Jesus Camp

Jesus Camp is a documentary about one of the most perplexing phenomenon in the world today- American charismatic evangelical Christianity. I think I have to preface this review with two comments: firstly I am not a believer and secondly if I were, charismatic religion revolts me on an aesthetical level. For me religion is quieter and more reflective, at its best it is deeply personal and internal- an examination of the soul- I come you might say out of a different tradition, in the sense that going back generations everyone in my family was either a Methodist or an Anglican. So in that sense, this film represents a strain of Christianity that I am naturally unsympathetic to: speaking in tongues and enthusiasm generally denote for me a rock concert, not a religious profession.

Jesus Camp was made to shock. The documentary makers are definitely not evangelical nor are they conservative: though their subject is both evangelical and conservative. They show their subjects- in particular Becky Fischer the children's pastor at the centre of the film- in a particularly bad light. Fisher uses the swell of group emotion to put forward both a religious and a political cause. She also teaches these kids to isolate themselves from other kids: the stress is on everyone else's sinfulness. Furthermore she and those affiliated with her ministry teaches them ideas which are just bizarre, that evolution did not happen, that Global Warming is a government conspiracy. What you have to say watching the film though is that she is an impressive propagandist in her own cause, she uses toys, keeps the kid's attention and is charismatic and fun to listen to. Her message is obnoxious and repellant- this is a call to extoll faith and neglect evidence based reasoning. She admits at the start of the program that she admires Islamic Fundamentalists and how in camps in Palestine they educate their kids (she derives this information from that incredibly accurate source- unidentified websites) to commit terrorist acts, she argues that she wants to do the same thing for young Pentecostal and Evangelical kids.

This woman is mad and dangerous. There is an issue though with her madness which I think the film should take more seriously. I am absolutely sure that lots of kids attend her camp in the summer but the film made me uneasy because it failed to take on two rather important questions. The first of which is that Becky Fischer may not be representative of most evangelical children's ministers: at various points she says that in her techniques she is an advance of them. I wouldn't mind betting that she comes from the more extreme fringe of this phenomenon. The second thing is that we should beware that we assume how the kids react to her: at one point one of the camp workers says that the kids are far too interested in having fun and far too uninterested in Christianity: they prefer climbing stuff to theology. In that sense I wondered how long this stuff will remain in the children's minds: you may be overcome in a crowd shouting that homosexuality is evil, you may be overcome in the crowd dismissing others, but does that endure or is that just a surface phenomenon. We get interviews with Kids demonstrating that some do internalise it, but I'm not sure we get any proof that all of them do.

There is another facet to this. This kind of ministry only works because in a sense there are kids who need it. One of the most interesting facets of this film I thought was less the condemnation of evangelical right wing crazies- I can do that for myself, thankyou- than the way that it portrayed the kids. At the beggining of the film Becky Fischer approaches two boys, who must be both about 10 and one of them confesses that he doesn't find social situations easy. For that boy religion gives his life meaning and means that he can confront to some extent his fear of social situations in Christian camp. Christian camp is something that these kids look forward to as a bonding experience. The thing that is central to them I'd suggest is that the Camp is fun, the beliefs flow out of the fun that they are having. In that sense, they aren't convinced by reason or by faith but by tieing together fun with this belief system. Its an interesting sidelight on why humans end up believing what they do, I don't think it is only relevant here and another post hopefully in the future will deal with it. But the central thing that I am trying to get at is that Jesus Camp is not a good thing, but that it supplies for these children things they would not naturally have.

All that said, and I hope you see why I am ambivalent about this film, the one thing you don't find at Jesus Camp is Christianity. Bear in mind all my aesthetical conditions above, but I found the purveyors of Jesus Camp to deeply unChristian. They do not know what Christ meant when he said do not cast the first stone, they seem not to have read the New Testament and to be using Christianity as a justification for expressing their own hatreds. More than the kids, it is the adults who run the camp who seem to me to end up looking ill, Fischer and her minions have such a warped view of reality, they are so consumed by hate, that they have lost their humanity. All kindness is directed to an end, all forgiveness is secretly abandoned and self righteousness is endorsed. I am not sure that that was the message of the New Testament. There is something very disquieting about hundreds of kids yelling 'righteous judges' without really knowing what it means and wanting to listen to anyone who disagrees. Something sinister about kids wandering around a bowling ring telling customers that they are going to hell.

Many of our belief systems in the end are psychological crutches- we rely on them to sustain us during the bad times and there is nothing neccessarily wrong with that. I think what we see with Jesus Camp is interesting: of course the theology and politics is crap, a point the film makers blast into your mind again and again and again. But in some way the more interesting thing is that the kids seem to enjoy it, for some of them it fills a gap in their lives. In part that is because say the boy who said he was isolated is home schooled- he doesn't meet many other kids- so in part it arises from this unique conservative Christian culture in the States, but it also arises out of real needs the kids have. I am not saying that I endorse anything that goes on at Jesus Camp, but in a way that's not the interesting question. The interesting question is about why these kids enjoy it so much, adult attention, the sense of being part of a 'greatest generation' and the comradeship of their fellow Christian kids I'd suggest have a lot to do with it. The basis of a religion, you have to be joking! But the film presents us, despite the intentions of its makers, with an interesting sociological portrait of how these camps perform a role in the life of the kids that go to them. And that is far more interesting than bashing Bush another time.

Paul Schofield

When Paul Schofield died I wrote this on Bits of News. I think at the time I should have posted it here- but I didn't and so I post it today, concurring even more than I did when I wrote it with my judgement on March 20th- as such I feel it should go on this blog.

Paul Schofield was one of the great actors of his generation. He did the great roles- Lear, Hamlet- and succeeded in being according to others the best Lear of his generation. He also took an oscar for playing Thomas More in a Man for all seasons. I came across him towards the end of his career, but even so you could see that this was a formidable actor. Its three performances of his- neither of which much remembered in today's obituaries that I particularly remember him for. That in a sense seared his impression upon my brain as a film viewer and as a consumer of poetry.

