Not looking forward to Hurricane Georgina

An interesting piece of research was just published in the Journal, Judgement and Decision Making. The authors, Jesse Chandler, Tiffany Griffin and Nicholas Sorenson of the University of Michigan came to some rather startling conclusions. Having analysed the register of Red Cross donations in a county in the midwest United States, they found that there was an increased incidence of donations if the person concerned shared an initial with the name of the disaster. Donations from people whose names began with the letter 'K' jumped 31% after Hurricane Katrina, similarly after Hurricane Mitch, donations from people whose names began with M jumped 30%. This is interesting. The researchers are unable, being good scientists to suggest why this might be so- but according to them it harmonises with many other studies done for example on the way that individuals look at historical characters- apparantly studies have found that those whose names begin with R tend to look favourably on Rasputin!

It is interesting- if not just statistical noise and researchers insist that it isn't because it exposes the irrational roots of human behaviour. Lets take an example, I decide to donate to a hurricane- Hurricane Georgina, whose impact was disastrous within the United Kingdom this year. I might think that my donation proceeded from a rational calculation- to relieve suffering- and that my choice of disaster was informed by the fact that those people were people who deserved caring for. But actually that is not the whole story. My bias towards the letter- which Georgina shares with Gracchi- may have influenced my decision- I unlike Matt Sinclair might not have been predisposed to donate to Hurricane Martha. Lots of human decisions are like this- and not all of them involve letters- but one of the interesting things I think about the current state of play in cognitive science is how much more we are learning about the irrational roots of human behaviour. Letters, numbers- we enthuse them all with character- and use them as signs. I don't think anyone quite understands why we do this- but we do- there are names as everyone I am sure recognises in their own life that just sound nice and names which do not. I am well disposed to people called Lucy and hate Agathas. This isn't based on empirical research- I don't know any Agathas- and though I know lots of nice Lucys I had the prejudice before I met them.

In a sense we have been playing this game for a long time. The 18th and 19th Century were filled with great and interesting theories about why we like what we like. Karl Marx's argument about class in part is an argument about culture- or at least became so in the hands of his 20th Century interpreters. Names for instance are very vulnerable to the fashions of class- the preponderence of Ernies as bus drivers or train drivers in the 1930s (and even in Harry Potter novels) has a lot to do with the fact that noone calls their kid Ernie today! But there are more individual things as well- the bias towards letters may be one- which we use to group the world and understand it. In truth the world were we to try to understand it rationally from the word go would just be too confusing- there is too much that is new and radically different- and so we use categories to understand it. Some of those may be rational categories- like for instance the fact that I tend not to like mustard, hence all mustard sauces are forbidden no matter how enticing. Some of them though come from deep in the psyche- I'm sure sexual preference for example influences our behaviour in ways that we are not aware of- equally I'm sure memories of our parents suppressed in our psyches do. These things of course Freud and Jung and their disciples attempted in the 20th Century to get at and still do.

So the simple suggestion that the first letter of our name influences our attitude to the news shouldn't surprise but it should remind us. Know then thyself says the poet- if only we could is the response of the learned modern! And now I'm off to donate to something beggining with G...

Youth

Youth is a short story by Joseph Conrad, the subject is not difficult to guess. Captain Charles Marlow, a frequent character in Conrad's stories, makes his first appearance in Youth telling the story of his journey to Bangkok as a young seaman in the 1890s. For most critics the most important thing about the short story is that Marlow, the narrator of the Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, makes his first appearance in the story. But actually this is a more significant piece of work than those critics would have you believe. Youth is a simpler piece of work and so often neglected but it has the merits of being both exciting and interesting, and mixing in a flavour of the difference between human generations as well as the flavour of life at sea.

The story is about the voyage of the vessel Judea from England to Bangkok. Its a comically bad voyage- the Judea is an old vessel which seems to break and splutter at the merest indication of hard weather or hard times. They fail to leave England, they fail to get to Bangkok with the vessel intact and the cargo provided for. The captain, Beard and his first mate, are both good seamen who reasons of luck have never in their long careers commanded before- Marlow describes himself as a stripling between two grandfathers. The point though is that their bad luck continues: through no fault of their own they end up on a vessel which is less than sea worthy and which creaks rather than sails. Of course the ironic touch is that for the young Marlow this is an incredible voyage- to the 'East'- it is romantic and character forming. Marlow is tested throughout by wind, wave and the crew and passes the tests with flying colours- he grows before our eyes. The book is also subtlely a celebration of the British merchant marine at the end of the nineteenth century- far more than any other Conrad I have read it argues for those hardy seamen from Liverpool- having said that it is an old man's nostalgic reminiscence of his prime- and we must always read this as Marlow's attitudes not Conrad's- Marlow recalls his crew as an embodiment of British pluck: does Conrad?

