The Balance of Power 2007

There is nothing particularly wrong with Policy Exchange's latest report on the balance of power between the left and the right across the OECD in 2007- however there are real questions about how much you can infer anything from it. Policy Exchange argues that the majority of the OECD is under the control of the centre right- a fair piece of analysis- though one has to add that were the United States to have gone Democratic in 2004 the majority of the OECD would be controlled by the centre left and don't forget how close the 2004 election was. In truth the US is evenly balanced between left and right. Furthermore there are real questions about whether this means anything- for instance a large number of citizens of the OECD live in Turkey where the big issue in the recent election was about secularism in Islam, an issue which few of the voters who will vote in November in the US will be concerned with. Local issues are often more important than people give them credit for: in South Korea for example relations with the North are very important. Governments like Aznar's in Spain often lose power thanks to miscalculations or like John Major's in the UK thanks in part to sleaze. Furthermore left and right mean different things in different places: many British conservatives would back the Democrats in the States and have always been hostile to Irish nationalism, many US Republicans would not have backed Erdogan in Turkey, and so on. Furthermore all this discussion doesn't reflect the other battle- that of ideas- between the left and the right. Leftwing governments as in New Zealand in the eighties can be very rightwing in practise- and no British Tory needs too much reminding of how leftwing conservative governments can be after listening to an old tape of Harold Macmillan!

Policy Exchange have provided a useful parlour game- I'm not sure its more than that!

Blogpower Roundup

A roundup chosen by the bloggers themselves of Blogpower's best posts of year is up here- I chose a post about the Robert Bresson film L'Argent, in part because I think its a good review, and in part because I think Bresson is one of the most important artists and film makers of the century and that he is deeply underappreciated.

As a bynote I should also say that the Carnival of Cinema is back- and there are some good posts especially complaints about Yahoo's list of the best movies of the last year.

Read both- in particular the Blogpower one- a fine collection of posts!

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.

The Professor's House

He had made something new in the world- and the rewards, the meaningless conventional gestures he had left to others.

Professor St Peter is the hero of Willa Cather's novel- the Professor's House- he is the hero of a novel in which nothing much seems to happen. The novel dwells on death repeatedly- St Peter himself beleives that he is dying, his best student Tom Outland died in the Great War and St Peter sees old loves and old attachments die around him to- he is he says transported back to his childhood, transported back within himself with neither his daughters nor his wife to keep him company. He has completed the work for which he was placed on the world- a history of Spanish adventurers in the Americas- and now all he sees is mindless games of conversational convention- the sport of furniture and clothes which fascinates him less and less.

Professor St Peter's book has gained recognition and the wealth that that provides enables his family to buy a new house- but the elderly academic wishes to spend his days inside a study in the house that they have left. A cold and bare study but one in which he can remain in solitude and think- where the ornaments of the room are signals to inspiration. For him the study remains a sanctuary, and its inhabitants- two clothes models- are as sacred as any other emblems of his own individuality. Emerging from the study, the Professor finds society outside tiresome and trivial. There is something he cannot grasp in the fascination his wife and daughters feel for small things- something he cannot appreciate about the way they interrupt the internal scholastic monologue.

His student Tom Outland shared that inclination. Outland was a country boy and part way through the story in the novella amidst the romain (as A.S. Byatt who provides an introduction to my edition charmingly calls it), Outland narrates his own tale- of how he discovered out in the south west United States an abandoned Indian village. What Outland tells us though is more than that process of discovery- he tells us about the pleasures of loneliness. The pleasures of sitting on the Indian tombstone and communing in the quiet with the intellectual idea of the past. The sense that Outland is more fundamentally disturbing than that- for going to Washington he realises that all the inhabitants of the capital are slaves. They are slaves to work and office, slaves to desiring lunch, slaves to desiring more and more and more- endless items to satiate an endless desire. A desire created by society.

For Outland and the Professor, such solitude finds society. However they both need society in order to thrive. Outland never looked happier than when playing with the Professor's daughters. The Professor's chief happiness came when Outland arrived- but also during his early marriage, when his children were growing up, when the sweetness of a child too caring of her father to disturb him, sitting outside his study for hours with a beestung finger charmed him. Furthermore he has genuine affection for his daughters and wife. He has a genuine sense of style as well. The story thus isn't simple- it isn't just that withdrawel from society is reccomended- happiness could not be found by St Peter in the hermit's cell, no less than official Washington, the cell would be barren of what provides human excitement. Convention may be the enemy but conversation is a good.

The Professor's withdrawel from the world is in part the withdrawing of a man who has become weary of the world, his lament over his vanished youth (visualised in those lines I quote above about Outland) is just as much a cry of weariness, of tired resignation as it is a point about the way that the world works. Death Cather implies is a renouncing not of the self but of company, a desire for death is a desire to be alone to meditate. Nobody interrupts in a grave. The irritating skin of society gets worse after time- after acheivement- after life has passed. There is no balm for existential doubt. Furthermore resting in that alienation is the alienation of someone who had been far away when his favourite son had died on the Western Front- its the angst of a society that has been shaken by death that is reflected on the page of Cather's novel- despite it never been mentioned, the shells of the Somme shake the Professor's living room.

