky and the other communist leaders, such as Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev, Stalin never questioned Lenin's judgment; and while they wrote pamphlets and delivered speeches, he quietly supervised the burgeoning army of functionaries. Lenin advanced him ahead of his more intellectual associates and in 1922 had him appointed the party's general secretary, which gave Stalin control of the party's cadres.

From the outset, Stalin used his office to promote communists who owed him personal loyalty and on whom he could rely in the struggle for party leadership likely to break out before long because of Lenin's failing health. It is he who created the institution of the nomenklatura: registers of communist officials eligible for important executive appointments and rewarded with such privileges as access to special food stores, hospitals, resorts, and even tailors and cemeteries. The policy of creating a privileged elite sustained the communist regime for the next seventy years by ensconcing an administrative class with a vital interest in the regime's survival. But, by the same token, it ensured that the communist ideal of social equality would remain an empty slogan.

No less galling were the Bolsheviks' disappointments with managing the economy. socialist literature had assured them that capitalism, driven by profit, was inherently much less efficient than an economy monopolized by the state. They believed that the bigger an enterprise, the better it functioned. They further believed that it was possible to run an economy without resort to money.

All these assumptions turned out to be wrong. Attempts to impose a central plan on the national economy proved futile. Mismanagement of factories, first by workers and then by Communist functionaries who replaced them, drastically lowered productivity. The effort, enforced by the Cheka, to stop private trade also failed in its purpose, as producers and middlemen found ways to circumvent it; the free market, which the Communists saw as the quintessence of capitalism and which they were determined to liquidate, did not vanish but shifted underground. Before long the shadow economy outstripped the official Soviet one. The hyperinflation that the government deliberately launched by flooding the country with banknotes did achieve its aim of destroying savings: by 1923, prices in the Soviet Union had increased 100 million times over those of 1927. But the abandonment of money made it impossible to keep a proper budget or calculate transactions between Soviet enterprises.

The net result of such amateurish management, aggravated by the civil war, was a catastrophic drop of all productive indices. Overall large-scale industrial production in 1920 was 18 percent of what it had been in 1913; the output of coal dropped to 27 percent and iron to 2.4 percent. The number of employed industrial workers in 1921 was less than one-half of what it had been in 1918; their living standard fell to one-third of its prewar level. A Communist specialist described what happened to the Soviet economy between 1917 and 1920 as a calamity 'unparalleled in the history of mankind.'

When confronted with such failures, Lenin's instinct was to resort to the firing squad.

Jack Goldsmith

2010-07-23T04:02:00.000-07:00

The Terror Presidency

In response to al Qaeda's August 1998 bombing of American embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, President Clinton issued several secret authorizations for the CIA to work with Afghan tribal elements to capture and if necessary kill Osama Bin Laden. The CIA had Bin Laden in its sights. But everyone in the CIA knew about Executive Order 12333, the 1970s-era ban on assassinations. Everyone also knew the fate of Robert Baer, a CIA case officer who, in the midst of organizing opposition to Saddam Hussein in 1995, was called home to Langley to face a career-ending FBI investigation for conspiring to murder Hussein. This is one reason why George Tenet and other senior CIA managers insisted that the White House be unambiguously clear about what the CIA was authorized to do to Bin Laden. 'CIA managers had been conditioned by history to read their written [authorizations] literally,' notes Steve Coll in Ghost Wars, the most comprehensive history of CIA activity in Afghanistan before the 9/l1 attacks. 'Where the wonks were not clear, they recommended caution to their officers in the field.'

The clear authorization that the CIA sought never came. Clinton's OLC agreed that the assassination ban did not apply to a military target, like Osama Bin Laden, who posed an imminent threat to the United Srates. So far so good. But then the ambiguities appeared. White House and Justice Department lawyers opposed an unrestricted lethal operation against Bin Laden, and would authorize his killing only if it were necessary for self-defense in the course of legitimately arresting him. This distinction was bad enough from the CIA's perspective, but the operation was further muddied by the lawyers' refusal to be clear about what constituted self-defense, or about how imminent a threat Bin Laden must pose before the CIA operation could commence. 'Wiggle room' in the authorization led the CIA to worry, in Coll's account, 'that if an operation in Afghanistan went bad, they would be accused of having acted outside the memo's scope.' Fear of retroactive discipline, induced by cautious legal authorizations, led the CIA to forego the covert operation.

In this and many other episodes prior to 9/11, intelligence officers spooked by cautious lawyers failed to take actions that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks. The CIA was, in the words of the 9/11 Commission Report, 'institutionally averse to risk,' and law and lawyers were a big part of the problem. It didn't help that CIA leaders encouraged their officers to buy professional liability insurance for legal expenses to be incurred in the expected criminal and related investigations. 'I think it's deeply disturbing that we have a system of government that asks young men and women to go overseas and take enormous risks for them and then say, 'Oh, by the way, you might want to get insurance to provide counsel because we might subsequently decide to prosecute you tomorrow for what we're asking you to do today,' says Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA General Counsel. Robert Baer, who was in a position to know, says the signal the insurance sends is clear. 'Don't take risky assignments. Don't get involved in any contravention or possible contravention of American law. Just don't do it. It's not worth it. You can't afford the lawyers.The organization's not going to back you up. Take a nice safe assignment. Take no risks.'

After 9/11, of course, the threat from terrorism seemed much different, and pressure on the CIA to take risks increased. But all of the institutional factors contributing to risk aversion remained in place, and stood as an obstacle to the White House's aggressive go-it-alone strategy. This is where the OLC became crucial. More than any agency in the government, OLC could provide the legal cover needed to overcome law-induced bureaucratic risk-aversion. 'It is practically impossible to prosecute someone who relied in good faith on an OLC opinion, even if the opinion turns out to be wrong,' a senior Justice Department prosecutor once told me. OLC speaks for the Justice Department, and it is the Justice Department that prosecutes violations of criminal law. If OLC interprets a law to allow a proposed action, then the Justice Department won't prosecute those who rely on the OLC ruling. Even independent
counsels would have trouble going after someone who reasonably relied on one. This is true even if OLC turns out to be wrong according to a court. One consequence of OLC's authority to interpret the law is the power to bestow on government officials what is effectively an advance pardon for actions taken at the edges of vague criminal laws. This is the flip side of OLC's power to say 'no,' and to put a brake on governmental operations. It is one of the most momentous and dangerous powers in the government: the power to dispense get-out-of-jail-free cards.

Walter Russell Mead

2010-07-22T03:13:00.000-07:00

God and Gold

The rise of the formerly insignificant kingdom of Prussia to great power status had destabilized European power relations. France and Austria, formerly bitter enemies, overcame their differences and joined with Russia to crush the upstart. If successful, this coalition would unite Europe under anti-British powers; Britain needed to protect its overseas empire from the French while helping Prussia. As the fighting spread, in May of 1756 Britain declared war on France, and the war officially began.

French victories in North America continued through 1761, but as the war went worldwide, the new British leader, William Pitt, decided to assemble the full resources of the maritime system for an all-out global war against the French. Pitt was an extraordinary figure at an extraordinary moment. Known as 'the Great Commoner' because, unlike most leading British politicians of the era, he did not have and, apparently, did not seek a noble title, Pitt came to public notice when he accepted the position of paymaster-general, one of the most lucrative offices in the British government—and promptly and ostentatiously refused to accept the very large customary bribes, fees, and other emoluments that went with it.

Pitt not only stood for a more modern, efficient, and meritocratic state; he had an instinctive understanding of global strategy and the maritime system. The Pitt family fortune was established by Thomas Pitt, who set out to trade illegally in India in defiance of the East India Company monopoly. The outraged company agents fined and imprisoned the interloper, but he was so determined and canny that the company ultimately gave up. They put the fox in charge of the chicken coop: they made him the governor of the company post at Madras. While ensconced there, Pitt bought a 410-carat diamond despite its surprising checkered past (the man he bought it from maintained that he had bought it from an English sea captain who had stolen it from a slave who had smuggled the stone out of the mines in a wound in his leg). Pitt realized a considerable fortune from the sale of the diamond (cut to 136 carats) to the French regent, who placed it among his country's crown jewels. Stolen in the French Revolution, it was later recovered, and Napoleon subsequently wore it on the pommel of his sword. It can still be seen in the Louvre.

With the fortune he made in India, Thomas—who soon became Sir Thomas—acquired control of the 'rotten borough' of old Sarum. Once a prosperous country town, by the time of Queen Anne Old Sarum mainly consisted of a few uninhabited ruins dotting a grassy hill near Stonehenge. Fortunately what it lacked in population it made up in parliamentary representation, and the empty borough retained a seat in the House of Commons. In effect, this seat became the property of the Pitt family, and ensured that William Pitt could face the electorate with calm and equanimity whatever the political weather.

But this also meant that Britain in 1757 had a prime minister who understood how an open society and unfettered capitalist enterprise enabled a country and its citizens to succeed in global competition. He saw how this economic power could translate into military and political power.

As no one before him, Pitt understood the full shape and nature of British power. He understood that he was fighting a world war, and that Britain's twin advantages were its global sea power and its prosperous economy. He determined to use the one to increase the other, and, taxing the British people as never before, he used Britain's credit rating and its financial markets to borrow sums that boggled the minds of his contemporaries. He spent lavishly to bring Britain's military power to a new peak of size and efficiency. With one hand, he sent prodigal subsidies to help Britain's desperate Prussian ally to survive its encircling enemies in Europe. With the other, he ordered armies and fleets to the major theaters in the global war: India and America.

Bankrupting the enemy while crushing him: this was the strategy that Ronald Reagan would use against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Reagan attacked Soviet economic interests by placing sanctions on its economy and the economies of its satellites; he sent military aid to the USSR's enemies and opponents from Central America to Afghanistan. And, while doing all this, he inaugurated a high-tech arms race that the Soviet Union could not win. The American economy became a decisive weapon of war, as Britain's had been against France under Pitt.

In India, the Seven Years' War in 1756 came at the height of an escalating Anglo-French struggle to control the south. Determined efforts by resourceful French agents had built a network of alliances with local rulers, and the French nourished hopes of driving the British out of their lucrative trading post in Madras. A string of island bases—Reunion, the Seychelles, Mauritius, Madagascar—could shelter French forces and trading ships making the long run from Europe. For the French as for the British, communication with their home base was the key to their local strength. Weapons and supplies had to come from the homeland; without secure communication home trade withered and died, and without trade their local power would do likewise.

Pitt's navy drove the French flag from the Indian Ocean. As the final contest for supremacy between French and British agents in India began, the French were completely cut off—while the British had secure lines of communication and supply.

Bjorn Lomborg

2010-07-21T03:25:00.000-07:00

Cool It

The southwestern United States have seen some of the fastest-growing cities in the US, and Tucson has experienced a doubling of the population over the past three decades to about three-quarters of a million people. This has also led to dramatic growth in developed urban and suburban land area. The population increase matches well the temperature increase we see for Tucson, with an almost steady temperature in the first part of last century but a marked acceleration in the second part. Research indicates that since 1969 Tucson has seen a 2.6°C increase just from the urban heat island. And since there has also been a temperature increase in the general area, presumably from both global warming and natural variability the average minimum temperature over the past 40 years for Tucson has increased more than 6°C.

Likewise, we have seen an increase in the urban heat island over Athens in the past 50 years. Here maximum temperatures have increased by about 2°C. In downtown Los Angeles, maximum temperatures over the past century have increased by some 2.5°C and minimum temperatures by some 4°C. New York has a similar night-time urban heat island of 4°C.

Recently we have been able to use satellite measurements of the direct temperatures over the entire surface of a city. When researchers looked at Houston, they realized it was a fast-growing city. From 1990 to 2000 it grew by 300,000 residents—a full one-fifth increase. Yet when they looked at the change in temperature as measured from the sky, they found an amazing result. Over a short 12 years, the night-time surface temperature increased by about 0.8°C. Over a hundred-year period that would translate into almost 7°C temperature increase.

And indeed, for huge cities these are the kinds of temperature differences that are being found around the world. Asian cities are today the most rapidly growing regions of the world. Sixteen of the world's 24 megacities (cities with more than 10 million people) will be in Asia by the year 2015. Not surprisingly, this is also where we find some of the largest urban heat islands. The daytime temperature difference between the tropical cities of Bangkok and Manila and their countrysides is 7-8°C. The same temperature differences are found for temperate cities like Seoul and Shanghai. If we go to the mega city of Beijing, researches have found that temperatures diverge some 10°C in the daytime and 5.5°C at night. And Tokyo with its 20 million inhabitants sees some of the most dramatic consequences of the urban heat island. While the daytime temperature of the area surrounding Tokyo in August was 28.5°C, the downtown was measured at 40+°C. And this high temperature is not just affecting a small inner core of the city—the high-temperature area covers some 8,000 km² or the equivalent of 140 times the area of Manhattan. Nights in August Tokyo only provide a slight solace, as the temperature drops to 9°C in rural areas but remains at 26.5°C in the city.

At the place where the urban heat island was first discovered, London is now also seeing a strong warming. Since the 1950s, the number of nights with intense urban heat has increased by four days each decade. Today temperatures are 4-6°C higher, and during the August 2003 heat wave reached 9°C. These worldwide urban temperature increases tell us at least two things.

First, many of these urban temperature increases over the past half or full century are of the same order or bigger than the 2.6°C that we expect to see over the coming full century. It is likely that for many cities the temperature increases mainly from the urban heat island of the twentieth century arc of a bigger scale than the temperature increases from global warming in the twenty-first century. Yet the increases have not brought the cities tumbling down.

Over the past hundred years, metropolises have had to adapt to temperatures that rose faster and higher than what we will expect in this century. Their inhabitants both were poorer and had less technological ability to adapt. Yet, the higher temperatures did not produce widespread and frequent heat waves killing sizable numbers of inhabitants.

