Gratuitous linking: Dave destroys Bono

Bono is one of the most repellant public personalities that I have come across- the tax exile who asks other poorer people to give their money to charity- I could continue this argument but have done so in another place. Dave though destroys Bono's latest offering here- in an article whose justified bile is worth imbibing! I reccomend it!

Why the Economist works

There are two magazines that I regularly buy and read- the Economist and Private Eye. There are a selection of magazines- Prospect, the New Statesman, the Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books that I often buy or consider buying- but my two staples are the Economist and Private Eye. I'm telling you this because of an article in the Atlantic monthly about the success the Economist has had in growing in an era when news magazines in general have been in decline. In part that growth ressembles that of the Financial Times in the Uk- the only paper to see its circulation continue to rise- and it may be due to the extension of a market- professionals with degrees- that the expansion of higher education in the last quarter century has acheived. But the Economist's success is interesting because I think it points to something else- and that is what we demand of magazines and why we read them.

One of the most important things to remember about any publication is that almost noone reads the entire thing- unless you are stuck in a hotel room in Milton Keynes with nothing else to do (an experience that sadly I have had) or on a long coach journey between Oxford and Cambridge (ditto- that journey last four hours and takes you through every byway in southern England) you are likely to read those bits of a magazine that attract you. So for example to take my own reading habits, foreign news, economics, politics of a certain type and book reviews of historical and literary tomes attract me, reporting about technology, scandal and disaster does not: you may have a different set of preferences, it does not really matter, the point is that you like me and like every other individual on the planet have a set of preferences about what you want to read and what you want to ignore.

The virtue of a magazine like the Economist in this context then- and the same is true of Private Eye- is not so much the quality of its reporting and writing as the content. A set of varied short articles (none more than a page and a bit long) allows a wide variety of readers to find something that they like regularly in the magazine. Compare that to Prospect or the New Yorker- often in those magazines you will find intelligent and thoughtful articles but if you don't like all three of the three main features, there isn't much point in buying the magazine. If you don't like the Economist's leaders, you have the rest of the paper. The same is true of the Spectator and New Statesman. The writer in the Atlantic says that the Economist in this sense mirrors the web- I'm not so sure about that, the Economist is more authoritative than many blogs for example. What is interesting is that the success of the magazine with a wide range points to a strength and a weakness of the web.

The strength is obvious: it is the heterodoxy of the internet. If you want provocative rightwing comment, here is the Corner, if you want magisterial analysis of the middle East, turn to Juan Cole, etc. What the internet lacks and one of the reasons that sites like Daily Kos and Liberal Conspiracy which begin to provide this demonstrates, is the editor. The problem with the internet is navigation and the weakness of the blogosphere as a product is its impenetrability to those who do not know it already. I find it difficult even to find blogs which say interesting and important things in a thoughtful way. A magazine in a sense does not have that problem- which is why something like the Economist that combines editorship with variety is a winning package and why entrepreunerially the challenge on the internet is to combine the virtues of variety found on the blogosphere with guides and platforms which allow people to assess it and find quality.

Work and Blogging

I worked for the BBC back in the day as a researcher on a documentary about the civil war. One of the things that frustrated me about that documentary and historical documentaries in general was how bad it was and they are. For a person who actually is interested in history and knows a little about it, the average historical documentary doesn't really seem to give you a good understanding of the history that it talks about. I was voicing this complaint to a friend of mine working with me at the time when she turned around and made me see the whole business of documentary making in a different way, she told me that people watch documentaries after they come home from work and that they could not cope with a deep and complex picture of the world at that point but wanted something to relax to. I know what she meant. Having done a job now for days on end, it is not easy to come back and immediately keep working on intellectual matters- the mind like the body needs a rest.

I am not writing this because it just struck me for no reason, but because of a post that Ashok wrote about blogging. Ashok has two complaints about blogging- one is that most blogs are stupid and the other is that most blogs are anti-social. I don't want to argue with his suggestion that the internet is much less sociable than it might seem- I have some durable relationships through the net but not that many. But I want to suggest that what Ashok diagnoses as stupid solipsism on the net- and there is much of it (this blog is not immune!)- is caused by something and something that may be of interest to us when we think about the general cultural levels of the population at large. If you as many people do spend between 9 and 5 working, or 9 and 6 or 9 and 7, then you'll know that one of the main conditions of modern life is tiredness. Not necessarily physical tiredness but mental tiredness. Much of what people do on the blogosphere is actually displacement activity- its an activity for their spare time and whilst they want their blogs to be good, they don't want to feel the pressure of being excellent and they don't want necessarily to be Newton on their blog when they have to be Boyle at work.