Schofield in 1989 was persuaded by Kenneth Branagh to take part in Branagh's Henry V as the King of France. Normally the French King is a pathetic man with little time on stage, but Schofield's presence imbued a small part with great weight and majesty. When he was on the stage, even playing a doddery old failing King, he gave that part a sense of Priam-like forsight. This was a man you could see who could not hold back the tide but could forsee the way that it was turning. He used Shakespeare's lines which create the personality of the King of France, to flesh out a role that was both feeble and wise. A role which in a sense performed the perfect counterpart to Branagh's Henry. Henry is of course the good King, vibrant and vital- Schofield's King was the good king grown old surrounded by foolish councillors and an even more foolish son. In a sense his presence in the play made it unneccessary for the earlier history plays about Henry IV to be performed- for Schofield's role demonstrated that the other side of Kingship was there, the side of kingship that worries and frets, that is powerless under the threat of fate. He performed that role so well that I can't think of the film without him in it- even though he was on stage during none of the major set pieces and probably only for a few minutes.

Secondly I came across him in Quiz Show where again he played a father to a brilliant son- but this time the brilliance of the son was flawed. The son, played by Ralph Fiennes, was corrupted by the lure of money. Schofield's role as the father was brilliant. He was able to make the father's slightly intellectually snobbish academic knowledge charming and forgivable. He was able to demonstrate how beneath the crust of sophistication there were very strong principles that this man believed in and wished to follow. Again Schofield's performance did not take away from the main drama of the film, rather his performance strengthened many of the other aspects of the film. He was the dressing that made the salad work, but he didn't obscure its other components.

My last memory of Schofield, and again it'll be one that lots share, is as a reader. He read in the early 2000s as he reached his eightieth birthday, the Waste Land on BBC Radio. He captured the full range of its voices, appreciated its nuances and the rhythm with which Elliot managed to infuse the closing calls at a pub or the crowds over London Bridge. Its one of the most frequently listened tracks on my Ipod and it demonstrates the ability of the man's voice to permeate the poem, to give a difficult text meaning and also its versatility, coping with all the different voices of Elliot's imagination.

I cannot claim that I knew Paul Schofield, nor that I saw his best work which people say was on stage. I was too young to observe him in his prime as an actor, too unobservant to realise as a teenager that I should have made an effort to see him and others of his generation before they passed. Yet I think from these three moments- captured on film and on radio- even I could sense today was a moment of sadness. We have lost a superb actor who lightened up the stage and was able to really reach into and think about great parts. For me, neither of the three experiences I wrote about above could have been the same without Schofield's sure grasp of what he had to do and his talent for doing exactly that- bringing out of his character something to make the films and poem work even better. Working with the grain, not against the other members of the cast, but with them and not overacting them off the stage with his performance.

PhD

I just thought I'd apologise for the radio silence on the blog- normal service will resume shortly- by saying that the reason is that I have just handed in my PhD thesis!

A Pigmy Leaf Chameleon

I was just watching Life in Cold Blood the latest David Attenborough series to get to sleep and saw this: its a pigmy leaf chameleon and is the smallest reptile in the world. Attenborough has been searching for it for the last fifty years.

Moses on drugs?

A recent paper argues that he was on drugs. I'd suggest that he hasn't proved anything: there isn't much else to say but if you are interested in a fuller discussion of the argument, then have a look at it. I don't suggest that you can refute the argument but I do suggest that the article doesn't prove its case.

Imagination and History

On November 14th 1959, the Clutter family were brutally murdered in their own home late at night. They were murdered by two drifters- Richard Hickock and Perry Smith- who hoped to find a large ammount of wealth at the Clutter household but of course found nothing of any value whatsoever. The tragic murder of the upstanding citizen Herb Clutter, his melancholic wife Bonnie, vivacious and successful 16 year old daughter Nancy and his fifteen year old introverted son Kenyon shocked the surrounding community. It also shocked America bringing down a group of reporters upon the sleepy Kansas town of Holcombe and in particular exciting the interest of Truman Capote, the novelist and essayist, who himself came to Holcombe and investigated the murders. His investigations turned into his non-fiction novel In Cold Blood and was dramatised in the films Capote and Infamous, both of which are amongst the better films of the last couple of years.

I have just read In Cold Blood- and what strikes me as interesting in reading In Cold Blood is its approach. Capote uses a novelistic format to put together what he says. That obviously means that his account is more vivid than say a historical account: this is a thrilling read about a gruesome matter and Capote gets you inside the mind of his characters. However nagging at the back of your mind is the question of how real what you are reading is. When Capote reports a conversation between the officer in charge of the case, Al Dewey and Perry Smith, the criminal, he cannot be giving you the accurate account of what happened. Dewey and Smith definitely talked to Capote- but it would be incredibly unlikely that their memories of that conversation would be entirely accurate or consistent. One of the best ways of telling that something is historical is that there are gaps and that knowledge is imperfect: Capote's account is too perfect. He also attributes motives where he cannot, even with his interviews, be sure that the motives are ones that the people felt at the moment that they committed the crime. Capote's account is therefore not the truth, it is a series of truths spliced with probable or possible ideas between them.

That may be true. But I would suggest that that has more in common with historical work than we all might think. Historical work relies on the imagination more than you might think. My own work for instance relies on the fact that fighting in a war is a traumatic experience: I cannot prove that every soldier in the New Model found the experience traumatic, but I can imagine that many did. Imagination fills in gaps by which we understand the rest of the evidence. So often for example what a historian does is go through the same process as Truman Capote- generating an imaginative construct and working his evidence into it. The ways that you tell good history is not that it avoids imagination, but that it involves an Occam's razor, whereby you rely on the least ammount of imagination in formulating your construct, and furthermore that you ammend and discard your imaginative construct with regard to what the evidence tells you. In that sense the Capote novel is more historical than we might think- it does not have the caveats that historians would introduce- but it does bring to light one of the real talents of history which is imaginative- empathy is neccessary in order to understand the way that evidence fits together, the person behind the instances of the past.

