The surreal comedy of cricket commentary revealed again

This is partly for the Umpire, who must be feeling dire given the situation New Zealand are in. Listening to the cricket commentary on Five Live Extra- I've just heard Mr Boycott give a great quote (in addition to yesterday's comments about how great Ian Botham was, a man Geoffrey told us whose success derived from a big good backside- you have to wonder!), you have to hear this in a Yorkshire accent for it to go down precisely right, but here is Mr Boycott's wisdom

When you get into bad habits, it becomes normal.

It does indeed, Geoffrey! Thanks for telling us.

PS Sorry just heard yet another great Geoffrey moment: 'Andrew Strauss needs to take my uncle Algy's advice', if only he'd listened to Geoffrey's uncle Algy there wouldn't be a problem- again the quote has its best effect when said in a Yorkshire accent! They are now discussing Uncle Algy, apparantly he played for Ackworth, had one eye and smoked under a tree at the end of the over. He was a 'good line and length bowler' and bought our Geoffrey 'pop and crisps'. And now he's off on a real jumpers for goalposts moment.

Cricket commentary is a surreal comedy!

PPS They are now discussing cappucinos in New Zealand!

American History X

American History X is a more important film than it is a good film. Its political attitudes are more important than its storyline- something that places it beneath films with a message that work as films. The mastership of a craftsman like Bergman was that he was able to say something and tell a story- American History X cannot do both. It has one central character who is realised fully- Derek Vineyard- a Nazi skinhead who becomes through the course of a prison sentence a more tolerant and humane individual. Its the story of him attempting to rescue his own brother from the same cul-de-sac that leads through the white rights culture down into the morass of prison and resentment, of hatred and fear and curses and death. Its a nasty subculture that the film portrays, a nasty, unpleasant, horrible and vicious culture filled with darkness- and in this case a particularly excruciating scene.

That culture comes under the microscope here- together with the reasons that some people might enter into it. The culture on the streets of America as portrayed in American History X is violent and brutal- its filled with bullying gangs and rife with problems. From murder to single motherhood in poverty, every blight on the urban landscape of modern America is here and there is little chance of redemption. These characters are locked- often accidentally locked into a cycle of violence, deprivation and poverty and Naziism gives them a reason to throw out their hatred to the world. Racism in the film is a scream from those who are deeply cut to their cores, whose brothers are murdered, who are forced off basket ball courts and beaten in the gent's toilets. In such deprivation it is easy to develop hatred and to develop not the better angels but the worst of our nature, it is easy to turn resentment into the hard currency of slogans and fear, into the harder coin of murder and violence.

As a political thesis, that has much to commend it. Of course support for extremism is much more complicated- I have dealt with some aspects of it myself in other places. The real point though about this film and one that it makes fairly and well is that those feelings are real. Those feelings of hatred and fear are central to the way that some people experience their lives. The fascist characters apart from Derek and his brother here are cardboard cutouts- but there is no denying the reality of the thrill that fascism gives to their lives- that it gives to their wandering egoes. Nor can there be any doubt that liberalism, personified here by teachers, is weak in dealing with these problems- a world in which there are simple problems is also a world in which there are unfortunately no simple answers and the complicated, nuanced points of a liberal can sound like blethering.

Ultimately American History X comes down to make a simple and important point- a point that I think has a lot of merit to it- which is about anger. Anger can be productive- it can lead us to build schools and hospitals. But it can be unproductive and if it takes over lives and obliterates sympathy it can be very unproductive and lead to real disaster. Anger can corrode our sentiments for our fellow human beings- we can end up so angry, so embittered with our situation and the world, that we never take a step forwards. To some extent anger in this way becomes a counterpart to depression, a mood that inhibits the natural cycle of human life, the natural attempt to build something for the future, for your family, for an ideal of goodness. Anger however directed feeds on itself- Derek makes the point continually that anger in this film is something that devours but never satisfies. Political anger is a kind of philosophical masturbation- it never satisfies, never produces anything but an itch to do it more and more- it might releive the instantaneous tension but can never supply an answer.

This film is preachy, it lacks subtle characters and there is a bit too much caricature for my liking- its quite possibly a bad film with a good message. Even the message could be improved- there are more things to be learnt and curiously for a film against racism, many of its black characters are even more cardboard than their white counterparts. But its a film from a point of view and it does succeed in conveying that point of view. More than that, it is a film about an idea and whatever we think of the stuttering delivery, the idea about the psychology of anger and the way it feeds extremism is a useful analytical tool. Its expression here is limited to the way that anger feeds off poverty, and the conversion of its leading characters is managed too easily- most neo-nazi teenagers don't take a night to convert back to tolerance- but its a worthy effort.

The Murder of Regilla

'A murder charge ws brought against Herodes in this way. When his wife Regilla was eight months pregnant, he ordered his freedman Alcimedon to beat her for trivial reasons. She died in premature childbirth from a blow to her abdomen' Philostratus

Philostratus was writing a life of Herodes when he wrote those lines. Herodes was one of the richest men in Greece and Rome in the 2nd Century AD, he was a philosopher, a tutor to and friend of Emperors and a massive donor of public art to the cities of Europe, Asia and Africa. He stood at the apex of Roman society- and his biographer honoured him as a man of impecable learning and taste. But of course during this process of exaltation, Philostratus mentions a fact that neither Herodes nor his powerful friends might wish us to dwell upon, that Regilla, Herodes's wife died in suspicious circumstances. Furthermore Herodes was accused of murdering her by her brother and the case went all the way to the Roman Senate before it failed for some reason that we don't quite know. The whole tale is sketched out by Sarah Pomeroy in her book which takes not Herodes, but his wife Regilla as the main character and attempts to sketch out the drama of a life unjustly curtailed.

Regilla was born in Rome to one of the highest families in the Empire- she was related to the Imperial Antonine house. We know almost nothing about her upbringing- though we can presume it was typical for a Roman girl of her day. Though the typical Roman girl or woman is not a subject about which we have vast ammounts of evidence anyway! Pomeroy is the first historian to actually write a chapter on what a Roman girlhood would have been like and she provides fascinating details of that life. She would have had a dozen slaves, trained in childcare to look after her, and several different wet nurses. The nurses' characters would have been examined- Romans believed that a wetnurse gave her charge not merely milk but also character through the milk. Most nurses and many of the other specialist team of childminders would have been Greek- the Greeks were the adknowledged experts on childcare in the 2nd Century. A Roman senatorial daughter would have had massive powers to torment and command her slaves. She would have been taught Greek, though her younger brother Bradua would have had a larger retinue and a more extensive education. Even so, Plutarch informs us that Roman girls could expect to learn mathematics and other authors inform us of a curriculum that would include the classics and dancing.

This kind of detail is fascinating and its what comes through again and again in Pomeroy's account. As a primer on what a Roman aristocratic woman could expect there is no better book around, that I have read. For instance Pomeroy talks of life expectancy (mid-30s), of the number of pregnancies (normally around 6 or 7- data born out in studies of slavery fertility) and the differences between Greek and Roman marriage. Greeks tended to favour endogamy- in Athens only siblings by the same mother were forbidden to marry and in Sparta by the same father. Herodes own family had instances both of half siblings and first cousins marrying. Roman law on the other hand was much stricter- under Roman law noone (excepting the Imperial family) could marry closer relations than first cousins. The difference had an impact as Plutarch noted on the ways that Roman and Greek marriage worked- the fear of the girl's family meant that a Roman marriage afforded more protection than a Greek marriage where the family of the couple were the same people. Herodes had a reputation for his temper before he married- he had violent encounters and Pomeroy implies that he probably beat up his wife. Not to mention the fact that for Herodes his wife, in Pomeroy's view, was definitely less important than his two catamites (to whom he dedicated numerous statues and monuments) and that she was a mere political alliance.

For the distinction between Herodes and Regilla was not merely sexual- it was also political. Herodes may have been rich, but he was Greek and he also was a new man. His father had built up an empire of business connections- probably unscrupulously- and Herodes had legitimised it, rising to become a senator and a magistrate. But to turn that legitimation into acceptance by the Roman aristocracy, he needed to ally himself with an ancient family. Regilla's family were ancient- both her father and brother were consuls and her family went back to the early days of the Republic. The rich Greek and the noble Roman were made for each other politically and whilst we do not know what precipitated the marriage, we can be pretty sure that that was uppermost in most people's minds. Equally Pomeroy is right to emphasize that Herodes did something rather extraordinary when he got married- he went back to Greece taking his young bride with him. Few Roman women travelled far outside Rome- almost none left permanently (exile from Rome as any casual reader of Ovid will know was thought of as a fate worse than death). Regilla travelled to Greece and furthermore she left permanently. Pomeroy speculates about the psychological effect that this might have produced upon her. She also uncovers interesting evidence of the role that Regilla played in Greece- she was appointed a priestess in two temples (one Herodes constructed for the purpose in Athens) and played an important political role in public life. She also had a number of children- two girls and a boy- also confusingly named Bradua, whom Pomeroy asserts that Herodes hated unjustly. Again we have no evidence that Herodes's hatred was unjust, though he seems to have made scant effort to remember his son in his will.

