Agreeing with Dizzy

Just a quick note- I have published an article on the Liberal Conspiracy agreeing with Dizzy about the fact that MPs should not have allowances to pay for rubbish collection in their London properties.

Otto Preminger

This is an important article and well worth reading about the great Austrian director Otto Preminger.

Cricket illustrates Life

The recent events in India illustrate an important rule for politics as well as sport: that process is often more important than outcome. That once a judge has given a decision, no matter its justice, you have to accept it. The Political Umpire makes the point in a cricketing context well here- but when you read his post, remember it applies to much more than just cricket.

Reading Class: The Talented Mr Ripley

The Talented Mr Ripley is Patricia Highsmith's first novel about the psychopathic murderer Tom Ripley. For those who don't know it the plot is as thus- Ripley is a poor ne'er do well in New York who is sent by an old acquaintance's father, Richard Greenleaf, to go to Italy and find Greenleafe's son Dickie and persuade him to come back to Italy. After going there and meeting Dickie, Dickie's girlfriend Marge and his friend Freddy Miles, Tom becomes increasingly enamoured of Dickie's lifestyle- to such an extent that he eventually murders Dickie and later Freddy and spends the rest of the book evading the Italian police. As Debra Hamel pointed out at Normblog the point of the novel is to elucidate and describe Ripley's character: the title provides a clue to that. Ripley not the murders nor the investigation is the centre of the novel and the reveal is about Ripley's character: slowly inch by inch Highsmith shows us Ripley the man and reveals to us his anxieties, paranoia and his thoughts.

When reading it therefore you get a very precise idea of Ripley's motivation. Why then does he do what he does? Murder normally is mystery: here it is the end of the mystery and in order to discover the real mystery we need to discover why Tom murders Dickie Greenleafe. In truth Tom murders Dickie because he envies the other man's class and sophistication, his money and easy living lifestyle. He murders Dickie because Dickie is slowly growing tired of Tom: because Dickie sees Tom in part as a sponge and possibly a homosexual sponge at that. Tom decides he has to become Dickie- he has to reinvent himself as an aristocratic young man about Italy, as a classy cool individual. Even his posture we are told changes as this process unfolds. Tom's hesitant slouch becomes Dickie's confident and assertive pose. Dickie's class though isn't all money- its also savoir faire. Its a certain style- a magnetism that Tom is forced to acknowledge and wishes he has. Dickie is someone- and throughout the book Tom lives in his shadow. In reality Tom seeks not to murder Dickie as to merge with Dickie, Tom seeks suicide not slaughter.

Poverty and wealth come together in this novel- and what we see is the way that the poor man sees the rich man. Not neccessarily as the owner of the accoutrements of money- but as the owner of the parephenalia of civilisation. Tom aspires to Dickie's culture, he is disappointed by Dickie's vulgarity (especially the poverty of Dickie's painting- Dickie reminds me of Vronsky in Anna Karenina, forever attempting to be an artist, forever failing) but he likes the carefree indolence of the young American. He has insecurity which is founded on poverty but not described by it. Tom's insecurity is fed into by other things: his possible homosexuality, his own poor family life, his anxieties about being a dependant. That insecurity leads him to murder and to various other things: but it remains the focus of the novel. It is what ultimately makes Tom's character sympathetic- and it makes you wish that he will escape, because all the time you are alone with his fears. None of the other characters comes alive in the same way as Tom does- because none of the others are given an internal voice and none of the others are in motion. In a curious way, murder becomes a means to social advancement in the novel.

I don't think I have captured the flavour of the book well- there is much more in it, including a really good read. But I think the way that it describes the experience, the total experience of social anxiety and its complexity- the way it derives from sexual, social and cultural signs- is perfect. Tom's anxiety is not all class based. But part of its structure depends on his class. It is not all based on his homosexuality and his idealisation of Dickie and rivalry with Marge: part of it though is. It isn't all based on his fear of being dependent both socially and monetarily on Dickie: part of it is though. Throughout the novel we see Tom grow and change- a haunted hunted man becomes even more haunted and hunted, but he gains respectability through murder.

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.