Why Tibet? Why Palestine? The Rational Choices of Protest

Dennis Prager draws attention to the differing treatment of Tibet and Palestine by the world: the Tibetans have been arguably more oppressed than the Palestinians and have behaved in some ways better than the Palestinians in resisting that oppression. Prager uses some rather extremist language to make his case- but some of what he says is true. Afterall anti-semitism is more prominent in the imagination of the world than anti-sinoism (at least the world excluding places east of Pakistan). Some of what he says is daft: apparantly the world's left dominates the world's media and politics, living with George Bush and Rupert Murdoch, I have to say I'm not sure I agree. Whenever I socialise with the 'left' they don't seem that happy that they are controlling the world- indeed there are reasons why rightwingers are happier with China than with Israel- to come back to Mr Murdoch, there is a market there whereas Israel is a much smaller and less economically important place.

But there is one reason that Prager completely misses and that is the rationality of protest. One of the most salient points made by George Orwell was that Gandhi would have been of little aid against Stalin: indeed one could say that for similar reasons the Dalai Lama hasn't succeeded against Beijing. But what Orwell said points to something really important- its politics not just political languages which govern the way that we respond to crises. The simple truth is there is not that much anyone can do to help Tibet. The government in China is a nasty despotic and tyrannical regime, it does not respond to persuasion and as a Westerner we can only hope that it falls swiftly. A protest in a foreign capital or a letter in a newspaper isn't going to hit the Chinese government, and isn't going to get through, given the censorship in China to the Chinese people. China's regime is opaque and hard to understand- but many of these cadres served the most murderous leader in world history- Mao Tse Tung, and participated in the regime that cracked down under Tianaman. The world's leaders have cravenly kowtowed to China over Tibet and Taiwan- but the truth is that we don't have much wiggle room with the Chinese- military threats and media tirades are unlikely to work so the West has put its hope in engaging with the Chinese and seeking to build a Chinese middle class which could at some point build an alternative regime. The hope with China is that economic growth will create the opportunity for a new regime to emerge, in stability, and that that regime will make progress towards solving issues like Tibet and Taiwan. The hope is that a Gorbachev or De Klerk will come to aid that movement. Its a long shot, but its quite possibly the only chance for the people of Tibet.

Israel though is a completely different case. Israel is a weak democracy. There are levers the West's governments and peoples can use to help the Palestinians that just are not available to us with the Tibetan situation. In my judgement we should not weaken Israel- that would isolate Israel as a uniquely bad country which is insane given the atrocities that others are committing. But that doesn't mean that protests and articles won't work in the Israeli context, Israelis consume the international media, they know what the view of other countries is of their position in the world. Fundementally the Chinese government is not open to persuasion, it is a semi-fascist despotism. The Israeli government is open to persuasion- just like say the American government is open to persuasion ultimately over Iraq. In that sense protesting about an Israeli occupation, even if its less worse than the Chinese occupation makes sense. There is a greater chance of your protest having an effect on Israeli policy because the Israeli government fundementally cares more about human rights than the Chinese government. Protests work best when they are directed at exposing actions that the governments concerned are themselves secretly ashamed of: the Israeli government has done some horrible things over the years, but in reality it is a different beast entirely from the Chinese government (and from many Arab governments.) It is a democracy with a free press and with free access to the global press. Prager is right what China is doing in Tibet (or for that matter what Russia is doing in Chechnya for that matter and we could go on) is worse than what is happening in Palestine, but ultimately because of the constitution of Israel's government and the exposure to international media of its population, thinking about persuading the Israelis through investigations and protests is worth while (whether those tactics work is a different matter). With China protesting about Tibet is likely to have about as much effect on the politburo as Gandhi might have had on Stalin.

This is a rough outline- but there is something here. The real reason why Mr Prager's point is true is that there is a chance of changing the Israeli public and hence the Israeli government's mind because of the nature of the Israeli regime- there isn't such a chance with China. If you really want an analogous case to the Palestinians which identifies the fact that the West treats them as a special case, you should look at another Middle Eastern democracy with a minority population- Turkey and the Kurds.

Le Doulos

I found it hard to review this film- I saw it this evening and it has taken me until now and listening to the dismissal of Stephen Fleming for the last time in Test Cricket (an occasion which is notable for New Zealand cricket if only for its historical significance.) Its not because the film is exceptionally complicated in form- its no Holy Mountain- of which I am still waiting for a review from Dave Cole after the behatted one dragged myself, Mr Sinclair and Vino to a screen to see it last Autumn. That is a call for the blogging community to put pressure on his hattiness to write that review- I am looking forward to it. But Le Doulos is no Lynchian masterpiece of the incoherent, its a very coherent detective and criminal drama, its got all sorts of the elements that one might expect from something like that- an interesting twisty plot, good acting, morose surroundings- dark and dripping with rain, a great jazzy soundtrack and irresistably cool leading actors- not to mention some sleek femme fatales at the side. It ressembles the great American noirs of the forties- deliberately- its structure reminds me of Out of the Past or of the Maltese Falcon- perhaps the closest modern parallels would be the Usual Suspects or LA Confidential. Getting hold of this film's plot is like trying to catch water in your hands, not easy, trying to get its point though is possibly easier.

What is its point? The film begins with a very didactic line- that the alternatives in its universe are to lie or to die. You have to watch the film in the light of the statement at the beggining where the director offers a commentary on his own film: and his commentary, his prologue, is a statement of the ambiguity of the life of his characters. They all live on the edge and to some extent, Jean-Pierre Melville the director, has tried to make us see them as all living in the same world through choices in his cinematography. None of these characters has a style of their own: they all fit into the film's style. All the men are dressed in trench coats, looking like so many Mitchums or Elisha Cooks. The scenes are dark- the interiors all seem underground or the curtains are drawn. When we are outside, we go out there in the middle of the night or in the evening and more often than not the camera follows the rain. This film has a style- and its characters are drawn into that style. They all are part of the same world- the criminal underworld. Most of the film revolves around a couple of robberies- we are dealing here with the classic figure of the depression, an individual gangster without a gang who makes a hit and makes his life through making hits.