This does not mean that the urban heat island may not have been bad for some or possibly even most cities. Although deaths have in general been declining (as we saw for Philadelphia above), they might have declined even faster without it. But it means that the doomsday predictions are sorely mistaken when they focus solely on ever more heat deaths without taking into account fewer cold deaths, and that adaptation will possibly strongly mitigate the temperature effects. If our forefathers were able to do so, it seems reasonable to assume that, being much richer and having vastly more technical prowess, we will be able to repeat their feat.

This also does not deny that with global warming the impact on cities will be considerably worse, because they will be hit by a double whammy—temperature increases both from CO₂, and from still-increasing urban heat islands.

But this leads straight to the second point. Unlike our forefathers, who did very little or nothing about the urban heat island, we are in a good position to tackle many of its effects. Presumably our goal is to prevent part of the problems of increasing temperatures over the coming century. It is curious that we focus so much of our attention on cutting CO₂, when it is likely that we could do much more and at much lower cost to cut temperatures by addressing the urban heat island.

Studies show that very simple solutions can make a great difference. One of the two main reasons cities are hotter is that they are drier. Cities lack moist green spaces and have large, impermeable surfaces with drainage, quickly leading any water away. Thus, the sun's energy goes into heating the atmosphere instead of into the cooling evaporation of water. If we plant trees and provide vegetation and water features in the urban environment, this will—apart from making a more beautiful city—dramatically cool the surroundings. For instance, air around the River Thames or within urban parks is on average 0.6°C cooler than neighbouring built-up areas. If we significantly and pervasively increase moisture, models show that at noon on the third day of a fine weather spell temperatures can be decreased by as much as 8°C.

The other main reason that cities are hotter is that they have a lot of black asphalt and dark, heat-absorbing structures. Although it may seem almost comically straight-forward, one of the main solutions is very simple—paint the tarmac and buildings white.

Dambisa Moyo

2010-07-21T02:59:00.001-07:00

Dead Aid

In the United States alone, the total annual amount of farm subsidies stands at around US$15 billion, and that number is rising. As a share of farmers' income, subsidies rose from around 14 per cent in the middle of the 1990s to around 17 percent today. The 2002 US Farm Security and Rural Investment Act gave US farmers nearly US$200 billion in subsidies for the subsequent ten years—US$70 billion more than previous programmes, and represented as much as an 8o per cent increase in certain subsidies.

The Europeans are just as protective. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) eats into around half the European Union's budget of €€127 billion (direct farm subsidies alone are worth nearly €€40 billion), and EU subsidies are approximately 35 per cent of farmers' total income. What this means is that each European union cow gets US$2.50 a day in subsidies, more than what a billion people, many of them Africans, each have to live on every day.

For the West, it would appear that everything is sacred: steel, cotton, sugar, rice, wheat, com, soybeans, honey, wool, dairy produce, peanuts, chickpeas, lentils and even mohair. These subsidies have a dual impact. Western farmers get to sell their produce to a captive consumer at home above world market prices, and they can also afford to dump their excess production at lower prices abroad, thus undercutting the struggling African farmer, upon whose meagre livelihood the export income crucially depends. With the millions of tons of subsidized exports flooding the marker so cheaply, African farmers cannot possibly compete.

Look at what has happened to two of Africa's chief exports: cotton and sugar, both of which have to contend with their Western counterpart producers.

In 2003, US cotton subsidies to its farmers were around US$4 billion. Oxfam has observed: 'America's cotton farmers receive more in subsidies than the entire GDP of Burkina Faso, three times more in subsidies than the entire US aid budget for Africa's 500 million people.'

Yet, the livelihoods of at least 10 million people in West and Central Africa alone depend on revenues from cotton, including some 6 million rural households in Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Mali and Zimbabwe.

In May 2003, trade ministers from Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali filed an official complaint against the US and the EU for violating WTO rules on cotton trade, claiming that their countries together lost some US$1 billion a year as a result of cotton subsidies.

In Mali, more than 3 million people—a third of its population—depend on cotton not just to live but to survive; in Benin and Burkina Faso, cotton forms almost half of the merchandise exports. Yet thanks to subsidies, Mali loses nearly 2 per cent of GDP and 8 per cent of export earnings; Benin loses almost 2 per cent of its GDP and 8 per cent of export earnings; and Burkina Faso loses 1 per cent of GDP and 12 per cent of export earnings. Moreover, a 40 per cent reduction in the world price (that is, equivalent to the price decline that took place from December 2000 to May 2002) could imply a 7 per cent reduction in rural income in a typical cotton-producing country in West Africa like Benin.

The case of sugar is a similarly sour tale.

The US sugar industry receives US$1.3 billion of support per year, European Union producers receive US$2.7 billion, and in the two years between 1999 and 2001 the OECD supported its sugar farmers to the tune of US$6.4 billion, an amount more than the total value of sugar exports from developing countries, and 55 per cent of the US$11.6 billion annual world sugar trade.

Like cotton, sugar subsidies hurt Africa. The charity Oxfam estimated the regime has deprived Ethiopia, Mozambique and Malawi of potential export earnings of US$238 million since 2001. The costs of Mozambique's sugar losses equalled one third of its development aid from the EU and its government's spending on agriculture and rural development. The EU also supports its producers by blocking the entry of developing-country imports into its markets with tariffs of more than 300 per cent. Oxfam estimated that Malawi could have significantly increased exports to the Union tn 2004 but that market restrictions deprived it of a potential US$32 million in foreign-exchange earnings, equivalent to around half the country's public-healthcare budget.

It's not just developed countries that are guilty of distorting trade markets. China is reported to support its cotton sector by an estimated US$1.5 billion annually. Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt and India put US$0.6 billion into their cotton sectors during 2001/2002.

But perhaps the most egregious examples come from Africa itself. African countries impose an average tariff of 34 per cent on agricultural products from other African nations, and 21 per cent on their own products. As a result, trade between African countries accounts for only 10 per cent of their total exports. By contrast, 40 per cent of North American trade is with other North American countries, and 63 per cent of trade by countries in Western Europe is with other Western European countries.

Simon Blackburn

2010-07-21T02:57:00.000-07:00

Lust

Bayle finds he cannot think of an argument against Diogenes and Crates, and turns to lamenting the infirmities of human reason, which is 'wavering and supple, and which turns every way like a Weather-Cock.' For just look how the cynics make use of it to justify their abominable impudence! But he still doesn't let the matter go, since even if the cynics were 'incivil, ill-bred, and ill Observers of Fashions,' this should not make them criminals. Nor can he find that the moral philosophers of the church, the casuists, have ever found reason in scripture for a condemnation of their actions.

After enjoying himself thoroughly by failing to find a decent argument against indecency, Bayle bows out, admitting that some might think the whole thing rather indelicate. But he defends himself with the standard argument of tabloid editors and other purveyors of stuff designed to tickle us with the pleasures of feeling shocked: 'I desire the Reader to observe, that when infamous Actions are but faintly represented, they do not so strongly produce the Horror and Indignation they deserve.'

Adrian Desmond

2010-07-17T02:57:00.001-07:00

James Moore

Darwin's Sacred Cause

He now not only had the most detailed castigatory travelogues of Southern slavery—Martineau's three volumes of Society in America, and three more of Retrospect of Western Travel, all published within two years of Darwin's return—but their author mooching around the dinner table. He would read them all. But there was no rush while she was a fixture at Erasmus's brilliant parties next door and stood ready to compare'our methods of writing.'

Already a literary lioness for her Whig government propaganda, Martineau was instilling the spirit of American abolitionism into a British anti-slavery movement, flagging after its achievement in emancipating the slaves in its colonies. She wanted the movement now to target the American south with its thriving plantations and internal slave trade. Martineau's two years of fact-finding was intended to measure American society against the nation's founding beliefs, but she was never a neutral observer. Even before returning home she had come out for immediate and complete emancipation without compensation for slave-owners. Any Darwin or Wedgwood woman visiting America might have had the same experience. (Aunt Sarah Wedgwood, articulate and self-opinionated, was in many respects a middle-aged Martineau with money.) They all shared the same radical Unitarian-humanitarian heritage, to which Harriet added the moral obligation to speak out.

Martineau's stories were standard fare at dinner parties. Having arrived in America amid rising anti-abolitionist violence, she had dared to speak at Boston's 'female' branch of the American Anti-Slavery Society as angry protesters stoned the building. She stood up for what she called the 'holy cause,' and William Lloyd Garrison, the ultra-abolitionists' driving force, publicized her words in his inflammatory rag the Liberator. Travelling with her ear trumpet through the south, she denounced slavery as an 'utter abomination and inconsistent with the law of God.' For abusing Southern hospitality the slave-holders hated her. Newspapers invited her back so they could cut out her tongue. In Charleston, South Carolina, where she saw a woman sold with her children in the slave market, they called her a secret incendiary, and she learnt of plans for her lynching. The prospect galvanized her: after 'witnessing & being implicated in the perils & struggles of the abolitionists' she wrote Society in America in the white-hot hope of mobilizing a moral army to free the blacks. This was Darwin's frequent dining companion as he penned his own incendiary racial-evolution notes.

While Yankees joked about her book being 'placed on the Index Expurgatorius of the South,' Maer devoured every word, and cousin Emma Wedgwood knew the Darwin sisters would 'really like Miss Martineau.' The women found her 'uncommonly acute,' and not just as an observer. She was a consummate literary strategist, weaving anti-slavery through her chapters to make it 'impossible for the Americans' to remove it from their edition. Some family members thought she was diluting the message by also rubbing in the 'sufferings of woman' in general. To Aunt Fanny Allen, this simply detracted from her 'noble true & powerful' remarks about 'the real sufferers, the slaves,' though she still believed the book would do 'infinite good.' It was 'impossible not to catch some of her hopefulness on Slavery.'

Martineau was an acquired taste, but the 'wonderful woman' had a knack for attracting 'geniuses,' Darwin marvelled—Whig grandees, Edinburgh Reviewers, freethinking professors, Erasmus who would send her a single rose from time to time. Erasmus saw her soft side; so did Charles, and he had to admit she was 'not a complete Amazonian.' 'Thinking too much' exhausted her, as it did him as he filled his notebooks. More to the point, she shared his first-hand experience of slavery as no one else in their circle. They had both witnessed brutality, felt threats of violence, heard shrieks of pain. They had seen black men treated as animals by white men behaving as animals. The sight of so much New World slavery, far from dulling their senses, had quickened their conscience, and in 1838 Darwin took notes on yet another new title by Martineau, How to Observe.

She had sketched out the book en route to America, aiming to distil what the 'philosophical traveller' needed to know about how the moral sense manifested in different peoples. Darwin compared it with a book on ethical philosophy by Sir James Mackintosh and found a common ground: besides 'some universal feelings of right & wrong,' humans have a 'moral sense' that varies even from race to race, Darwin noted, just as breeds of dogs have 'different instincts.' Moral feelings are as 'natural' to people as herding instincts are to deer. Yet however fixed mankind's 'conscience or instinct' might seem to be, it can be changed and improved. It was more grist to Darwin's mill as he ground on, trying to grasp how savages became sophisticates.

The American South for Martineau was an incongruous mix of politeness and injustice, patrician slavery without guilt. On the plantations charity and barbarity were bedfellows, yet many whites considered slave life idyllic. It was blindness due to ignorance, and her remedy was education: teach white Southerners the nation's libertarian principles and slavery would cease. Darwin sympathized but his approach would undercut the very wellsprings of the 'domestic institution' (a common euphemism in America for slavery): the belief that slaves were another kind, or could be treated as such.

Douglas Den Uyl

2010-07-17T02:56:00.001-07:00

Spinoza's Modern Humanism

Substance is where everything comes from and to which everything is ultimately referred or dependent upon. There's nothing outside of it, and there's nothing else to explain what it is other than itself. Of course, once one begins thinking about substance in this way, substance starts looking a lot like what at least many people would ordinarily say about God!

That is precisely what Spinoza does in the opening propositions of the first book of the Ethics—he links substance and God together so that they are both names for the same thing. One notices also that the definition of God has a lot to do with infinity. Spinoza shows that substance is infinite (E1P8). We tend additionally to think that there can only be one of the kind of God Spinoza defines, so Spinoza proves that there cannot be more than one substance and that it couldn't have come from anything other than itself (E1P5-6). In addition, Spinoza formally links God and substance together (E1P11). Other concepts, such as existence and self-causation, have helped along the way, but the important idea for our purposes is that everything whatsoever, including God or substance itself, is encompassed by this concept expressed by the two terms 'substance' and 'God.' But those terms do not quite give us the picture we need. For that picture, the terms 'attribute' and 'mode' are also required.

As we see in its definition, an attribute describes the essence of a through the attributes of the substance. Since God or substance is infinite, whatever the attributes of God or substance are, they must also be infinite. Moreover, it turns out that God or substance would not only have attributes that are infinite, but also infinitely many infinite attributes (E1P10-11). Thus, if we could give a description of one of these attributes—say 'thought'—that description would mean, when applied to God or substance, that thought was infinite in God or substance. The idea that God's thoughts are applicable to everything that exists is probably not too far off from what most people would intuitively say about God. What Spinoza adds, however, is the idea that there are infinitely many different attributes of the same God or substance. It's like saying God or substance is infinite in both 'length' and 'breadth,' although since we mentioned 'thought,' those terms used in this context are of course metaphors, not actual descriptions. Still, we can imagine on the one hand a line of thought, and we can imagine on the other a range of thoughts. God or substance would be infinite in both ways (not to mention infinitely many others).

Within 'thought' we might be more comfortable talking about 'thoughts.' A 'line of thought' is generally another name for a string of discrete thoughts. These discrete thoughts might more generally be called 'modes' of thought. To be a mode of thought would be to be this or that thought. That's the idea behind the definition of 'mode' Spinoza gives, noted above. The 'affections of substance' used in Definition 5 are the particular manifestations of substance. Of course, those manifestations must be understood in a certain way. In this case we are considering them as kinds of thoughts. However, given what Spinoza has said about substance or God and attributes, there are an infinite numbers of ways in which God or substance may manifest itself (E1P16). Thus, there are also an infinite number of things that can be said about any given manifestation (E1P25Cor.). In this case, we're just talking about one such way—the manifestation as a thought of some sort. Although there are an infinite number of possible ways to consider any particular manifestation, our limited nature only allows us to really speak of the manifestations of two attributes, thought and extension (matter) (E2P1-2). So when we talk about things in the world around us, we do so in terms of something being either a mode of thought, or of matter, or both.