Dirty Tricks

This is a really interesting interview with a former Republican Dirty Tricks man. I should emphasize that what is interesting is the techniques he describes- they are international- they were used for example in Australia by the liberals and they are used by all sorts of people from the right like the interviewee to the left. It is interesting though to see some of them being rehearsed and its quite an eye opener- some of the techniques- pretending to be the other side and phoning people during the Super bowl are very subtle and clever. All of them tend to make democratic decisions harder- as there are upcoming elections in the US and the UK and other places, we should know about these techniques and beware of them.

The Relevance of Rigour

The Taxpayer's Alliance has come in for some criticism on this blog occasionally- however yesterday their response to the rumours that Cambridge and the LSE might rethink their attitude to some A-Level subjects was just right. It was just right because it restated what I think is an important principle- that the A-Level should not be degraded. However the TPA's analysis brings back to my mind at least the important difference between academic and vocational qualifications- a distinction that needs making again and again- though it is between two things which do blend into each other.

The point about academic subjects is that they are a different type of training to a different type of vocation than vocational subjects. They are trainings in rigour and reason. The harder academic subjects- physics, maths, history, philosophy, literature, chemistry- require years of study and intense thought. They also require learning a discipline- evaluating evidence or preparing chains of reason- in a field in which many intelligent men and women have worked before. To study one of those subjects at university is to acquire a flavour of what it means to be a scholar and consequently of what it means to reason, analyse and discuss results. Of course the subject matter is to some sense extrinsic to that- but all those subject headings really describe not so much an area to be studied, as a discipline to study that area with. They involve the use of rules which tell you how to evaluate and use reason in a particular context- as such they have a universal validity. They don't tell you how to be a good anything- but they do train you in how to reason effectively, how to analyse ideas and data and evaluate them.

If we turn from that model to look at a vocational qualification- we can see that some such ie law or engineering share that quality of being a training in a discipline of thought. Other vocational qualifications aren't training so much in a discipline of thought as they are in training another kind of discipline- physical activity for instance may not require much thought but may require a lot of skill. Take the art of cooking- cooking requires a certain degree of skill, an ability to see what should happen at a particular moment to the dish you are preparing. It does require analysis- but more instinctual analysis- the ability to see for instance when a spice is needed or a herb is required to give the dish more taste and when it isn't. You could put other crafts into that category too- from the precise moulding of a pot by a potter to the construction of a painting. They are crafts. They do not require or exemplify the same skill as say a degree in history does- not because they are inferior but because they are not that type of training.

This isn't to say that we require one type of qualification or the other to be available- its just to say that one isn't the same as another. I wouldn't trust a mathematician or a historian with a resturant kitchen, but I would prefer them to a cook when it came to being an accountant. There is no metaphsyical sense in which one profession is 'better' than another: and yet the key point here is that there is a real difference in the kind of skill that is being used and cultivated through their study. And that is precisely the reason why many people want to leave the academic subjects and do vocational qualifications- they don't want the same experience as they have at school or university, they want to do something which has more external results than the products of analysis do. Its vital to keep that distinction in mind- because it reminds us that if we try and make vocational study academic we will lose the attractiveness of the first and the rigour of the second. Rather we should look at tailoring vocational studies more precisely to the actual needs of people in jobs- looking for example at apprenticeships and other things- and we should open both kinds of study to people throughout their entire lives. Most of us afterall will have to retrain during the fifty years that we can expect to spend in the workforce now- and the government since the foundation of the Open University has recognised that fact.

Vocational and Academic qualifications are ultimately different but equal ways to acheiving different careers- reason won't knock nails into walls, a knowledge of construction won't solve a third order differential equation- its time we were realistic about education.

The Oddities of Ron Paul

Ron Paul has some questions to answer. It appears that his newsletter sent out for over twenty years has published racist, anti semitic, homophobic material. The most shocking moment to me is that he apparantly has allowed a publication in his name to go out which compares Israel to the Nazi State of the 1940s. Paul may not have written these newsletters but they all went out under his name and regularly contained these attacks- if he read them he must have been aware of their content. Either he has had a change of heart- or he is an inappropriate candidate to be in a position of high office, such as that he aspires to. Its time he made a statement to clarify whether he thinks all blacks are just after welfare, gays contaminate heterosexuals with physical contact or that Israel planned the World Trade Centre bombing.