Now we come to the murder. Simply put- all we have is the account with which I began this chapter, suspicions in the ancient sources about Herodes's character, the fact that Regilla's brother began proceedings and the way that Herodes behaved after her death. None prove in my view that Herodes murdered Regilla- its quite possible that as Pomeroy argues he did murder her- but there is no direct evidence that he did and we do not know why the senate refused to convict. Probably there wasn't enough of a prosecution case to convict upon- normally Roman slaves would be tortured and then pressed into giving evidence, in this case Herodes's slaves were far from Roman justice. There were enough rumours in Rome about Herodes's treatment of his wife for her brother to prosecute. The simple plain truth is that we probably will never know. Pomeroy argues that Herodes's massive building program after his wife's death was due to some guilt complex or to a desire to dispel suspicion. Again there is no way of knowing- and its always dangerous to impute motives to people when its perfectly reasonable to imagine other thought processes going through Herodes's mind- afterall if you can't boost your own prominence, why not boost that of your wife. The quote by Philostratus, who was one of Herodes's supporters, implies that there was some domestic violence involved- but why Alcimedon was never punished despite Herodes been found innocent has never been adequately deat with. The truth is that the pieces of evidence we have in our hands as to the murder are contradictory and don't clearly indicate anything save that there was a tragedy- we don't know enough about any of the principles and our sources are not good enough to conclude much. (Another review that takes a similar line to me is here and has further good reasons to be sceptical.)

The real value of Pomeroy's book lies not so much in its treatment of Regilla and her murder- despite my title- as in her discussion of ancient women. I am cautious as to whether there is much that we can really say about Regilla- all we can probably say is that somehow in that house in Greece a tragedy occured- and probably that that tragedy was related to domestic violence in some way. What happened though is veiled in mystery. Far more fascinating is the insight from this reconstruction of the life of Regilla, we get into Roman women as a group. It is probably impossible to do anything more than Pomeroy in attempting to reconstruct Regilla- but it seems from what she has written that there is plenty more to be done on Roman women. This book is a wonderful introduction to the subject as it sketches out a plausible vision of what a Roman aristocratic female life might have been like, based on the best evidence. We may not know how Regilla died, but thanks to Pomeroy we know much more about what her life might have been like.

Globalisation and the Welfare State

Most people on the British left are free traders or fair traders- we do not oppose globalisation and do not expect it to make real differences to the way that government policy in the UK works. That might seem counter intuitive. Afterall competitive pressures you might assume will lead to arguments for diminishing the welfare state to become more powerful over time. Essentially the welfare state often supplies through its payments a floor to the kind of wages and conditions that companies can offer, and as cheaper labour comes to the market, you would expect governments to adjust welfare provisions downwards both to enhance competition and to lower tax rates. Well that's not actually true. A study by a set of German academics (A. Dreher, J. Sturm and H.W. Ursprung) for the journal Public Choice (pdf*) finds that globalisation has made very little difference to the composition of public spending. They suggest that we might have over-estimated globalisation as a phenomenon and that some of its effects may be blurred. However they also argue that this lack of consequences stemming from globalisation for public expenditure, arises because there is a compensatory effect- that politicians are rewarded for compensating their constituents who fall out of work and who might fall out of work. The fear of the consequences of globalisation mitigates those consequences in a paradoxical way. Its an interesting finding- it doesn't alter the way that the economics of globalisation- but it does remind us that that does not determine what we do about globalisation.

The point is that economics does not always lead politics, especially in a democracy. Democratic power, manifested in the ballot box, creates incentives to mitigate the consequences of loss and I would argue that demonstrates not merely the justice of democratic systems but also their stability. It is because of a democratic system, that some measure of equality is preserved despite the inegalitarian consequences of competition. In this sense the argument about globalisation is part of a larger argument about the way that democracy goes hand in hand with a just and stabalising social policy. It would be interesting to see whether that's true and whether the spending policies of dictatorships and democracies say in Latin America are very different and also to see what impact compulsary voting has upon the way that governments spend money. Overall though, because this is a dual study of policy in the OECD and in a larger collection of countries, I think its possible to say that the responsiveness of politicians to electorates has led to different policies being created. The fact that most current governments see their legitimacy as rising from the people, not descending from some other authority, leads them to a situation in which they are constrained in their actions.

Ultimately when it comes to globalisation, the constraints to appealing to public legitimacy seem to cancel out the constraint of global market pressure.

*The article is only free for a while, so it may become unavailable at some point in the future.

Crossposted from here

Ben Ohlen's economics

I found this summary of the work of Ben Ohlen, a Harvard junior fellow, fascinating. There are several interesting ideas in there- for instance that as you decrease the number of corrupt officials, the price of a bribe rises. But the one I found most interesting was what Ohlen found in his work on democracy- that when you assacinate a democratic leader that makes almost no difference to the future of the country concerned. Economic growth and political stability stay roughly constant. Its when you assacinate a dictator that things really change- assacinating Mugabe say in Zimbabwe would change things much more than assacinating Gordon Brown in the UK. The point I think that is contained within this argument is a crucial one and reflects a central truth that few in public life articulate because it would diminish their importance: politicians in a democracy are expendible, institutions are not.

Niall McKeown The Invention of Ancient Slavery

As a PhD student, you sit for hours and sometimes days trying to work out how a set of evidence fits together and becomes a theory. Hopefully you find yourself a way out of the morass, and put together something which can be vivaed and be the starting point for an academic career. But always lurking in the background is a suspicion that what you are investigating actually doesn't exist or even worse, that its impossible to find the answer of the question you have set yourself. I used to wonder a lot about writing an anti-PhD thesis- a thesis that demonstrated that there was no answer to this particular conumdrum, that this particular question was just impossible to resolve without some surprising discovery and a proof that future scholars need not follow in my wake. A destructive PhD you might say and yet there is more merit than just fortifying a depressed PhD student in doing that kind of exercise: because it demonstrates that there are some questions that are incredibly hard to answer, some problems that we may never solve and some ideas that though attractive cannot be proved.

Dr. Niall McKeown, a lecturer in Ancient History at the Birmingham University, has taken my half imagined possibility and converted it into a book. His study analyses the history of Roman slavery- how many slaves were there, who were they, how were they treated, what did they think of slavery, what were their relations with their masters and each other. McKeown examines several answers to these questions from a variety of scholars from the past hundred years. His history of the historiography of slavery starts in the decades just after the Great War and continues roughly to the new millenium. He analyses people who he asserts (and others will have to verify this) are typical of historians of slavery: we have racist interpretations of Roman decline through ethnic mixing, communist interpretations that see class war with slaves continuing throughout Roman history and different national interpretations- German, French and Anglo-American- which perpetuate other ideas. McKeown also moves to consider how specialists from other fields- literary and demographic- have considered slavery and how they too have put forward interpretations of the institution and how it functioned.

McKeown takes us through these different ideas about what ancient slavery was- and does it brilliantly. He summarises their arguments and then demonstrates how the same set of evidence, used by those scholars to make one point can be turned around to make another. He points to the ways for instance that rhetoric in Martial or Juvenal is highly difficult to understand- these were the comedic writers of the day and we don't really 'get' the joke. Afterall would you use Blackadder as a guide to British eating habits in the First World War- were all British soldiers eating 'rat o'van' (rat run over by a van). Comedy exists to exploit what may be unusual or just funny situations- and without knowing a culture inside out it is hard to separate the funny joke from the context. McKeown skewers various historians who take too literally the words of literature- he also suggests that all historians are limited b what they study. For example, great German historians have put a lot of effort into studying the words of slaves to Oracles- but that is obviously a self selecting sample or it may not be? But we just don't know.

This point of ignorance is made again and again. When Bradley, the great scholar of slavery in English, argues on the basis of Roman legal documents that there were a great variety of crimes committed by slaves and therefore that slaves and masters were antagonistic naturally to each other, Mckeown pulls him up. Afterall the legal texts that he examines give no guide to the frequency of the crimes that they discuss. Furthermore those crimes might be merely interesting legal problems created by law and of interest to intellectually minded lawyers. Its fascinating to think about what happens should a slave commit a crime and then be freed, should he be tried as a slave or freedman? That might just have been a Roman lawyer trying to solve a specific if rare puzzle or even a Roman law lecturer puzzling over a particular problem: it doesn't mean that there were armies of slaves out there trying to murder their masters.