I suppose that is what is most interesting about the story- because it is ultimately a reflection on youth as it looks from old age- in that sense it has a lot in common with Ikiru where the hero beleives it is a girl's youth and not her zest which keeps her passionate. So too in this story the romance and the crew's character are portraits from age. They are dramatisations of memory- a memory no doubt scarred by many less exciting and less comical episodes- some of which Conrad was to introduce us to later on in his fiction. Marlow makes his entrance onto the stage therefore of British literature not as an embodiment of slashbuckling youth, but as an embodiment of fond old age- swigging from a bottle (we are constantly reminded of the bottle being passed round as he tells his story) whilst telling his friends of high deeds and comical mishap. In that sense the unlucky captain is both comical and tragic: he is comical because nothing he can do will ever assuage his failure, but he is tragic because no less than Marlow he is the representative of old men who have lost their opportunities, made their choices and sit around the fire at night telling stories of their own youth.

Ikiru A thought

I apologise for lack of posting. However tonight I went to see Ikiru- the great film by Akira Kurosawa- the problem with Ikiru is that it is a film which by its nature is not easy to comment on. It is incredibly difficult to grasp what the film is actually about- not because the plot is hard to grasp naturally- but because the ramifications are so dense. In a sense that is what defines a good story- it is defined through the fact it has texture, it has depth. You can go back and back to it, go and rethink an aspect, ask a different question, see the whole story from a different angle. Ikiru is one such film: there are so many different interesting angles that you can see it from, so many aspects to it- like a painting by Escher it repays neverending analysis and thought.

Ikiru is a film about death- we know from the first frame that our hero will die soon. There is no doubt about it and we know the end as soon as we know the beggining of the film. You might think that this takes away the interest of the film- far from it. For this is a film about what it means to die, and therefore about what it means to be alive. How ought one live one's life- if as is said any day could be your last? (In the age of industrial warfare, that sentence has a particular poignancy- especially when stated in a society like Japan in the fifties which had been overhung by war.) Through that Kurosawa investigates any number of interesting issues- the ethical, political, social and bureacratic that defined contemporary Japan. However for today's purposes I do not want to focus on any of those themes- preferring instead to concentrate on something else- Kurosawa's treatment of old age.

The central character in this piece is an old man- but curiously and unlike say other notable filmks of the same era- for example Umberto D- he is an old man surrounded by the younger generation. There is noone of a comparative age in the film (there is actually one minor exception a clerk at the civil service office in which he works) but there is noone else. Noone else is confronted by death in quite the way our main character is. This means that he relates to the others in a curious way. He desires them- for their life. They consider that his desires are sexual- there is one girl who is supposed by many to be his mistress- but actually it is her charming vitality that he desires. She even begins to find him scary, freakishly stalking her, he seems to any dispassionate audience to have lost a sense of perspective and discovered infatuation but in truth it is with what she represents that he is infatuated not her in particular.

The thing that reawakes Watanabe, the old man, is not a young mistress as all his friends think, but is youth itself. Kurosawa is interesting about this- because during the film he proposes a definition of youth- youth is the ability to love life. And loving life is the ability to take what you are doing seriously. He is a council official- the moment that he recovers his youth is when he becomes interested, engaged, involved. It is the moment when he discovers meaning in his life- when he recovers his zest for something- that something being doing for someone else. But it could be anything- it is the interest that gives him youth, the obsession with something, the sense of unreasonableness- the sense of unaccomodating demand upon life. He demands that life be made better for those whom he is responsible to- and demands it despite the fact that it is impolite- he becomes youthful because he enjoys impropriety but impropriety not for its own sake- towards an end.

Movement away from death is not the fact he faces down death nor some potion, but it is that he faces away from death, tears away the swathes of cloth that have mummified him and looks on life again. He dies smiling.