The Saragossa Manuscript

The Manuscript found in Saragossa is one of the great monuments of 19th Century culture- written by Jan Potocki it tells the tale, supposedly through a manuscript discovered in Saragossa, of Alphonse Van Worden and his attempt to get from France to Spain in the mid 18th Century. Van Worden's journey is delayed and obstructed by a group of gypsies, Moors, scientists, occultists, a set of sexy lesbian princesses and the spirits of two hanged men. These individuals engage him and tell him stories which parallel those of Boccacio or Chaucer- there are baudy stories, erotic stories, exotic stories, bizarre stories, ghost stories, tortures, rescues, deaths and duels, treatises on science, treatises on the Kaballah and accounts of the history of the wandering Jew, Ahaseurus. The tales are amazing- better than the tale which contains them all- they contain all sorts of life and love and mystery and magic. The Manuscript is an almost unfilmable book because of its extent- almost anything you could desire to read about and write about is here- from the gentle pains of remembering lost loves in old age to the glory of feeling it in the first flush of youth.

Putting it on to a screen is therefore not easy. Particularly that's true because the Manuscript works on a very imaginative level. You have to for example imagine two beautiful Moorish princesses, draped over each other and over the hero and how they seduce and play with his mind, making him into their tool whilst they entice his senses with sisterly caresses. You have to do this in your own mind- and to have it rendered in flesh and blood women is bound to be disappointing. The same goes for so much of this incredibly intense book- you have to not be there in order to impose your own images of horror and delight upon it. This is a world crafted in such humane colours that we all have met its characters- and we can all appreciate the bullying Busqueros, so much so that we all put a face to him as we read. Putting a cinematic countenance in there deprives the book of its personal impact.

The version put out by the Polish director, Wojciech Has, in 1965 though does manage to entice you in. It surprised me. In that I didn't think anything could give me the same mixture of horror and delight as the book does. It does. There are some wonderful sequences- especially when our hero reaches out his hand to caress the face of a lesbian princess only to find he is stroking the countenance of a hanged man. There are some really good comic moments as well- as characters climb up ladders and terrify other characters in the middle of the night- or as servants laugh at the misfortunes of their stupid masters (of which more later). The film captures some of the burlesque of the original- its sheer joie de vivre, its appreciation of the eccentricity of normal human life and the wonder of that eccentricity- its praise (to borrow an Erasmian phrase) of folly.

Where the film doesn't cope so well though is in conveying some of the book's deeper reflections. The book contains characters- a Kabalist and a scientist- which the film contains but does not exploit. The hours of commentary that these two men supply- by way of explication of the situation that Van Worden finds himself in and of the wider world- vanishes and is replaced by their mute presence. They sit and listen but they are not as crucial as they are in the book- this leaves their presence rather moot. You wonder why they are there- what their characters are doing- you wonder why the Kabbalist has a sister and what her relevance is. In the book she is a crucial character- in the film the line of decolletage is low cut but the purpose of her character is unclear.

This means that the film loses something of the quality of the book- which is that its anchored within the enlightenment. It loses something of the nature of the book as a fictional encyclopedia of the eighteenth century and instead changes into something else. The film includes many more revelations of the soundness of the working classes- many more revelations of the way that they unlike their more privileged masters they do understand. They think that duelling is silly, that absurd honour is silly etc etc. Of course that message is absent from the book- but its been placed there by the director. A twentieth century message about class has replaced an eighteenth century obsession with the bizarre intellectual movements of the age- this diminishes the film in my eyes.

Its worth saying as well that not everything does work here- for moments of beauty and there are many, there are also moments of clumsiness when you regret that the director wasn't more in control. At points the story veers away from him, at points the plot is lost. Having said this this is a worthy effort to film an unfilmable book, to condense 700 odd dense pages into 2 hours of film. That it doesn't quite work is not a surprise, that Has got it anywhere near to working is.