Evidence is difficult to work with and Mckeown demonstrates some of its problems. But this goes further into the work say of demographers. He is very good at exposing the fact that demographers work on the basis of assumptions. Most modern demographers of Roman slaves work on the basis that 10% of the Roman population was enslaved. McKeown points out that there is basically no evidence for this figure- beyond a survey of 1000 people over three centuries in Egypt which produced a figure of 11% as slaves. But those 1000 were biassed- they lived in Egypt- furthermore even within the sample we can tell that there were biases- in the city 13% of the population were slaves, in the countryside 7% and it happens that our sample is biassed towards urban areas. If say 5% of the Roman population were slaves then it changes all of our calculations about how many were indigenous, born from slave mothers, how many of them were abandoned children and how many were born outside the empire and then caught and captured and brought to the Empire.

This doesn't mean that McKeown is relativistic- far from it. Its because he accepts there is such a thing as evidence that he can suggest ambiguities within it. The work he provides is positivistic in that it assumes that there is such a thing as an eventual absolute truth- its just that it might not be accessible, that the limitations within the evidence might make it difficult to get to that absolute truth. There were slaves and they did live in a particular way- its just that its very hard to get to the generality of slaves because they left no records behind them and because the records of the slaves we do no about are atypical, precisely because they are recorded slaves. We can deceive ourselves as well- and Mckeown is very conscious of the way that we can imagine pasts which go way beyond the evidence that we have in front of us. Another image I have from my Phd is that evidence in the dark whilst you are dreaming up your theory seems to coalesce, turn the light on and it scatters in front of you- anyone who has honestly done historical research knows that feeling and McKeown brings it back to life at least for me.

Its an interesting problem that we face. On the one hand there are definite historical truths- or rather there are definite historical falsehoods. Were I to say that there were no slaves in ancient Rome I would just be wrong, categorically and unquestionably wrong. But its much harder to say much more that is definite about those slaves. In the end history is about piecing together evidence using imagination- and there is always the danger that the imagination, the art of history, takes over from the evidence collection and begins building houses on sand. Furthermore what McKeown provides us with is evidence that there will always be legitimate contestation within history about the meaning of evidence- Michael Oakeshott said in his essay on history that the past had left us artefacts out of which historians created narratives. And Oakeshott was right- the problem is that the artefacts can be connected in other ways. If you deny the presence of the artefacts from the past, you are talking in falsehood- but there may be several ways to understand the past.

In that sense, McKeown's book sits less readily with the extreme post modernist relativism- the kind of sentiment that argues that there is no truth- than with a doubting scepticism about the validity of interpretation. Relativism is a stupid policy- but scepticism is a sensible one and it allows one independence of mind and also the readiness of self criticism that is the mark of the true historian. Furthermore the kind of scepticism that McKeown in this book creates is scepticism based on the evidence- not a generalised cynicism- but a specific scepticism coming out of genuine problems in the detail. In that sense his work provides a useful corrective to the over imaginative historian- and indicates a way forward- a waryness about our own capacity at intellectual discovery and a commitment to the dry work of evidence collection that is thoroughly to be welcomed.

David Willets at the LSE

The Fast show had a sketch where a character every week sitting with a group of middle class friends made a social faux pas and ended the sketch by saying 'I'll get me coat.' The Sketch illustrated a principle that David Willets's lecture at the LSE on 20th February attempted to elucidate in more academic and less amusing way. Basically Willets argued, rightly, that law is much more than just an act of government. Law embodies convention. In some sense what is written in the law is an expression of the conventions by which we operate. As Willets demonstrates for reasons to do with game theory and also evolution, such conventions are neccessary to maintain a stable functioning society. He does not really go farther than making this point- and its a sensible point and his talk is well worth reading, but I think it leads on to some important consequences particularly for us on the liberal left.

The first consequence is that leglislation is not the be all and end all. It is important to obtain leglislation in many areas- one being for instance safety at work where leglislation creates a normative equilibrium using which companies compete. But it also reminds us of the virtues of doing things which are not leglislated. Take my example from above for a moment, I think one of the most important advances in life in this country during my parent's lifetime and partly during my own is the advance of equality- sexual, racial and between sexual orientations. The evolution of attitudes on those matters has not been something only produced by government- its been produced as well by people changing their behaviour and that has often come about because they have been shamed into changing their behaviour. Campaigning works. I've been in rooms where people have argued that explicit consent isn't needed for sex or that homosexuals are worse than heterosexuals- and seen the distancing that everyone else in the room does from those people. The intake of breath, the slight contempt in the voice, all those things tend to create an unwritten but still powerful social consensus that operates to constrain what people can and cannot say. In reality this is what we mean by political correctness- its a code of convention and for the most part its a sensible code of convention.

You can see it in other ways as well- but it gives us on the liberal left a challenge. Because to have recourse to government action to repress attitudes is the easy but ultimately flawed way of doing things- it doesn't work in the end. Governments can leglislate against discrimination in the workplace, against all sorts of tangible crimes but attitudes are hard to change by the blunt instrument of leglislation. Rather it is social stigma and generational change that changes a society's mores. We can do little about the second- but we can do a lot about the first. Its why campaigning say against sexist advertising is so important because it sends out a signal that this is unacceptable. We have done a lot of good work in the past on this- but we need to keep up the fight say against perceptions of black people as physically strong mentally weak individuals. And its also why some of the right's counter attacks- from semi-racists like Mark Steyn- are so worrying because they enable people to think that this sort of language- and ultimately this attitude is a legitimate one when it isn't. Its immoral.

What we on the left have to continue to do is what American political scientists call framing. Framing means making the debate fit into our norms by using things like this website and other avenues to say that racism, sexism etc is not merely wrong but that its immoral and to be condemned. By doing that we create conventions. But we also have to be alert to other people manipulating the discourses of society- for example the religious claiming that they are discriminated against- when they actually are not. Being forced to treat others equally is not being discriminated against, it is being coerced and such coercion may be justified. Also we on the left can really get to an important dimension of citizenship and fellow feeling- equality. A society riven by class hatred is a society which cannot sustain recipricocity in its values, it cannot sustain in the long run the kind of world that David Willets wants to produce. Ultimately such a society devolves into one where the people's allegiance is bought by politicians and where class becomes such a dividing line that people feel no sympathy or empathy across it. Mr Willets's logic leads one to put a priority on equality as a means to social cohesion and to democratic stability.

One last point deserves emphasis though, because although Willets's arguments do not naturally prescribe a moral system- there are indications in there of what a moral system that would fulfill his conditions looks like. Game theory relies upon the idea of trust: I break my word with those that break their word and I keep my word with those that keep their word. We all prosper more in a society which does the latter rather than the former. And that involves of course the most important moral sentiment within our consciousness- sympathy. If you think of the moral advances of the twentieth century- from the emancipation of women to the creation of a welfare state- they have all depended upon the extension of sympathy to a class of people who previously did not receive it in the same way. Sympathy is the centre of any system of morality which prioritises the way that we behave towards others- and as Willets discusses there are good evolutionary reasons to be sympathetic. Far from suggesting that we need to embrace a Christian world view as the basis of our normative thinking or ushering in a reign of relativism, Willets's arguments lead us to a position where sympathy, in classical Scottish enlightenment terms, becomes the basis for our moral position in society. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, they all maintain sympathy as a moral value but also do much more: if we are to seek the kind of minimalistic moral concern that will satisfy everyone and make the law best reflect the way that people think, then working off the basis of sympathy gives us some clue as to how that could happen.

That also gives us clues as to how to argue and what to argue. It refocuses the debate upon the real issue between us and conservatives of every hue: that is what we do about equality. Ultimately we argue that in an unequal society the bonds between people, the productive equilbria in game theory, are disintegrated by the mutual distrust produced by massive inequalities. Ultimately should some people or classes of people have better access to law, Parliament, the instruments of power in the market etc, that delegitimates the games that we play. Either we end up with a population which quietly accepts and does not engage, or worse we end up with a situation involving rising criminality and fear. Willets is right to target the way that we see each other and the way that we behave each other as the best avenue to pursue in understanding the productive synergies that we produce in society: he is entirely right in appreciating the force of convention in changing behaviour. Where he is wrong is to underestimate and not even to mention the effects that inequality can have on all of this. Inequality is most often economic inequality- but it can also take the form of glass ceilings which may not show up as easily in statistic. However understood, inequality is corrosive to society and corrosive therefore to the productive externalities that wider cooperation between us all can produce.

Crossposted from the Liberal Conspiracy

Ken

Dave has got an interview with Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, over at his website. Its a short interview but it is interesting- partly of course to see how far any London mayor has to work around the limitations of his office. Livingstone can't raise redistributionary taxation so has to work in policies of redistribution in other ways. It is also interesting to see how far the campaign is already negative- Ken spends a lot of time answering Dave's questions which mostly invite positive answers with comments about Boris Johnson and Livingstone is getting a fair degree of hate on Tory websites. More than anything though I think this marks the fact that Dave is one of the better Labour bloggers around- to get this kind of interview demonstrates his reach- and his articles are always fascinating and interestingly couched. Its a pity he didn't get longer with Livingstone because its my opinion that people like Dave Cole and David Hill sometimes would ask more interesting questions than the professional journalists.