This is a world then of gangsters and their molls. From the first frame of the film, Melville makes another point: that you can't trust a single individual in this world. That the world beyond the state is a world where everyone might be a liar. Its interesting that in the first conversation we hear in the film- after a long establishing scene with a lead character going through the rain to a desolate house- is about who is deceiving who. Both characters in the room don't trust each others' friends- they think that the other's mate is an informer for the police and at the end of the scene, despite the fact that they seem to be friendly with each other, one of these men shoots the other in cold blood. A shooting which the character that is shot does not expect and reacts to with surprise. Its an incredible opening scene and it sets the tone for the entire film: when you watch this do not expect anyone's motivations to be what they say are or to understand why people take the actions they take. This is a film in which one man can be said to have only two friends in the world: both of which he deceives compulsively. Beyond the rule of the law, everyone is imprisoned in his own distrust of everyone else and the most successful man is the most cynical, the most callous. You cannot even trust that when you open your own door, the consequence will not be deadly. In this game, outside the law, you either end up as a bum or dead- as one of the characters says.

This world produces a particular kind of character- Melville goes beyond the Hobbesian analysis he offers of the world beyond the law, to sketch the individual beyond the law. Again its interesting that all of them seem the same. They all have the same style, all speak in the same way- with short sentences, undignified by reference to art or music or anything beyond the matter in hand. This is a world where everyone is an undifferentiated egoist. All of them seek nothing but their own gain in life, their own satisfaction. There are ways of seeing the film as a testiment to one character's kindness to another: I don't completely see it that way. None of the characters demonstrate real kindness- fellowship there is a lot of, but there is a distinction between the thinking that makes you and I part of the same gang and the thinking that places you as a chief object of my actions. The first sees you as an instrument to the attaining of my end, the second sees you as an object of my generosity. The first action constantly recurs in this film: the second is nowhere to be seen. These are characters so free that they conform in every way to a type- they lose their individuality through their freedom. Anarchy here does not liberate but imprison.

And it imprisons them in a last and crucial way- a way in which it imprisons the audience and in which to return to my introductary paragraph makes a profound point about the nature of truth and its relationship to power. In this film, a narrative is offered of events and we all believe it: at the end that narrative is flipped. But unlike say in the Usual Suspects, Melville doesn't allow you the luxury of imagining that one of these narratives is true. Both could be. There is plenty of evidence that everyone in this film is a compulsive and perpetual liar. They tell lies all the time and they never tell the exact truth. At the end of the film, the forces of law enforcement are unable to find the truth about what has happened- at two points in the film anyone objective arriving on the scene would suppose that there has been a shootout between three characters whereas actually in both cases (the first in all seriousness and the second in black comedy) the scene we see has been directed by one of the characters involved. Truth is a casualty of the loss of order, memory is a casualty of the loss of law. These characters don't know what is remembered about them and what is remembered about others. They don't know what to remember. They don't know what to rearrange and who to beleive. Truth in this film is the ultimate reason why humanity beyond the law destroys itself and why it reduces itself into a common denominator- the egoist. Hobbes was right: life outside the law is a state of perpetual fear where man's equality with his comrade in their ability to deceive and kill each other is the only constant. Art and literature, philosophy, music even film vanish into a vortex of criminal suspicion.

Le Doulos is a great film which handles topics which are seldom touched, because it investigates human nature without the constraint of a state and human nature without a state is not a pleasant thing. Life beyond the law is the domaine of wisecracking gangsters, is the domain of noir and film noir is all about the inevitable downfall of all of its protagonists. The only way to escape is to leave that world and yet once trapped within that world, it is almost impossible to leave- characters do try but they cannot escape their pride or their pasts.

A great reason for Americans to vote Democrat in November

I complained about Barack Obama's supporters' videos before- but this is something completely different



Hat-tip to Aaron and Andrew Sullivan. Beware watching this is painful- very painful.

Reflexive morality

I think Rowan Williams really gets at something important in his argument here about the essence of Christianity. Dr Williams's article is an interesting one because it captures something important about human psychology- in a way its a counterpart to Barack Obama's speech recently about race. Both are very Christian documents but encapsulate truths which I think go beyond Christianity. You can see morality in two ways- you can see it as a set of things which allow you to make a judgement on others, ethics as a foundation for law in a sense- or you can see morality as a set of things which allow you to make a judgement on yourself. Partly this is a tempramental distinction. The first attitude of course is neccessary for the construction of a political theory: law is related to ethics and is the imposition of public ethics upon private lives, I don't think anyone could disagree with that. However I do think we often lose the second element of that dual conception of morality- that morality is not merely a system for the examination of others and their division into good and bad people, but it is chiefly a system for the examination of ourselves. When one listens to some commentators, particularly but not exclusively on the right, you get the sense of stern upholders of rectitude who rebuke the sinners of this world: but actually that's not true and anyone who has examined themselves thoroughly knows that its not true. As soon as you think about your own actions you realise that moral humility is the only route to any understanding of yourself or others. And that means that it becomes very difficult to say that there are people who deserve being discarded- because in reality their misfortune is often more a result of chance than of moral or other desert. Politics can too often turn as the Archbishop states into a round of recrimination that doesn't solve any problems but just makes those recriminating feel better about themselves. That is not productive and does not recognise the humanity of those who we are opposed to- as soon as we fail to do that, we have lost the argument and in my judgement become immoral.

Blogging audiences

Iain Dale is entirely right to say that blogging is not really a number's game. He is right for all the reasons he mentions. The one area I would suggest adding to Dale's account is the blog as purely a personal thing- this blog is undisciplined and eclectic partly because it just contains what I'm interested in on a particular day, could be Roman history, could be a 21st century Iranian film. You can market your blog obviously by being more specific but I think it depends what you are aiming for whilst blogging. Iain has been, though coyly he doesn't say this quite, a very successful blogger partly for his chatty style. Others adopt different styles and personas but there is no one right way to blog, you blog because you want to and ultimately its an expression of your personality. A blog which was marketted to a specific degree and turned away from your personality would not be one that was enjoyable to write (I have sometimes written articles because I had to and often those are the worst articles on here in my opinion). Iain is absolutely right and in some ways the more we worry about audiences, the less like blogs we become, the more constrained we are by our audiences.

Knowledge and Economics

Chris highlights a rather interesting fact- that consumer spending continued to grow over February despite the banking crisis and the panic in the City of London. Its not a fact that's been reported- and it could indicate that the economic situation is not quite as dire as it appears from reading the newspapers (it could not as well)- but there has been no discussion of it. There has been no analysis even of why it doesn't affect the underlying reality of impending doom. Its interesting for me at least to think about why. There are many possible causes- one of which being that those who write the newspaper articles are all of one mind and dismiss this fact as incidental for some reason and not reflective of underlying realities.