The rising tide of hatred

The 90s and 00s have been the years of vitriol. Whether its Anne Coulter accusing Democrats of 'treason' or its Michael Moore accusing George Bush of being a Saudi puppet, whether its the mad bloggers of the right rounding on appeasers or its the mad bloggers of the left rounding on chickenhawks, its open season on the internet and in the newspapers. There is perhaps something peculiar about the times that we live in: George Bush has been a uniquely divisive President in US history partly because he has been so ambitious. In the UK, the parties have begun to alternate for much longer periods of time in and out of office- the stakes are therefore higher in any election. Though we shouldn't overrate it: Nye Bevan afterall said in the 1940s that Tories were lower than vermin and fights in the House of Commons are not de rigeur as they were when Hugh Cecil confronted the Irish MPs in the 1900 and 1906 Parliaments. In the US, duelling politicians contend on the airwaves- not as Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton did at sixty paces. Nobody at this election looks like doing what Lee Attwater did or even repeating Karl Rove's antics in 2000. Its easy to get overexcited and assume that today's events are novel- when they are merely repetition.

So why then are such notable bloggers as Ashok and Ruthie worried about the state of conversation on the internet? Are they wrong? The real answer to that question is that they aren't wrong. Because something has changed and its brought more of the gutter out into public view than ever before- that is the invention of the internet. Effectively whether its Guido in the UK or Drudge in the US or those commenters making death threats against Dick Cheney or those columnists who revel in the facile comparison of George Bush to Adolf Hitler, they are only out there because of the creation of this medium. Blogging can do many good things- but it can also do some things to retard political conversation and even education. If academics can use it to hold virtual conferences in which someone from Utah can speak to someone from the Ukraine about their research, then so too can nutcases and fascists, conspiracy theorists and loons. Imagine the joy that you get when you suddenly discover that someone else is interested in the mating habits of the millipede- and then imagine the joy you get when you realise that you aren't the only one who feels that Bush is Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin rolled into one and multiplied together. Lunacy is profitable on the internet because the lunatics can gather into communities and support each other, reinforce each other, leave comments on each others' posts telling themselves they are all great and be happily ignorant of the fact that they are morons.

In a broader sense- one of the key and best insights of conservative thinkers down the years has been the power of convention. Convention not law moulds the way that we think and behave and the ways that society is generated. Convention exists in regular life- so that for instance certain things are conventionally rude, if you say them you are shunned. It is conventional not to think in most communities about assacinating the President of the United States: but on the internet you have more choice. You can shape your community to reflect your prejudices and thus the prejudices of the community become its conventions. Weird behaviour like over exuberrant political hatred or unthoughtful vitriol can become conventional habits. The internet ressembles thus nothing so much as a vast student union societies fair, where you chose your society and end up singing about Stalin in the Labour society and Hitler in the Tories. Most people grow out of university though and realise that they have to fit into the conventions of wider society which preclude talking about how 'they' control the world (in language reminiscent of the third reich) and about how liberals or conservatives are evil- but on the blogs they can loose those aspects of themselves, they can regress to the student hack hurling hate and use the fact they have an audience as validation. Just look at some of the worst blogs and how they use their stats as an alibi for instance.

And they do it in public. As a blogger you put forward your most objectionable side to the world. Lets take another simple example. Readers of this blog will know Matt Sinclair. Matt Sinclair is a really good friend of mine- yet we often disagree about politics. On our blogs the disagreement about politics is the central thing about our relationship- though we both try to keep it civil- in real life its not the central thing at all. And that goes for many of the regular commenters who I actually know here. Writing about politics is not the be all and end all of anyone's life and most bloggers to exist in society have to have friends with other opinions, workmates etc. And yet on the net we are reduced to argument- so consequently we sometimes look and sound much worse than we are. Allow as well for the fact that whereas when in conversation with someone I can say with a wry smile, oh you just are interested in fleecing the poor to pay for the lusts of the rich- with a blog you don't have the luxury of tone or the ability to catch someone as they listen to you and moderate your thoughts to their sensitivity. All you have is the brutality of the written word- a word which is sometimes more stark than you want it to be and consequently more offensive. As Ruthie says there is also the fact that anonymity liberates us to become much nastier- I wouldn't dream of saying to someone's face that they are an idiot, I might say it on a blog though.