We all struggle ultimately with other people- they are as Sartre said hell, they are as Bergman implied our only route to God's existance. Cather's novel places other people and the self in contradiction- it tends to no easy answers- but it demonstrates an acute power of observation is at work within its pages. The world, that old Christian bugbear, is very much with us- its impact upon us all is the subject of almost everything we do- even when we renounce- and failing to acknowledge both its danger and its pleasure is the mark of folly.

Religious Bigots

The Muslim Public Affairs Committee is an organisation with a long history of odd behaviour- they have over the last few days excelled themselves. They published last week a call for the names of the researchers for Policy Exchange's recent report to be given to them- they wanted Muslim activists to ring up their offices and tell them who these eight researchers were. MPAC accused these researchers- and the whole Sufi community in the UK- of being fifth columnists for a zionist neo con cabal who were intent on destroying Islam and then the world...... fill in the blanks. They suggested that these Quislings should be reported to them so that MPAC could "dig deeper and expose every last detail of the Sufis who tried to destroy their own community." Having been called up on this language, MPAC are now asserting that their interest was purely in the researchers' credibility as researchers- given that they advertise this operation as being "A Hunt for 8 Sufi Zio Con Frauds"- I'm not entirely sure that their interest is in research methodology.

That's particularly true given the rest of the content on their website. They have published articles which argue that Sufi scholars collaborate with the Pharoah of our time George Bush and that Sufism is a trend in Islam that promotes a passivity desired by the zio con forces of evil. They have also published articles defending Sufism but it definitely seems to me that MPAC beleives that this is a legitimate debate- its strange that they don't have any articles saying that any other strands of Islam aren't Islamic! Furthermore their official statement, 'The Hunt' supports the anti-Sufi case- they state there that the Sufis have been used throughout history as a weapon in the arms of Russian and British and now American imperialism. The slurs on Sufism are absolutely and completely ridiculous. Anyone who knows an iota of the history of Islam- obviously noone involved in MPAC can be listed in that category, knows that Sufism is an old and established trend in Islamic theology.

For the benefit of MPAC, it might be worth rehearsing some of the contributions of Sufism- and others can add to this- in stimulating Islamic theology and political thought. Plenty of sources see Sufic communities going back right to the beggining of Islam- into the eighth century. Muzaffar Allam in his study of Indian Islamic political thought argues that Sufis have been present in India since the 11th or 12th centuries. As Richard Eaton demonstrates in his studies of the growth of Islam in India- Sufi movements provided many of the missionaries that spread throughout India to convert communities to Islam. Indeed David Cook shows in his studies of martyrdom and Islam that Sufi movements were also central to the growth of Islam in Indonesia and in many other places around the world. Great Sufi poetry and art has animated Islam: think of the Persian/Turkish poet Rumi whose work provides inspiration for art in the middle East right up until today, where its often quoted in the novels of Orhan Pamuk. The thesis that Sufis have never done anything for Islam- implied by MPAC- is just plain wrong and perhaps the organisation would like to withdraw its slurs.

Quite frankly though this goes further than just that. Because MPAC in reality are saying something else. They are saying that they have the right to define what Muslims ought to do or be- Muslims can't support say the invasion of Iraq. What utter nonsense! It is not for MPAC to define the essence of Islam. Muslims have been throughout history a group with a wide variety of beliefs just like Christians and Jews and Hindus and all other faiths. MPAC demands the names of these researchers because ultimately it wants to publish them and expose them- it doesn't want to argue or discuss (afterall they are Zio Con quislings) it wants to condemn. It doesn't want to examine why some Muslims might decide to help Policy Exchange- that they do convicts them and means they are irrelevant- they don't need to be talked to, they just need to be condemned. That stance fits into a general pattern- whereby their rhetoric is violent and conspiratorial- they don't seek to understand, they don't take on other arguments, they just want the luxury of an easy assertion that everyone else is evil. Their rhetoric avoids unhelpful facts- how can the war against Islam be a verifiable fact when Tony Blair bombed the Serbs out of Kosovo. How can it be a verifiable fact when the West repeatedly attempts to do things for Darfur and when westerners put their hands in their own pockets to help victims of the Tsunami? Has MPAC ever looked at the amount of aid that the EU gives to Palestine? Have they ever considered the support that America has always given to Pakistan?

MPAC want to define Islam and define certain people out of Islam. They seem to want Islam defined politically. Their politics is bizarre, conspiratorial and has a tangential relation to reality. But it goes further than that- in reality their conception of Islam excludes many Muslims from its definition. They basically argue that Sufis are quislings- they basically say that they would junk the entire tradition of Sufism because of the closeness of some present Sufis to politicians that they don't like. They are apocalyptic in their language. They are aggressive in their abusive calls for the silencing of those that disagree with them. If there is one thing likely to make me sympathetic to Policy Exchange in this whole debate, its the attitude of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee. I still feel that there are legitimate questions about the reporting in Policy Exchange's work and I have no problem with critiques of it: but as Liberals we should stand, as our enlightenment predecessors did, against religious bigotry. And religious bigotry is what MPAC peddles against Muslims who don't back their political line and against plenty of others as well.