Francesco, Giullare di Dio

"a monument to stupidity... never before have Christianity and cretinism been so close to one another" Martin Oms

The tale of St Francis is one of the most central of the Catholic saints to Christian life. Roberto Rosselini directed a film based upon St Francis's life in the 1950s- a follow up to his trilogy about the end of the war (Roma citta Aperta, Paisa, Germany Year Zero) took the theme of the Christian renounciation of the world and attempted to create an alternative to the war, greed and genocide which had dominated his era. St Francis and his disciples in this movie are held up as an alternative- a Christian folly- against the worldly wisdom of the dictators who had deformed the modern era. This film is an attempt- like Robert Bresson's work about Joan of Arc- to reclaim the values of a medieval saint and install them in a modern era. It is a utopian film- but its utopia is the utopia of personal spiritual fulfilment- of rebirth through Christ, the utopia of what St Francis calls perfect happiness, the renounciation of everything, even happiness itself for the beatific vision of God acheived through suffering.

In that sense the film rejects the whole basis of modernity. From first to last this is a film that revels in folly and stupidity. Its heroes are the mad and the starving- its power lies in its reinvention of poverty. Similarly to the Christians studied by Peter Brown in his magnificent study of Poverty and the Church, Rosselini wants us to remember that wealth is independent of virtue and indeed can be opposed by it. Possessions in this film are an absolute evil. Villagers who love their pigs and cows not as brother animals but as possessions let them obstruct their own salvation. One of the monks, Ginepro, is so foolish that every time he goes out he manages to lose his habit, or rather he grants someone else the privilege of taking his habit from him. That happens three times- the last time the Monks are being visited by Sister Chiara and they have to drag the naked Ginepro off to a bush to reclothe him using some plant stems and a coat. Ginepro's naivety and his lack of property though are of a piece- worldly wisdom is all about the collection of possessions, Ginepro has no idea about how to function in a world of possessions. Give him a load of wood and some vegetables and you'll find him as likely to allow the wood to be cooked and the vegetables to be used as material for the fire as anything else- indeed you can expect him to not realise that food goes cold and rots with time.

Poverty is a virtue here- but so is laughter. St Francis laughs himself throughout the film- he finds things absurd and funny- the title translates as St Francis, God's jester! The monks laugh repeatedly and joy is something they often express. But its the object of their laughing and their joy that Rosselini wants us to observe. Joy proceeds in this film from comradeship. Everyone is everyone else's brother. Poverty has abolished property and even a sense of individuality. Everyone follows St Francis and Francis himself follows his congregation- allowing them to take major decisions- and of course the living God. Francis declares himself the leader because he is the greatest of sinners and invites, nay orders his own followers to place their feet upon his face and neck because of his manifest and multiple sins. This response to every question is echoed by his followers- when Ginepro is captured by the Barbarian King, he too uses the response, telling the King that he Ginepro has deserved death because of the way that he has betrayed God and submitting to any torture with a stare that signifies his increasing saintliness. Hence Francis in a conversation later in the film tells one of the monks that the only way to Christ is to suffer for him- in suffering man abases himself, wipes himself clean of sin and comes closest to the Christ of the cross. In wordly happiness, man is furthest from that Christ and lives in sin- even if he loves Christ, so long as he is rich or powerful or even content, he cannot acheive full happiness, wallowing in the mud he can.

But that's not to say that pain does not hurt or touch these monks. Rosselini wants us to see that- and in perhaps the film's most important scene which is almost silent he does. In the nighttime Francis prays on his own to God, and as he prays a leper comes along almost silently beside the dwellings of the monk. Francis watches the leper through the trees, observes the man's bloodied and emaciated face, his infected hands and his doomed limp. He moves up to the leper, almost level, the leper slowly moves away. Francis keeps following the man, then deliberately he stands in front of him and hugs him, blessing him in hugging him. Of course we are meant to know what this means. Leprosy in the Middle Ages was the most infectious disease of them all, the most feared disease. The leper moved away to spare Francis, Francis embraced him to remind the leper and himself of the man's common humanity. Perhaps the most important shot of the whole film is at the end of this sequence, the leper moves on and St Francis filled with shame and horror collapses weeping to the floor. As a piece of cinema it is incredibly powerful, not a word has been spoken and yet the central Christian themes of compassion and abasement, of the centrality of morality, the sadness of fallen man and the hope of salvation have all been expressed wordlessly in the actions of a Christian saint and a disfigured human being.

And this is a film that we can take in this way. Originally it was preceded by shots of medieval art work. Even in the form we see it in most normally today- it is a story told like a medieval religious chronicle. There is no story- and the most important aspects of St Francis's life and order- his commission from the Pope and his preaching are left out. This is a story rather about what makes a saint, it is a story whose message is spiritual and not secular or historical. Whereas as a historian my film would concentrate on St Francis, the Pope and the Emperor, this film concentrates on St Francis and his comrades, their charity, their foolishness and comedy. That has a more profound message though for our times- Rosselini's film wants us to refocus. For too long he is telling us we have focussed on politics, for too short a time on ethics. To renew society after the experience of total war it is ethics though- it is the personal and sainthood that can reach something that no ammount of political theorising can. In a sense this is self criticism- Italy had of course sustained a Fascist dictatorship and Rosselini had worked for it- when he talks of sin, Italy's sin must be at the forefront of our minds. But this is a deeper film than a mere examination of a personal and national moment- Rosselini wants us to refocus our attentions, politics is not enough, only ethics can save us now is what he seems to be saying.

Martin Oms considered this film to be the marriage of Christianity and cretinism- his comment missed the point. This film exalts cretinism to be the foundation of a truly Christian life. Such a vision is incompatible with almost any modern philosophy of government- to laud the beggar and the preacher on the street over the responsible member of society, the senile old man over his children who want their cow to build families not be fed to religious simpletons, the monk who robs a peasant of his pig in order to feed a sick comrade over the industrious farmer. It puts all our heirarchies upside down and reminds us of how different the Middle Ages are from our own time in terms of mental outlook. Rosselini was to pass in later films, as Martin Scorsese argues, to considering the Dosteovskyan question, is idiocy truly possible in the society that we have built or is there no place for the holy fool in our world?

Regardless of our answer to that question, this is one of the most powerful portraits of the holy fool in western cinema- there may indeed be nothing else much like it. It is a beautifully shot film- as a non-Christian I do not agree with its message but I cannot but marvel at the power with which that message is expressed.

Britney Spears: the perils of instant judgement

Columns like this one in today's Guardian worry me. For all I know the author may be right- but her argument seems to me to be unrelated to any fact. Basically she asserts that Britney Spears and her decline and fall can be accounted by the society that she lives in. The fact that Britney has problems is a result of our expectations in attempting to control her and our attempts to describe those problems in terms which we would only use for a woman and for a mother. She suggests that Britney does not have problems, its we who have problems, not seeing a rebellion against the celebrity system as a natural phenomenon, but as the psychotic aspect of a woman who has betrayed motherhood. I'm not saying that Lisa Appignanesi is wrong- she might be right. But I would say that I know nothing about Britney's psychology and I don't think that Lisa Appignanesi does either. I don't know why Britney has done the things she has done. I don't know what has prompted her father to take control of her affairs, I don't know the content of her relationships with her husbands or her children. I can only hope that the best things are being done for and by her and her family- but without closer knowledge who am I to say anything.

Lisa Appignanesi seems to me here to be making a real mistake- she has a set of assumptions about the way that psychiatry works, as a tool here for sexual oppression. She then finds an instance and shows that it can be seen as fitting with her thesis- and then she proclaims that her thesis is true. Anecdotal evidence is always hard to assess- but its harder still if there are ways of conceiving of the evidence in a different light- Britney may be a victim of mental illness, we don't know. We don't know why her doctors have made the judgement they have made. Caution is always a good principle when thinking about other people's lives especially when you don't have the fullest information set- scepticism is needed from the writer as well as the readers. I don't think that Appignanesi has demonstrated either scepticism or caution here- and it makes it very difficult to take what she says in the future seriously.

Garden State

Garden State is a film that everyone wants to hate- there are lots of 'really' and 'like' in it- too many for my comfort. The characters are self referential and not profound- they are awkward and need to make unique moments in human history in order to reassure themselves. They are self important but meandering in the morass of life in the twenties- they are filled with the angst of lives lived in comfort without real problems. But the film still charms. Maybe its Zach Braff the lead who manages to act an impassive mid-twenties young man with utter conviction, maybe its Natalie Portman whose performance in this film puts her yet again at the height of her proffession as an actress, maybe its a wry cast of supporting characters, maybe its Braff's meandering direction- he is filled with the incidental in life- maybe as well its his writing which is equally zany and all over the place. Maybe its the fact that the film knows that it is incidental- that 'real life tragedy' is more important than other things- or that its worth enjoying life to the full no matter what your position. Garden State isn't a major film but it defines the very essence of whimsy.