It isn't likely though that every journalist and economist working on these issues has actually made a conscious decision that these figures are to ignored. Rather I suspect they don't know about them. What this feeds into is an important intellectual concept about the gathering of knowledge and how it works. Since Thomas Kuhn philosophers have been interested in paradigms- insights that become the basis for everyone else's work. So for example scientists today will work with Einstein's theory of relativity seeking to extend it and allow for complications within it, they won't all go back and challenge it. Well something similar, but at a very greater speed, happens in journalism and on blogs. Everyone finds a story, they all agree that the story is crucial- say its the unpopularity of a government, the inability of a minister- and then they go and find evidence for it.

The process of journalism and of blogging is not as rational as it seems- we find the evidence which supports our conjectures about the world and we ignore the evidence which doesn't. The good bloggers or journalists go out and try and find evidence which contradicts their world view so that they have to think and be challenged- but there aren't many rewards for that. The rewards are there for people who carry on with the same world view (the Simon Heffers of this world) and who can fit any fact into it. With the economic crisis, there would be few rewards for saying that such a thing is not happening- the rewards come for stating with any ammount of economic literacy that it is and that its going to be awful, the next great depression etc etc. Afterall if it doesn't happen, the journalist will only be exposed in Private Eye but will be able to keep their job through the next paradigm.

Blackboards: Education and Civilisation

Blackboards is a stark film. It is an Iranian film, made about people on the border between Iran and Kurdistan during the war between Iran and Iraq. It portrays the life of itinerant teachers, roaming to find classrooms who will listen to what they have to say, to a basic smattering of learning- the alphabet and the two times table are the two pieces of information that our teachers attempt to convey. We follow two of these wanderers who separate off from the group and start attempting to retail their learning throughout the border areas. One takes the high path and the other the lower path. Reeboir goes up into the mountains and finds a group of young boys smuggling contraband between Iran and Iraq. Said takes the low road and ends up attached to a group of pilgrims attempting to get back to their homeland inside Iraq. Both form semi-emotional attachments: Reeboir to one boy who does sort of want to learn, Said gets married very briefly to a single mother in the party and then divorces from her when she demonstrates her lack of interesti in him.

Its a stark story though. The two characters encounter rejection after rejection after rejection. Said's relationship with his wife is particularly pathetic. She scarcely acknowledges his presence and doesn't even talk to him for most of the film. She ignores his efforts to teach her to read. But he also misjudges the situation, he is unable to see for instance that her ties to her son are more valuable to her than her ties to him, he fails to see that when she has lost her son, the last thing she wants is a lesson in Arabic grammar. Said's misunderstanding pervades the film. There is a sense in which this film is one of the most embarrassing I have ever sat through- you feel the embarrassment of the main characters. The truth is that they are trying to force education upon these people who don't really want it. Noone actually wants to learn to read and most of the time, Said and Reeboir are just hassling them to acquire a skill they see no need for.

And why should they need it? At no point does Said or Reeboir's skill come in useful. Ironically the one time someone does want Said to read something it is an old man whose son is in an Iraqi gaol, but the language of the letter is Arabic and Said can't read Arabic, only Kurdish. In a sense the whole film is summed up in the use of the blackboard. At no point is the blackboard actually useful as a teaching aide. Throughout the film, the blackboards that Said and Reeboir carry on their backs are used for all kinds of things- as shelters from airraids (as in the picture above) or rifle fire, cut up for splints so that an injured boy can walk, used to carry an old man who is ill or even used as a clothes line. But when they are used as blackboards- to convey knowledge- they are singularly inadequate. They fail to interest those who look at them- and on the one occasion where one of the boys does use the blackboard as a teaching aide, a bombing raid means that he has to flee. The last scene of the movie captures the utility of writing perfectly in this environment. Said wrote at the beggining of his relationship on the board 'I love you', his ex-wife turns away from him, carrying away her dowry, a blackboard with 'I love you' written on it. The irony is evident- words can say anything you want, but that is all Said has, the words and not the passion.

Writing is useless in this film because this film portrays a society right at the cusp of social development, right at the moment before society. We see no evidence here of law- and little evidence of property. There is nothing here- except warring armies whose shells, chemical weapons and rifles disrupt the lives of a nomad population. Writing is an artificial thing- writing 'I love you' to a girl only matters when she can read it and agrees with you on its meaning and significance. If she doesn't read or doesn't agree that those words are significant, you might as well have written 'I think you are a pink elephant' for all that it is going to effect the world. Similarly with writing when you are being bombed. The useful knowledge here is practical knowledge- medicine, remembered stories about rabbits- but training and academic degrees even in practical subjects are useless- there isn't the time to get them and to devote to them.

When we talk about civilisation, we often imply that it is natural. But it isn't. The best historians of the subject have discussed the way that civilisation is an artificial imposition- it is a creation whereby we warp the world. Much of what we do on earth to sustain it is useless- and its use is not its essence. The teachers come from a civilised world where one might want to read a book or a newspaper, to know what is going on. Education quite simply does not make sense to the people on the Iranian-Iraqi border, why should it? That implies something about civilisation in general- perhaps becoming civilised is not a rational choice- but rather a mutation produced by a particular constellation of things as a response to a particular situation. Blackboards leaves you in no doubt that there are few attractions to lure the people of Kurdistan to take up the blackboard and use it to teach: afterall when the planes are heading to bomb you from above, a blackboard is much better camoflage than sums are.

The Flight of the Red Balloon

The Flight of the Red Balloon is the kind of film that you shouldn't see in certain moods. Don't go if you want to see a film packed with action or plot- because this is not the film that will satisfy you. It will instead annoy. The film is a meditation. We follow a red balloon across Paris in the first twenty minutes and then we follow a family, a single mother Suzanne, her son Simon, Simon's Chinese nanny Song and various other characters who come in and out of their lives. Always round the next corner or behind the window lurks a red balloon which follows Simon- and Song, a film student, is making a film about the presence of red balloons in Paris (a homage to the French film, Le Ballon Rouge).