Now that we have a rough idea of substance, attribute, and mode, we can look with particular interest to the 18th proposition of the first book of the Ethics: 'God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things.' Though the meaning of this proposition is worked out in many successive propositions (as well as beyond book one), we can move to the point immediately. Remembering that there is nothing outside of God (or substance) and that everything that is must be understood in terms of God, this proposition is telling us that God is not simply something upon which everything depends and who makes it possible for things to do anything that they do or be anything that they are. Spinoza's point is actually more radical: everything actually is God (or substance). Indeed, how could it be otherwise? If God is truly infinite in infinite ways, and there's nothing outside of God or independent of God, then what makes the most sense is to see the things around us, including ourselves, as simply particular manifestations of God (or substance). To say otherwise would be to give something some independence from God. But that itself would mean that God faces some limit, namely, something that is not God, and that thing would throw up a boundary—or limit—to what God is. God's all-encompassing infiniteness would not be so all-encompassing or infinite in that case (E1P14). It is more plausible to think in terms of the one substance or God expressing itself in particular or modal ways than it is to suppose there is something that God or substance is not. But, of course, in saying all this, proposition 18 makes immanence an essential feature of all that is, not to mention an essential feature of Spinoza's philosophical system.

An idea often associated with Spinoza is the idea of 'deus siae natura' or 'God or nature' (E1App.; E4Pref.). The idea is quite simple: God and nature are interchangeable terms for Spinoza. Consequently, we actually have three terms that turn out to be identical in meaning and reference: substance, God, and nature. The significance of this equation of God and substance with nature is, at least, a reinforcement of immanence. Since God and nature are the same, there is no separation of God from nature. God didn't create the natural order; God is the natural order (and it is God).

Jeffrey Collins

2010-07-16T04:27:00.001-07:00

The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes

Religion grew from basic mental seeds, chief among which were a driving curiosity about the cause of all things and a deep anxiety about the future. The desire to know causes and effects was basic to all regulated 'Mentall Discourse,' but religion went beyond this and attempted to ascertain the first cause and the final effect. This was impossible, as causal relations could only be understood by sensory interactions with matter. Ultimate causes and effects were not subject to such interactions. Nevertheless, the desire for such knowledge—a 'perpetuall feare'—induced humans to postulate an 'invisible power' that would both explain human origins and determine the future. This invisible power was in turn assumed to be incorporeal and above human understanding. It was reverenced in the same way powerful men were reverenced, with gifts' gratitude, and submission.

The religious impulse was thus entirely natural but not reasonable. It eschewed the sensible world and vainly sought to know 'second causes.' Gods were fears 'personated,' invisible entities imagined to explain the caprices of material existence. Men did not fear God directly, rather they feared the unknown, and they personified this fear into a supernatural, incorporeal, and omnipotent entity. Fear formed 'in every man his own religion: which hath place in the nature of man before Civill Society.' Reason did not lead humans to a conception of God. Likewise the 'Attributes which we give to God' were not aspects of 'Philosophicall Truth' but rather of 'Pious Intention.' They had merely instrumental value.

Hobbes's projection theory of religion might have been reconciled with a sincere Christianity if it had been paired with a faith in revelation. Indeed, in Leviathan he claimed that though Christianity and pagan religions were similarly motivated by fear, the former was true because it was created 'by God's commandment and direction.' However, this assurance was fatally undermined by Hobbes's deep scepticism about all revealed sources of divine 'commandment and direction.' Hobbesian religious logic would oscillate around the following paradox: religion was properly ordered by the sovereign according to revelation, but revelation itself was often dubious and always dependent on sovereign authority for its obliging status. Hobbes left nothing other than the volition of sovereigns for distinguishing the religions of history. If religion was a fear of invisible power 'feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publiquely allowed,' superstition was merely a similar belief in tales not 'publiquely allowed.'

Hobbes's fully developed religious thinking was thus built on two propositions: a belief (potentially compatible with sincere Christianity) in the psychological necessity of religion; and a profound scepticism (incompatible with Christianity) of revealed knowledge. To these foundational points must be added a third consideration: Hobbes's constantly reiterated conviction that elemental features of Christian metaphysics were irreconcilable with his own political philosophy.

Hobbes's civil science depended on the fear of death as the chief psychological force motivating humans to accept social constraint. If the fear of death was not the most basic of all fears, then it would not motivate naturally anti-social individuals into ordered society. Christianity, by promising eternal salvation and threatening eternal damnation, trumped the mere fear of death. Christian justice was transcendent, otherworldly and eternal. It short-circuited the logic of a political theory in which the war of all against all was the ultimate evil, and civil stability the ultimate good. 'For if one sovereign commands him to do something under penalty of natural death,' Hobbes wrote,

and another forbids it under pain of eternal death, and both have right on their sides, it follows not only that innocent citizens may rightly be punished, but that the commonwealth is radically undermined. For no one can serve two masters; and the one to whom we believe that obedience is due, under fear of damnation, is no less a Master than the one to whom obedience is due through fear of temporal death, but rather more.

Hobbes's discomfort with Christian soteriology would prove centrally important in his mature religious writings. Most critically it has been identified by scholars as the motivation for many of the heterodox theological opinions expressed in Leviathan. The controversial theology of Leviathan, notorious in Hobbes's later decades, particularly targeted those features of Christianity—the afterlife, the spiritual soul, the divinity of Christ-that most threatened the psychological mechanisms of his political theory. Much could be said on this point, but a few examples will suffice. Leviathan employs the terms 'heaven' and 'hell,' but recasts them as earthly phenomena. Conceding the novelty of his proposition, Hobbes argued that eternal life in Scripture did not refer to life 'in the heavens' but rather signified the promise of eternal life on earth. Salvation was the promise of an endless delivery from the perils of the state of nature. Hobbes expended even more energy debunking traditional concepts of demons, purgatory and hell itself. Leviathan dismissed these as heathen and Aristotelian notions. Originally a corrupt pagan art, demonology had been co-opted by the Jews. Jesus, Hobbes claimed, spoke of demons only metaphorically, but Christian clergy found the concepts of possession and damnation useful as props to their power. He argued, with scant scriptural foundation, that the torments of hell were temporary, not eternal. Christian conceptions of salvation and damnation were profoundly at odds with Hobbes's vehement materialism, his rejection of all 'substances incorporeall,' and his insistence that references to the 'spirit of God' were absurdities of speech. Perhaps Hobbes's boldest effort to defuse the threat Christian soteriology was his adoption of the mortalist heresy. Mortalism held that the soul died with the body, and thus would only live eternally in bodily form after the second coming of Christ. This, it has been convincingly argued, served to delay divine judgement of individuals to an almost unimaginable point in the future, and thus further thwarted the challenge posed by eternity to Hobbes's political theory.

Against the Christian understanding of the Kingdom of God as the perfect and invisible unity of the saints, Hobbes understood it as a literal kingdom on earth, a series of polities—first Israel, now the Christian commonwealths-passing through history. The high priests of these kingdoms were temporal sovereigns. The 'holy' was the public power of the state, and the sacrament was a sign of entry into the commonwealth. Abraham, Moses, David, and even Jesus figure in Hobbes's writings as essentially political figures.

Francis Wheen

2010-06-27T05:22:00.000-07:00

Strange Days Indeed

In the summer of 1972 the Oval House in London staged Foco Novo, an agitprop drama by Bernard Pomerance celebrating the struggle of Latin American guerrillas against military oppression and US imperialism, which kept its audience in a state of thrilled terror with occasional armed raids through the theatre's street doors. (The Times's critic, spoiling the fun as ever, pointed out that the play was rather
ineffective as agitprop since the only characters to emerge as human beings were the villainous Americans, while the guerrillas remained plaster saints. 'I doubt whether the Tupamaros or any other such group would recognise themselves in these boy scout patriots.') A few months later cinema-goers could enjoy State of Siege, Costa-Gavras's account of the abduction and murder of Dan Mitrione by the Tupamaros, which presented Mitrione as a CIA agent who deserved his fate. 'I went to see that film,' an Argentine guerrilla recalled years later. 'Before entering the cinema I was an imbecile. I left the cinema as a revolutionary.' Its American premiere at the Kennedy center in Washington DC was cancelled by the director of the American Film Institute, George Stevens, on the grounds that Costa-Gavras had 'rationalised an act of political assassination.' In California, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army watched State of Siege like students poring over a crib sheet before an exam, hoping to learn the secret of the Tupamaros' success. The SLA's first widely-publicised action—the assassination of a 'fascist' public official in Oakland, California—was the result, though it seems unlikely that their Latin American tutors would have awarded many marks for the choice of victim: the local schools superintendent, Dr Marcus Foster, whom they shot with hollowpoint bullets dipped in cyanide, was not only popular with liberals and the black community but also happened to be an African-American himself. The Black Panthers denounced the SLA's psychopathic commander, a petty crook named Donald DeFreeze, as a police agent working to discredit the entire underground.

Whlle Tariq Ali and the International Marxist Group drooled over the exploits of Latin American guerrillas or republican fighters in Northern Ireland (one pamphlet advertised by the IMG in 1973 was simply titled Freedom Struggle by the Provisional IRA), they seemed strangely reluctant to take up arms themselves. Ali was once approached by someone claiming to represent the Angry Brigade, London's only home-grown terrorist group, who suggested it might be a good idea to plant a bomb at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. 'I told them it was a terrible idea,' he says. 'They were a distraction. It was difficult enough building an anti-war movement without the press linking this kind of action to the wider Left.' The logic is hard to fathom, given that his newspaper would applaud similar attacks elsewhere in the world.

The Angry Brigade's brief but spectacular war began on 30 August 1970, with a bomb at the house of the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir John Waldron. A week later they targeted the home of Sir Peter Rawlinson, the attorney general. Over the next year there were twenty-three more bombings—against targets as diverse as the Miss World contest, the Home Secretary and the Spanish Embassy—but no fatalities. This was perhaps the only guerrilla band of the early 1970s which never killed anybody—a point of enduring pride for Hilary Creek, one of the surviving Angries. 'Basically, I'm not ashamed of anything I have done,' she said more than thirty years later, breaking her long silence in an interview with the Observer. The only flash of anger occurred when the man from the Observer mentioned bombs:

You use the word 'bomb,' but be careful about using it because nowadays that's such a value-loaded term. You think of Omagh, you are not thinking of half a pound of gelignite that causes small structural damage. It is important to put things in perspective. What nobody picked up on was that it wasn't the bombs themselves that they were worried about. It was the fact that it exposed the vulnerability of the system. How could someone go and do in the back door of a minister? It wasn't so much the criminal damage, it was the fact that it made them look stupid.

Karl Marx said that change comes not from the weakness of the powerful, but from the strength of the powerless. The urban guerrillas in Europe and America sought to exploit both at once—asserting their own strength by demonstrating the impotence of the state—though they were scarcely the people Marx had in mind: like the Tupamaros, most of them were university-educated youths from the middle class. Hilary Creek, whose father worked in the City, attended Watford Grammar School and Essex University. Almost every soldier in the Angry Brigade—and there were probably no more than half a dozen—had studied at either Essex or Cambridge. 'We were not that serious,' says John Barker, who ripped up his Cambridge finals papers as a protest against the Vietnam War. 'Yeah, man, we never took it seriously anyway: what I mean is that like many people then and now we smoked a lot of dope and spent a lot of time having a good time.' The proletarian odd-man-out in this troupe of strolling minstrels and wastrels was Jake Prescott, who had been an orphan at the age of seven and a convicted burglar by the time he entered his teens. While serving a jail sentence for possessing a firearm, in the late 1960s, he read about the Black Panthers and their belief in armed resistance. 'I took it all to heart. I had no objectivity. So when I got out of jail I thought, "London here I come." I wanted to live it.' He fetched up in an Islington commune with several members of the Angry Brigade, who asked him to address three envelopes for them one day in January l972. What he didn't realise, until he heard a news bulletin the next morning, was that the envelopes, sent to national newspapers, contained a communique claiming responsibility for an attack on the house of Robert Cart Ted Heath's secretary of state for employment: 'Robert Carr got it tonight. We're getting closer. The Angry Brigade.'

Hunting down the Angries suddenly became the top priority for the police and security services. Scotland Yard seconded thirty officers from Special Branch and the Flying Squad into a new unit known as the Bomb Squad. The Daily Mirror offered a £10,000 reward for information which led to an arrest. The Times warned that the Angry Brigade 'cannot now be dismissed as a group of cranks. Some senior officers credit the group with a degree of professional skill that has seldom been experienced.' All most flattering for a handful of dropouts whose technical expertise was limited to lighting a fuse on a stick of gelignite, and who used a child's John Bull printing set to typeset their communiqu6s. Naturally, the Angries basked in the flattery, issuing ever more extravagant bulletins about the might of their invisible regiments.

Carl Schramm

2010-06-26T18:14:00.001-07:00

Robert Litan
William Baumol

Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity

An analogy to military arms races is instructive. In medieval times, every king seemingly was forced into an arms race in which the ante was constantly raised, with innovation relentlessly raising costs. Stone castles replaced wooden castles and were not only more costly to build but far more costly to besiege. Gunpowder and artillery in the mid-fourteenth century increased the cost of fortification. The sociopolitical innovations that led the kings to become less dependent on vassals to man their armies forced them to pay their military often purely mercenary troops, which added significantly to royal expenses. The predictable consequence of this military Red Queen game was that the kings were almost always seriously short of funds. For whenever they did manage to scrape up enough to proceed on military enterprises with little financial hindrance, this merely invited ratcheting of the arms race up yet another notch, so by the inherent character of the 'gamer' any amount that seemed sufficient on one day was sure to be woefully inadequate in the next.