Nowhere is this clearer than Sam, the character that Portman plays and the main love interest of the main character- Andrew Largeman. Sam is a whimsical character in her very essence. The pretty girl who falls in love with a man that missed a kind of normal kid things: she is willing to sit on the steps with him whilst everyone else goes off leaving them alone. She wants to be original- and so she dances and does a silly noise when she feels too conventional. There is a sense of fun about her- and Portman captures a girlishness which is both appealing, vivacious and also laced with a kind of compassion. She could be cruel- but only through carelessness and ignorance of convention- she would not hurt deliberately and has no calculation in her personality. She naively asks questions because she does want the answers: at one point Braff's character says that she is like a 'little detective'. She gets to the bottom of his character more than anyone of his original friends do, partly because her naivety is laced with compassion.

Compassion is the key to this film- whimsy is made up of it- whimsical comedy is based on having compassion and affection for the characters. Part of the reason that Garden State works as opposed to being irritating is that all the characters are portrayed with an understated affection. Less is said than often could be said and conversations are closed off rather than opening out to revelation. When revelation does come the film becomes clumsy- it was not meant to string out such grand narratives but it conveys incidental detail and the growth of a love, that is not spoken because the characters feeling it do not have the articulacy, but is still very real and based on mutual affection and regard. There isn't so much a meet cute in this movie as a meeting followed by a growth of cuteness.

Cuteness saturates this film- sometimes it irritates but often it charms. Its insubstantial but its basic good naturedness, affection for its characters and the charm of its performers manage to make it a minor, but still fun, film. This is life acted out and not observed- there is a great scene about being disconnected at a party, there are great little moments but also there are mawkish ones which don't work. Its a piece which works if you see it for what it is: a small vignette that means nothing, but is fun and lit up by some good performances. A little slice of indie fun and games amidst the grimness of life.

Taxation in the Early Middle Ages

I know that this does not sound like the most glamorous of subjects- but actually I think that this is one of the more interesting findings that has recently come out of history. Its central to the way that we understand the evolution of the state. The Early Middle Ages see the creation of modern Europe, the division of the meditereanean between Christianity to the north and Islam to the south. By understanding what happened we can understand the reasons why our history looks the way it does. But more than that by understanding what happened we can see how different reactions to the downfall of imperialisation (the process of the break up of Empire) took effect and we can see how in this case tax effected the way that regimes evolved.

Chris Wickham's magisterial study of the later Roman Empire and early Middle Ages is a multi chapter work, each of whose segments deserve separate analysis. He explores so much that its hard to confine a discussion to a single blog post- so I hope that people do not mind me turning this into an intermittant series- given that it is in my opinion one of the more important books I have read recently, especially with regard to what I think is a neglected subject: the transition from the classical to the medieval. Tax in my view is also a neglected subject: its not sexy, but gritty. Regimes are often defined using the traditional taxonomy used by Aristotle- democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, but seldom do political theorists in the classical tradition turn to analysing the way that they produce revenue and use that revenue. Yet since Harrington (and perhaps Polybius and Machiavelli) the taxation basis of a society has been one of the ways that a social analyst can distinguish and understand a system best.

The early middle ages saw a vast change in the taxation systems across Europe. Basically at the beggining of the period- in say 400- the meditereanean and its European, Asian and African shores were dominated by the Roman Empire. From the Severn to the Euphrates, the Rhine to the Nile, a single political entity or two allied political entities ruled the entire meditereanean basin. That had consequences. Firstly a vast system of taxation was used to supply the two main cities of the Empire. Rome and Constantinople depended on the annona- supplies of grain taken from the agricultural lands of Egypt and Syria. Rome's population at its height was around a million citizens- and they received free handouts of food from the state. But food didn't merely move to the two main imperial capitals. Food and goods moved from Gaul and Britain towards the Rhine frontier, supporting a vast army there. From Egypt and Syria it moved to the Euphrates where a vast Roman army faced the Persians. From the Aegean supplies moved up to the Danube to supply the Roman army that faced the northern world over that river. The Empire denominated all this movement in coin and paid its soldiers a salary- it also channelled that emense wealth to the construction of a civil service which supported the Emperor and controlled and applied this complex system.

Everywhere in the Roman world we see complaints about the levels of taxation and even an Emperor, Valentinian III issued a law in 450 curbing the rapacity of his own taxation assessors. Imperial orders required accounts three times a year to be submitted from rural districts and relied on inspections by local governors. We can see from Egypt, admittedly the most economically developed and politically precocious Roman province, that tax collection was a violent and an insistant pressure on especially rural society. This had consequences for the Roman system of government- coup was the most common form of change of government, soldiers might mutiny for higher pay (as any reader of Tacitus will know) and the city mobs were both large and mutinous. On the other hand it also accounts for the Roman world's stability as an entity, it was centralised and subject to a regular bureacracy. The Roman world did not see, until its crisis, pressures to break up, rather as in the 3rd Century, Emperors rose and fell at the centre. The Roman system was not centrally controlled- but the resources it produced were centrally directed and linked up a vast area, making the defence of the Rhine say reliant upon incomes produced in Provence or the defence of the Euphrates on incomes from the Nile. This picture though becomes very different after the crisis of the 5th Century in the West and the crisis of the 7th Century in the East.

The results of these two crises were to unravel the central acheivement of the Roman Empire- its existance over so much territory. This had consequences in that in all the provinces of the Empire, the state turned more and more inwards and became more and more localised. In Africa after 439 for example no grain fleet sailed north to distribute free grain to the Roman population. The same was true of Egypt after the Arabic conquest in the 7th Century. The great armies for example on the Rhine disappeared completely at some time in the 5th Century, on the Euphrates at some point in the seventh. Defence became local: the provinces of Anatolia had to bear the entire burden of defence against the Arabs- the Byzantines even further localised their defence by basing armies in districts or themes whereby fertile parts of Anatolia were connected to an outer defensive rim. The province of Gaul had to maintain the Merovingian state on its own. Even in Arabic Egypt, it is the constriction of horizon that is most evident. You see that Arabic Egypt does not send income out to the other parts of the Caliphate but rather keeps it within itself. The localisation of the Roman world is a trend that militates against the kind of complex regime that had sat on that world beforehand. Simply put in many parts of the Empire by 800 were supporting themselves in a variety of different ways- variety had replaced uniformity.

All provinces though did not find that their rulers responded in the same way. There is an East-West division here- the Barbarion states of Western Europe, Visigothic Spain, Merovingian France and Vandal Africa were substantially different to the Byzantine Empire and Arabic caliphate which preserved more institutional continuity. In the West, the picture that emerges from Wickham's study is that there was no need for Western states to maintain taxation and consequently it fell away as a method of extracting revenue. The armies of the Barbarions were maintained through grants of land- that afterall was why the Vandals, Visigoths, Franks and others had come into the Roman Empire in the first place and consequently rulers felt no real need for the elaborate taxation systems that the Romans had constructed. In Spain for example such structures fell into disuse because of their unpopularity and the fact that they were not required to support an army whose loyalty was based on grants of land. The same picture is true of Merovingian Gaul. The point though about these regimes is that rather than being vulnerable to coup at the centre, they were vulnerable to revolt at the periphery. Carolingian Frankia was subject to massive splits- as was Visigothic Spain. The splits meant that armies were formed to contest and obtain new rewards and new plunder and the system worked. Once a polity had attained its maximum size it could not do anything save for feed on its own factions.

The situation in the East is different. What happened in the East was that there was more continuity. Institutionally the Roman Empire survived through the early middle ages in the East- and until 630 controlled pretty much the territories that the empire had controlled in the days of Augustus. After the Muslim conquest of Syria and Egypt, the Byzantine Empire was reduced to Anatolia and was forced to support itself from that province alone. The Byzantine method of coping with this change was dual- firstly the empire switched the places that provided it with goods. The city of Constantinople contracted- but still received grain from the Western provinces particularly Sicily until its conquest by the Arabs. It also though localised its military- Anatolia was divided into themes and those themes supported particular units which were recruited and supplied from them. The Emperors did maintain a central force- the tagmata- from the eighth century onwards- and that was supplied centrally by taxation and the army was still paid but we are getting the formation of a system of localisation. The scale of everything was reduced.