The film is languid. It really does not have a plot- there are several plots but none of them connect or really have anything to do with each other. Suzzanah's friendship with Song steadily grows over the movie. There are episodes in which Song does favours for her, translating the work of a Chinese puppeteer for her, turning her father's old 88mm film into modern video and generally being the friend that Suzanne needs. Suzanne herself is faced with repeated troubles- she seems always rushing to do something else. A single mother, whose boyfriend Pierre is a feckless novelist staying in Montreal rather than facing his responsibilities, she has to work, keep her son happy and also manage her own property. The anarchy of modern city life is central to the film's perception of Suzanne's life.

The director's choice is to eschew story in favour of a sort of realism. Hence the film doesn't really go anywhere or does anything. Rather than that we see the contours of real life- which are difficult to perceive as a narrative, we live our lives in streams of events not in stories. In one sense therefore this story is a more realistic perception than you often get in films of what life is like. On the other hand there are reasons why film makers in the past have forced their perceptions of life into stories. It keeps people watching- film is not merely documentary, it is also entertainment and a film which does not entertain ultimately is a worthless film. Hsiao Hsien Hou attempts to add a magical element to his story via the traverse of the red balloon across the screen and musical interludes- this is an attempt to add both meaning and mystique to the plot. One is tempted to wonder about the metaphysical meaning of the balloon- some critics view that balloon as an image of the way that the past constantly touches the present in the movie.

I am not so sure that there is a deep philosophical meaning here or that it is an interesting one if it is present. Rather this film strikes me as the kind of film that excites film students and those who love cinematography. There are some wonderfully crafted shots- some truly exquisite moments of cinema. There are also some superb moments for the characters- all the actors here, particularly the excellent Juliette Binoche manage to capture their characters. But ultimately this is a film without a plot, and thought it may have a philosophical point, that point is not easy to capture or define. Just under 2 hours is a long time to spend with a film whose only reccomendation is the beauty of its shots and moments of excellence. It seems barbaric to dismiss this film but there is something disappointing for the non-film student. Paris is indeed beautiful, the cherubic Simon is charming- but there isn't much more to this film than that.

The Flight of the Red Balloon is a film student's failure. Having said that, if you want to see some beautiful shots of Paris and some charming acting, you'll like it. But it has no plot, no real point. It is just what it is- a piece of triviality which aspires to be something more, a piece of beauty that lasts a long time admiring itself- and ultimately an exquisite folly. See it if that's what you want, but if you don't, I'd reccomend something more mainstream.

Remembering home: The Netherlands amongst Dutch Americans

David Zwart has an interesting article in the most recent edition of the Michigan Historical Review. Zwart argues that in the 1940s two images of the Netherlands came into contact and conflict. On the one hand the Netherlands Information Bureau (set up by the Dutch government during the second world war) attempted to put forward an image of the Dutch as modern and powerful, a good ally for the United States thanks to their toleration of religion, their modernity and their resistance to Naziism. On the other was the image cultivated amongst the conservative religious folk of places like Holland, Michigan. Many of these people had fled the Netherlands in the 19th Century, they had fled what they saw as religious persecution to the New World and compared themselves explicitly to the Pilgrim Fathers. Their image of the homeland was as a traditional and unindustrial place, a place where religious persecution thrived and that marked a moment in the eschatalogical history of the human race- when the people of God were turned on by a pharisaical majority.

Zwart devotes a lot of interesting attention to the ways in which people developed both identities. The Netherlands Bureau used all the traditional press tactics of the 40s, sending journalists to Indonesia for example and monitoring the American press. They also produced propaganda films in great quantity. Perhaps more interestingly, the citizens of Michigan, one of the largest Dutch settlements in the US, also sought to influence public opinion about their homeland. They put in a festival about tulips every year, emphasizing the traditional Holland that they had left. They also put on a festival about their own origins which blamed the Dutch 19th Century authorities for their intolerance. They emphasized these occasions with a national advertising campaign, seeking tourists and making the point that they shared an experience of America as a promised land of religious freedom and fulfilment. Most of these settlers had come from one church and retained their affiliation with it- so this religious sense of emancipation was crucial to their identity as Dutch-Americans.

It is easy to see that these two visions of Holland- one put forward by the Dutch government and the other perpetuated by an immigrant community were in conflict with each other. Zwart is not as good as he could be in establishing this conflict in a real sense- the campaigns don't seem to have been directly antagonistic- but there is no denying that their messages conflicted, their portraits of Holland were drawn from very different sources. Whether they confused Americans is another matter of course, and there are indications in Zwart's article that Americans were worried about other things, not less Dutch imperial behaviour in Indonesia and the Dutch position in the world, than the behaviour of Dutch Americans but still the detail is interesting. Often we assume that immigrant communities are a sort of fifth column for their home country: on this occasion though we see something very different. The community in Holland, Michigan and the Dutch community throughout the US had an image of the Netherlands that was negative, as a pre-industrial and repressive community. Their message directly conflicted with efforts to cement American-Dutch friendship in the mid-twentieth century. Relations between them and the home country were much more ambiguous than our picture of immigrants as fifth columnists might suggest: they brought their politics over from Europe, but it was a politics antagonistic to Europe. Their immigration was a moment of liberation from tyranny, it did not make them look nostalgically at the home country.

Barack Obama's religion

Reading about Barack Obama's speech on race (of which more here) what astonishes me is the religious rhetoric that Obama uses. His speech seems to me deeply Christian in its motivations- and in its tropes. Particularly Obama's concern with forgiveness shines through the speech and particularly his forgiveness for someone close to him who has disappointed him. Furthermore it is the absense of anger in the speech whether at black or white racists, but the willingness to find reasons for their evil feelings that suggests to me a deep Christian conviction. Central to the Christian faith is the idea that one should hate sins not the sinner, that one should forgive and turn the other cheek and that one should not cast the first stone. Senator Obama managed to bring out in his speech many of those sentiments and suggested that the best way to end racism was to end the conditions which brought it about. In this sense Obama is a more religious candidate than many I've heard of or read about before running for office, it will be interesting to see if this kind of rhetoric works. But its testament to the fact that religion in the US works on the right as well as on the left.