Thus monarchs found themselves perpetually underfinanced, heavily in debt and unable to find willing lenders, and reduced to distasteful expedients) to beg for a bit here, wheedle or extort a bit there. Indeed, much of medieval history is a story of battles—not the supposedly glorious clashes of arms) but battles between the kings and the subjects from whom the monarchs hoped to draw their funding. As some historians have put it, they were 'pauper kings.'

Fortunately, there is a happy and peaceful ending to this (truthful) parable about military Red Queen games. One consequence of the unceasing chase for money was that kings desperate for funds were forced into recognizing the rights of the individual. This process began in England and spread to the United States and eventually to much of Europe. To be sure, the process was a gradual one. Rights first were granted to the magnates (the fewer than ten earls and less than one hundred barons in England at the time of the birth of parliament), and then to towns and the commons (the upper middle class, the knights, the landowners, and the wealthier town residents). Furthermore, some kings found it necessary to turn to commerce rather than funding themselves with taxes and wartime booty. This made commercial activity—indeed entrepreneurial activity—respectable for members of the English nobility.

All of this helped lay the foundations for the future free-market economy and its remarkable productivity and record of growth. Indeed, the evolution of the rule of law—which predated the evolution of democratically chosen representatives—arguably was the single most important contribution to the birth of entrepreneurial capitalism.

Patrick Gardiner

2010-06-26T18:13:00.001-07:00

Schopenhauer

This was, in a way, Kant's problem; but he answered it wrongly, by employing the juridical notion of law, while at the same time stripping that notion of the implications of superior power and sanctions which are essential to it. Yet if his procedure was misguided, the instinct which led him to adopt it was to some extent right. For to do something because one has been told to do it, and because one either fears the consequences of disobedience or desires the rewards of obedience, is to act not as a moral agent but as a self-interested one. Morality and legality must be distinguished, not confounded ; Kant partly saw this, but—because of his theological obsessions—finished by trying to get the best of both worlds. To comprehend the need for making the distinction, one has only to consider the role of law as it functions in its natural habitat, the State. Political society, and the rules governing such society, find their source and rationale in egoism alone. Men form states purely as a means of protection from the incursions and aggressions to which they believe themselves to be exposed from the actions of their fellows: on this point Hobbes was entirely correct. It follows, Schopenhauer thinks, that the positive enactments of the state, the laws and decrees by which it fulfills the purpose for which it was designed, have as their single aim the prevention of the suffering of wrong by one individual at the hands of another, thereby mitigating the consequences of the bellum omnium contra omnes which Hobbes rightly saw to be the natural condition of human existence. And to give effect to such enactments, punishments and penalties are necessarily attached to their infringements, since there is no other way of ensuring their general observance. The sole purpose of punishment is thus deterrence and not (as Kant, for instance, maintained) partly retribution. Indeed, the whole conception of punishment as retribution is founded upon a primitive desire for revenge; and it is in any event actually wicked and arrogant, for no man can take it upon himself to be a 'purely moral judge and requiter of another' in the manner implied by many upholders of the theory. Nor is there any force in the oft-repeated Kantian objection that on a deterrence view punishment involves treating a man as a 'mere means' and not as an 'end.' It is useless to appeal to so vague and indefinite a principle in a context like the present one, and in any case the criminal, by infringing the rules of the society from which he has received the benefit of security and to the maintenance of which he was in a sense pledged, forfeits his right to the treatment due to a law-abiding citizen.

Schopenhauer holds, then, that the state is simply a contrivance formed for the convenience of men. For that reason it is absurd to exalt its nature and functions in the way that has in Germany become popular, as if it represented a quasi-divine entity capable of promoting 'the moral aims of mankind.' Yet German philosophers habitually talk in these terms, and in so doing display the characteristic failing of their race. For at the sound of certain expressions, of which 'the State' is one and 'Being' (Sein)—'that vacuous infinitive of the copula'—another, Schopenhauer says that the German's head begins to swim: 'he at once plunges into a kind of delirium, and launches forth into meaningless high-sounding phrases, synthetically stringing together the most abstract and hence the emptiest concepts' (Parerga, II, p.256). We should not be deceived by such verbiage, however; for any theory, of whatever kind, which involves the claim that the state is some sort of moral agency must be rejected.

Dane Kennedy

2010-06-26T18:07:00.003-07:00

The Highly Civilized Man

He clearly found Islam's ethical doctrines and codes of conduct more edifying and socially purposeful than any of its rivals', though there is little evidence that he personally abided by them. He also felt a genuine affinity for the sentiments expressed in Sufi poetry and practice, though this association raises questions of its own about the depth of his commitment to Islam. The British Orientalists who originally encountered Sufism in India in the late eighteenth century—and, indeed, coined the term—believed that it had 'no intrinsic relation with the faith of Islam,' viewing it instead as an Eastern form of freethinking. Burton saw it in a similar light, adopting a Sufi perspective, persona, and poetic style for his own freethinking manifesto, The Kasidah (1880).

What this suggests is that Burton's feelings toward Islam must be framed in the context of his attitudes toward Christianity. He was drawn to Islam because it gave him a vantage point from which to point out the limitations of his own European Christian heritage, not because it possessed in his mind any unqualified truths or virtues. He was most fervent in his advocacy of Islamic beliefs and Muslim practices during the decade—the late 1850s to the late 1860s—when he was most actively engaged in a polemical campaign against the universalist claims of evangelical Christianity. His dismay at what he regarded as the destructive effects of Christian missionary activity among the West African peoples with whom he came in contact during his years as British consul in Fernando Po (1861-1864) made him especially outspoken in his praise of Islam. Not only did he argue in his books on the region that Islam was better suited to the needs of Africans than Christianity but he also referred to himself as a Muslim in private communications and conversations. In letters from West Africa to his friend Monckton Milnes, he wrote that he was taking '"sweet counsel" together' with his 'Moslem brethren' and wishing 'for a little of the "Higher Law" (viz that of Mohammed).' Soon after his return from West Africa to England, he spent a weekend at the country home of Lord John Russell, where his hostess reported in her diary that he 'calls himself openly a Musselman.' His host, however, qualified Burton's provocative affirmation of faith, noting that he 'believes in no particular religion, though calling himself a Musselman.' This gets us closer to what Islam meant for Burton—not an expression of faith in its own right, but a means of challenging the unquestioning faith of his countrymen.

Burton exhibited an intellectual curiosity in religions of all sorts, but this curiosity never carried over into the unquestioning commitment of the devout believer. While in India he was intrigued not only by Islam, but by Roman Catholicism, choosing its services over those of the Anglican chapel while he was stationed in Baroda, and by Hinduism, claiming that his intensive study of the faith had been rewarded by the privilege of wearing 'the Janeo (Brahminical thread).' He gave a sympathetic hearing to the doctrines of Mormonism during his visit to Salt Lake City, concluding that Mormon theocracy was 'the perfection of government.' He even had something good to say about what he termed the 'fetish' beliefs of West Africans, which avoided the objectionable 'anthropomorphism' that afflicted Christianity. 'The Negro Deity if disassociated from physical objects, would almost represent the idea of the philosopher,' by which he meant 'a pure theism.' Late in life he became interested in the claims of Spiritualism, finding in its eclectic 'mix of rationalism, experimentation, and anti-Christian secularism' a perspective much to his liking.

Alain de Botton

2010-06-26T18:07:00.001-07:00

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something much more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative. our choice of occupation is held to define our identity to the extent that the most insistent question we ask of new acquaintances is not where they come from or who their parents were but what they do, the assumption being that the route to a meaningful existence must invariably pass through the gate of remunerative employment.

It was not always this way. In the fourth century BC, Aristotle defined an attitude that was to last more than two millennia when he referred to a structural incompatibility between satisfaction and a paid position. For the Greek philosopher, financial need placed one on a par with slaves and animals. The labour of the hands, as much as of the mercantile sides of the mind, would lead to psychological deformation. Only a private income and a life of leisure could afford citizens adequate opportunity to enjoy the higher pleasures gifted by music and philosophy.

Early Christianity appended to Aristotle's notion the still darker doctrine that the miseries of work were an appropriate and immovable means of expiating the sins of Adam. It was not until the Renaissance that new notes began to be heard. In the biographies of great artists, men like Leonardo and Michelangelo, we hear the first references to the glories of practical activity. While this re-evaluation was at first limited to artistic work and even then, only to its most exalted examples, it came in time to encompass almost all occupations. By the middle of the eighteenth century, in a direct challenge to the Aristotelian position, Diderot and d'Alembert published their twenty-seven-volume Encyclopedie, filled with articles celebrating the particular genius and joy involved in baking bread, planting asparagus, operating a windmill, forging an anchor, printing a book and running a silver mine. Accompanying the text were illustrations of the tools employed to complete such tasks: among them pulleys, tongs and clamps, instruments whose precise purpose readers might not always understand, but which they could nonetheless recognise as furthering the pursuit of skilful and dignified ends. After spending a month in a needle-making workshop in Normandy, the writer Alexandre Deleyre produced perhaps the most influential article in the Encyclopedie, in which he respectfully described the fifteen steps required to transform a lump of metal into one of those deft and often overlooked instruments used to sew on buttons.

Purported to be a sober compendium of knowledge, the Encyclopedie was in truth a paean to the nobility of labour. Diderot laid bare his motives in an entry on 'Art,' lambasting those who were inclined to venerate only the 'liberal' arts (Aristotle's music and philosophy) whilst ignoring their 'mechanical' equivalents (such as clock-making and silk-weaving): 'The liberal arts have sung their own praise long enough; they should now raise their voice in praise of the mechanical arts. The liberal arts must free the mechanical arts from the degradation in which these have so long been held by prejudice.'

The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth cenrury thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human.

Aspects of this evolution in attitudes towards work had intriguing parallels in ideas about love. In this sphere too, the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie yoked together what was pleasurable and what was necessary. They argued that there was no inherent conflict between sexual passion and the practical demands of raising children in a family unit, and that there could hence be romance within a marriage—just as there could be enjoyment within a paid job.

Initiating developments of which we are still the heirs, the European bourgeoisie took the momentous steps of co-opting on behalf of both marriage and work the pleasures hitherto pessimistically—or perhaps realistically—confined, by aristocrats, to the subsidiary realms of the love affair and the hobby.

John Robertson

2010-06-26T18:06:00.002-07:00

The Case for the Enlightenment

Rousseau's response to Mandeville was both an appropriation and a critique. He agreed with Mandeville that man was not naturally sociable. The earliest men and women were solitary beings, their only passions being amour de soi, a desire for preservation, and pity, a sympathy for the suffering of other creatures which fell far short of sociability. As population grew, however, men and women were forced into more frequent contact. Gradually they formed families, then small societies, developing language to persuade each other to meet their needs. As they communicated, they began to identify with each other, estimating themselves in the eyes of others. To amour de soi they added the passion of amour propre. Resembling Mandeville's 'self-liking,' Rousseau's amour propre was a reflexive passion, based on the judgement of others. But Rousseau also attributed to man a quality completely absent from Mandeville's account, a capacity to choose, or will, his values, a capacity which Rousseau called man's 'perfectibility.' By equipping natural man with this capacity Rousseau reopened a question which Mandeville had treated far less seriously, the question of men's capacity for hypocrisy.

For Mandeville, hypocrisy arose from the discrepancy between the arbitrary definitions of virtue and vice established by the first legislators and the actual passions governing men's behaviour. It was harmful, he suggested, only when those definitions were taken at face value by overzealous moral reformers, or when clergymen were given free rein to impose their ascetic values on the laity. Hume had countered that even this was to exaggerate the problem. The clergy, to be sure, were hypocritical preachers of self-denial. But ordinary men derived their values from their passions, not against them, judging moral worth by what was 'useful and agreeable.' Rousseau did not engage with Hume, but his response to Mandeville demonstrated his hostility to such straightforward Epicureanism. His objection was that it ignored the force of the Augustinian insight into man's capacity for moral deception. The multifarious ways in which men deceive their fellows, professing certain values while pursuing the gratification of their passions, had been explored at length by the late seventeenth-century moralist La Rochefoucauld, and were the subject of renewed affection by French dramatists in the 1740s and 17740s. What Rousseau now added was an interest in languag€e as the instrument of such deception. It was an interest Mandeville had anticipated, but Hume had ignored. The crucial case of linguistic deception, Rousseau argued in the Discours sur l'inegalite, was that which produced the institution of property, when one man not only appropriated a piece of land to his own use, but persuaded others to accept his claim. It was property which entrenched inequality at the heart of modern society, and thereby enlarged almost infinitely the scope for hypocrisy, as men competed to pretend to be what they were not. From that moment, Rousseau argued, moral corruption was unavoidable, and was destined steadily to advance until men fell under the yoke of despotism. Only by a wholly new act of will, he subsequently argued in Du Contrat Social (1762), could they hope to rediscover the possibility of virtue, and realise the promise of their original perfectibility.

Smith first responded to the challenge of Rousseau in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759; he continued the argument in the Wealth of Nations. Even then, however, Smith was not satisfied. Returning to the Theory of Moral Sentiments at the very end of his life, his final revisions show him still wrestling over his answer. How this response to Rousseau should be understood is now central to Smith scholarship. At the heart of the problem, Smith agreed with Rousseau, was inequality. Smith had no illusions about the scale of inequality in modern societies, and no society he recognised, was more unequal than a fully commercial society. But such inequality was not incompatible with a distribution of wealth which enabled the poorest classes to live better than ever before.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

2010-06-26T18:06:00.001-07:00

The Black Swan

In the not too distant past, say the precomputer days, projections remained vague and qualitative, one had to make a mental effort to keep track of them, and it was a strain to push scenarios into the future. It took pencils, erasers, reams of paper, and huge wastebaskets to engage in the activity. Add to that an accountant's love for tedious, slow work. The activity of proiecting, in short, was effortful, undesirable, and marred with self-doubt.