It was in Ummayad Egypt, curiously, that the tax system went under the least change. Here tax was still being paid right up till the end of the period that we are dealing with- and there are records which demonstrate the rapacity of governors and local officials in dealing with taxation. In Egypt, the Arabs invaded as a ruling military caste, refusing to be swallowed by the local population it took them a long time to begin to own land and even for the Egyptians to use Egyptian instead of Coptic or Greek. The Arabs segregated off their religion and their language from the Egyptian subject population and lived off the tax revenue that they could extract. Wickham surmises that this was one of the reasons why in Egypt Islam and Arab cultural identity was so strong, whereas in the West by the end of our period, a Frank was someone just born north of the Loire irrespective of their ancestry or language. The point is that the Arab commitment to a large non landed but salaried army meant that they became a separate elite which was supported by the non-Arab tax payer. Its also interesting that in Egypt this meant that there were few ways for the native population to protest effectively- there was no real aristocracy to appeal to and therefore tax rebellions and tax wars are a frequent feature of Egyptian politics running right up until the ninth century. Syria has a similar profile- though here the situation was more stable because of the fact that there were more Arabs who had been there before the conquest and hence were landed and therefore taxed and therefore could appeal to their brethren. Another facet of Ummayad rule was that the taxes collected in Egypt or Syria did not go outside those regions- this leant the provincial governments great wealth with respect to the centre. Whereas in the Roman world, the outer peripharies and the inner circles had been the places where taxes were collected and spent and consequently where power was, in the Ummayad empire there was more centralisation within a province and less without it.

This change in the direction of the tax yield and in the West, in the nature of the tax yield changed politics. It leant politics according to Wickham a much more centrifugal force. In the West maintaining authority was much harder because the business of tax collection had supplied some of the glue keeping the provinces and particularly armies together- the landed army now only wished for plunder and could easily turn into a local force raised for civil war. If the West tended to division and increased warfare, then in the East the old provinces of the Roman empire became more independent of each other. The Arabic empire was less cohesive than what it had succeeded. Curiously in this new localistic world it was smaller states like Byzantium and Lombardy in Italy which maintained more cohesiveness- they were able to because precisely of the move to localising tax revenues. Keeping societies together had become harder because they were no longer fiscal wholes. What we see therefore in the Early Middle Ages is a succession of attempts to maintain cohesion whether through inventing ceremonies- the Visigothic Spanish kingdom used church councils- or maintaining an intrusive legal apparatus as in Lombardy, the state was preoccupied with its own break up and obsessed with regional autonomy instead of local coup. If that autonomy was different in different regions- that related to the different taxation structures and if furthermore the social structure of Ummayad Egypt was different from Frankia that related to the way that its tax was structured.

Tax is obviously not the whole answer nor does it determine a society's complete history- but as I hope this brief survey of Wickham's work indicates it structures the reality to which rulers responded in the early middle ages. One cannot understand say the judicial activity of western Kings or their ceremony without seeing that they were in part attempting to maintain control over kingdoms that threatened to split apart at any point. In the West royal power was increasingly transferred through the aristocracy, in the East every peasant knew who his taxes went to. Simply put in the West the King moved further away from his subjects. Furthermore throughout the Western world, the state became vulnerable to splitting up. The Roman world of coups at the centre gave way to kingdoms who were liable to breaking up into regions. This was less true in the East where the provinces at least had an integrity thanks to the tax system but even there the lack of transfers between provinces created structural cleavages which could lead to regional independence. In the East the most common form of revolt remained the tax revolt, in the West it was a peasant rebellion against a Lord or a Lord's rebellion against his King. Its an interesting subject- and I will return to Wickham's thesis- I am not competent in reality to criticise it but its worth laying out in full, and my views I'm sure on it will evolve as I read more and think more about the issues involved.

Am I the only person in the world who thinks this...

but Barack Obama's celebrity supporters don't impress me at all. I'd be more impressed by people who know something about politics telling me about their opinions than by Jessica Alba and Ryan Phillipe. I'm sure Ms Alba and Mr Phillipe are intelligent, kind people but they have no recognised expertise in politics, there is no reason why I should presume that they know anything more than my next door neighbour. Politics is not a feel good enterprise, its a proffession which requires emense skill and intelligence. I have no doubt that Barack Obama could make a President of the United States: he has the intelligence and charisma to do the job. But I'd prefer to hear from the Samantha Powers of the world than the Jessica Albas, I'd prefer to hear from people with a cogent argument rather than people telling me that yes I can or citing vague and perhaps unacheivable aspirations for where the United States will be in eight years time. Afterall the business of politics is the art of the possible, to misquote Rab Butler (a man who really did know what he was talking about), the business of celebrity is the art of creating an illusion of glamour- the two proffessions may seem to have a lot in common, but at the cutting edge of them, they don't.

The dottiness of an ex-Cambridge don

The former Chancellor of Cambridge University, Lord Broers, yesterday morning, asked a question in the House of Lords. He said,

My Lords, have the Government considered increasing the age at which young people can buy alcohol to the level in the United States? I have observed in the university world that young American students coming to this country are amazed at the alcohol consumption of our undergraduates.

Lord Broers's solution is daft, just think for a moment about where that would leave the ages of consent. He seems to be saying that you should be able to vote (age, 18), drive a car (age, 17) and even have a child (age, 16) but that raising a pint in a pub at the age of 20 is somehow beyond your ken. Its interesting that Lord Broers seems to want to make childhood extend so long that it takes people into their twenties, thinks that a pint in a pub is a more serious act than voting for a government or even having a kid, and considers the best way to deal with a problem for some is to make something illegal for all. What's interesting about Lord Broer's comments is their paternalism: ultimately irresponsible people voting doesn't matter because voting doesn't matter, but irresponsible people getting drunk at midnight on the street does matter because one might be leaving the opera then. Furthermore if 10% of 19 year olds in the UK can't handle their drink, that's obviously a reason for the other 90% to have alcohol forcibly removed from them.

We will never solve the problem of young people drinking in this way- as the minister noted a prohibition would be deeply ineffective- it would also alienate teenagers rather than persuade them. Public information campaigns- the drink driving campaign is a great one to emmulate- even city centre planning regulations- are likely to be much more successful instruments in dealing with this problem. Raising the drinking age would merely criminalise a large segment of the population who are behaving perfectly sensibly and betrays an attitude of mind where the first response to a problem is what should be the last resort- having recourse to the statute book to ban someone from doing something.

British Foreign Policy

I published an article about British foreign policy over at the Liberal Conspiracy- and the reasons that Britain will inevitably weaken and that it is in our interests to weaken over the next few years. Essentially other countries will grow wealthier, which is a good thing for us as it will make us wealthier- through prices dropping, technical innovation and more demand for our services, but it will mean that absolutely the UK will slip behind countries like China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico etc. That's not neccessarily a bad thing but it does mean that the current debate say over the Iraq war is really a redundant one- Iraq is the end of the story not the beggining of one. Its far more likely that British troops will be intervening on a regional basis say in Kosovo or being part of a European effort to curb Russian expansion than to be intervening in the Middle East in the future. That means that a lot of the presumptions about UK foreign policy may have to change- we need to do more cultural and economic diplomacy, rely more on the fact that due to immigration we have great links say with the Indian subcontinent, and do less military activity. Furthermore we need to look at fortifying NATO and strengthening the internal cohesion of the alliance.

Rambo 4: the world's worst movie?

Some people think that there is no objectively bad art: well there is, its called Rambo and at 120 minutes long, it is 120 minutes too long. Put simply, nothing in this film is any good- a better budget means that it just passes the Hills have Eyes 2 in my refuse collection- but apart from that it has no redeeming features. Sylvester Stallone who stars in and directs this movie should be thoroughly ashamed of himself- he has stunningly managed to craft a film without the least shred of a redeeming feature, in which the contest for worst performance is only won by the actors playing the Burmese army because their depictions are comically racist, whereas his of Rambo is just comically crap. The film is awful- do not rent or buy this movie or go and see it- any popularity it gets demonstrates that Western civilisation is truly in trouble and deserves to decline and fall.

Rambo 4 tells the story of John Rambo, now out in Thailand strangling snakes for a living, who is hired by a group of Christians to escort them into Burma. He then is joined by a group of hired skinheads to go and rescue the said Christians from the Burmese prison camp in which they have been held. I'm sorry if this breaks the overwhelming suspense but Rambo does indeed rescue the Christians, just before the young pretty female one is about to be raped by an evil oriental (the wording is deliberate- this is a racist movie) and just as one of them is eaten by pigs- all the better to show you some graphic CGI blood, my friend. (Incidentally the budget for CGI blood was really large on this film, there are several wonderful CGI reconstructions of how a human body breaks up, wonderful apart from one fact, that they would be obvious to a one eyed village idiot!)

Sylvester Stallone in the title role acts badly, well that's inaccurate actually, he has one expression throughout the entire movie. When he is happy, Rambo scowls like a tough guy. Sad he scowls like a tough guy. Killing people he scowls like a tough guy. Even going home to a sentimental family reunion he scowls in exactly the same manner. He just scowls and stares- there is no hint here of growth or development in the character- when he, at the beggining of the film, is being unsuccessfully petitioned by the Christian group leader to take them down the river and when moments afterwards he is petitioned by the sexy girl to take them down the river, he looks exactly the same even though the lines show he has much more sympathy with the latter than the former.