Wonderful Winnipeg

My Winnipeg is not a conventional film. Guy Maddin's latest, a docufantasia according to its director, charts his attempts to escape from his hometown to which he is tied by ties of memory, history and culture. But it is much more than a buldingsroman- it is rather the tale of a mystical attempt at escape. My companion watching the film described the experience as being like watching a dream- she was right- there are those faint connections, bearly perceivable- my own thought evoked by a line in the film about Winnipeg calling it an unreal city, was that it ressembled the poetry of Elliot or the prose of Joyce. The film is a stream of thought- rather than a movie with a conventional narrative- and you have no sense at any point of where you are save that you are in Winnipeg. Maddin confronts his childhood, his anger about his own town- he makes actors act the parts of his family- brilliantly using the old Anne Savage (last seen in Edgar Ulmer's fantastic Detour in the forties) to play his mother and casting some deliberately wooden actors as his siblings- one of whom died when he was 16. His father is played by a mound of earth in the living room buried under a rug- the man died in the seventies and Maddin chooses to recreate his image in this way- a tomb amidst the room, a silence in the maternal confines of the home. Lastly there is his dog- Toby- played by his girlfriend's pooch- who in a comic turn looks nothing like the original dog.

You might think we have the cast- but oh no we don't. For as we go through the film we see a variety of characters from Winnipeg's past- great hockey players, school boys, girls and nuns, mayors, Prime Ministers, whores and Indians. Some flash by so that you scarcely notice them, others like a dancing mistress at a seance stay in your mind. All add to a fascinating panorama- a description of a city in the flakes of memory, reflected in the flakes of the ever present snow. One image- the image I have chosen to put up on the blog- stays with me and that is of horses who escaped from the fire only to freeze in the water. This is a film filled with images- it is a collage- from a vagina to a set of rivers merging and the arteries of blood rushing through a human being- from the ever present falling snow, trains through the streets, workers rushing at soldiers, the first world war, a hair salon, a department stall, a male stripping contest etc etc etc there is image after image after image- it is like a carnival into which everything that Maddin associates with his memories of Winnipeg is thrust and it is there for a reason.

The dreaming is not purposeless for it conveys the essense of what Maddin himself is. Towards the end of the film we have the semi-Stalinist worker's princess who gestures everything back to life and would enable Maddin to leave his memories- but of course what Maddin demonstrates is that that would be false. How can there be a city without memories? Ok some of those memories are farcical and some are of downright evil (regret with Maddin the demolition by philistine politicians the great monuments of post war Winnipeg and share his outrage by all means): but they are all memories- they are all real associations. They are all moorings in a world of chaos. This movie is about geography- it is about the way that geography really leads us all the way back to the womb- one of the reasons that Maddin is fixated by his mother is that as his mother says at one point, I gave birth to you. Its a revelation that is worth thinking about- we are our histories. In some way, Maddin is Winnipeg and should he escape Winnipeg- he would escape Maddin. This curious dream world is the director himself and its resistance to being circumscribed in the traditional narrative of film is his resistance. In that sense this film is a final affirmation of the crucial part character has to play in movies- character cannot even be confined by the construct of plot, story or narrative.

If Maddin is Winnipeg, then furthermore that means that Winnipeg is an aspect of Maddin. This is another thing that justifies, that explains why this film is important. Winnipeg without a human being does not exist- or rather it does- but dully. Winnipeg as imagined exists and is real- it is a place that matters to human beings. Ultimately the dream of Winnipeg is more important than the reality of Winnipeg- in a curious way when Maddin gets actors to react his family life the reaction is more important than the actual action that it immitates. For the reaction is that part of the family life that Maddin has preserved, archived and that still to this day influences him- the rest of the participants are either dead or have their own version- but none have the truth. The world Maddin is telling us in this deeply humanistic work is what takes place in human minds- it is important for the associations it creates within us. Part of being human is to have those associations and the dialogue between us and the world is what makes life worth living. Ultimately Maddin presents to us his Winnipeg- in so doing he shows that that is one of the many Winnipegs that matter and all of which have an owner who calls them mine.

And they are all indeed- as the song says- wonderful.