But things changed with the intrusion of the spreadsheet. when you put an Excel spreadsheet into computer-literate hands you get a 'sales projection' effortlessly extending ad infinitum! Once on a page or on a computer screen, or, worse, in a PowerPoint presentation, the projection takes on a life of its own, losing its vagueness and abstraction and becoming what philosophers call reified, invested with concreteness; it takes on a new life as a tangible object.

My friend Brian Hinchcliffe suggested the following idea when we were both sweating at the local gym. perhaps the ease with which one can project into the future by dragging cells in these spreadsheet programs is responsible for the armies of forecasters confidently producing longer-term forecasts (all the while tunneling on their assumptions). We have become worse planners than the Soviet Russians thanks to these potent computer programs given to those who are incapable of handling their knowledge. Like most commodity traders, Brian is a man of incisive and sometimes brutally painful realism.

A classical mental mechanism, called anchoring, seems to be at work here. You lower your anxiety about uncertainty by producing a number, then you 'anchor' on it, like an object to hold on to in the middle of a vacuum. This anchoring mechanism was discovered by the fathers of the psychology of uncertainty Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, early in their heuristics and biases project. It operates as follows. Kahneman and Tversky had their subjects spin a wheel of fortune. The subjects first looked at the number on the wheel, which they knew was random, then they were asked to estimate the number of African countries in the United Nations. Those who had a low number on the wheel estimated a low number of African nations; those with a high number produced a higher estimate.

Similarly, ask someone to provide you with the last four digits of his social security number. Then ask him to estimate the number of dentists in Manhattan. You will find that by making him aware of the four-digit number, you elicit an estimate that is correlated with it.

Ian Plimer

2010-06-04T01:58:00.000-07:00

Heaven and Earth

The IPCC has promoted the view that global warming creates extinction. This was based on one study. Suggestions that human-induced global warming results in extinction is, at best, scientifically flawed. It was suggested that rising sea surface temperature in the equatorial Pacific Ocean led to the disappearance of 22 of the 50 known species of frogs and toads in the Montverde cloud forest of Costa Rica. However, the authors also suggested that lowland deforestation may have a major influence on preservation of the cloud forests. This reservation was ignored as human-induced global warming was given as the reason for extinction. Although 21 of these species are known from elsewhere, one species (the golden toad) lost its only habitat and became extinct. It was the loss of this species that led to the conclusion that human-induced global warming could create an extinction of 20% of species over 50 years with a 0.8°C temperature rise. However, the trade winds that bring moist air from the Caribbean spend 5 to 10 hours over lowlands before they reached the golden toad's habitat. By 1992, 18% of the lowland vegetation remained after land clearing, resulting in an increase in the altitude of the cloud base thereby depriving the cloud forests of their moisture. Land clearing created the extinction of the golden toad, not global warming.

Estimates of the impact of climate change on wildlife using the modelling method endorsed by the IPCC ate a good example. When the models are run, they are not in accord with the modern distribution of wildlife. This agrees with other studies on the effect of climate change on wildlife. They are worthless because, despite the advances in mathematical simulation, the assumptions made are simplistic and lack critical variables. The scope for error is huge and cannot be reliably estimated. The same models have warned us that there will be massive extinction if the temperature rises yet these predictions of extinction arc the opposite of what is seen with past warmings. A consultation with the Oracle at Delphi would be a more useful method of prediction.

Other emotive speculations on extinction are misleading, such as those regarding foxes in the Arctic, as touted by the IPCC. The key publication on foxes does not deal with extinction but migration of red foxes into the range of Arctic foxes in North America and Eurasia. The Arctic foxes survived the last interglacial warming and the Roman and Medieval Warmings and hence it is hardly likely that the milder Late 20th Century Warming would lead to their extinction. There are a great diversity of reasons for species migration which seem to be related to hunting or competition rather than human-induced global warming.

The emotion about human-induced global warming is underpinned by the assumption that a future climate change will be so rapid that plants and animals would not be able to adapt to with the rate of temperature change. This view ignores the past, where there have been large climate changes on the scale of decades which have not led to plant or animal extinction. For example, the Fremont Glacier in Wyoming records a substantial warming from 1840 to 1850. A substantial warming in less than a decade is far faster than the most speculative catastrophist models for human-induced global warming, yet there is no evidence that there was an extinction in North America at that time. Multicellular plants and animals have been on Earth at least 500 million years, so they have enjoyed at least 20 major climate changes. If we took the emotive argument to its logical conclusion, then there would be no multicellular life on Earth, as previous global warmings would have tendered life extinct and planet Earth would be a moonscape. Why was there not an extinction with the Eemian interglacial, the Younger Dryas, the Roman Warming, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Warming or the Little Ice Age? Why is it that only the Late 20th Century Warming will produce extinction whereas previous times when it was far warmer did not produce an extinction?

A key argument is that plants are immobile, hence a rapid global warming will push them into extinction. The scenario is that when plants become extinct, then animals that feed off plants will also become extinct. Because this was not seen in previous warmings, the alarm bells should have been ringing for those speculating about extinction due to warming. What is observed is that plants in the Arctic have adapted to the frigid conditions but their distribution is rarely limited by warm conditions. Many Arctic and alpine plants are extremely tolerant to high temperatures, adult trees harvest the light and it is only when an adult tree dies that a plant is replaced. This process takes time thereby giving lichen, fungi and animals time to move with the migrating plant ecosystem.

Geology shows that in times of global warming, there is an explosion of life, diversity increases and speciation is rapid. The Cambrian explosion of life (542-520 Ma) took place in the post-glacial warm times when atmospheric CO₂ was at least 25 times greater than today. Other great diversifications have taken place in the past. Species-rich forests existed during the warm Tertiary times in the western USA where many mountain species grew amongst mixed conifers and broad leaf sclerophylls. It is only by completely ignoring the history of the planet can it be claimed that global warming can produce extinction.

In modern settings, it is also suggested that increased temperature will bring more species diversity by extending the ranges of plants and animals. Replacement of high altitude forests by mixing with low altitude forests to create greater species diversity has happened in previous times of warming and would be expected in another warming event. Furthermore, if a future warmer climate had a higher atmospheric CO₂ content, plant life would be far more vigorous because increased CO₂ enables plants to grow better in nearly all temperatures, especially at higher temperatures. Both animals and plants are limited by the latitude and altitude cold-boundaries of their range and are not limited by the heat-limited boundaries of their range. If atmospheric CO₂ is doubled, plant growth is unaffected at 10°C and growth is doubled at 38°C.

On a global scale, satellite measurements of vegetation between 1982 and 1999 showed that plant growth increased by 6% in response to slightly increased rainfall, and slightly increased temperature but the major change was due to slightly increased CO₂. If the CO₂ content is doubled, the net productivity rise of herbaceous plants is 30 to 50%, while of woody plants it is 50 to 80%. In the European Alps, there are plant species counts from 1895 to the present. Mountaintop temperatures have increased by 2°C since 1920 with 1.2°C of that rise over the last 30 years. Of the 30 mountaintops, nine showed no change in the species count, 11 gained 59% more species and one had a 143% increase in species. The 30 mountaintops showed a mean species loss of 0.68 out of an average of 15.57 species. The loss of a species from a particular mountain does not mean extinction but shows local mobility of plants. There are numerous other studies of lichen, plants) butterflies, birds, plankton, marine systems and fish to show that a slight temperature rise induces species diversity species migration and adaptation.

These observations show that planet Earth is dynamic. Life is constantly adapting to change. Life will adapt to change when temperature and atmospheric CO₂ rise slightly. Whether the changes are natural or human-induced is irrelevant. Far greater changes occurred in pre-industrial times without extinction of life. Detailed studies in a specific area may record a local extinction. However, this is misleading, as an extinction is the total loss of a species whereas local extinction could mean that a species has migrated to another area. Some species that were thought to be extinct in one area have been found decades later in another area.

To argue that increasing temperature and atmospheric CO₂ will result in extinction of plants is to argue that CO₂ is not plant food. Even if the planet warms due to increased atmospheric CO₂ it is clear that plants will not feel the need to migrate to cooler parts of our planet. In fact it is the very opposite. Young plants adsorb more CO₂ than old plants. If we wanted an effective carbon plant sequestration scheme, then we would cut down all our old growth forests and plant saplings or even leave what was forest as grass, both of which would adsorb far more CO₂ than mature trees.

Jonathan Bate

2010-05-27T03:57:00.003-07:00

Soul of the Age

In the great theatre of the world, with the gods as audience, we are the fools on stage. Under the aspect of Folly, we see that a king is no different from any other man. The trappings of monarchy are but a costume: this is both Folly's and Lear's discovery.

Folly tells us that there are two kinds pf madness—one is the thirst for gold, sex and power. That is the madness of Regan, Cornwall, Edmund and company. Their madness is what Lear and Timon reject. The second madness is the desirable one, the state of folly in which 'a certain pleasant raving, or error of the mind, delivereth the heart of that man whom it possesseth from all wonted carefulness, and rendreth it dives ways much recreated with new delectation.' This 'error of the mind' is a special gift of the goddess Folly. Thus Lear is happy when his mind is free, when he's running around in his madness like a child on a country holiday. 'Look, look, a mouse: peace, peace, this piece of toasted cheese will do't.' That brings a smile to our faces, not least because the mouse isn't really there. In the Folio text of the play, Lear repeats his demand to 'look, look' at the end of his life. Cordelia is dead, but he deceives himself into the belief that she lives—that the feather moves, that her breath mists the looking-glass. His final words are spoken in the delusion that her lips are moving—'Look on her, look, her lips,/Look there, look there!' Her lips aren't moving, just as there isn't a mouse, but it's better for Lear that he should not know this. Philosophers say that it is miserable to be deceived. Folly replies that it is most miserable 'not to be deceived,' for nothing could be further from the truth than the notion that man's happiness resides in things as they actually are.

We are far from the pursuit of conventional wisdom now, from the pantaloonish cliches of Polonius with his 'To thine own self be true,/And it must follow, as the night the day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man.' Deception may conceivably be a good thing, says this darker, more paradoxical play. As the wise Fool puts it, 'I would fain learn to lie.' Lying is destructive in the mouths of Goneril, Regan and Edmund at the beginning of the play, but Cordelia—the Fool's double—has to learn to lie. At
the beginning, she can only tell the truth (hence her banishment), but later she lies beautifully and generously when Lear says that she has cause to do him wrong, and she replies 'No cause, no cause.'

The closing section of Erasmus' praise of Folly undertakes a serious praise of Christian 'madness.' Christ says that the mystery of salvation is hidden from the wise and given to the simple. He delighted in common people, surrounded himself not with the rich and the powerful, but with working fishermen and humble women. He chose to ride an ass when he could have mounted a lion. The language of his parables is steeped in simple, natural things—lilies, mustardseed, sparrows. We might compare Lear's language of wren, dog and garden waterpots in act four of the play. The fundamental fully of Christianity is its demand that you throw away your possessions. Lear pretends to do this in act one, but actually he wants to keep 'The name, and all th'addition to a king.' Only when he loses his knights, his clothes and his sanity
does he find happiness.

But he also becomes kind. Little things show us this: in act one, he's still always giving orders. Even in the storm he continues to make demands: 'come, unbutton here.' In the end, though, he learns 'to say please and thank you: 'pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.' He has begun to learn true manners not at court, but through the love he shows for poor Tom, the image of unaccommodated man, the image of himself : 'Didst thou give all to thy daughters? And art thou come to this?'

Charlotte Higgins

2010-05-27T03:53:00.001-07:00

It's All Greek To Me

At the beginning of the sixth century there lived in Miletus, in Ionia, a man called Thales. According to Plato, in his dialogue Theaetetus, Thales died by falling into a well while he was gazing on the heavens, poor fellow. If early Greek science can, occasionally, come under fire for being insufficiently empirical and too focused on the assertion and counter-assertion of cosmological theories, then at least tradition has it that the man credited with the founding of Greek science—and philosophy—was interested, to a fault, in observing natural phenomena. You might say that Thales, not looking where he was going, also gives us the foundation myth of the mad professor, of the thinker so wrapped up in important abstractions that everyday concerns fall by the wayside.

In ancient Greece there was no word for what we would term science, as such, and the earliest thinkers, who now tend to be referred to under the umbrella term of 'pre-Socratic philosophers,' would likely have described what they were doing as conducting 'enquiries'—which is what Herodotus the historian was doing, albeit from a slightly different perspective. What Thales and co had in common with Herodotus
is that they tried to explore natural (or, in Herodotus' case, historical) phenomena without explaining them in terms of the gods or of the supernaturd. To begin to try to explain the world as a sequence of rationally explicable events—to say that storms at sea are not sent by Poseidon; nor is lightning Zeus' thunderbolt—was an intellectual shift of extraordinary power, as significant, if not more so, than the intellectual shifts that ushered in the Reformation, or the Enlightenment. It was a move that cleared the pathways for the riches of philosophical, literary and political developments of the fifth century and put man, rather than the gods, at the centre of the universe.

Still, fans of ancient Egypt and Babylon might point out, with justice, that way before the Greeks got going, enormous advances had been made in mathematics and astronomy (a debt that Plato himself acknowledged). The Babylonians, for instance, actually had a reasonably accurate calendar, which is more than the Greeks could manage. In a typically chaotic manner, each of the Greek poleis had their own version of the calendar, with different names for the months, and based on a lunar system—which, of course, does not dovetail with the solar system. If you calculate your calendar on the basis of lunar months, there will be 10 or so days left over each year. So every few years, if things felt out of synch, if a midsummer month didn't feel sufficiently midsummery, a city state would simply have the month again, to even things out.