All those things combine and they drag the traditional media with them- afterall the traditional media always want to sell papers. That and the increasing popularity of tabloids leads to a perceptive coarsening of public debate- a coarsening that Ashok and Ruthie have spotted. In my view there is some coarsening going on, but there is also a lot of stuff that is happening because of technological change- because the gatekeepers have gone away, the long tail is triumphant and therefore the conventions that hold society together have less force. On the internet I have no need to socialise with those I disagree with- unlike in real life!

Iowa Tealeaves

It is difficult to read the results of the Iowa Caucuses last night with any precision. On the Democratic side Obama has been strengthened, on the Republican side Romney has been weakened. It may be that Obama is heading now to New Hampshire, a possible win in South Carolina and the nomination- but there are many slips ahead. As for Mike Huckabee- it should never be forgotten that in 1988 Iowa was won by Pat Robertson and that Huckabee will be significantly weaker in New Hampshire than he was in the midwest. Having said all of that, I do think that the results in Iowa are interesting- in particular four results are interesting, firstly the fact that Obama and Edwards beat Clinton, secondly that Huckabee beat Romney, thirdly that Ron Paul got double the vote of Rudi Giuliani and fourthly that on the Democratic side of the aisle the minor candidates were not merely blasted away, they were wiped out.

What does that mean? Well the last piece of information tells us something very interesting- personal charisma mattered in Iowa more than personal politics did. A good communicator with a good CV like Biden or Dodd was flattened as the Democratic caucus goers sought the established candidates. Furthermore the large turnout in the Democratic party meant that the minnows were effectively destroyed and flung out of the race- in the Democratic party established figures lost to media figures- something that you would expect in a race largely driven by independents (who voted overwhelmingly for Obama) and young people (ditto). Media momentum must lie behind Ron Paul's 10% as well- which ecclipsed Mr Giuliani's 4%- but behind that lies the other and perhaps more interesting story of the primary.

The victors of this primary were the populists. On both sides of the aisle, populists triumphed over establishment candidates. On the Democratic side, John Edwards had a good showing- though possibly not enough to keep him alive. On the Republican side though we saw something fascinating. Because there was no perfect conservative candidate running- none of the alternatives looks particularly appetising to most conservatives- you saw the conservative coalition splinter. Huckabee's victory reinforces the old historical trend that the Midwest supports populists and actually reinforces to me the idea that this could become a new battleground in American politics- where the politics of John Edwards and the politics of Mike Huckabee contest states like Iowa and Montana and all the rest. In a sense the lesson of Iowa is a lesson about the retreat of Republican orthodoxy into the south. But its also a lesson about the functioning of American politics- part of what drives the Huckabee campaign is class. Huckabee appeals on the basis of class and social morality- in that sense he is a warning shot to both parties because he undercuts both of their traditional coalitions. Ron Paul likewise is in the position of mounting an insurgency particularly against the war in Iraq- again the isolationist impulse in American politics should never be underrated.

Not all states will be as populist as Iowa. I'd reckon now if Super Tuesday comes up and Obama maintains this level of support- he is odds on for the nomination. As for the Republican race, its still wide open. But the hint of populism reemerging is an interesting one and perhaps the longest lasting lesson of these events.

Dizzy thinks about the internet

Having myself written about the comparison of UK and US blogs- I was interested to see that Dizzy had looked at the issue- and more interesting than that he has a really good article about it. I don't have much to add- save that I think the institutional distinctions are more important than funding limits because of the potential for out of campaign spending by inexplicitly politically aligned groups- but the article is well worth reading and I reccomend it.

The NHS and lifestyle choice

Matt Sinclair thinks that the NHS reduces the sphere of private accountability to a minimum because all risk is pooled together in one pot. If your healthcare is not something which costs me any money, I don't feel interested, in Matt's view as to whether you smoke or not or take drugs or not or do whatever you wish to do. If your healthcare is something that costs me money, then in a Millite sense (that any action which is other regarding we should have the ability to regulate) I have the right to regulate your conduct. Its a worthy argument- I think though that its wrong- partly because it overestimates the actual strength of the Millite position on liberty.