Lines, yes, script. Ummm, most Hollywood films employ a scriptwriter. Sometimes they aren't that good. Art Monterastelli and Sylvester Stallone should never work again on dialogue or in films. The dialogue is incredible. Nobody speaks like they speak in this film. This is worse than a school play written by a bunch of five year olds. Poor Julie Benz has to at one point say "Maybe you've lost your faith in people. But you must still be faithfulto something. You must still care about something. Maybe we can'tchange what is. But trying to save a life isn't wasting your life, is it?" The lines don't really get better- but hey it doesn't matter because the quality of the acting would make up for the weaknesses in Sly's performance and the shit script, well they don't. Most of the actors get nothing to do- and when they do they do it badly. I never thought I'd see a worse Cockney tough guy than Vinnie Jones but Graham McTavish manages to make me regret they didn't cast a professional footballer in his role.

And as to the ethics of the film. Matt Sinclair thinks the film is pagan- I think Matt is being too kind by a long way. This film doesn't have an ethic beyond the utility of psycopathic murder- oh and the idea that its so much better to go in and kill people than be nice to them. Its an insult to paganism to describe the cretinous morality of the film as having anything to do with paganism. Mark Kermode got it right on Radio 5 recently- there is a lot of atrocity in order to make you feel happy when atrocious murders happen later on. The Burmese soldiers here have no character- they are just vicious thugs, who strip and rape girls (though only when Rambo turns up- so he can rescue her immediatly). They have no humanity. This is not a pagan film, this is a fascist film. It invites us to reject the other and enjoy the torture of the other. It wants us to enjoy the fact that the Burmese soldiers are killed in horrific ways. Furthermore the Burmese soldiers all have comedy evil sneers- this is racism combined with a revenge movie with the subtlety of a yob chanting insults. The film is filled with dodgy sexual imagery as well: its a paean to homosexual sado masochism (ah we're all brutish thugs together kind of thing) but its one female character is there as a literal adornment. She is a kind of Christian Scherahazde, good at persuading men with her sexy figure, but in battle or even in other scenes just too hysterical to be any use. Every time she is on the screen you can feel the film's sexism, and every time you see Rambo you can feel its prehistoric view of masculinity.

This movie is a disgrace- its the kind of film that did I not support free speech I would support laws against. It perpetuates the worst image of manhood around- the least interesting view of the world, the least interesting cinematographic skill, it is quite simply atrocious and has no redeeming image apart from its budget. This film is quite simply shit.

Crossposted at Bits of News.

The Political Compass

Courtesy of James, I just did this test for fun to see where I come out- this was the result

Economic Left/Right: -1.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.64

As always with such things, its imperfect but that actually captures my position- at least with regard to my segment- fairly accurately- I am quite surprised. On these kind of things I've ended up being told I beleive in all sorts of things- normally because the questions are badly drafted. Anyway have a go yourself...

There will be Blood: the loneliness of creating a nation.

I am still digesting 'There will be Blood' which I saw last night at the Odeon in Covent Garden. I am not entirely sure about what to say about the film- save that I agree with Roger Ebert's review that it is a portrait of madness. There is something else though that the film really is about: the creation of the United States- and I think those two themes- madness and creation- are tied together in this film in an interesting provocative way. Madness becomes the impulse towards creation- and authority follows the mad lust for gold or for oil.

In Citizen Kane, Mr Bernstein says to his interviewer that 'It's easy to make a lot of money, if that's all you want to do is make a lot of money.' He is talking about the banker Thatcher but also about Kane himself and the way that Kane didn't seek to make a lot of money but rather spent it. Kane afterall is the generation after the great oil profiteers and all of Kane's ambitions from running newspapers to running for office are aspirations within a civilised society. The interesting thing about this film is that it is set in the generation before Charles Foster Kane- the generation who made the wealth upon which Kane lived. The generation who were out in the oil fields and gold mines physically hewing out of the ground what turned into the fuel for the industrial super power that was the United States by 1920. This film begins with the end of the gold rushes of the 19th Century in the 1890s and ends in the great crash of 1929.

Its hero is a character who creates a civilisation therefore. We are in early California- a sparcely populated area of the United States whose population hovered around the million mark at the turn of the twentieth century. We don't see an officer of the government at all- and law out here is a cursory thing enforced merely in the buying and selling of land. Rather what we see is the two great traditional powers of pre-civil states- the Church and the coin. The Church is represented by Eli Sunday- a charismatic preacher who inspires his flock and purports to drive devils out of them and drive their illnesses away. The coin is represented by Daniel Plainview- our hero- whose hands and money are creating oil fields around the town- and in the Sunday ranch. His power is the sucking out of resources from the land- whereas Eli sucks out the inspiration from his parishioners. The two men are involved in a confrontation; a confrontation that takes us through the whole film. But its a confrontation that in many ways merely exemplifies the real underlying theme of the film- both men are utterly vicious and ruthless, both are willing to humiliate the other and both are unpleasant to the extreme- it is that unpleasantness that lies at the centre of the film.

Daniel Plainview is a hero. He is the kind of man who founds towns and schools- but he is also immoral and angry. He hates almost everyone in the world he confesses at one point. He has no friends- he even alienates, abandons and attacks his adopted son. He is also grows in madness through the film- his meglamonia becomes more and more pronounced as the film proceeds. His anger and loneliness reflect each other. This is the type of man who makes a state- the type of man who thrives when everything comes down to his own talents. Plainview is virtu personified- he shapes history by despising all of its frontiers- in many ways he mirrors the Russian oligarchs of today or the British industrialists of the 18th Century. What the film invites us to do is to judge him as a human being- to weigh him in the balance and find him wanting.

But it also invites us to observe his trajectory- as the inspired prospector turns from man into monster. It invites us to see the personal consequences of overbearing wealth- like Kane, Plainview ends up alone in Xanadu, alone in a palace of pleasures, strolling empty corridors and whipping out in drunken rages at subordinates or indeed anyone who comes near. That madness is born of loneliness: Plainview has created a nation, there is none like him. It seems to me watching the film that as the movie progresses increasingly Plainview has less and less to do with lives around him- the world of civility leaves him behind. By 1927 as the film ends, the world is made for men like his son, the Kanes of the world, who have adjusted to civility and its constraints- who don't murder in their rages, who don't drink whisky by the gallon, who don't hate the world and all who live in it. The last scenes of the movie are crucial because- and I won't let on to what happens, they bring Plainview's last rejection of any collegiality, any claim of affection, they show his final decline into madness- like Gloria Swansson at the end of Sunset Boulevard, the lights focus as the character dies.

Plainview's character evolves as the movie goes on- but he is always lonely and never demonstrates wide degrees of affection- possibly he does towards his son but mostly he seems impassive to others but emotional about himself. He is a competitive man- lives for and through competition- and that is his incentive to develop his oil wells. The same goes for the preacher Eli- who is also fueled by rage- a sublimated rage as opposed to Plainview's overt alcoholic rage. Both though are the type of man who forms a world, who creates a nation. This story is their story and it demonstrates the unattractiveness and the neccessity of that type of person. This review is incomplete because my thoughts about the film are incomplete- but ultimately there is something here of the loneliness, rage and hatred that fueled men who wanted to create power, to create states. That rage promoted by some old injustice, or as in this case inequality in settled society, leads to the creation of great things- at great personal costs. This film is not about present society because its not about civil society- it is about the creation of civil society. Its not about the brutality of capitalism or the brutality of evangelical christianity but about the brutality of both before the state- when gold and God are there to reinforce authority instead of existing within the bounds set by authority.

The roar and coat of the a lion is beautiful viewed from afar through the prism of history, but come up close and the blood dripping from its fangs and the loneliness of its supremacy are far less impressive.

The Conformist: Fascism's beauty and Liberalism's untidy charm

The Conformist has just been re-released in the UK- it was made in 1970, one of the first films of the Italian director, and now elder statesman of cinema, Bernard Bertolucci. It is about the career trajectory of a Fascist secret policeman in the Italy of the 30s and 40s, the reasons for his Fascism and the things that he has to do- including murder his old Professor- in order to maintain his career in the secret police. Its a fascinating film on many levels- for what it reveals about the cod-Freudianism of the 1970s for example- and it is a beautiful film, with some truly spectacular shots. It is this beauty which actually is the point at which the film reaches profundity and says something which is important about Fascism as a concept and conformity as an ideal. Bertolucci was trying to say something about the aesthetic of the movement in the 20s and 30s and also about the aesthetic of liberalism, he was trying to demonstrate to us something about different kinds of beauty and their political value and through the film, through the use of different shots to deal with different characters and the use of situation, he manages to demonstrate this approach.