Work is the subject of our lives and so you would expect the internet, which is the activity of spare time, not to be as intense or powerful as working life. That is one of the many reasons I'm sceptical about net revolutions- not that I don't think the net has power (Amazon and Daily Kos in different ways demonstrate that) but that I do not think either a great truth or a great political movement will emerge purely from the internet. My scepticism arises from my sense that people's lives take place more off the internet than on it- and lack the leisure at present to engage fully all the time with what they read online. Ultimately the problem here is not necessarily a lack of engagement but could be a lack of spare leisure to spend on hard analysis or political engagement.

In Cold Blood: Part 1

I'm reading In Cold Blood (Truman Capote's classic account of a group of murders committed at the Clutter Family farm in Kansas in 1959) at the moment- one of the interesting things that comes out of the book (as an immediate impression) is the way that in reality the value of the book stems from the fact that it is a summation of interviews. Capote skilfully interweaves the accounts of various people who were involved into a fictional narrative, composed out of actual interviews about actual events. What he does is perform a reconstruction through fiction of what his interviewees told him. There are real dangers in this approach in that obviously he mediates his evidence through his imagination- and there are dangers in that he does not take an impartial view of his own evidence. However it is worth saying that what he does do is provide a vivid account- which awakes the empathy of the reader. I'm not sure that this mode of writing- a fictional account of non-fictional events- is something that you can rely on purely to get the sense of an event- but it is an important view on an event. It allows us to recapture some of the emotion of the participants- who Capote got very close to- and it allows to understand what the case looked like to an interested and thoughtful observer. The fine writing probably does more to reawake the conservative world of the Holcombe congregation and the killers who came to destroy the lives of one of its leading members more than a number of dusty history books could: I have found in particular the account of the Clutters which forms the first part of the book more interesting than any of the rest. The Clutter family including Herb, the father, teetotal, godly and responsible, the psychologically enfeebled mother, the bright, pretty capable daughter and the physical son are captured wonderfully- and what Capote does is draw us into that world- so strange to him and to us- a world which is more interesting than that of the killers who came to so brutally interrupt it. This isn't rigourous history- but it is useful empathy- and that is a thing that every historian has to develop.

Great Books

The thesis that Great Books are the source of education is one that has a long historical pedigree: one particular facet of that debate is explored in a book reviewed in the city journal recently. But regardless of that article, it is a debate which is worth having. I have a problem with a great books approach- not because I think great books should not be read (the thesis that Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Mill, Nozick and the rest are wiser than the average citizen, average student, academic or dare I say it blogger is one that I do not object to at all) but because you cannot understand great books appropriately without reading them in context.

The arguments that I will make here are more fully developed by Quentin Skinner. Essentially you can view every book or argument as existing on its own- and also as existing within a context. Every book has a long context and a short context. Take Hobbes- his Leviathan is definitely based on a reading of Thucydides (he translated the Greek historian after all) and Aristotle, mentioned in the text. But Hobbes's Leviathan is also based, as Professor Skinner has discussed, on arguments going on at the same time between theorists like Francis Rous the younger and Anthony Ascham about the nature of political promises. You cannot understand Hobbes without understanding that he was deliberately responding to both kinds of debate. Even better take a text like Locke or one of Plato's dialogues, both of these are not merely implicitly aimed at contemporary debates, but explicitly. Locke's Treatises are directed against Sir Robert Filmer. Plato's characters in his dialogues are often contemporary philosophical figures: it would be stupid not to realise that Plato was in dialogue with those philosophers.

Context is important- both for understanding what a text was written for and to understand what the words within a text actually mean (even if a text is doing something with those words which attack the contemporary definitions- Hobbes and natural law is a great example). On the other hand, there is another principle we should not forget: we should not fence in great texts behind walls of obscurity. I have no problem with the term middle brow- and indeed the more people read these texts the better. That is because the texts often do something to the people who read them: Livy for instance is a text who I only know in isolation (I have read a smattering of other Roman sources) but it is one that is enriching my mind at the moment, provoking my historical instincts and giving me food for thought. Learning is hard- but we only stop the process by suggesting that there are two alternatives absolute knowledge (for which context is indispensible) and absolute ignorance: actually learning is a process as well as a destination and the process is personally important. If we recognise that then we can see that a great books approach is a good didactic tool- go out and read Cicero and Plato and Locke and Rousseau- but as well go deeper and read around, read the historians who have studied the context and the sources which are the context ultimately of the great books you read.

The Dumbest Generation?