A new Baby Boom?

John Radzilowski provides an interesting argument in the Journal of American Ethnic History that the United States saw a baby boom amongst immigrants in the 1920s. He suggests that you can see this having an effect in all parts of American history- for instance in some Polish parishes in 1941 40% of the congregation went to fight in World War Two. Radzilowski doesn't suggest many implications- some are obvious though. The American migration of southern and eastern Europeans was so large and over so quickly that its impact is not really a good indicator of what other immigrant populations will do. Secondly this immigrant community and in particular its brief and important baby boom in the twenties changed American history- a huge generation of young people in the thirties emerging from labouring working classes in the midst of the depression helps explains the rise in crime in the thirties. Its possible there are other conclusions that might be drawn but Radzilowski draws attention to an interesting demographic phenomenon.

Beowulf

Beowulf is one of the most ancient poems that we have. It is the Illiad of English verse- we know little about when it was written or how it was put together. Putting it on the screen was always going to be difficult- the sentiment and thought of the Saxon ages of England are not easy to recover without caricature- skilled hands and minds are needed for the task. Unfortunately skilled hands and minds did not put together this recent effort. It is sad that the director thinks that the original poem is 'boring'- that tells you something about his abilities to direct this film. You can see the marks of exertion: the script is filled with references to the coming of Christianity and sentimental analyses of sexual passion and the way that it corrupts men. Indeed if anything this is a replacement of the complicated morality of the original- with a simple equation between promiscuity and the beggining of moral turpitude.

The film's glossiness is part of its attempt to appeal- but that glossiness fails. The film was developed by using new digital techniques and the actors here do not appear, only their images constructed from software. It does not really work. For this viewer, the animation did not work. I was not terrified by Grendel but amused, not titillated by Grendel's mother but bored. The animation lessened the power of the story and made the point that the film makers were attempting to make less powerful than it should have been. As plenty of other film reviewers have commented the film contains adult material- sex and violence abound- and yet the visual style is one that only works with children and teenagers. In that sense the style and the story contradict, in order to take the first seriously, you have to be of an age where you cannot absorb the second.

Passing on to the subject of the story. What we have here is the repeated efforts of heroes to liberate their world from monsters- Grendel, Grendel's mother and a dragon all crop up- but they are undermined always by their desire for the seductive mother. Beowulf from the moment he enters the story is a ladies man, eyeing up a young queen (wife to the King who needs his help) and eventually he sleeps with Grendel's mother to create a new monster the dragon. We learn that in this, Beowulf merely immitates the actions of Hrothgar, the King who needed his help, who too slept with Grendel's mother and fathered Grendel. This story suggests two things- that the sexual wiles of women are irresistable and always evil and that as Beowulf says it is not Grendel who is a monster but we humans who are monsters.

Both are very unrealistic hooks to hang a story from- and neither it should be noted are in the original. The succubus is an old idea- but in an age of equality and comradeship between men and women a rather old fashioned idea- its not unusual of course for men to do foolish things because of sex but in this film, sexual desire is almost solely a bad thing and in life of course it isn't. Life is more complicated than that. Furthermore in this film political power creates monsters- whereas actually in reality, monsters were always the creation not of political power but of lawlessness. That is true both of Greek and Norse myth. Monsters live in the world of heroes- the world before the state- before a monopoly of force. Interestingly in this story of sons slaying fathers the Oedipal element is completely left out- the idea that the son could be a challenge to the father is cod psychology but probably too sophisticated for this film.

More interesting than the film's premises are its value as a social document about how we see the past. Christianity here is the post-heroic religion- the religion as Neitsche saw it- the religion of cowardice and forgiveness. To this is counterbalanced the ethic of the hero and the pagan- its an ethic that many feel nostalgic for, especially on the political right and explains for example the return of many conservatives to the classical world for inspiration. This film is a testament to that sense of unease that we still seem to have with the world that we have- the civilised world, the legal world. Its an interesting phenomenon and one that deserves thinking about- but definitely this interpretation of Beowulf is contrary to Lewis and Tolkein's myths- they sought to reinforce Christianity and law, this seeks to undermine it.

A story with bad premises need not be a bad story- it doesn't help but neither is it an insuperable barrier. The problem with Beowulf though is that the film is really not much more than the sum of its special affects (cartoonish special effects) which light up the sky. The dialogue is too stilted and replaces the beauty of the original with a sort of stilted modernism. The voices work in many cases- Sir Anthony Hopkins does for example his usual turn so does Ray Winstone- but nowhere is there any special work. This is grunting gruffness by numbers. Its worth it if you like seeing cartoon dragons have their guts sliced open or cartoon sexiness- but I'm not sure that that is a major qualification for a film.

The long and the short of it is that this is a film in which Beowulf wrestles, monsters get biffed and Angelina Jolie gets naked (as a cartoon!). There isn't much more than that to this film.

Milosevic on Trial

Slobodan Milosevic was an awful tyrant- one of the worst that the world has seen and his condemnation throughout the globe (excluding perhaps Serbia and Russia) was deserved. He sanctioned the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and began wars which killed even more. In the early part of this century, Milosevic was surrendered by Serbia to the International Court at the Hague and in a trial, designed deliberately as an imitation of the Nuremberg, a set of prosecutors and judges attempted to bring him to account and make a finding of fact about what happened in Serbia during the 1990s. It is fairly evident that the Serbs committed atrocities, the prosecution's task was to prove as a matter of law that those atrocities had happened and that Milosevic had been behind them.

As such the documentary, originally made for television in 2007 but screened as part of a human right's season at the Clapham Picture House this year, chronicles that process of judicial interrogation. It presents footage from the trial- so you see the exchanges between witnesses, lawyers, judges and of course Slobodan himself who decided to represent himself in his own case. The rest of the film contains interviews with other people involved in the trial- particularly the lead prosecution lawyer, Geoffrey Nice, and on the other side Milosevic's lawyer, young, articulate and English speaking Dragoslav Ognjanovic. Ognjanovic is a Serbian nationalist who argues that Serbia itself is on trial, not Milosevic at the Hague and also believes that the trial is unjust. Nice on the other hand argues that the trial is not merely just but neccessary, and provides substantiating evidence of the atrocities, particularly by being filmed going to places where the Serbs killed people and discussing on camera the events that took place there.