Let me explain with the use of a couple of empirical points:

a. It is true that the age of healthcare has been the age of increased regulation of what we put into our bodies- opium in the form of laudanum was legal in the nineteenth century but isn't today. But there isn't much evidence to connect the fact that drugs are illegal with the survival of the NHS. Those who support the NHS and support drug legalisation today often overlap. Whereas those who want to privatise the NHS and support drugs being illegal often overlap as well. Homosexuality is not under threat from those worried about STDs, its under threat from those worried about the Bible. The 'yuck' factor and not the abstract Millite argument is what really motivates bans. Look at the distinction between the discussions about banning fatty food and stressful jobs- there is a discussion in the one case for aesthetic reasons, there isn't in the other because an overworked lawyer is more attractive than a fat slob.

b. Matt misunderstands wilfully Mill's argument and consequently misinterprets the zone of Mill's freedom. Mill's concept of freedom is very tricky to understand- but if it were as Matt suggests inclusive of all actions that affected others in any way, the area of free rights would be tiny. Afterall all our actions in some ways effect others- even actions taken in complete privacy- a choice of job afterall effects others sometimes more than a choice of lifestyle does (even in a system with an NHS). This brings me to another point, what Matt neglects is that of course other regarding actions don't require a state to be other regarding- my health has more profound implications for many than those required to pay for it. It has ramifications for my family and for my friends (including Matt) which go far beyond its ramifications for the state. Matt states that public healthcare makes everyone's health a 'public good'- sorry my friend actually everyone's health is a 'public good' whether you have a healthcare system or not.

c. Matt's preferred solution is that,

individuals, rather than taxpayers, are paying for their health insurance it should be possible to allow adjustments in their premiums for healthy behaviours.

His preferred solution though creates many other problems. Genes matter as much as environmental factors- would Matt accept a system in which companies were allowed access to our genetic code and set different premiums based on that for various people, sometimes prohibitive premiums. What about such premiums actively discouraging people for example from performing various important jobs- take for example those who volunteer to be part of the royal lifeboat association (something that involves them in great risk for a real public good and for free)- that would incur them a higher premium is that fair- the same thing might be said about special constables. The concept of splitting the insurance pool for healthcare could take us down some very dodgy paths.

Healthcare isn't an easy issue- but splitting up the insurance pool doesn't seem to me to be a good way forward in tackling it. Nor does a strict adherance to a particular concept of Mill's argument for liberty. Matt Sinclair is one of the most intelligent bloggers on the right and raises an interesting issue- but I don't think he manages to provide a good answer to his question nor to frame his question in an appropriate way.

The Children's Crusade and Media

I have written an over academic article over at the Liberal Conspiracy on the way that the Children's crusade worked and what it tells us about the way that we react to information. I think its interesting-noone else does which is why noone else has commented but I think it probably was too academic for that forum- and should have been posted here. So that's an encouragement to regular readers- get across and take a look! I think it also comes out as too postmodernist- I don't endorse the fully relativistic position on this!

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone- especially Welshcakes who got in to comment before I could put this post up. I really enjoy writing this blog so thanks for reading it- I hope its as enjoyable to read as it is to write it. And I hope everyone who reads this blog has a great 2008 and had a great time last night whether curled up watching a DVD in bed or out on the town somewhere or anywhere in between!

The Legend of the Holy Drinker

Joseph Roth is a novelist who is less appreciated in the English world than he ought to be. Roth's fine novella- the Legend of the Holy Drinker- is the story of Andreas, the drinker of the title, and his miraculous progress towards death. Roth himself was an alcoholic, meandering like his character through the streets of Paris as he wrote this novella- and knew that whereof he spoke. The novel though accomplishes two things- one less profound but which lies in a tradition which runs backwards through Oscar Wilde of using the lives of the poor, reconfigured as fairy tales, to reinforce lessons for the rest of society. The other more interestingly adopts the point of view of the poor saint to remind us of the ugliness of human kind and the redemptive quality of a good soul. Andreas is cut off from human society, served a prison term for a murder in defence of his mistress, is a drunkard, unwashed and with a torn shirt and yet he is a saint- without malice or forethought- who lives in a present generosity, a figure of true amour de soi, he aims for his own good without attacking the good of others and he is, as he constantly says a man of honour.