Crossposted at the Liberal Conspiracy

Lermontov A Hero of our Time

Mikhail Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time" is a book which boasts its irony in its preface. The book focuses on Pechorin, a Russian officer in the 19th Century Caucasus, who Lermontov beleives is typical of his age- hence the title. Like Dosteovsky's Raskolnikov, Pechorin is a symbol of the alienation of 19th Century Russian youth from Russia and the spiritual traditions of orthodoxy. Pechorin is a superfluous man- cut off from history he has a Faustian sense of his own ability to control history and other people. Pechorin like so many other Russian heroes before and since, like Onegin for example, is a creature of cynical intelligence- purposeless he strives to manipulate the purposes of others. He sees through the subterfuge of society, sees through the elaborations of human deceit down to the rotten core of the human heart. It is symbolic that for Pechorin, marriage- the ultimate in sincere emotional commitment within any human life- is a signal, according to an old gipsy prophesy, of ensuing doom. Sincerity leads to downfall, love to instant loss.

Lermontov's tale illustrates his central character episodically. We see five main stories develop around Pechorin- three of which concern romantic endeavours in which he is involved- two of which concern his relationships with other men. Throughout the stories various ideas run like lines to demonstrate to us the kind of man that Pechorin is. He, we are assured by his own voice (three of the stories are told from Pechorin's point of view as part of an unpublished journal), is a creature who feels lust but not love. He is able to appreciate and admire female beauty but he strives always to value it. Most of his emotions are common to most of mankind- he hankers after girls that he doesn't have and then grows bored of them- but the distinction is that Pechorin never moderates this passion with reason or religion. He follows his appreciation callously leaving behind in its wake those whom he discards. He applies the same logic to friends- seeking after beauty he discards the instances of beauty. In that sense he operates as a pure Platonist might- looking for the ideal and discarding the real instances of it.

Pechorin's outlook is moulded by romanticism. The entire novel is shot through with Byronic overtones- there is an explicit reference to Rousseau and the narrator indicates that this memoir is what Rousseau might have written, had he not been writing to be heard. At a deeper level though the novel is about the triumph of sentiment over reason in the human soul. Sentiment drives the plot in all the stories. Characters are unable to control, unable to master their passions. As an essayist in human psychology, Lermontov suggests that there is nothing more to us than our passions and where they lead us. Patterns of passion, Pechorin assures us, are not to be trusted- they do not exist. Instead the demands of desire are essentially random- Pechorin seeks to understand them, not to tame them but to exploit the passions of others to fulfill his own. A classic Don Juan, he seeks to manipulate both men and women for his own ends- and yet ultimately Lermontov assures us that this leads Pechorin empty. As he says at one point within the novel, he is the cause of much unhappiness whilst also being the unhappiest of men.

This tale is rooted of course within a historical situation. Russia after the reforms of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great was a place undergoing massive change. A vast bureacracy had taken over from the ancient aristocracy of boyars and state service became the only method for advancement within society. Furthermore as Russian authors chronicled Russia felt a cultural inferiority to things further West- but also felt that those societies to the West lacked spirituality, lacked a centre. You can see this theme running through the great Russian authors of the 19th Century from Pushkin to Chekhov, through Turgenev, Herzen, Dosteovsky, Tolstoy and its here in Lermontov as well. Part of Pechorin's characterisation is about the position of Russia after the reforms of the 18th Century- Pechorin is a hero of his time- like Russia he has been modernised and stripped of his spirituality. He is like modernity, angst filled, power driven, successful and spiritually empty. He cries out for a God that he cannot beleive in and does not even mention.

You cannot take away the Russian anchor from Lermontov's tale. Its filled with the colour of the Caucasus. You see the customs of the frontier tribes of Chechnya in the 19th Century, their brutal society of bands and frontier theft. There is an orientalising vision at work here- we are instructed that these tribes are primitive and yet their members, the artless beauty Bela for example, understand better than the civilised Pechorin the demands of passionate morality. Part of the charm of the novel though is the taste of this society- a society where a Circassian raid on a country house would not be unexpected- a society which lies on the northern border of Islam, on the southern border of orthodoxy. There are wonderful descriptions of rides through the Chechen mountains. Descriptions of small spa towns, embedded outposts of Russian colonialism amidst the barbarism of the frontier. That description in one tale gives you a real sense of the nineteenth century- I suspect that though Lermontov is describing the Caucasus, he could be describing somewhere near Kinshasa, Calcutta or Kansas.

And yet for all the local colour, the underlying theme of the book is universal. It comes back to that great question of the 19th Century, phrased with typical bluntness by Nietzsche, that when God is dead you have to find something else to fill his gap. Philosophers from Rousseau to Kant to Hegel to Schleiermacher struggled with the position of God in an age of materialism- they all came to different and distinct answers. Lermontov's work is a sceptical recasting of the question- he asks what happens to the unmoored human being and in a sense he comes back to Rousseau's answer. God may not exist but he is neccessary for human beings to turn amour propre into amour de soi. He is neccessary for human beings to anchor their passions around. Without God men will still anchor their passions, but as with Pechorin they will anchor them around an egotistic attempt to control others, with God they anchor them around an egoist's love of the divine which sees that as more vital than human attachment.