Ashok always manages to provoke and challenge me- and a recent post on whether we are the dumbest generation ever has managed to do exactly that. You see in one sense when he describes what it is to be truly interested in intellectual subjects he is entirely right- it is the challenge of realising that you are ignorant and attempting to do something about that ignorance that is at the centre of any proper intellectual life. When I look at history and see the amount of subjects that Hobbes, Newton, Aristotle, Plato, Marie Curie and the rest got wrong, that does not put me in a position to exalt myself above them but rather humbles me: they all thought they were right, so do I but have I any more warrent to say I am than they did? The quest for understanding is a never ending one- and it is one that we all follow to the best of our abilities and with reference to our own interests. The key thing though is that that journey is one that we may never succeed in finishing. I remember once being told the story of a historian interviewed for a post at an English university who was asked 'you have always said your life is a pilgrimage where are you going?', to which the wise don replied 'Pilgrimage comes from peregrinatio (Latin: to go about), the point is not to arrive, the point is to travel'. I agree with him.

So where do I disagree with Ashok. Well its this. It is far too easy to go from the realisation that noone in the modern world knows everything- to the discovery that there are some who are not concerned with knowledge- to the idea that things have never been this bad. I'm not sure that is true. Simply empirically, there are more people who are literate today than there ever were in the past. There are more people with degrees than there ever were in the past. Ashok may reply- ah but are they thinking. The problem with that is that it is a highly subjective judgement- I do not know about the comparative rate of deep thought today and in the 17th Century (and if I don't know, I suspect Ashok doesn't either!) What I do know is that as I travel to work on the London tube every morning I see the normal awful tabloids and multicoloured books- but I also see people reading Henry James (Tuesday morning), Umberto Eco (Wednesday) and Jose Saramango (today). I can't tell you how they are reading those texts but I can tell you they are- and I can tell you that more people are reading those kind of things than they did in the comparatively recent past (just go back 200 years and think about what the average person read then!)

So whilst I agree with Ashok's high aspirations about the intellectual life- I do not agree that the world today is less intellectual than it was in the past. Indeed I think it may be as much or more intellectual. There are more people who have access to this stuff- there are more people going to read, to the theatre, to the cinema and those people travel and meet other people more. This is not a utopian vision- obviously there are ways in which our society is not and maybe should not be a society of philosopher citizens- but its far from the dumbest society ever.

Phoning through the past

This video is incredible- because it illustrates how quickly the world has changed in the 20th Century. Dial tone phones are of course now a thing of the past. In the 1930s when this video was made, in the UK there were still single numbers- London 1 etc- telephones had just exploded to becoming a consumer product, like the internet of today. Phones have of course become a standard consumer product- about possibly to be replaced by Skype and other things like it.

But they have done so incredibly quickly- the pace of technological development means that the lives that we live today in so many aspects- including the one I'm typing on to you now and the fact you are reading this online- would have been unrecognisable to our parents, let alone our grandparents when they were growing up. Someone who was born in 1920 will have lived through the rise of the car, the rise of the washing machine, the rise of the computer and the rise of the internet. Just think about that for a moment- and one of the central differences between our century and the past becomes clear. A medieval peasant could say between 1200 and 1400 be pretty confident that though there were changes in the way he farmed, his grandparents would understand them. For us though, how would you explain to your great grandparents (who as mine did died at some point before the second world war) how the internet works. Just imagine for a second how much change, if the girl in the video is still alive (and probably in her late seventies, early eighties now) she has seen.

Its an interesting thing to think about: because coping with technological change has suddenly become so much more important. Kids do because they are born to an era with the current systems: but for the rest of us, the fact that we learn so much when we are children is no longer adequate. We have to keep learning as adults just in order to keep up with the ways that communication and life are changing- that produces the stress of adults who have to learn how to program Sky Plus (Tivo for Americans) and work out HTML.

The world is changing and that means that we have to change the way that we learn- its no longer ok just to learn as a kid, welcome to the world which changes so fast that even adults are ignorant.

What is a Public Intellectual?

Polls of the most important public intellectual come out all the time at the moment- the American journal Foreign Policy is doing one at the moment (no prizes for guessing the main subject of that journal) and has a list out of which you can vote the top twenty. Fair enough you might say- accept really what they seem to be talking about here is political polemecists, not intellectuals and that the idea that a vote reflects any kind of intellectual merit is a bit like the idea that a vote could determine the best scientific or mathematical theory, its stupidity is only matched by its inanity.

What do I mean by the first thing I said? Well take a look at the list. At first sight you might see names like Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist, Noam Chomsky, the American linguist, Richard Dawkins, the British Biologist and so on and think aha- this is about a spread of thinkers over a wide area. You would be wrong though. Take Chomsky, I doubt he is there for his linguistic work which has been dominant in that field- I'd suggest his presence there is actually because of his jeremaids against American power. Likewise I'm not sure Dawkins makes the list for his biology, rather than his ability to upset religious people. At least the three I quote above and others like Benedict XVI are distinguished intellectuals (whatever you think of their political thinking- and in some cases (Chomsky comes to mind) their policy ideas are inferior to their other work). But Christopher Hitchens, great polemecist and writer he may be, has contributed very little of intellectual value to the world. His recent biography of Tom Paine is an absolute joke, which would be hilarious if it weren't meant seriously. Likewise Al Gore, good politician no doubt, but I doubt he had anything to do with the intellectual foundations of political theory.