This trope has been used before- Dostoevsky's idiot, Prince Mishkin has some simularities to the artless drunkard Andreas. But Roth wants us to see how Andreas's story relates to our own stories, our own thoughts- fairy tales have meanings and we need to understand Andreas at a deeper level in order to appreciate what Roth is saying. Andreas's drink frequently we are told drives his memory away. Memorylessness is a key feature of his character- Andreas doesn't change though the world around him does and drink is his instrument to drive his memory away. In Roth's story drink is the weapon that the saint uses to obliterate his own memories- his sense of self. Furthermore it obliterates his artfulness- Andreas is not artful and loses money to wasters and to theives- he is easily diverted by a pretty face or ankle and easily conned. He is so easy to con, so easy to deceive and persuade though precisely because of his attitude to life. He does not act but merely flows through life- like a river he can be diverted but he follows the course that the valley sets for him. And he uses drink to control any temptations not to follow it.

Consequently the unnatural aspects of the fairy tale- the fact that Andreas keeps accidentally coming across money which sustains him is a feature of the character examined. Like everything else, sudden riches just crop up in Andreas's wake. He is improvident- but is so because he just expects more to pop up and to generate a life for him. Life for him is not something that is thought through, examined and analysed but something that just happens to him. That perception of life means that he avoids all kinds of comparisons (though not jealousy of the girl he loves)- he is natural and unaffected. Roth portrays him as such but also leaves us in no doubt that Andreas is incapable of living in modern society- like a Skimpole without the lie he leaves a trail behind him of destruction and improvidence. The point is that because he is a saint he cannot be a citizen- because he is a Christian, he cannot be a consumer. Roth's tale takes place in a dreamingly Catholic Paris- St Therese is central to it and at some point I will return to this tale to discuss its theology. But at the centre of it is this character and ultimately this character's strength which is also his flaw- his saintliness which leads to his inability to live as a modern citizen. Roth though leaves us in no doubt that this failure to survive in modern society is not a downfall- for Andreas events all have the same character- even death. When he dies, he goes to sleep without concern- the consequence is that whereas he has lost everything that we might think matters- none of it does matter to the Holy Drinker.

Like Mishkin he points out to us the illusion of society and the difficulty of living a moral life within the world- the Holy Drinker is a standing rebuke to the way we live now.

Apologies

Apologies for slow posting- I have a tempramental internet connection at the moment and am sorting it out- I've got a post to go up right now but for the next few days things may be slow.

The Children's Crusade

In Chartres, amidst the calls for knights and noblemen to go to Spain to fight against Islam, a group of shepherds led by Stephen of Cloyes one of their number, got up and started marching to deliver a letter from Christ to the King of France. Months later in Cologne Nicholas of Cologne set off with a group of German adolescents to take ship to the Holy land and recover the true Cross and with it Jerusalem. The movements may have been related- we don't know. We don't know though we can guess who took part, we have little knowledge of what happened to those that did take part- and we know only three people's names who were on the expeditions- Stephen and Nicholas referred to above- and an Otto who petitioned the papal curia in 1220 to be releived from his vows to crusade. And yet these crusades have become famous, passed from chronicler to historian, from poet to philosopher, from novelist to children's novelist, until they became part of the common currency of our times. The Children's Crusade is one of those events that shocked Europe at the time- yet had almost no consequences- it survived as a myth- a rumour- a disquieting revelation about human nature that kept the leaders of the Church and the doctors of the enlightenment awake at night.