Whatever you think of that stance, its novelisation is a fantastic feat- and provokes a lot of thought. The character of Pechorin provokes and intrigues in equal measure as an exempla of how a particular vision of humanity works.

Just a little point about comments

Just a little point on comments- generally I don't delete comments unless they are abusive or obviously spam. I've got two comments over the last couple of days which have basically been compliments with the web address for a gaming website affixed. I'm afraid I treat such comments as spam and do delete them. If you want your comments to stay up, then don't reccomend completely out of context a gambling website at the end of the comment.

Nick Clegg

So Clegg has won the LibDem leadership contest, not knowing much about the man I can't really say much about what this means, but it might be worth casting an outsider's eye on it just because I am precisely the type of person, in this case, who the Libdems will want to appeal to (someone who doesn't know as much as he should about their party). The only thing I really know about Clegg is this- he is young and fresh and new. He won't frighten anyone and looks presentable on TV- basically he is David Cameron with a yellow rosette in presentational terms. The problem I have with that is that it will be interesting how he separates out his profile from Cameron's. LibDem leaders have often done best at times when the major parties are in meltdown like the nineties or early 2000s- and its possible that Clegg if he makes it to the next election or the one after next will be in that position again visa vis Labour. But LibDem leaders both in the late nineties and early 2000s were distinct from the new young things in the party doing well- then Tony Blair. Paddy Ashdown's action man image and Charles Kennedy's understated and self deprecating Scottish burr were a thousand miles away from Blair's evangelistic glamour- in a sense more than any policy platform the identity of the leadership meant that the Libdems established a national profile. Clegg worries me in that sense for the Liberals- and I wonder whether the more cerebral Huhne might have been a more distinctive choice. With Clegg you get the feeling that the voters might decide they want the real nice clean handsome young PR boy and vote for Cameron.

Its a minor worry and a mere thought- but I do wonder whether the LibDems made a collossal mistake when they got rid of Kennedy, who is one of the few natural communicators left in politics- the sort of bloke you'd meet down the pub, a bit like Ken Clarke. Neither Cameron nor Brown has that appeal and I'm not sure that Clegg does either. It'll be interesting to see how they differentiate Clegg's personal story from the "liberal conservative" sitting just down from him in the House of Commons.

The Manuscript found in Saragossa

Our understanding of the enlightenment in popular culture is driven by a perception of it as the age which lighted up Europe after centuries- millennia- of barbarism. The philosophes of the Enlightened Age- Voltaire, Gibbon, Hume, Rousseau, Spinoza et al- were successors to Lucretius and Cicero- masters of science, economics and philosophy, sages who advanced the arguments which led to modernity. Of course part of that picture is right: but the Enlightenment was a much broader and deeper phenomenon- nourished not merely from the springs of philosophy but also fortified in verse and sustained by the birth of the European novel. Think of the Eighteenth Century and it isn't merely the shades of Hume and Smith that return to haunt you, but those of Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney. The explosion of the public sphere led not merely to the economics of Riccardo and the horrific events of the Terror, but also to the novels of Jane Austen and the poems of Byron. The Enlightenment was far broader and more vast than the pens of intellectual historians can traverse, as a moment in European history it encompassed so much more.

Jan Potocki, the Polish political adventurer, ethnologist and egyptologist, was one such typical enlightenment figure. From the 1790s onwards he prepared a vast manuscript- the Manuscript found in Saragossa, which tells the adventures of Alphonse Van Worden, an officer in the Walloon guard in the mid-eighteenth century, as he attempts to travel from France towards Madrid. Its scale is stunning- Van Worden's journey is interrupted by a series of characters who each tell their own stories. Those stories inclose other stories and they are told by a wide variety of people. Their subjects are even more vast. Potocki wrote of all frames of human experience- we have touching reminiscences of the past counterposed with humourous almost Quixotic accounts of the danger of Chivalric honour. We have accounts of the construction of the universe in a deeply Spinozistic way- even at one point a Hobbesian account of the soul as motion. Those are set aside deeply erotic tales of seduction by Moorish ghost princesses and by aristocratic grand ladies in Spain. We have love and horror. Characters return in different contexts as the story's mosaic takes in Italy, France, Spain, England and Austria. The strength of this is Chaucerian in its love of life- Potocki sees virtue in absurdity.

Throughout the tale, Alphonse Van Worden grows. We read it through his account and consequently we read his response to what he finds out. Often we hear him comment on stories- particularly those which affront his sense of honour (Van Worden's father was a world renowned expert on duels) and Christianity. Throughout the book, Van Worden though becomes exposed to different ideas- to exotic thoughts that he did not deem existed. He has to recognise them and deal with them- and while he is not converted, he is changed by his experiences. The last section of the book deals with his later career and definitely it seems that Van Worden realised that the conventional life he lived after his adventure was dimmed by the glory of the strangeness he encountered. Potocki definitely leaves us in no doubt that variety is to be treasured- to use Isaiah Berlin's distinction this is the novel of a very wise Fox who knows many things.