The work of the early scientists is often preserved in tiny fragments, or expressed in rather obscure and gnomic terms, or known only as quoted or summarised by later writers; piecing their theories together is a delicate, and often contentious task. Thales put forward the theory that the world was held up by water; and that earthquakes, far from being the work of Poseidon, were the result of wave tremors from below the earth. Anaximander, another Milesian, perhaps Thales' pupil, wrote a prose treatise, called On the Nature of Things, he is thus responsible for one of the first-preserved prose sentences in Greek. (The very first writer of Greek prose is reputed to be Pherecydes of Syros in the Cyclades, who wrote about the gods and the creation of the cosmos in the mid-sixth century.) For Anaximander, the governing principle of the world, what 'held it up,' was the Boundless, or the Infinite (which is an attempt to answer the question left hanging by Thales, that is, what holds the water up?). Anaximander was responsible for the first attempt in Greek astronomy to posit a mechanical model for the heavenly bodies: the earth is a flat-topped cylinder, he held, while the sun, moon and stars are formed by hidden wheels of fire. (In other words, he proposed that what we see as a star 'is like a puncture in a vast celestial bicycle wheel,' as one eminent writer on Greek science puts it.) Symmetry is key to Anaximander's conception: opposites are separated out to generate the hot and the cold, the dry and the wet. His pupil, Anaximenes, who was working during the third quarter of the sixth century proposed on the other hand that air was the primary material: as breath governs humans, so air governs the world. To explain change and world formation, he offered the idea of condensation and rarefaction of the air: air becomes fire by rarefaction, condenses to become water and again to become stones.

Leon Krier

2010-05-27T03:48:00.001-07:00

The Architecture of Community

Maybe we should ask ourselves not what is wrong with ourselves, but rather what is wrong with our critics. How do we react when a prominent British architect condemns in the mass media the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren, while applauding the achievements of Sir Denys Lasdun, architect of the graceless London National Theater? The normally constituted individual thinks, 'There must be profound reasons for saying such a thing even if I don't get it,' and indeed many modernist artists and critics in all modesty claim to be so far ahead in their thinking that it will take the non-expert decades of effort and patience before gaining access to the arcane.

Once art and criticism move away from the rational, the aesthetical, the logical, i.e., the self-evident and verifiable proposition onto a plane of the hermetic and unprovable, then anything, any statement, becomes 'authoritative' as long as it is repeated in speech and print.

Contrary to the 'culturally correct wisdom' civilized people don't have to be specially educated to like good architecture; they have however to be brainwashed in order to grow a liking to architectural products they would otherwise despise. Historical cities and buildings, and traditional aesthetics are endearing to people generally, not because of 'history'—'culture'—'memory' but simply for their self-evidently superior quality, their beauty, efficiency, and practicality. Civilized human intelligence is generally seduced and convinced by objects that are at once useful and aesthetic, by the harmony of shapes, common construction methods, and compositions without any explanation and justification.

Jan Crawford Greenburg

2010-05-27T03:44:00.001-07:00

Supreme Conflict

In their session Monday morning, Gray and Thornburgh found Souter extraordinarily congenial, although they did worry that he had no life-defining cases, when he'd taken an unpopular stand and weathered the storm. Luttig was especially troubled and took the strongest stand against Souter of anyone in the administration. Souter simply did not have a sufficient record for the nomination. 'I cannot tell you who he will be as a Supreme Court justice,' Luttig told Thornburgh and Gray. 'On federal law, there's nothing. We're drawing the most specific inferences based on the most pedestrian state cases possible.'

But in the White House, Sununu was ready to make his case with Bush. when he nominated Souter to the state supreme court, he was looking for 'someone who would be a strict constructionist, consistent with basic conservative attitudes,' Sununu told Bush. 'I'm sure he would do the same thing when he encountered federal questions.' 'What he says and does is what he is. No pretense, no surprises.'

Sununu's characterization of Souter more accurately described Jones, a favorite of conservatives. She had been general counsel of the Texas Republican Party before becoming a judge, and she had a well-established track record after only five years as a federal judge. But she didn't have a forceful advocate to match Sununu.

After their meetings in the Justice Department, Souter and Jones went to the White House. Souter met with Bush in the residence early that afternoon for about forty-five minutes, talking about his judicial approach and general view of the court system.

Bush had talked earlier in the day to Jones about many of the same things, and he found himself liking her better than Souter. He could understand her views on the law. Where Souter was obtuse and indirect, Jones had been more straightforward and easier to understand. But Jones was young and almost brittle in appearance. She was just forty-one, and her slight frame made her appear even more youthful. And as a University of Texas Law School graduate, she lacked the Ivy League credentials—Harvard and Harvard Law—that lawyers in the White House counsel's office instinctively valued. Souter, the product of elite northeastern private schools, was seen as more scholarly. 'Brilliant,' the advisers all pronounced.

As Sununu was pushing for Souter, Gray and Thornburgh were worrying about Jones and how she'd handle the intense pressure of a Judiciary Committee hearing. Her conservative credentials would also mean more of a fight, and Bush didn't want that-even though he could have won it: Jones's nomination would have put southern Democrats in the impossible position of voting against a bright law-and-order woman judge at a time when the Supreme Court did not have one justice from the South.

For an hour, Bush sat alone with a yellow legal pad, making a list of pros and cons. The reclusive New Hampshire judge, cast as the more scholarly of the two, seemed more suited to have the title of justice. He was the kind of man who would devote his life to the Supreme Court.

At 4:15 p.m, Bush asked Souter into his private office, just next to the Oval Office, and formally offered him the job. Less than an hour later, Bush stood at the lectern in the White House briefing room and introduced the obscure judge to the Washington press corps. Souter stood quietly at his side with his arms crossed. He looked slightly stunned as reporters fired questions at Bush about abortion and whether Roe v. Wade was history.

Bush was pleased that reporters were surprised by how quickly he made the nomination. Advisers immediately characterized it as the mark of a forceful leader. Vice President Dan Quayle, who earlier in the day had argued that Jones was a better choice, told the College Republican National committee later in the week that the nomination 'is just the latest example of [Bush's] decisive executive style.' But the description of Souter as a brilliant legal scholar and deserving replacement for his friend Bill Brennan was too much for Thurgood Marshall. Three days later, Justice Marshall derisively told Sam Donaldson of ABC News that neither he nor Brennan had ever heard of Souter—even though Brennan was responsible for overseeing matters on Souter's court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. He said he 'didn't have the slightest idea' why Bush had nominated him. 'I don't understand what he is doing,' Marshall groused of Bush. 'I don't understand it.'

Edwin West

2010-05-27T03:43:00.001-07:00

Education and the Industrial Revolution

Even his figures conceded that three-quarters of all children were already in school. And Forster himself would have been the first to stress to a twentieth-century audience that his Act of 1870 was intended primarily not to create education from scratch but simply to augment it. As he told Parliament, the object was to complete the existing voluntary system by filling up the gaps. His ideal was an heterogeneous national system.

Today, a century later, the situation is reversed. State schools provide most of the education whilst private provision fills the gaps. How do we cxplain the rapidity of the transformation? One answer lies in the type of administrative machinery that Forster set up, a machinery which seems to have gathered its own momentum and to have developed far beyond his original aspirations. Forster intended simply that the Government should make strict enquiries into educational needs in each area and only set up school boards in those areas where a significant deficiency was proved.

As it happened many officials were often over-ambitious in their reports of these needs. Gladstone himself could not stop them. He protested in 1873 that four-fifths of the children in his own constituency were already provided for and that for the remainder further provision in three additional infant schools was being organized. Why set up a school board, he protested, which in comparison with voluntary arrangements already being made was of necessity cumbrous and costly?

At a time of rising population, the question soon arose on who should provide the schooling for the net increase in children, the new school boards or the voluntary system? Soon alter 1870 the Education Department (not Parliament) took upon itself to establish the rule that where school boards existed, however small, they had the first right to supply the new deficiency. Even Forster, the author of the 1870 Act, could not stop this administrative horse from galloping. He protested, at a meeting in 1878, that those who ought to decide on new schools were those who were willing to build them. The Education Department, Forster proclaimed: 'would find that they had engaged in a most obnoxious business which they could only transact with odium if they tried to take upon themselves to decide whether any fresh call was necessary or not.' But now out of office Forster was powerless. New board schools appeared with increasing momentum throughout the country. Where excess board school capacity was created, the boards were able to reduce their fees and to drive out many private establishments. Many private schools indeed were forced into take-overs by the board school system and swelled the number of board schools that the 1870 Act was subsequently claimed to have 'created.'

Anthony Trollope

2010-05-27T03:27:00.000-07:00

Australia and New Zealand

She was a good-looking, strong woman, of excellent temper, who could do anything she put her hand to, from hairdressing and confectionery up to making butter and brewing beer. I saw her six months afterwards, 'quite the lady,' but ready for any kind of work that might come in her way. When I think of her, I feel that no woman of that kind ought as regards herself, to stay in England if she can take herself or get herself taken to the colonies. I mention our cook because her assistance certainly tended very greatly to our increased comfort. The viands provided were mutton, bread, vegetables, and tea. Potatoes were purchased as an ordinary part of the station stores, and the opossums had left us lettuce, tomatoes, and a few cabbages. Dinner was always dignified with soup and salad, which must not, however, be regarded as being within the ordinary bush dietary. In other respects the meals are all alike. There was mutton in every shape, and there was always tea.

Tea at a squatter's table—at the table of a squatter who has not yet advanced himself to a man-cook or butler and a two-storied house—is absolutely indispensable. At this squatter's table there was colonial wine and there was brandy, produced chiefly to supply my wants; but there was always tea. The young men when they came in, hot and fagged with their day's work, would take a glass of brandy and water standing, as a working man with us takes his glass of beer at a bar. But when they sat down with their dinner before them, the tea-cup did for them what the wine-glass does for us. The practice is so invariable that any shepherd whose hut you may visit will show his courtesy by asking you to take a pannikin of tea. In supplying stores to men, tea and sugar, four and meat, are the four things which are included as matters of course. The tea is always bought by the chest, and was sold by the merchant at the rate of ls. 6d. a pound. There was but one class of tea at the station, which I found to be preferable to very much that I am called upon to drink in England.

The recreations of the evening consisted chiefly of tobacco on the verandah. I did endeavour to institute a whist table, but I found that my friends, who were wonderfully good in regard to the age and points of a sheep, and who could tell to the fraction of a penny what the wool of each was worth by the pound, never could be got to remember the highest card of the suit. I should not have minded that had they not so manifestly despised me for regarding such knowledge as important. They were right, no doubt, as the points of a sheep are of more importance than the pips of a card, and the human mind will hardly admit of the two together. Whist is a jealous mistress; and so is a sheep-station.

I have been at very many bush houses-at over thirty different stations in the different colonies—but at not one, as I think, in which I have not found a fair provision of books. It is universally recognized among squatters that a man who settles down in the bush without books is preparing for himself a miserable future life. That the books are always used when they are there I will not say. That they are used less frequently than they should be used I do not doubt. When men come in from physical work, hungry, tired—with the feeling that they have earned an hour or two of ease by many hours of labour—they are apt to claim the right to allow their minds to rest as well as their limbs. Who does not know how very much this is the case at home, even among young men and women in our towns, who cannot plead the same excuse of real bodily fatigue? That it should be so is a pity of pities—not on the score chiefly of information lost or of ignorance perpetuated, but because the power of doing that which should be the one recreation and great solace of our declining years perishes from desuetude, and cannot be renewed when age has come upon us. But I think that this folly is hardly more general in the Australian bush than in English cities, There are books to be read, and the young squatter, when the evening comes upon him, has no other recreation to entice him. He has no club, no billiard tables, no public-house which he can frequent. Balls and festivities are very rare. He probably marries early, and lives the life of a young patriarch, lord of everything around him, and master of every man he meets on his day's ride. Of course there are many who have risen to this from lower things, who have become squatters without any early education, who have been butchers, drovers, or perhaps shepherds themselves. That they should not be acquainted with books is a matter of course. They have lacked the practice in youth of which I have just spoken. But among those who have had the advantage of early nurture, and have been taught to handle books familiarly when young, I think that reading is at least as customary as it is with young men in London. The authors I found most popular were certainly Shakespeare, Dickens, and Macaulay. I would back the chance of finding Macaulay's Essays at a station against that of any book in the language except Shakespeare. To have a Shakespeare is a point of honour with every man who owns a book at all—whether he reads it or leaves it unread.

Herbert Spencer

2010-05-27T00:55:00.000-07:00

The Americans

Every one knows that to be a successful warrior was the highest aim among all ancient peoples of note, as it is still among many barbarous peoples. When we remember that in the Norseman's heaven the time was to be passed in daily battles, with magical healing of wounds, we see how deeply rooted may become the conception that fighting is man's proper business, and that industry is fit only for slaves and people of low degree. That is to say, when the chronic struggles of races necessitate perpetual wars, there is evolved an ideal of life adapted to the requirements. We have changed all that in modern civilized societies; especially in England, and still more in America. With the decline of militant activity, and the growth of industrial activity, the occupations once disgraceful have become honourable. The duty to work has taken the place of the duty to fight; and in the one case, as in the other, the ideal of life has become so well established that scarcely any dream of questioning it. Practically, business has been substituted for war as the purpose of existence.