Yes there are some names on the list that I had not come across- Hu Shuli for example the Chinese journalist. But equally there are names which astonished me- as a historian I can name many more intellectually exciting people than Tony Judt and Niall Ferguson (off the top of my head, Quentin Skinner, Sir Keith Thomas and Ira Katznelson all make me think far more than Ferguson with his Telegraph pieties has ever done.) All lists will have names that you don't see- but the difference between the two sets of people is that Ferguson say is a great self-publicist (the man has an ego the size of Olympus to go by his TV appearances and lectures- only exceeded by David Starkey) whereas Skinner, Thomas and Katznelson have made some very original contributions to their periods and to their studies. In a sense this isn't so much a set of interesting people who can provoke and make you think, as a collection of great self-publicists- the list produced by Foreign Policy is about marketting not mastering a leading subject.

The same thing goes for their method of choosing the top twenty- again what does the fact that x wins a vote tell you about the ideas that the winner has expressed? It tells you nothing! To take an example, I am not qualified to tell you how good a physicist Richard Feynman was and how he compared to Enrico Fermi- I have no idea because I don't know about higher physics. I do have an idea about historians but that's because I have a PhD in the subject- and even then with history outside my own specialism, I don't know who has the best knowledge of the sources. To say that I can judge the most original and thoughtful intellectual on all these subjects is crap! And it reinforces something that I think we should be very careful about- to understand the best idea as the most popular idea is not a sensible thing. Subjects are complicated and they require a lot of patience and learning- becoming an intellectual is not writing a blog, its not writing for a newspaper, its learning facts, understanding arguments and thinking deeply. The list from Foreign Affairs includes trivial people and is based on trivial grounds- that is a pity- I want to know who are the most interesting people in other subjects because then I can go and read them- a list that contains Christopher Hitchens is unlikely to give me that.

Reasons to love Cricket

Stephen Fleming has just announced he will retire as New Zealand captain. On his resignation he has asked how he wanted to be remembered and he said he would want to be remembered as a thinker about the game, as someone who could bring together a team and make them more than the sum of their parts. If anyone needs a justification for watching sport, then the fascination of human psychology under pressure is a great one- cricket shows that often at its best. Its fiendishly complicated and incredibly thoughtful as the bowler, captain and fielders conspire to trap the batsman into playing a shot he doesn't want to play. I'm sure the Umpire will have something to say as will James Hamilton: but I think its interesting that the bit of cricket that Fleming declared he enjoyed was the thinking, the way the game could be shaped by leadership and tactics. Its one of the things I enjoy watching team sports- you can see the tactics being played out on the field.

Conservatism

An interesting post from Iain Dale this evening on rural theatres. Iain wants to know why their funding is being eroded- the answer it seems is that with money tight, the Arts Council are focussing on the 2012 Olympics. What's interesting though is that Iain considers this worthy of blogging- I completely agree with him. One of the sources of strength for conservatism is the notion of organic little platoons which come together to grow civil society- Iain wants those little platoons which cultivate localism and peculiarity to be strengthened and reinforced with public money. I think we should facilitate their growth as well- a small amount of money to a village theatre is something that produces immeasurable goods for a community and fortifies society- its something any real conservative ought to support.

Civilisation- the teaching aide

The game Civilisation for those who don't know it is incredibly addictive and great fun. In it you take charge of a civilisation- from a set of options including such noted civilisations as the Persians, Babylonians, Chinese, French, British and even Americans. You take your civilisation through the course of history, from the demise of nomadism to the age of the fighter jet. Its a wonderful game and has built into it all sorts of ideas about forms of government and economics and all sorts of things, it provides quite a useful intro for anyone playing it to all those ideas and to the idea that history could well have taken a different course- once you have built the Great Wall of China in Egypt and taken Mongolia to the space race you reall understand the idea that history is contingent, there is no plan and everything could have happened differently.

It is unsurprising therefore to me to find that educationalists have picked up on this and there are increasing efforts to use games like Civilisation and its cousin Simcity (where you build and govern a city) as teaching aides in the classroom. Aaron Wechel writes interestingly in the current issue of World History Connected about the way that teachers can use the games- both to introduce kids to concepts used in the game that they might not come across in other ways, and in making them think as though they were world leaders. Of course as Wechel notes there are problems with the whole concept of civilisation- world leaders don't choose to have Newton discover the laws of gravity and democracy doesn't emerge in a society just because someone says it ought to (if it did Donald Rumsfeld would still have a job!) There are additional detailed problems that Wechel doesn't really deal with- are the effects of particular governments and systems right for example- indeed kids need to realise that the effects of particular systems aren't neccessarily understood and are often a matter of dispute. Wechel rightly doesn't want teachers to teach kids to uncritically absorb the games they play but to critique them as well.