Variety here is not merely the variety of experience- though that's there, Ian Maclean, the editor of my edition, suggests that the novel is like a Spanish inn containing all social sectors of society. We also see the variety of culture. For this Spain is a successor to medieval Spain- the Spain of Maimonides and Averroes as much as of Charles and Phillip. The novel is filled with the occult- characters like the wandering Jew and the Marquis of St Germain make appearances. Indeed the whole book is bound together, the story is even created, by a vast conspiracy run secretly from caves amidst the Spanish mountains. Everything is revealed eventually to be the creation of this conspiracy- like a Newtonian universe, the exterior of the story is mysterious, but its interior workings are as logical as clockwork. The interest in conspiracy though is typical of an era which was buttressed at one end by the controversy of the Rosy Cross and at the other by rumours of the influence of Freemasons. In that sense Potocki is a child of his times, seeking a mechanism even in the fertile abundance of his novel that will equate to the mechanisms of nature.

And neither are they neglected, for one of the characters, Velasquez is as interested in the enlightenment that we know of as any of our intellectual historians are. He unfolds the design of the universe to his willing (and unwilling listeners- one of the great pleasures of the book is the number of times people go off and say they are bored by other people's tales! There is a reassuring humanity to these characters) listeners. He even manages to seduce a girl to be his wife through his skilful geometrical unfolding of the Cartesian world. And his understandings are based upon the solid foundations of enlightenment science: he gives us a little tour of the world of enlightenment thought from Herriot to Newton, from Locke to Leibniz. That tour is yet another attempt to read the universe's hidden logic- to illumine that which is darkened. To use Kant's phrase, he and Potocki both dare to know.

What is so astonishing about this book is that you come out of it without one clear idea- the fox here has definitely won over the hedgehog who knows one thing very well. Its a book that breaks up impressions into shards- and confutes its own attempts to rationalise its progress. Like the Canterbury Tales, to which its been compared, its pleasures and beauties lie in its minatures- in haunting tales of gothic melodrama, in subtle comic take offs of false chivalry and in the constant humanity of many of its principal narrators (particularly the wry Gipsy King Avarado). Its hard to sum something of this size and complexity up save to say that it is huge and complex- but to some extent I think that's the point. It demonstrates that despite the best efforts even of the Enlightened philosophe, our intelligence cannot sum up the whole of existance in a set of laws or any idea of God. Existance is too vast for us to ever totally grasp, and all our theories can only be proved by their incompleteness and their imperfection.

Potocki's life and his work are filled with vitality and colour, they can't be captured even on the canvass of a blog post, go and read the book.

Little Dieter needs to Fly

Teddy Roosevelt once said that in order to govern, any senator or congressman or President ought to serve in the United States armed forces. Watching the documentary, Little Dieter needs to Fly, one realises why TR had that view. Dieter Dengler was a naturalised American who came to the US in order to fly planes- he came from Germany after the war where there was no airforce or commercial airline and ended up joining the US navy and flying missions over IndoChina. Dengler was shot down and captured by the Vietcong- he was taken through the jungle to a prison camp and held there with eight other prisoners, including one other American, till he escaped and by chance, heroism and endurance managed to get himself rescued.

Dengler's story is amazing- his grandfather was a resistor to the Nazis in Germany- paraded through the local town where he was the only person not to vote for Hitler in national plebiscites. He grew up in postwar poverty- beaten by a local blacksmith to whom he was apprenticed. When he arrived in the States he began by peeling potatoes and eventually hauled himself through night school and a variety of military jobs, until he reached the planes. But of course it was the planes that were his real love- and one of the things that instantly strikes you is the way that Dengler found his exhileration in the skies above Indochina. He talks on the documentary about the way that to him the bombing of Vietnam was an exercise- it was dislocated from what was happening below. After he returnhed to his base, he found he couldn't sleep save for in the cockpit of a plane- that was the only place where he could find peace from the horrors of war.

And there were horrors aplenty. Dengler's stay in captivity should disabuse anyone who thinks that the Vietcong were some cuddly sixties protest cause. Whatever the rights or wrongs of American presence in Vietnam, Dengler and his fellow prisoners were treated horrifically by the Vietnamese. Before getting to the camp, Dengler talks of being dragged behind water buffalos, kicked on the ground, hit with rifle butts and various other indignities. Placed in a camp, shackled together, allowed only two minutes a day to go to the toilet (in an exercise that involved Vietnamese soldiers shooting at them for fun), effectively sitting in each other's dysentry and diarhea for six months, with nothing apart from rotting meat (with lice crawling over it) to eat, the prisoners were treated abominably. Dengler tells stories about the way that the Vietcong behaved in villages- it reminds you of stories from Apocalypse Now, only the casual brutality happened. Dengler's escape was owed to errors by the guards- they left the prisoners unguarded for two minutes and the prisoners fled.