The first scenes of the film involve mainly our fascist character, Marcello Clerici, crossing vacant corridors, saluting pristine guards etc. Dressed in a sharp suit, and moving at a comically fast pace, reminiscent of some film noir sequences- the character embodies a certain aesthetic. Bertolucci is keen to photograph Clerici's fascist period at oblique angles- in one sequence a car drive is photographed diagonally upwards from the wheel. He dwells on the long corridors and lines of the Fascist aesthetic. When Clerici meets his future wife, Giulia, she is dressed in a skirt which is crossed by black and white lines. You get the sense that the Fascist aesthetic is about forcing the natural curves of a woman's body into lines, into the strict artificiality of a political system. The point is of course that the same could be said of Clerici's conscience, he too is being forced from curves into lines, from complication into loyalty by dictatorship. You see the image repeated all over the place. Clerici's father confined to a mental asylum repeats a description of freedom endlessly, but repeats it in a stark void. A white prison, sanitised, whose benches stretch out in seemingly endless lines without a break for an individual to sit upon them. The white artificiality of the scene reminds us of the purification that Fascism involves- a single solution to every problem- and a diagnosis of madness for those who do not adhere exactly- for those that maintain their individuality.

However the film does not merely portray fascism, it also portrays liberalism. Clerici is sent by his Fascist bosses to assacinate his old Professor who lives in Paris. When he goes to see his old Professor, he goes with his newly wed wife, Giulia, and meets the Professor's wife, Anna. In reality the meeting with the Professor turns into a complicated sexual game- as Anna seduces Clerici and spiritually seduces Giulia, the Professor spiritually seduces Giulia and the two men fence ideologically. But the key point here is the conception of beauty. Counterposing Anna, in her classical dress- looking very like Anna Karina in Goddard, to Giulia in the first scene she appears in is intriguing and demonstrative (Giulia eventually ends up dressing like Anna more and more, a conversion to liberalism in sartorial form). Anna's dresses are elegant but they run with her body not against it- they emphasize her shape, they don't tyrannise over it. We could mention other things too- the aesthetic of the places that they go in Paris is again different to the aesthetic of the long corridors and lonely saluting functionaries of Italy. Firstly Paris is filled with people- people are always everywhere- even when the Professor's colleagues (and ideological sympathisers) escort Clerici to see him, these are people dressed not in uniform but their own style. Secondly Parisian architecture is not so bleak and linear- but curves and the spaces are confined.

Perhaps the most important element in which Paris and Italy differ in the film is sexual though. In liberal Paris sex is available and emotional. The sexual escape that Clerici finds with Anna is an expression of freedom, desire and emotional commitment. Clerici, Anna tells us is a coward, we know that though already for he is getting married in order to avoid sexual commitment. He is getting married precisely to fulfil the bourgeois ideal, a family uncontaminated with the dirt of sex, with the difficulties of emotional entanglement. For Clerici there is only the relationship with the prostitute and the wife- both of them clean of entanglement- both of which are endorsed by the Catholic priest in confession and both of which are imprisoning. Anna though and her husband offer something different: sex for them is something to be enjoyed, to be sensed and to be welcomed. The liberal aesthetic is liberating literally- and it is hedonistic. The Fascist aesthetic is repressive. Nowhere is this less evident than in a scene at the end of the Parisian phase of the movie. The four characters go to a dance and the two women- Anna and Giulia- dance together in an exceedingly sensual and sexual manner- they then lead a conga off from the dance hall, leaving Clerici and his fascist 'minder' alone together for a moment. Clerici walks into the middle of the hall and the conga returns surrounding him in his confusion. While everyone else in the room is filled with joie de vivre, Clerici is upset and confused by the spectacle of the joy of other people, by the liberating neglect of persona to fulfil personal happiness.

In a sense, Bertolucci offers us an aesthetic commentary on Orwell. Orwell, in 1984, tells us that for Julia and Winston Smith the ultimate act of liberation was no holds barred sex- the act in itself, purged of the misplaced purity that Big Brother granted it, was the ultimate revolution against totalitarianism. For Bertolucci, that much is true as well. But Bertolucci is making a more subtle aesthetic point- the Fascist aesthetic confines and requires conformity. Requires a man to marry a wife he does not love, to abandon the principal of enjoyment for a spurious sacrafice to the desires of society, requires strict linear fashion. The liberal aesthetic is more natural and based on pleasure- like C.S. Lewis's God, the Liberal is a hedonist at heart, promising pleasures evermore. The point of the film is not so much about the origins of conformity- as about its nature. Conformity by its very nature is forced and requires a human being to give up their own desire in pursuit of that which society offers- salutes, huge offices and long corridors. Bertolucci is keen to make us realise that of course this is suppression- the Fascists have mistresses- and it leads to unhappiness and to mental asylums confining those who talk of freedom. What it doesn't lead to is spontaneity, pleasure and happiness, what it doesn't lead to is all the quirky, difficult and different relationships that humans construct in order to help themselves live in comfort on this planet. What it doesn't lead to is the emotional entanglements of actual life- in attempting to reduce life, art and sex to the prism of perfection, it drains them of their meaning and imposes upon the world a falsehood that the world eventually cannot bear. The conformist finds a conga- an expression of undiluted pleasure- a scary revelation of the fact that pleasure is both spontaneous and untidy.

In the film, we see Fascism's endpoint as well as its beggining. The conformist uses that end point of course to reveal to the new authorities- a mob singing revolutionary songs- the Fascist careers of others. But in reality he has not changed- he has not discovered the essence of liberalism- the spontaneous untidiness of life, rather he wants to force people into a new line. Unforgiving he is the puritan inquisitor, the communist show trial prosecutor, the fascist secret policeman, forever worried about what society demands as social or sexual or aesthetic tithe. But he cannot acheive either happiness or spontaneity!

Film Classification

Over at the cornerstone blog, Julian Brazier, the Conservative MP, has called for a tightening of the law on Video Nasties. He describes his bill in this passage

My bill aims to make the British Board of Film Classification accountable to Parliament. It would give a Parliamentary committee the power to review and veto key appointments and the guidelines the BBFC works to. It would also introduce a new Parliamentary appeal against videos - at the moment the only appeals allowed are by the industry in favour of them. In Australia anyone can appeal.

I can see what he wants to do and appreciate why. Films have an effect on their audience- and if they didn't, they wouldn't be made. I have said before that I think we worry far too much about sex and too little about violence in the cinema- but also Mr Brazier needs to worry about context. I've said before that in some films violence is clearly indefensible but in some films, it is neccessary to make a point or to illustrate something that I need to see. For instance, the film Downfall is so powerful because it shows the violence produced as a result of Hitler's unreal refusal to surrender, Saving Private Ryan's realism illuminates the horrors of even a virtuous war, Goodfellas demonstrates the poverty of life as a mafiosi through the use of violence: other films use graphic sexual content to make points- I've just seen the Bertolucci film- the Conformist- where the sexual relations between a man and his wife and mistress illustrate the fundemental realities of Fascism. Context is all important in deciding what kind of violence or sexual image is being used and whether it should be banned.

But is Parliament the right place to handle this kind of issue. Mr Brazier forgets, what Conservatives in the past would never have forgot, that Parliament has defects as well as perfections. MPs often react on the basis of an emotive tabloid headline and not from a reasoned appreciation of the issues. Furthermore Parliament is overloaded with business at the moment- it often spends far too little time on major issues- and probably wouldn't have the time to really consider this kind of thing adequately. Parliamentary oversight, if it meant anything, could easily lead to a more puritanical restatement of what we already have- which is not the direction I think we need to go in. I think we need to adjust the balance between violence and sex and also need to adjust the balance against purposeless nudity or violence on screen- Parliament is more likely to keep the balances the same in all instance and tighten up. And furthermore it is likely to do that on an adhoc basis- paying attention only when the media pays attention. There is a whole argument about standards of censorship- but I'm not sure that Parliament is the appropriate place to make decisions about the minutiae or hear appeals.

Furthermore in setting guidelines, I think its right to err on the side of liberty. The problem is that MPs are more likely to err on the side of caution and make the guidelines stricter than they need be. I wonder whether the natural authoritarianism of politicians and the press might create a real problem here of censorship- it would be a real loss if for instance Casino or Goodfellas were not allowed to be shown in the UK because of the decision of various members of Parliament. Of course this is an argument against all regulation- and it doesn't work all the time- but speech is a central and important freedom, without which democracy becomes difficult to secure. It isn't easy to censor speech- that's why personally I prefer a voluntary code that says more about who can watch a film (depending on age) than on what everyone should watch. This is not an easy issue- but I'd prefer that we have to endure a couple Hills have Eyes Two, if the choice is between that and Parliamentary regulation of what can be said on film, lets err on the side of free speech.