But I think what this whole discussion brings out though is the fallacy that many people still hold to, that computer games have no beneficial effects for children in terms of education. I think that they do- Civilisation is an obvious example where a game can teach kids about some historical concepts. But other games too are interesting in the way that they breed better cognition- for instance SimCity makes you really think about how to be a City mayor in America- how rising crime effects economic performance and prosperity for instance. Even a game that might seem not to have so much educational merit- Championship Manager (a game in which you are the manager of a football team and buy and sell players in order to create the perfect team) actually has benefits. The game teaches you to analyse massive databases of players- filter them- deal with psychology and most importantly deal with a budget. All of that is important for kids to learn. Of course all the games have presumptions built into them which maybe and often are faulty- but they shouldn't be dismissed.

Sometimes we can be too focused on being Jeremiahs, actually there is plenty of good in computer games and plenty that people can learn from them- especially when the game itself is treated with caution.

The Tomb of an Emperor

The first Emperor of China is a historical character and his legacy defines in many ways what China is today. He originally was not Emperor of China, but the Prince of a powerful western Kingdom Qin. During his reign as King of Qin, he conquered the other kingdoms which constituted ancient China. The King of Qin became an emperor in 221BC over a vast landmass, stretching perhaps over a third of what is modern China today. His power was extensive- Chinese histories credit him with an almost totalitarian ideology, an aim of unification which stretched to the elimination of any possible rival, including the massacre of 460 scholars and the destruction of older feudal patterns of service and government. He brought in a single currency and connected together the walls that previous Chinese governments had constructed to the north, to build the first defensive Great Wall. The Emperor's dynasty lasted a very short time- within years of his death in 210BC, his son the second Emperor was killed and chaos descended before the rise of the Han Emperors beggining in 202BC.

The Emperor though left much behind him. The Han reigned to some extent in conformity with his principles especially of unity- and the shape of the currency that he had originally drafted remained the same right up until the early 20th Century. Much of our account of his acheivement comes from the Han historian, Sima Qian, who was born in 145BC and whose histories cover the whole of Chinese history from its mythical origins to his own lifetime. Sima Qian was hostile to the Qin Emperor partly because his dynasty replaced that of the Qin, and his history is not a history as we would recognise it in modern terms. Sima Qian writes fables and chronicles and treatises on subjects, the past for him is a set of exempla and a set of dates. He doesn't dwell as we might like him to on subjects relevant to us, but rather has the preoccupations of a Han civil servant: so his book tells us of stories about assassins, stories about how to govern and how not to govern, chronicles of dates and all from a perspective that denegrates the Qin. Despite that Sima Qian is one of the great historians of the ancient world- his name deserves to be up there with the great classical historians.

However we are incredibly lucky when it comes to the Qin Emperor, for in the mid-1970s a peasant in China came across a stupendous find. In the soil his spade hit a terracotta head, and archaeologists coming across to work on the site found not one but thousands of terracotta bodies and artefacts scattered in the soil. Having reconstructed what the site must have been, they worked out that these terracotta bodies constituted a seperate state that the Qin Emperor hoped to rule in his afterlife. At the British Museum in London at the moment, some of those finds are being exhibited. You see all sorts of people that the Emperor required in his afterlife: he has strong men, acrobats, musicians, civil servants, soldiers of all types and even a royal charioteer. Some of these artefacts bring to life stories from Sima Qian's accounts. For example on the Emperor's death, his senior civil servant Li Si kept the Imperial demise secret. He did so by maintaining the illusion that the Emperor was still alive giving orders from his Imperial chariot- and to some extent when one sees the chariot, one can imagine how that worked. The Emperor closeted and secretive and Li Si and a couple of others conspicuously running in and out to receive orders.

The terracotta army itself is shown in all its glory. It is incredible what the craftsmen (probably conscripted) could do. The skill with which the faces in particular are rendered is stunning- the visual impressiveness of what you see makes you reel back, considering that these are faces looking straight at you from thousands of years ago. The picture in particular of a fiery Turkish looking light infantryman stayed in my mind all of last night. The Museum have organised the exhibition in a very proffessional way- first they show you some Qin artefacts and describe the role of the Qin Emperor in Chinese history, avoiding much of the detail but trying to give a non-sinologist a good understanding of what this man was and what he represents. Then you proceed to see the terracotta army and court itself- which is a stunning experience and having it put in context before you see it, it becomes more impressive. The Emperor constructed this army to protect him in his afterlife- it appears they were stationed on the only open access route to his tomb in order to guard it. His tomb itself has never been opened and apart from Sima Qian's fantastic descriptions and some scientific work above the site on concentrations of metals found underneath, noone knows what is there. What we have though is these soldiers- we know they were painted and so their rather mundane colours today aren't as impressive as the gaudy way they were decorated- we know that irises for instance were painted in the eyes and we can tell all this thanks to chemical analysis of the surface of the statues. They are beautifully vibrant and vital. Each has its own character and facial expression, beard and overall look.