Dengler and his friend Duane Martin ran off together, attempting to find a river and escape to Thailand. Conditions again were awful. They had one shoe between the two of them and their feet were cut to ribbons by the jungle floor. They escaped drowning several times. Duane was eventually killed by a villager, Dengler was fortunate to escape and eventually was rescued by a keen eyed US pilot who saw him signalling SOS from a river bed. He was emmaciated and haunted by dreams of the horrors he had seen. For Dengler, the death of his friend Duane who whom he had shared the experience of escape and who was closer than his wife, than his mother and family touched him to the quick. You get a tremendous sense throughout Dengler's account of that standerd emotional reaction of people serving in the armed forces to conflict- the bond that they develop between each other and particularly from the living to the dead. Asked by Werner Herzog whether he feels a hero, Dengler responds that the only heroes are the dead.

In 1982, when Margerat Thatcher prepared to go to war to recover the Falklands, she turned to the two men in her cabinet who had previously served in the military- Lord Carrington the Foreign Secretary (who resigned over the war eventually) and Willie Whitelaw. Their experience proved vital to the Prime Minister over the insuing weeks. Roosevelt's statement about war and the neccessity of service is of course wrong- in that there are great politicians and great leaders who did not in any way serve their nation in war- but even so it captures something important. Too often we are too blase about the positives of war, that it creates a good situation, forgetting the costs to people, costs which endure long after the wars are over. This is not a pacifist point at all but a prudential one- in order to order troops into combat, you have to be aware that there will be Denglers, there will be those whose lives are ruined completely by the experience. Being too keen on war as it promotes the muscularity of a generation is a cowardly posture: in order to properly comprehend what you are doing in ordering troops into battle you have to understand what Kurtz calls the horror. You have to see the viciousness of the combat and the terror that you are committing young men to experience.

Sometimes that is neccessary- but its always worth remembering that war has massive costs. Dieter Dengler's story reminds us of that constantly.

The Virtue of the Right

Alex Hilton infuriates me. His latest article in the Guardian repeats one of the most dangerous nostrums of the politically partisan, whilst conceding intellectual ground that I think he ought not to concede. Hilton has said in the past that he hates Tories- now he says he hates the right. He hates them because he sees the right as pursuing a self consciously selfish aim and beleives that there is no such thing as principled right wing politics. Of course Mr Hilton's assertion is manifestly untrue: most of the rightwingers I know may be in error but one thing they are not is unprincipled.

But this goes further than that statement. Lets for a second presume that the right are in the wrong and are in error. There are some errors that deserve hatred- for instance racism etc deserves hatred (though I would not ban the expression of racist views). The right's errors though lie in various areas which aren't in my view ipso facto immoral- the right puts too much of a value on a misconstrued notion of freedom, too much value on authority providing safety and security and too little value on equality and real freedom. There are other values you might place alongside that- but overall those ideas and arguments have a long pedigree, are respectable intellectual positions and do have good ends in view- even if the biproducts of those ends would be evils.

Mr Hilton seems not to recognise that- and to be so swallowed up in the bile of partisan hatred, trade union war mongering and spite for 'hoorays' that he has lost his sense of proportion. Furthermore whilst doing that he himself has moved into the territory of the right. His partisan anger has blinded him to the fact that to be rightwing is not to have an accent but to espouse a set of ideas- one of those ideas is that absolute poverty matters more than relative poverty. On that argument Mr Hilton is on the side of the Tories- I don't want to rehearse the argument again- but there are good reasons to think that poverty is relative as well as absolute- arguments Mr Hilton neglects. The perils of partisanship are such that you arrive at a position where you embrace your opponent's worst positions because they are popular, just because your fundemental cause in politics is not your ideas but hatred of your opponent.

What Mr Hilton has forgotten is that the real end of any political argument isn't to win, but to persuade. However hard that might be, there is no future in political arguments which exclude either the left or the right for snobbish reasons- we can both learn from and hope to persuade each other- and if we don't, then our politics is dishonest and is about winning, not getting things right. The day that one can't admit to error, is the day that one dies as a serious person.

Responding on Pester Power

Matt's response about pester power is a very interesting one. He misreads my post, or perhaps I miswrote it, because he assumes I was accusing him of backing corporate punishment, I wasn't at all. My argument was that the power of pestering had grown because parents had become more unwilling to exercise discipline against their children. That unwillingness stemmed from an increased sympathy with their children. Symbolised by campaigns against smacking and caning. Matt thinks that this represents the rise of relativism- I don't see that it does. I think it represents the rise of a sympathetic morality as against the principle that the parent's authority justifies them doing what they want to to their own children. What I take issue with Matt on is him calling this phenomenon relativism- and maybe I wasn't clear enough about that. It isn't that parents or government are losing their moral sense- it is that their moral sense is changing- and that that undermines their authority. That isn't relativism- strict relativism is an idea that moral principles are all much of a muchness and that there is no such thing as right or wrong. If I beleive that hitting my child is wrong, how is that relativistic.