Is this modern ideal to survive throughout the future? I think not. While all other things undergo continuous change, it is impossible that ideals should remain fixed. The ancient ideal was appropriate to the ages of conquest by man over man, and spread of the strongest races. The modern ideal is appropriate to ages in which conquest of the earth and subjection of the powers of Nature to human use, is the predominant need. But hereafter, when both these ends have in the main been achieved, the ideal formed will probably differ considerably from the present one. May we not foresee the nature of the difference? I think we may. Some twenty years ago, a good friend of mine, and a good friend of yours too, though you never saw him, John Stuart Mill, delivered at St. Andrews an inaugural address on the occasion of his appointment to the Lord Rectorship. It contained much to be admired, as did all he wrote. There ran through it, however, the tacit assumption that life is for learning and working. I felt at the time that I should have liked to take up the opposite thesis. I should have liked to contend that life is not for learning, nor is life for working, but learning and working are for life. The primary use of knowledge is for such guidance of conduct under all circumstances as shall make living complete. All other uses of knowledge are secondary. It scarcely needs saying that the primary use of work is that of supplying the materials and aids to living completely; and that any other uses of work are secondary. But in men's conceptions the secondary has in great measure usurped the place of the primary. The apostle of culture as it is commonly conceived, Mr. Matthew Arnold, makes little or no reference to the fact that the first use of knowledge is the right ordering of all actions; and Mr. Carlyle, who is a good exponent of current ideas about work, insists on its virtues for quite other reasons than that it achieves sustentation. We may trace everywhere in human affairs a tendency to transform the means into the end. All see that the miser does this when, making the accumulation of money his sole satisfaction, he forgets that money is of value only to purchase satisfactions. But it is less commonly seen that the like is true of the work by which the money is accumulated—that industry too, bodily or mental, is but a means; and that it is as irrational to pursue it to the exclusion of that complete living it subserves, as it is for the miser to accumulate money and make no use of it. Hereafter, when this age of active material progress has yielded mankind its benefits, there will, I think, come a better adjustment of labour and enjoyment. Among reasons for thinking this, there is the reason that the process of evolution throughout the organic world at large, brings an increasing surplus of energies that are not absorbed in fulfilling material needs, and points to a still larger surplus for the humanity of the future. And there are other reasons, which I must pass over. In brief, I may say that we have had somewhat too much of 'the gospel of work.' It is time to preach the gospel of relaxation.

Stanley Wells

2010-05-21T18:56:00.001-07:00

Shakespeare For All Time

Shakespeare's fools are mostly wise; they hover on the edges of the play's action, enabled by their classlessness to move easily between high and low characters, glancing obliquely in anecdote, jest, and song at the follies of their social betters: 'He uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit,' says the Duke in As You Like It of Touchstone, whose name, meaning a piece of stone used to test the quality of gold or silver alloys, hints at his function.

Entertainers within the play, the fools entertain the audience too, both directly in songs and comic set pieces such as Touchstone's disquisition on the lie (5.4.67-101) and indirectly in a complex interplay of significances perceived by the audience but not necessarily apparent to the characters for whom they are intended. Paradoxes associated with wisdom, or wit, and folly, the possibility that a 'wise' man such as Malvolio in Twelfth Night may be more truly foolish than the fool Feste or even the drunken Sir Toby Belch, and that fools may exhibit their own kind of wisdom, recur endlessly in Shakespeare's plays. Paradoxically wiser than those around them, fools live on a threshold of communication which can induce a strong sense of melancholy. Touchstone is Shakespeare's most robust fool, with something of the clown about him; more subtle and more characteristic is Feste, who entertains the lovesick Orsino with the intense melancholy of a song which, as Orsino says, 'dallies with the innocence of love,/Like the old age':

Come away, come away death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid.
Fie away, fie away breath,
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O prepare it.
My part of death no one so true
Did share it.

Not a flower, not a flower sweet
On my black coffin let there be strewn,
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown.
A thousand thousand sighs to save,
Lay me O where
Sad true lover never find my grave,
To weep there. (Twelfth Night, 2.4.50-65)

Actors have suggested that the song's extremity of lovesickness obliquely mocks Orsino's, but if there is an element of send-up here, it is virtually submerged in sympathy. And no one could be more sympathetic than the apotheosis of Shakespeare's use of the character type, the Fool of King Lear, whose very namelessness assists the sense of a disembodied intelligence existing purely for the sake of his master (like Ariel in The Tempest). Lear's Fool accompanies him into the storm with selfless loyalty—'But I will tarry, the fool will stay,/And let the wise man fly'—and goes to bed in the noontide of his life when Lear's folly burns away in madness.

As Shakespeare sought narratives which he could turn into drama he must have had an eye open for episodes that he could develop into extended stretches of theatrically effective action. Some such scenes are relatively simple in structure—the overhearing scene (4.3) in Love's Labour's Lost, in which each of the lords reveals that he has broken his vow by succumbing to love, succeeds by the brilliant neatness of its design, the balcony scene (2.1) in Romeo and Juliet is for most of its length a duet, and Lady Macbeth's sleep-walking (5.1) is little more than an interrupted soliloquy. But it is easy to underestimate the amount of imagination, intellectual skill, and sheer practical stage craft that went into the fashioning of such ambitious and extended scenes as the trial of Shylock (4.1) in Tbe Merchant of Venice, the forum scene (3.2) in Julius Caesar, the play scene (3.2) in Hamlet, the opening scene of King Lear, the multi-perspectived overhearing scene (5.1) in Troilus and Cressida, the banquet scene (3.4) in Macbeth, and the amazingly complex denouement (5.6) of Cymbeline, in which revelation succeeds revelation with dizzying virtuosity. The playwright had not only to imagine himself into the minds of the characters in these situations, and to write their speeches, he had also to shape and plot the scenes with concern for dramatic pace and rhythm, for the practical resources of his stage, and in such a way that his actors had time to make their entrances, and to change costume when necessary, and that they never needed to be in two places at once.

Before Shakespeare sat down to write he had to do a lot of preparatory work. More for some plays than for others. A few give the impression of being composed on the wing. There are signs in the first printing of Much Ado About Nothing brilliant though it is, that Shakespeare made it up as he went along—for instance, at one point the text as first printed reads 'Enter tbe Prince, Hero, Leonato, John and Borachio, and Conrad' even though only Don Pedro (who was called Don Peter at the start of the play) takes part in the following dialogue with Benedick, who is already on stage. There is a legend that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written hastily to please Queen Elizabeth by showing Falstaff in love. Literary critics have complained that the Falstaff of this play is a pale shadow of his other self and the play notably includes a far higher proportion of prose over verse than any other. But the plotting is dextrous and the dialogue lively; audiences rarely complain.

Most of Shakespeare's plays, however, bear witness to a massive amount of what Dante Gabriel Rossetti called 'fundamental brainwork.' Romeo and Juliet, though greatly valued for its lyricism, is architectonic in layout and design, its action punctuated by the three appearances of the Prince, always as an authority figure—first as he stills the brawl between the followers of Montague and Capulet, next at the climax of the second violent episode, culminatiig in the death of Mercutio, and finally as he enters to preside over the investigation into the lovers' deaths and to apportion responsibility for them. The play's characters are carefully conceived to complement and contrast with one another, the preparations for the Capulets' ball at which Romeo first sees Juliet are ironicaliy echoed by those for her marriage to Paris, and each of the play's three love duets—one in the evening, at the ball, the second at night, in the garden, and the third at dawn as the lovers, now married, prepare to part—is interrupted by calls from the Nurse.

Mark Mazower

2010-04-29T19:42:00.001-07:00

Dark Continent

When foreign governments were approached for support, their reactions depended upon the prospects for German victory the nature of local attitudes towards the Jews and the opportunity costs of resistance. They tended to be particularly cooperative in handing over Jewish refugees and other non-nationals, but they were usually more reluctant to allow their own fellow-citizens to be deported. Some governments, notably the French, the Slovak and the Croat, were at least as enthusiastic in their anti-Semitism as the Germans and responded warmly to the chance of removing their Jewish population 'to the east.' In Romania and later Hungary where extreme anti-Semitic movements briefly held power, the bloody consequences shocked the Germans themselves. Even where the locals dragged their heels, as in Greece or the Netherlands, cooperation among the various German authorities often ensured that a high proportion of the local Jewish population was deported. Virtually none emulated the Danes in helping most Jews to escape, though the Italians—for their own reasons—did all they could to obstruct the Final Solution in the areas under their control. And as for neutral Sweden and Switzerland, recent revelations indicate their willingness to turn Nazi racial policy to their own advantage.

The British and American governments, for their part, suffered from no lack of information. Churchill was receiving Ultra decrypts of the Einsatzgruppen reports from the East, which summarized the killing totals. Several individuals, including Jan Karski, an astonishingly brave Polish emissary emerged from occupied Europe to brief London and Washington with eyewitness accounts of the ghettos and even the death camps themselves. But apart from some vague public warnings to the Germans, little was done, and the chance to bomb the camps was passed over. Whether this inaction stemmed from anti-Semitism, from inability to imagine was what taking place, or from the fact simply that the Final Solution was never a central concern of the Allied war effort remains a matter of controversy.

Popular opinion inside occupied Europe is also difficult to gauge. Anti-Semitism was a continent-wide phenomenon with a long history of course, and in some areas explains an attitude of detachment and even enthusiasm for the Jews' plight. Nor should it be forgotten that genocide always offers spectacular opportunities for enrichment—abandoned factories, shops and properties, furniture and clothes—with which popular satisfaction may be purchased by the occupying power. After 1940, Eichmann extended the 'Vienna model' of 'Aryanization' of Jewish property to Amsterdam, Paris, Salonika and Europe's other major cities, while Rosenberg's agents alone plundered the equivalent of 674 trainloads of household goods in western Europe. Seventy-two trainloads of gold from the teeth of Auschwitz victims were sent to Berlin. If most of this went into German homes or Swiss bank vaults, a considerable sum lined the pockets of unscrupulous collaborators, informers and agents of every nationality. Yet it must be said that approval of the Final Solution was not a common phenomenon. In response to the horrors of occupation, most people living under Nazi control had retreated into a private world and tried to ignore everything that did not directly concern them. With traditional moral norms apparently thrown to the wind, the unusual cruelty of the Germans towards the Jews created a more general alarm among non-Jews.

What cannot escape our attention are German reactions—or the lack of them. There was no public protest inside the Reich to match the furore over the euthanasia campaign. Most Germans appear to have accepted that the Jews were no longer part of their community. Ordinary middle-aged policemen took part in mass executions; university professors, lawyers and doctors commanded the Einsatzgruppen. They did not do so out of fear: there is no recorded instance of a refusal to shoot innocent civilians being punished by death. Rather, the letters of concentration camp guards and death-squad killers reveal what ordinary individuals living in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century were capable of doing under the influence of a murderous ideology. Even in the midst of killing, private concerns about girlfriends, wives or children continued to worry them.

When SS-Untersturmfuhrer Max Taubner was tried by the SS and Police Supreme Court in Munich in May 1943 for the unauthorized shooting of Jews in the Ukraine, the court offered a revealing insight into the moral values of the Third Reich. Its judgment stressed that killing Jews was not in itself a crime: 'The Jews have to be exterminated and none of the Jews that were killed is any great loss.' In the court's eyes, Taubner's offence lay rather in killing them cruelly and allowing /his men to act with such vicious brutality that they conducted themselves under his command like a savage horde.' Even though he had acted out of 'a true hatred for the Jews' rather than 'sadism,' he had revealed an 'inferior' character and a 'high degree of mental brutalization.' 'The conduct of the accused,' ran the verdict, 'is unworthy of an honourable and decent German man.'

A similar acceptance of racially motivated killing was evident inside the Reich. The segregation of forced labourers and POW workers, enforced by the Gestapo, became accepted as a normal state of affairs. Denunciations of foreign workers were commonplace. The public hanging or flogging of workers who formed sexual relationships with German citizens seem to have occasioned little protest, as did the restrictions imposed by the police on their movements and activities: Polish workers were, for example, forbidden to use bicycles or to attend church. Nazi views on the inferiority of 'East workers' seem to have been commonly accepted. The inhabitants of Mauthausen grew used to seeing camp inmates shuffling through their streets and the casual brutality of their SS guards. When several hundred Russian POWs managed to escape from the camp, on 2 February 1945, only two local families are recorded as having offered a hiding-place and shelter. Most of the escapees were quickly rounded up or shot like 'rabbits' by local farmers, excited Hider Youth teenagers and towns-people eager to participate in a terrifying bloodletting.

Thomas Asbridge

2010-04-29T19:29:00.001-07:00

The First Crusade

By 1 April local Muslim powers were practically fighting for the opportunity to offer the most generous terms in return for peace and safety:

The emir of Tripoli offered us 15,000 gold pieces of Saracen money plus horses, she mules, many garments' and even more such rewards in succeeding years. In addition the lord of Jabala, fearful of another siege, sent our leaders tribute of 5,000 gold pieces, horses, she mules, and an abundant supply of wine. Now we were well provisioned because many gifis from castles and cities other than Jabala were sent to us.

With so much wealth pouring in, it was decided to further refine the system governing the distribution of booty by setting up a special fund which saw one-tenth of all spoils put into a communal kitty. Even though only a quarter of this was eventually dispersed among the 'poor and infirm,' it still made a marked difference to their standard of living. As his lands back in Europe lay on the border with Iberia, Raymond of Toulouse would have been aware that for much of the eleventh century the Christians of northern Spain had grown rich on the tribute extracted from their Muslim neighbours to the south in what amounted to little more than protection racketeering. As time went on this system had become so profitable that the Christian kings of Leon-Castile had actually become reluctant to overthrow their ever-weakening Islamic 'enemies' for fear of losing valuable revenue.

A similar reluctance seems to have taken hold of Raymond in the latter stages of Arqa's investment. If the town fell he would either have to follow up his threats and assault Tripoli itself or move on south, but so long as the siege continued and the local Muslim world remained cowed, he could reap a rich harvest. Unfortunately for Raymond, cracks soon started to appear in this comfortable arrangement. A number of lesser crusade figures became increasingly greedy and each, hoping to establish his own tribute network, 'dispatched messengers with letters to Saracen cities stating that he was the lord of the crusaders.' The emir of Tripoli also started to wonder why he was paying so much money to protect himself from the Franks when they were not even able to capture Arqa. The crusaders countered the first signs of this questioning with a brutal raid against Tripoli, of which Raymond of Aguilers happily reported: '[Afterwards] the land stank of Muslim blood, and the aqueduct [which ran into the city] was choked with their corpses. It was a delightful sight as its swirling waters tumbled the headless bodies of nobles and rabble into Tripoli.' For the time being a rebellion had been averted, but the precarious balance between threat and exploitation could not remain in place for ever.