China is one of the hardest societies I have ever tried to understand. I have only been there once- but that's once more than most Westerners. Reading its literature and looking at its art is a very foreign experience in the way that reading Islamic literature or even Indian literature is not. Through accidents of history, China seems like another region of the earth from Europe. But its an increasingly powerful and important place- from films by great directors like Zhang Yimou to its economic importance, China is not merely an object of curious interest for the West, it is a place we have to understand. This exhibition therefore is a wonderful opportunity to learn something about China and the way that it was created and its history. The terracotta warriors are so impressive that they are a reminder of the grandeur of Chinese civilisation. They are also an incentive because of their beauty to try and understand more about the culture from which they sprang, seeing their beauty inspired me to buy translated fragments from Sima Qian's history. An exhibition like this is precisely the thing that the world's museums should increasingly engage in- if there is to be dialogue between our cultures then this is a wonderful way of expressing it and I hope some British treasures make their way temporarily to Beijing.

The Museum's exhibition reminds one of the importance of Chinese civilisation and the importance of cultivating an understanding of it. It also reminded me very visibly of the difficulties of historical research. There is so much that we do not know and will never know about the first Emperor. The history that we have is fragmented and written long after the Emperor's death. We have these artefacts but with many of them we are not sure of their use- and we have not yet seen inside the tomb of the Emperor to see what clues lie there.

One thing I do regret about the museum's exhibition is that there was not more outside or inside from historians of the era, Chinese and Western, discussing the Emperor. There wasn't even a good academic biography for sale- an unpardonable lapse! Another gap was that the First Emperor's attitude to religion was left untouched. We were invited to see the army as a simplistic guard for the afterlife or as a manifestation of the Emperor's meglamania: but I would have liked to see something more about what Chinese people of that time beleived about the afterlife and how that connected to what the Emperor did. One interesting question that wasn't touched upon was why none of his successors made this kind of tomb- it could be that they did and the tombs are lost waiting a farmer to discover them, it could be that his example discredited the practice, it could be that beliefs had shifted, it could be that this is one of many such tombs, leaving the exhibition I was none the wiser. One felt like screaming for more information. But having said that, that is possibly the churlish attitude to take. The exhibition is wonderful- the fact that these statues have left China must have been a great diplomatic acheivement and the museum has arranged them suitably well.

The First Emperor is one of those figures whose actions had momentous consequences spreading out through time, doubling and redoubling until his creation, a unified China, became one of the great powers of a globalised world in the 20th Century. Seeing the terracotta warriors, seeing the artefacts he collected around himself in his afterlife, one gets a sense of the immense power that he wielded, the creative wills that bent to his commanding will and the strength of his shortlived imperium.

Mark Steyn and Culture

Mark Steyn has a way of shocking me by producing some really good articles at times- I think he does this out of spite, he knows that I don't like some of his work and he wants me to be spinning in confusion unsure whether to like or dislike him. Sorry my sense of humour got the better of me tonight!

Anyway today Steyn has produced I think an excellent article about popular music and the need for a canon. It is really a wonderful defence of learning for the sake of appreciation. Basically Steyn's point is that you can't understand why the Beatles are great unless you understand why Bach is great. The two go together- to understand the one is to understand the other. He makes a point about the way that in order to understand something's greatness, you have to be able to see it in its context, to see what developed around it, why that move was important. Its crucial that Picasso could paint landscapes and had been trained because then his other paintings developed a meaning, its vital that Duke Ellington could play the classic solos because then he could use them in his own work. I agree completely with him: one of the wonders of artistic knowledge is the way that it supports itself. Every time I watch a new film, or read a new book (those being the two art forms I know) they tell me something about all those previous artworks I've seen and watched. And there is a strict heirarchy of knowledge in art- I would listen to Martin Scorsese for hours on film if I could because he has watched everything, and has interesting ideas about all of what he has seen.

Music is something sadly on which I'm not able to comment. One of the most illuminating moments of my life was sitting with a friend who understood music in a jazz bar in Prague. He described to me the way that what I saw as a cool sound, was actually the product of a complex interweaving of notes, a lattice of harmonies. Suddenly I saw music for a moment as this beautiful structure, which people played with, understood and manipulated- suddenly it became more than a simple nice tune, it became art, something I cared for and might grow to love. I think that appreciation is to be valued. It isn't easy to get to- appreciation of the arts is a real cost. Its something that takes time and effort, its something that you have to struggle to get to and it is something that relies on context. To take writing, its because I understand the history of English poetry that I can appreciate the opening line of the Wasteland, that April is the cruellest month- in that opening line Elliot tells us that everything that has gone before resting on Chaucer is wrong. That April is not the month of gentle showers but the month of cruelty. Poetry and novels are echoing always with previous works- the anxiety of influence was a disease that Harold Bloom diagnosed flowing through each and every author.