I think that this discussion has really started on the wrong foot. Let me lay out two alternative things to discuss- one of which I think Matt was interested in and the other of which I am more interested in. Should parents have authority over their kids to stop them buying sexy dresses et al? In Matt's view and my view they should. I can't see any argument there against that authority- and like Matt I agree that parents should stop their children dressing up in these ways. But there is a second and more interesting question, that in a clumsy way I was trying to get at? Why have these trends happened- why is it that parents are under pressure and feel themselves to be coerced by their kids to buy these things- I think that's a much more interesting question and it shouldnt' be conflated with the first issue. I think that question comes down to two related factors- one of which is the growth of different kinds of moral understandings of childhood and its relationship to adulthood and the other to economic conditions which strengthen the position of children in relation to adults.

The moral conditions are the increase in the notion that kids themselves should be respected as autonomous agents. That means that if I hit a kid or behave authoritarianly to a child in some sense I am hurting it. That leads to me being more cautious about the way that I behave to my children, becoming less authoritarian, less willing to quickly shut them up with a clip round the ear. I don't think that that is neccessarily a bad thing- neither do I think Matt thinks it is. But I don't see it as a rise in relativism- it is a rise in moral sentiment if its anything. The argument is a moral one, you should respect the child as an autonomous being- it isn't a relativistic one. Ultimately if I say that smacking is wrong, I am not being relativistic because a relativist doesn't believe that anything is wrong. Rather I am arguing that the moral conditions of punishment have changed. And I think that argument is strong- but it has consequences and one is to shift the balance of power within a relationship between parents and children towards the kids.

Secondly we have the economic conditions. Advertising here is key because it gives the child an advantage in terms of knowledge. So too are other features of modern society. One of which is the length of time parents work and hence their guilt about how their child is being parented. Its quite frequent for both parents now to need jobs in order to maintain a standerd of living and also to maintain self esteem- again that is a wider trend in society which has to do with all sorts of other economic and social developments. It leads to parents attempting to buy their child's affection- so consumption becomes an indicy of how much you love your child and hence the power of the pester, which in this case is the child calling out for attention and for love. The diminished time that parents and children have together is a vital and ignored factor in all of this because it strengthens all the other trends.

What I accuse Matt of here is not moral error- I think that he is right that we should resist kids who demand the latest video game- what I am accusing him of is not understanding the processes which lead us to this point. I think that they are much more complicated than just the growth of moral relativism. I don't see that growth. Rather I see the roots of this lying in the growth of the idea of a child as an autonomous agent, so the adoption of restrictions on parental authority and various economic conditions (both in terms of advertising and decreased parental time spent caring for kids) which lead to that development. There are good reasons why those three developments have happened. There is a too simplistic conservative point of view that suggests if only we were more authoritarian the problems of the world would be solved: I think that conservatives need to think more about both the moral and economic reasons why authority has eroded before discussing what should happen to bolster it. Perhaps I didn't express myself clearly enough in my last post, but this is the argument that I was trying to get at.

Classical Kissing

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then another hundred. Then when we have made up many thousands, we will confuse our counting, that we may not know the reckoning, nor any malicious person blight them with the evil eye, when he knows our kisses are so many. Catullus

Catullus was one of the great Roman love poets, and his series of poems to his mistress Lesbia are justly amongst the most famous in the world. This passage is interesting though because it throws into sharp relief the importance of the kiss in the ancient world to their conceptions of how love was expressed. A recent article in Leeds International Classical Studies by Richard Hawley (PDF) deals with the subject of the way that kisses are described by classical authors in more detail and what Hawley describes is interesting because it demonstrates firstly the ways that kissing has changed its function since antiquity and the ways in which kissing changed its function within antiquity.

A kiss has always been a symbol of erotic desire. What we see though in the sources is an evolution and a distinction from modern erotic desire. Kisses in early antiquity, amongst the drinking parties held in Athens in the 5th Century BC and frequented by Socrates and Alciabedes, were often between equals: Socrates warns one kisser about the danger of kisses as a prelude to love instead of a part of love. By kissing the idea is that one might fall in love with the recipient of your kisses. By the Hellenistic period, the expression of kissing in poetry and in philosophy has become much more erotic- erotic fulfilment arises from the participation in a successful kiss. In Roman times this erotic kissing is no longer an expression of same sex relationships- but of male desire for women, the kiss becomes something you do to your girlfriend not your boyfriend. From Socrates's fears about the effect of kissing a boy on his friends to Catullus's evocation of lying in bed with Lesbia kissing her repeatedly as part of an erotic performance is actually quite a distance.

It also symbolises though another crucial difference and distinction. A kiss was a mark of power in the ancient world- erotic power. To French kiss someone, insert your tongue in their mouth as you kiss, was seen as a type of domination. Older lovers would french kiss their boyfriends. Women would be kissed by men. Women who kissed men were looked down on- its no surprise that the Greek word for prostitute derives from the Greek word for kiss. And there were different words for the erotic dominatory French kiss than for the kiss shared between equals and lovers. By the time of Ovid, a kiss is used as part of Ovid's lover's ensemble of force to conquer women into granting sex. Kisses here are almost blandishments to rape. What one sees in Augustan Rome therefore is a much more imperial style of sexual relationship where say in Ovid the domination of a woman is actively praised as the end for which the lover seeks.