The courtroom drama is fascinating. There are several exchanges which show vividly the way that Milosevic was able to exploit the system of the court in order to make his own points. Obviously in any legal system, you have to provide opportunities for the defence to make their points: Milosevic was quite able to turn the trial into a political occasion, airing bizarre conspiracy theories- apparantly the US, Germany and the Vatican were behind the Srebrenica massacre for example. The court process though is interesting from another perspective- you get a sense of the drama of a trial- the unexpected withdrawel by witnesses of their statements, the dramatic moments when evidence is produced, the confrontations between witnesses and lawyers and the confrontation of those who committed war crimes but protest innocence with evidence of their crimes. This is particularly vivid in the case of the leader of MUP (the Serbian military police), General Ivanovic, who is at one point shown evidence that MUP's specialist unit, the Scorpions, committed crimes within Bosnia.

All that is good- but the footage of the trial is often arranged to tell the story too dramatically. Its an odd criticism to make of a film that its too dramatic- but lots of this film feels like it has been drawn together by the conventions of staging and not those of truth. Firstly some of the material outside the court feels staged- meetings between Milosevic's appointed legal team are stilted and obviously done later for camera. There is a constant attempt on behalf of the documentary makers to assert that all interviews were done contemporaneously with the footage that they explore- it would have been better had those interviews been done later and admitted that they were historical. Furthermore this staginess means that we lose track of particular allegations: you capture the clash of the personalities but have little idea of what the Serb army or police force actually did. We know from the film that they weren't very nice, but I'm sure the film makers could have provided excerpts from the trial or even interviews which would have taken us further into understanding what happened in Bosnia and Croatia in the 90s. Furthermore, this is a portrait of an evil man, but nowhere do we get an examination of evil and what it means to be evil, what made him evil. The film takes us to the doorstep of tyranny, but does not open the latch and look inside the mind of the tyrant. Occasionally Geoffrey Nice tells us that Milosevic was an opportunist who lost control of himself and proceeded to start to do illegal things in the cause of opportunistic desire for power, but nowhere is this fleshed out.

Partly all these issues result from the conventions and limitations of documentary film making. It would have been nice to see more- but the case was not concluded and the footage say of final speeches does not exist. Milosevic died just before he was to have closed his defence and so there was no verdict. Furthermore the documentary is limited by the available time- it lasts just under an hour and a half and sums up a legal process that lasted many years, in which time both the first judge assigned Sir Richard May and the defendant died. There are complexities that naturally it cannot cope with. It also suffers from the nature of a modern documentary, explaining events to those who have forgotten the nightly bulletins from the former Yugoslavia in the nineties. Styllistic tics apart, its fascinating to see the largely unexpurgated film of the events in the courtroom.

The most fascinating thing about events in the courtroom is the behaviour of the protagonists. Milosevic behaves like a politician confronted with an accusation- he blusters and widens the question in the way that politicians do when confronted by accusations. The lawyers on the other hand behave like lawyers, focussing in a dispassionate way on the minutiae of the case. The differences between the approaches, the languages, that the two sides use is evident throughout and provokes most of the judicial ire with Milosevic: he did not behave ultimately as a witness on trial but as a politician in a political process. To some extent of course he was a politician involved in a political process- he was right- the process was intended to reach a political end, which was to account for genocide. But on the other hand, his behaviour devalued the way that was being used to achieve that end- for his own purposes Milosevic wanted to impugn the language of impartial legality with which the trial was examining his crimes. He did not want to be convicted but more than that, he did not want the possibility of a verdict. He did not beleive that there was anything wrong with what happened under his regime- and his way of proving that was to state that a legal method was the wrong way to examine his regime. Its an argument that his supporters have been making ever since.

Was the trial of Milosevic ultimately a good thing? On balance I think you have to conclude it was: partly for the sake of the victims. At one point we are presented with a montage of victims of Serbian atrocities: one can only imagine the cathartic release of at last giving evidence about what had happened to them in an open court. Its the same instinct that leads families in normal murder cases to fervently desire justice for their loved one, that meant the trial was a vindication of sorts and a closing of a chapter in kind for these people. As to Milosevic, it is hard to dismiss what happened at the trial. Thousands of hours of evidence were produced showing how horrible the Serb government of Yugoslavia was. The verdict was, as the film suggests ultimately, less important than the documentary record supplied. Geoffrey Nice even suggests, rightly in my view, that the verdict may well have obscured in the end the sheer volume of evidence submitted in the trial. Because we have an incomplete process in the end, all we can see is the evidence of Milosevic's wrong doing.

This is an interesting documentary- it isn't often that you see inside an international court room- you may not understand the process or the history of Yugoslavia much more at the end of the film than you did at the beggining, but you do get a sense of the scale of the atrocities and the personal drama of the court room. This is the court as gladiatorial combat, not as long boring argument, its courtroom politics for television: that has its disadvantages but also its memorable strengths.

Iain Dale, Background and Parliament

Iain Dale posted a rather interesting article today which argued that journalists tended to report stories about people like them. He even suggested that this meant that Labour ministers like Harriet Harmon got an easier time of it because their dilemmas about selection in schools were the same as those faced by the Nick Robinsons of the world. He may indeed be right. But I doubt that Iain really thought through the implications of what that would mean. Because if he is right about the 'people like us' phenomenon and if he agrees with me that most MPs spend most of their time leglislating about things that none of us elected them to do (from road safety to foreign relations with Belize to business law) then he would also agree that one of the things that a population of MPs have to be is not merely representative of the population through election, but also 'people like us'. In the sense, that if what Iain says is right, MPs should represent the population statistically in terms of their background as well as representing them through election: afterall otherwise they will just be leglislating for the upper middle class inhabitants of Westminster (not that there is anything particularly wrong with being upper middle class- but it is just one segment of the population). I take it therefore that Iain is in favour of all-women shortlists, all-ethnic minority shortlists, perhaps all working class shortlists? By the logic of his arguments he ought to be...

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.