The great writers though manage to combine that with accessibility. I learnt to read novels- and I have to say watch films (the great twentieth century entertainment) because I began through enjoying them, I ended appreciating the same books. Most of the early readers started the same way, Jonathan Rose writes illuminatingly about the way that the first Labour MPs for example read Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin and others and thought about them in their own way. There is a wonderful novel which really describes this process which unfortunately I can't lay my hands on right now- as soon as I find my copy I'll review it- but what shines through that book is the importance of embibing cultural classics to discovering the world of culture. The route to Austen is the route through Austen, the same goes for all the great writers and indeed for filmmakers from Orson Welles and Michael Curtiz to David Cronenberg. Its when you are bitten with the bug that you know that you have fallen in love and through falling in love you learn to appreciate and to link everything together and understand this lattice of things which all have been created partly for your pleasure.

Steyn is entirely right- you can enjoy the arts (I enjoy Music in this sense) without knowing much, but you enjoy them a hell of a lot more when you have exposed yourself to even more. Part of life is a continual adventure in self improvement- I definitely think that there are 'miles to go before I sleep' and probably will be when I'm dead- and I think that goes for art as well as anything else. There is always something 'further up and further in' to look at, there is always something which can prompt you to understand more or to reevaluate what was once familiar and now is strange. Sometimes I think in modern life we are too comfortable, the truth is that life is an adventure of understanding. For us who lag, it is worth looking up to those who are scaling the heights, but if they are worth looking up to then they are looking in admiration at the next climber. Nobody arrives at the summit, but the effort is what makes everything worth while- because by mastering that interesting novel you suddenly have another angle on human experience. Sitting down and saying no further is surrendering that knowledge and beauty that you might acquire by going up another notch- the world is limitless and its beauties are vast.

Steyn is right. To step back is folly, to stop is folly, and in this quest the canon (the works judged before by others as good) is a useful if not flawless guide. Relaxing in a comfort zone of the works written in your own culture or your own time is a waste- there is more to see and life is too short not to read that Egyptian novelist, see that Iranian film, find out about that twelfth century monk's poetry and listen to some Beethoven before going to watch Belle and Sebastien.

Lola Montez- the insignificance of celebrity

I've just written an article on that topic at Bits of News.

Depressing

This is just depressing. Its not that you shouldn't bluff about subjects you don't know- everyone does and it is a social skill to be able to engage on subjects you don't understand, its one way of learning. But to aspire to be able to bluff and not to aspire to know depresses me. This is a personal post, but its at times like these that I'm tempted to become a grumpy young man.

The benefits of Blogging

Polly Toynbee is a recipient of a lot of hatred on the web from a lot of people- she lectured about the blogosphere and the press gazette reported on her lecture this week. Iain Dale has written a cogent article criticising her piece and being relatively positive about some of her comments. His agreement with her that its worth considering how difficult political choices are and be tolerant of politicians is something that I agree with. I want to discuss one point that she raises which I think illustrates something rather interesting about the blogosphere as opposed to the traditional media.

In the traditional media, as people often point out there is a choice of very few options- you have the Guardian, the Sun, the Times etc- who all appoint people of the same kind of experience. Most of those who write about politics in the mainstream media are people who hang around Westminster and talk a lot to politicians- many of them write pieces of incredible insight based upon these contacts they make at Westminster and Toynbee is right to say that that is an incredibly good way of thinking and writing about politics:

here is a skill in crafting a column with a beginning, a middle and an end, a coherent argument and at least three facts readers don't know, preferably information gleaned from talking to the leading players in the case.

She is right that this is one approach but as later in the speech she confessed her experience as BBC social affairs correspendent struggling to get her views in instead of the Westminster lads on the politics of social affairs that isn't the only perspective. One element of this can be seen in the rather difficult analysis of Islam that is produced often in the papers- some commentators seem not to understand at all that a religion is not a timeless thing or a regionless thing but varies- statements like Islam is peaceful or warlike are nonsense- some Muslims are peaceful, some aren't. The majority at the moment live in peace.

What the blogosphere does offer is a place where people can write who know more about specific issues and take a more academic attitude. There are virtues to being away from Westminster and being a consumer of articles, books, manuscripts and a professional in some other way of life. I'm always intrigued by policeman's blogs, nurses blogs and academic blogs. There are blogs like Iain Dale's which are more like the journalist's but most of them are out there talking about their author's knowledge of some area. Indeed the majority of blogs aren't actually political but they may deal tangentially with political issues.