In this context, two events sealed the fate of Raymond of Toulouse and the siege of Arqa. Ever since Peter Bartholomew had 'discovered' the relic of the Holy Lance of Antioch, in June 1098, and Raymond had endorsed his story the countt status and prestige had grown alongside that of the visionary. With Adhemar of Le Puy's death the Provencals had begun promoting Peter as the expedition's new, popular spiritual leader. Given Peter's unpredictability, Raymond's patronage of him was always going to be as risky as it was empowering, but as the months progressed Peter's visions and pronouncements became ever more fantastical.

This reached a peak after 5 April 1099 when Peter Bartholomew came forward claiming to have witnessed a new vision of Christ, St Peter and St Andrew. The message he bore to the crusaders was utterly extraordinary. According to his story, the Lord had proclaimed the existence of many sinners among the crusading ranks and instructed Peter to root them out in the following manner: Raymond of Toulouse was to call forth the entire army and have them 'line up as if for battle or for a siege.' Peter would then 'miraculously' find the crusaders arrayed in five ranks. The Latins in the first three ranks would be devoted followers of Christ, but the remainder were those polluted by sins ranging from pride to cowardice. Peter actually came forward saying that God had instructed him to oversee the immediate execution of any crusader found wanting in this bizarre selection process.

Not surprisingly, there was an almighty uproar once Peter's story had been broadcast throughout the army. Antagonisms, resentments and jealousies towards the upstart prophet that had been held in check by his widespread popularity now bubbled to the surface. Outside the Provencal contingent, crusaders may have harboured nagging doubts about the authenticity of Peter's revelations, but in the tide of zealous veneration for the Holy Lance that followed the seemingly miraculous victory over Kerbogha they had thought better of openly challenging the visionary. Peter's claims after 5 April were so outlandish, his recommendations so extreme, that for many his spell was broken. At last doubts were openly expressed, and their mouthpiece was Arnulf of Chocques, chaplain to Robert of Normandy. Already 'a respected man because of his erudition,' Arnulf was unswervingly ambitious and must have realised that by discrediting Peter Bartholomew he himself might be lifted to prominence. He publicly challenged the validity of Peter's visions and, by association, the authenticity of the Holy Lance. Bartholomew's bluff had been called, but even in the face of these accusations he refused to back down, offering instead to prove his integrity through an ordeal.

Ordeals played an important if infrequent role in medieval systems of justice. Our popular modern perception—that brutal trials by fire or water were the mainstay of the legal system during the Middle Ages—is far from the truth. In reality, ordeals were used only as a last resort and, in particular, when an individual's moral character could not be vouched for within society. In such cases, where an oath could
not be busted, the accused might undergo some form of trial, usually under the supervision of the clergy. This might involve holding on to a red-hot iron or placing one's hand in a cauldron of boiling water. Again, contrary to modern misconceptions, it was not generally expected that the defendant would emerge totally unscathed even if innocent. Instead, the wounds of the accused would be bound and inspected some days later, with any sign of infection being taken to indicate guilt.

By April 1099 Peter Bartholomew must himself have been totally convinced of the Holy Lance's authenticity and his own role as God's messenger, because he chose to undergo a particularly harsh and hazardous trial by fire, reportedly saying: 'I not only wish, but I beg that you set ablaze a fire, and I shall take the ordeal of fire with the Holy Lance in my hands; and if it is really the Lord's Lance, I shall emerge unsinged. But if it is a false Lance, I shall be consumed by fire.'

Peter underwent four days of fasting to purify his soul before the test. Then on Good Friday, before a massive crowd of crusaders, dressed in a simple tunic and bearing the relic of the Holy Lance, he willingly walked into an inferno—blazing 'olive branches stacked in two piles, four feet in height, about one foot apart and thirteen feet in length.' Contemporary authors provide very different accounts of what happened to Peter in those flames. Raymond of Aguilers, an eyewitness, but also a steadfast champion of the Holy Lance and its discoverer, believed that he emerged unscathed:

Peter walked through the fire, and his tunic and the Holy Lance which was wrapped in the most exquisite cloth, were left unsinged. As he emerged Peter waved to the crowd, raised the Lance, and screamed out, 'God help us.' Whereupon the crowd seized him, seized him I say, and pulled him along the ground. Almost everyone from the mob pushed and shoved, thinking Peter was nearby and hoping to touch him or snatch a piece of his clothing. The mob made three or four gashes on his legs in the tussle, and cracked his backbone. We think that Peter would have died there if Raymond Pilet, a renowned and courageous knight, had not with the aid of numerous comrades charged the milling mob, and at the risk of death snatched him from them. But we cannot write more because of our anxiety and distress.

It is not inconceivable that Peter was trapped and injured by a hysterical riot—charismatic spiritual figures were often mobbed by ecstatic crowds in the Middle Ages. Indeed, in the early thirteenth century a frail and sickly St Francis of Assisi made his last journey in the company of a bodyguard, because it was feared that if he died on the road his body would otherwise be ripped apart by relic hunters. Even so, Raymond of Aguilers admitted that Peter suffered some 'trivial burns on his legs' during the trial.

The northern French crusade chronicler Fulcher of Chartres, who was not present at Arqa, was much more sceptical:

The finder of the Lance quickly ran through the midst of the burning pile to prove his honesty, as he had requested. when the man passed through the flames and emerged, they saw that he was guilty, for his skin was burned and they knew that within he was mortally hurt. This was demonstrated by the outcome, for on the twelfth day he died, seared by the guilt of his conscience.

However they were inflicted, there was no escaping the fact that within two weeks Peter Bartholomew died from the injuries received on the day of his ordeal. His Provencal supporters saw to it that he was buried on the site of his trial, but for most crusaders his reputation had been irredeemably tarnished. The true efficacy of the Holy Lance was now doubted, its cult widely criticised, even ridiculed.

At the same time, grievous damage was done to Raymond of Toulouse's reputation. Having ridden on the back of the Lance's cult, he now suffered a severe reversal at its refutation. Then, just as his claim to lead the crusade was faltering, a second dilemma emerged. Around 10 April ambassadors from the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus arrived at Arqa. They had come to protest loudly Bohemond's retention of Antioch and the contravention of the oaths given at Constantinople. Offering 'large sums of gold and silver' as an enticement, they instructed the crusaders to wait for Alexius himself to arrive on 24 June, 'so that he could journey with them to Jerusalem.'

This news prompted the emergence of a definite rift within the expedition. Raymond, who had been pursuing a policy of d6tente with the Greeks, now argued that Alexius' arrival would only strengthen the crusaders' chances of reaching Jerusalem. While they waited the Franks could concentrate on finally overcoming Arqa and thus avoid a harmful blow to their martial reputation. The majority, however, distrusted the emperor's intentions or, indeed, doubted whether he would ever actually make the journey to Arqa. By mid-April a fully fledged stalemate had been reached, with neither side willing to budge. The dispute became so heated that the clergy declared a period of fasting, prayers and alms-giving in the hope that God would then return peace to the expedition.

Raymond of Toulouse was in a desperate fix. He still enjoyed considerable support, but even some Provencal crusaders were beginning to lose faith. Around this time, Tancred, whose support Raymond had earlier bought with the handsome gift of '5,000 solidi and two thoroughbred Arabian horses,' broke ranks with the count and transfened his allegiance to Godfrey of Bouillon. Sensing that the aura that had surrounded the Holy Lance was now shattered, Raymond made a calculated decision: no longer able to rely upon the power gained from association with one relic cult, he cynically resolved to 'create' another. In order to replace the totemistic energy of the Lance, Raymond looked once again to appropriate the memory of Adhdmar of Le Puy. In life the bishop had carried a relic of the True Cross—a small piece of wood believed to have been part of the cross upon which Christ was crucified—and on his death this had found its way to the port of Latakia. Raymond now dispatched Adhemar's brother, William Hugh of Monteil, on an urgent mission to Latakia to recover the relic. Raymond's plan was not bluntly to forsake the Holy Lance, but rather initially to augment and then gradually replace its cult with that of Adhemar's cross. This scheme was not wholly successful, for when William Hugh duly returned with the relic in hand Raymond's own entourage became so imbued with crusading zeal that they too wanted only to make an immediate departure for Jerusalem.

Ultimately, Raymond manoeuvred himself into a corner. He allowed his capability as a leader to be too closely equated with success at Arqa. As the crusaders' siege of the town foundered, the double blows of Peter Bartholomew's death and the widespread unpopularity of Raymond's pro-Byzantine stance left the count reeling. With even his own men demanding a resumption of the march south, he was forced to concede. In the first week of May, Raymond finally agreed to leave Arqa unconquered and continue the journey to Jerusalem.

As the march began, the crusaders were pleasantly surprised to find that the southern Levantine climate affected seasonal change. One writer observed: 'We were eating spring beans in the middle of March and corn in the middle of April.' With an earlier harvest they hoped to find plentiful supplies on their journey through Palestine. Once the decision was reached, the siege of Arqa was promptly abandoned. The crusaders passed through Tripoli in peace and by 16 May they were at last set on the road to Jerusalem.

The pilgrimage to the Holy City was now in its final stage, but the crusade would never again be dominated by Raymond of Toulouse. The count had, for a time, held sway over the expedition, even coming close to standing as its unchallenged leader, but the debacle at Arqa was a watershed in his career. From now on he would have to share power and prestige with his fellow princes.

Samuel Eliot Morison

2010-04-23T21:44:00.000-07:00

Admiral of the Ocean Sea

One day was spent exploring the Rio Gibara in a boat. Martin Alonso Pinzon brought in specimens of the native creole pepper, and something he thought to be cinnamon, which raised hopes of a lucrative trade in spicery. Columbus had his first taste of sweet potatoes—or were they yams?—with 'the flavor of chestnuts' and of cultivated American beans; he saw the wild cotton growing, with flowers and open bolls on the same bush. The boatswain of Nina brought in resin from the gumbo-limbo, which the Admiral thought he recognized as the mastic he had seen in Chios on one of his early voyages. Some Indians 'yessed' the Spaniards when they inquired about the one-eyed and dog-headed men of Sir John Mandeville; others accurately pointed eastward toward Haiti when asked where gold came from.

Until the last day of his stay, Columbus kept the confidence of the natives, because he maintained good discipline among his men, and the natives had no gold to tempt their cupidity. There must have been considerable sporting between the seamen and the Indian girls, for the habits of the Tainos were completely promiscuous. But Columbus says nothing of that, since his Journal was intended for the eyes of a modest queen. Instead, he dwells on the Indians' docility and imitativeness; when they heard their visitors saying the Ave Maria and singing Salve Regina at sundown they tried to join in, and readily imitated the sign of the cross. His own words about the natives of Puerto Gibara are directly quoted by Las Casas:

They are a people very guileless and unwarlike, all naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them. It is true that the women wear merely a piece of cotton big enough to cover their genitals but no more, and they are very handsome, not very black, less so than the Canary Islanders. I maintain, Most Serene Princes, that if they had access to devout religious persons knowing the language, they would all turn Christian, and so I hope in Our Lord that Your Highnesses will do something about it with much care, in order to turn to the Church so numerous a people, and to convert them, as you have destroyed those who would not confess the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And after your days (for we are all mortal) you will leave your realms in a very tranquil state, and free from heresy and wickedness, and will be well received before the eternal Creator, whom may it please to grant you long life and great increase of greater realms and lordships, and both will and disposition to increase the holy Christian religion, as hitherto you have done. Amen.

On the night of November 5 the embassy returned from Holguin with a most discouraging report. They had walked up the valley, past fields cultivated with sweet potatoes, beans and maize; they observed many kinds of birds, including the Hispaniola mockingbird that they took for a nightingale; but they had pricked the Grand Khan bubble. Instead of visiting the imperial court of Cathay where Luis de Torres expected to air his Arabic, they received a primitive welcome in a village of fifty palm-thatched huts and a few hundred inhabitants. They had been treated with great dignity, 'chaired' into the principal house, and seated on one of the carved seats or metates that Taino caciques used, well described by Ferdinand as 'made of one piece, in a strange shape, and almost like some animal which had short legs and arms and the tail, which is no less broad than the seat, lifted up for conveniency to lean against; with a head in front and the eyes and ears of gold. These seats are called duchi.' Rodrigo the mariner doubtless enjoyed it, but Torres felt humiliated in having to call upon the interpreter from Guanahani to make a speech to the men. After that was over the women and children were allowed in to see the 'men from Heaven,' whose hands and feet they adoringly kissed. They pressed their visitors to spend a week or two; but the Spaniards, seeing 'nothing that resembled a city,' returned next day, in company with the cacique and his son. These were entertained aboard one of the caravels, since Santa Maria was then high and dry.

If the embassy missed meeting the King of Kings, they nevertheless encountered a more pervasive sovereign, My Lady Nicotine. 'The two Christians met on the way many people who were going to their villages, women and men, with a firebrand in the hand, and herbs to drink the smoke thereof as they are accustomed.' The tobacco pipe of the North American Indians was unknown to the Tainos, who rolled cigars which (as in Cuba today) they called tobacos. Inserting one end in a nostril, they lit the other from a firebrand and inhaled the smoke twice or thrice, after which the cigar was handed to a friend or allowed to go out. When a party of Tainos went on a journey, as Rodrigo and Luis de Torres observed them, small boys were charged to keep one or more firebrands glowing in readiness for anyone who wanted a light; and by halting every hour or so for a good 'drag' all around, Indians were able to travel great distances. Las Casas, commenting on this passage some forty years later, says that the Spaniards of Hispaniola were then beginning to take up smoking, 'although I know not what taste or profit they find in it.' Apparently the bishop never got beyond his first cigar. Within a century of his writing this, the use of tobacco had spread throughout the Western World, to men and women alike, despite the opposition of kings and clerics. As a gift from the New World to the Old it proved far more valuable than gold.