What were the Children's Crusades? Well firstly there were as I said two of them. On both medieval chroniclers say that 'pueri' (latin for 'boys') took part. Some historians beleive that those pueri were a social group- marginalised young men on the edge of medieval society- some beleive that they were an age group- the young. Gary Dickson who has produced the most authoritative modern treatment suggests a mixture of the two- that the pueri were most likely shepherds and the dispossessed- young men before their marriage who left their homes and went to join these movements. The crusades happened in the Chartres region of France and in Germany. At our best guess, the crusade around Chartres developed after a request was sent out to the churches of the Chartrain to furnish soldiers for Christian armies under pressure in Northern Spain. The Chartres crusade arose out of processions around the great cathedral at Chartres- our best guess is that Stephen of Cloyes, mentioned by a chronicle from Laon, went home and was inspired by those processions to mount his own procession to bear a letter from Christ to King Phillip of France at St Denis. We know that that excitement led to perhaps hundreds and maybe thousands (numbers are hard with our limited information) to go south to St Denis. After St Denis, for some reason the remnant of the crusade headed off into the Rhineland- we have them recorded in a document at St Quentin, 140 miles north east of St Denis and a possible eye witness account by Renier of Liege at Liege in the first fifteen days of July 1212. From there they went onto Cologne where the movement seems to have grown in size. Dickson comments that fewer shepherds and more young people seem to have been present because the references in the chronicles emphasize the youth more. Nicholas of Cologne's group passed from Cologne southward- over the Alps and into Italy heading for the meditereanean- before attempting to board ships at various ports down the coast, culminating we think at Brundisium on the southern coast of Italy.

A spontaneous popular movement like this is not something that passed without comment. Monastic chroniclers were terrified of its implications- angry at the outburst of enthusiasm and fearful of the ways that the pueri had deserted the authority in particular of their parents. But nor was it unusual in the medieval world. There were movements before this- that behind the crusade launched by Peter the Hermit in the 1090s for example (though his movement did attract aristocratic support which the Children's Crusades didn't) and later movements like the Shepherd's Crusade of 1251 for example also had a popular nature. Popular revivals of religious sentiment were a feature of European religious history right up until the reformation and beyond: in 1457-9 thousands of French youths headed for Mont Saint Michel to pray and chronicles talked of the countryside emptying, similar things happened in the sixteenth century for example John of Leiden roused his supporters behind a manifesto of equality and free love based on the scripture. Such upheavals were the price society payed for a surplus of young men who were unemployed and ready to be roused to a biblically literalist interpretation of Christianity. They had other effects too- Dickson the author of the latest study of the Children's Crusade argues that one of those effects was mass migration. Effectively the pueri moved from Germany down to Northern Italy and many of them stayed behind within Italian towns- legends still connect many families in Genoa with the families of pueri who stayed behind, and Otto our petitioner to the papal curia was himself an emmigrant to Italy. Furthermore Dickson argues the effect of the crusade was to popularise the discourse about Crusades and hence about identity within medieval Europe: the call to crusade, made by Pope Innocent in 1213, was the first to address the people of Europe as well as its princes.

The Crusade has passed latterly into fiction and fairytale. Many of whose elements are unreliable- we have little evidence that there were mass sales into slavery at the end of the crusade- its not that likely that babies took part as one rather inspired chronicle has it. Nor that as medieval writers asserted the whole thing was a dasterdly plot by the Old Man of the Mountain or by Stephen of Cloyes's father who had sold his soul to Satan or for that matter by anyone else. Protestants in the 17th Century accused the Pope of selling out the crusaders and loved the self inspired nature of the movement. Voltaire in the 18th Century thought of it as a testament to his new doctrine of a socially contagious mental disease- religion. Victorians imagined it as the march of the innocent- H.G. Wells thought it was a 'dreadful affair'- Bertolt Brecht saw it as an analogy for wartorn central Europe and even a historian whose credentials were as impressive as the British Byzantist Sir Stephen Runciman couldn't resist gilding the history. The truth is though that the movement was a revivalist movement- launched from within the lower classes. We don't know an awful much about it- but what we do know makes it more fascinating than any myth would have it- we have a group of people marching away from their homes in the service of a living God, a God who breaks up authorities and family. The God of truly radical religion- not radical in our sense of the word- but radical in a much more profound sense- the God that destabilises.

The Children's Crusade is a useful marker in that sense- and Dr Dickens's book a useful testament- to the power of religion.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Merry Christmas everyone, I will raise a glass to you all this afternoon over my Turkey and Christmas Pudding, I hope you have a really good day and loads of great presents! Sorry about the shortage of posting- too much shopping for presents!

Religion and Politics

Oliver Kamm has a great article up about the separation between the two here- afraid I won't post much more today- too much Christmas shopping- but there may be an article tommorrow.