Personally that's where my interest in blogs lies- its that kind of supplement to the media that I think they can provide- say with Juan Cole's blog about the Middle East being a prime example- that I am really concerned. In that way the blogs can actually improve output by providing another perspective- not supplanting the media but just providing a different way of looking at the world.

Popeye the Shanghai Man

Interesting article on Popeye in Salon- which showcases the earlier Popeye comic strips. Those early strips show Popeye almost as a Cagney character, a bruiser with an attitude. I wonder how much he was a model for Orson Welles's sailor in the Lady from Shanghai.

Why is Culture almost never Right?

18 Doughty Street asked last night why cultural artifacts always seem to come out leftwing. Some of the commentary is good, some of it noticably that from Douglas Murray, who I've rebuked before, is infantile. Particularly infantile is an uncritical version of anti-establishment conservatism, to whose flaws Matthew Sinclair recently pointed on his blog, the idea of a massive leftwing conspiracy originating in the Universities and spreading across theatreland, films and television is as ridiculous as it is untrue. There is rightwing culture out there: films for instance like the upcoming release involving Will Smith that enjoin people that anyone can be a stockbroker should they wish to be or tv serieses like ones which invite kids to be reeducated 1950s style are hardly in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement. Its worth noting that much more of the cultural landscape is dominated by the right than many of them would choose to remember, its also worth remembering that plays and books don't neccessarily or indeed often fit simply into a left-right dichotomy.

But what accounts for this sense of leftwing culture. Partly its because of a more general fact about intellectuals- they tend left. In the United States for example, in 2004, PhD and degree holders voted more leftwing than people who had left university before they obtained a degree or only obtained a high school diploma (source CNN). As intellectuals constitute the core and most loyal audience for plays and books, if not for films- it makes sense for books to be marketted to them. We need to distinguish here obviously between the mass market and the art market. The mass market contains all consumers within society- and ferociously rightwing books like Anne Coulter's make lots of money- but for a less mass market publication it often pays to trend left, afterall the most loyal audience trends left.

The real problem with 18 Doughty Street's look at these subjects was that it didn't reflect the fact that culture really doesn't have a political side to it. Culture, whenever it reflects upon human beings, attempts to take us into their minds, to make us reconceive their conceptions. In that sense, rather than being particularly rightwing or leftwing, culture makes relativists of us all in that it introduces us to new ideas and new concepts through the media of our imaginations. It enhances what Adam Smith would have called our sympathetic faculties. Often that bends and warps the cultural artifact in a way its maker could not have predicted- I have a friend who read into Malena, a profoundly feminist film, an anti-feminist message. Unlike political manifestos culture doesn't neatly fit, partly because it can't neatly fit into the caricatures of snarling politicos.

This is a subject that needs more than one blog entry. I want though to end on one last point which I think Doughty Street didn't capture and that is part of the problem for the right within culture is that one of the things that our culture is very good at doing is showing things, one of the things it isn't so good at doing is arguing things. I myself have been involved in television, and in an apolitical production was told off for trying to introduce ideas- its much easier to film situations. So whereas along the same logic, its easy to film a beggar and at the same time film the computer parts being unloaded at Heathrow from China that take him out of a job, its very hard to film the free trade argument. The camera and the stage are media in which the situation is all important, and its very easy to make an argument for collective action based on pity for a situation- its very hard to argue using a camera for free trade or against pity.

This is a very incomplete answer and I will return to this subject in days to come- there is something interesting here- I don't think 18 Doughty Street captured at all what is going on and I don't think they presented the issues in all their subtlety, I hope this post contains some worthy thoughts on the subject, though even I in taking it up am unsure as I hope you can tell about the purview of these terms right and left and their relevancy to culture.

What ultimately the politics of culture are I'm not sure.

Scholarship and the Internet

Its fascinating to see the effect that the internet is already having on research. The ability of historians now to find and look at their sources online or even to photograph them using digital cameras and look at them on a screen at home instead of reading them in a library. The ability of scientists, as described here to video their experiments, thereby making them easier to replicate on the internet. One imagines a future where instead of footnotes, the internet versions of articles will contain hyperlinks to sources of information, allowing the reader to instantly and simply check what he is reading against the sources of information or experiments it relies upon.

The Times Literary Supplement and the joys of serious thought and frivolity

Sometimes owning a blog just allows you to be an egomaniac- well here I am and this post is solely about a link but what a link, this link my friends is to an article that soars from donnish joshing to the heights of speculation about the sin of Onan, from masticating at high table to masturbating in high old biblical times! The TLS is an institution- many a time some grizzled Cambridge old hand has said to me something like just look back at the TLS of 19-- and you'll find the article by Wilkins that destroyed Bilkins's career by showing that his analysis of Charles I's letters were wrong. Anyway go over and enjoy the frivolity of high serious thought! Better still read the TLS...