This trend is mirrored in the way that kisses are used in non-sexual connotations as well. Again its worth thinking about vocabulary- whereas we have one word for kiss, the Greeks and the Romans had a couple- and they had words which denoted the social kiss, the kiss of greeting. Mostly such kisses were exchanged within family groups- you would kiss in greeting your brother, sister or particularly mother. Children were often kissed, by holding them by their ears and kissing their faces. Kissing outside the family seems to have grown and extended during the Roman Empire- kissing non-relations or non-friends was seen by many Greeks as something that Persians did. There are wonderful stories in Xenophon about lustful Persian governors kissing boys that they fancied in order to savour the sexual pleasure. During the Roman empire, kissing became more of a universal phenomenon.

That was backed by a second trend. We have noted before that kissing is used as a mark of domination- the conquest of another's mouth by one's tongue so to speak. Social kissing though could also be a mark of domination. The Greeks noticed that Persians kissed the floor in front of their kings. Refusal to let someone kiss your face, instead letting them kiss your hands was a sign of submission. Priam does it to Achilles when seeking the body of his son Hector. Universal kissing of feet or carpet in front of someone was seen as a mark of power, or imperium, and consequently as the shades of the Republic were abandoned in Rome such kissing becomes more important. We see it in the age of Diocletian for example, where imperial dignatories would kiss the floor in front of Emperor.

A kiss for the ancient world was therefore never just a kiss- it always meant something more. Its interesting to try to imagine the way that manners have changed over the years- the subtle languages of signs by which we orientate ourselves. By examining the Greek and Roman kiss I think we can see how much the way that humans behave within groups has changed- and changes even between eras of the past- its an interesting study and one can only hope that Richard Hawley succeeds in his ambition of completing further work.

Jesus Christ my personal saviour or saviour of Mankind

Bill Scher mentions a Mitt Romney dogwhistle to the Mormons in his recent speech and describes something about Mormon theology here- its an absolutely fascinating couple of seconds- well worth watching.

History's Judgement

Political leaders and Journalists always make me laugh when they talk about history. (For a fine recent article which provoked this outburst see here.) Perpetually leaders talk about the judgements that history will deliver upon them, how for instance a Nixonian reputation for corruption will in the end turn into a Nixonian reputation for foresighted peace making (it is ironic that they don't understand the two judgements can be true of the same person). American historians unfortunately reinforce such hubris but compiling lists of great Presidents- evaluating Washington against Reagen (as though it were possible to compare a ruler of a small agrarion republic to the ruler of a vast multicultural complex state). One of the reasons that politicians make me laugh is that they claim that their reputations will be assessed by history- and that they will pass some grand examination in the future at which dons, sitting like schoolmasters, will award passes and fails.

Actually there never will be such an examination. People tend to presume that there will be because they tend to presume that historians will know in the future things that we don't know now. We can now see that Harry Truman's policy of containment was a successful strategy to combat Soviet Russia, we can now see that Neville Chamberlaine's policy of appeasement was a failure in combatting Hitler's Germany. Neither of those judgements were so obvious at the time. But equally there is much that historians are ignorant of, that those close to events or even those contemporary with events do know. Most importantly because historians do know what happened, they don't know what it was like to be there- to take the decision. Even I have a better idea of what Tony Blair thought in 2003, because I was there and had to think about what I would have done. A historian can't do that, his art lies in imagining himself into that position but he can never be there. Furthermore so much of life happens casually. Think about it this way, imagine you died tommorrow and all memory of you was purged from the world- all we would have of you would be the documentary traces you left. We wouldn't know what you were like- we would only know what others thought you were like, and even then only what they would commit to paper or film about what you were like. Uncertainty is the lot of the politician, it is also the lot of the historian.

And that uncertainty leads to another factor- its seldom that those stentorian dons are ever in accord. You can hold a poll and get a result- but that's like an election and historical fashions change. Since the 1960s the English Levellers have gone in the history of the civil war from being close to Karl Marx to being close to Billy Graham. Since the 18th Century, empires have waxed and waned but so have their reputations- for Gibbon's contemporaries empire caused corruption, for Kipling's it represented a civilising mission, for ours it seems brutal and constraining and we all use Rome as an example. Putting your trust in the judgement of history is like putting your faith in fashion remaining unchanging. Yes its difficult to imagine for instance that anyone sane will ever think Adolf Hitler was a good thing, and equally that anyone sane will think Winston Churchill was a bad thing- but the majority of politicians don't start genocides or fight brave lonely conflicts. The majority of politicians make mistakes and misjudgements, and have good intentions- and the balance between their error and their success is a fine one. Clement Attlee's reputation in England depends on where you stand politically, as does FDR's in the US. Its a very odd politician that is everyone's hero or everyone's villain.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't judge politicians- but we should remember that we judge them not against the standerds of some abstract historical tradition, but against our own moral sense. History will render no judgement on Blair, Bush or Nixon- the discipline of history allows us to evaluate different versions of what happened and why against the evidence, its then for us to come up with the moral judgements. Historians are not Gods but human beings. As there is no view from nowhere- and politics is all about balancing competing moral needs- a historian judges, just like anyone else, by his moral compass the ethics of a politician's behaviour. He might know more facts: but his moral judgement is just the same as any one else's.

Cross posted at liberal conspiracy.