The Cloven Viscount

Italo Calvino's novel, the Cloven Viscount, is a fascinating gedankenexperiment. Calvino imagines a character- the Viscount Medardo who goes to the Turkish wars and in a battle in Bohemia is split in half with a cannon ball. One half of Medardo, the bad un, is a savage tyrant who returns to his people to kill and maim- to split everyone in half who is not already a half person- to cut flowers in half, animals in half, to hate the world and everything in it that is not halved. The other half of Medardo, the good un, is a pious and saintly beggar who takes his halfness as a signal to respect everyone else that lacks, but is so saintly that his very example irritates and his preaching alternately irritates and bores. Calvino follows the two halves through the novel- they seek the same girl who they both fall in love with and inhabit the same semi feudal landscape- they do so until a denoument that reflects the real nature of Medardo and closes the circle of the story.

As you can imagine this gives Calvino an opportunity to explore various types of human division. There is a metaphor in here for the Cold War- this was written in 1951 when the prospect of the two halves of humanity destroying each other was not so unlikely as it seems now. The novel is novel about a postwar situation and though the war is against the Turks, not the Germans, the idea of a Europe sweating from the aftermath of atrocity and the memories of madness would not have been foreign to audiences reading this novella in the 1950s. The description of the surroundings of the camp of the Imperial troops in Bohemia are graphically disgusting- they parallel the images of terror in Kadare's siege and suggest an appreciation for the horrible reality of chivalric warfare- horses lying with their guts hanging out, camps of prostitutes infected with the gruesome pox surrounding camps of soldiers, the men themselves approaching a battle in which they have nothing to look forward to but dying. And so the story's grisly approach constructs the surroundings for the split of the man- the surroundings for the inevitable tragedy to come- this is a postwar novel and in a way is about the condition of modern man- the condition of man lying under the threat of the horror of total war.

The Viscount in his split personality lives as one person within two bodies- Stevenson's (a novelist that Calvino admired) Jekyll and Hyde come to mind instantly as parallels to the Viscount. But using this device is merely a method to explore the world of whole persons: what Calvino is doing is twofold here- he explores the nature of good and evil and explores the nature of personality. Let us get into these two distinctions. What he demonstrates through his exploration of good and evil is that pure moral good is often something we idealise but do not actually like- a kind of pious disdain for mocking jokes or constant attempts to remind everyone in the midst of enjoyment that there are others who are not enjoying the world- takes all the enjoyment out of life itself- rendering life a husk. If goodness is a lonely business then by neccessity- so Calvino demonstrates is evil, evil creates fear and fear creates difference. Moral persons do not make actual persons- and a pure good person or worse a pure evil person is not merely likely to be a fool, they are unlikely to be human. It is this which moves us onto our second point- what Calvino is doing here is telling us something about what it is to be human. Humanity comes out not merely of our moral good or bad qualities but also of our ability to get on with others- to be comradly. Empathy rather than puritanism is a way out of our dilemmas- and empathy means recognising and sympathising with the moment that morality is less important than sitting on a couch reading. The saint at that point becomes a nagging parent- and an uncomfortable colleague for any adult.

Calvino's vision is an interesting one- its a brief story and there is more subtlety in these issues than the space of this article allows or the space of Calvino's story allows- but what this indicates is how humanity is not easily reduced into any theoretical or moral construction- dissection is not a useful theoretical tool!

Cristiano Ronaldo- a slave?

Cristiano Ronaldo a slave? Sepp Blatter's comments that the Manchester United winger is a slave have aroused anger and scorn, Ronaldo himself seems to be the only one who agrees with Blatter. The issue is simple- the Manchester United player wants to play for Real Madrid, at the moment his club do not want him to leave and as they hold his registration and he has a contract with them, their word is law- he will not move. Those disposed to shed tears for the Portugeese player ought to remember though that Ronaldo lives not the life a galley slave, or of a footballer from the early part of the century, but a man earning over a hundred thousand pounds a week with a new girl on his arm every night and more desiring to be there, and with houses, cars and no doubt every luxury under the sun to discard and buy again at will. Simply put he is a very fortunate and very arrogant young man- a kind of Ashley Cole on the wing- who deserves the scorn he is getting.

And yet... and yet... there is a sense in which the complaint he and Blatter are making is strictly true. Ignore for the moment the fact that you like me would like to kick Ronaldo in the face when he makes one of those sympathise with me I'm only a millionaire comments. Ronaldo cannot do something that you or I can do- he cannot walk away from his job, leave it and drop it. All the commentary envisages that Manchester United might for example leave him to rot in the reserves- they won't because it would diminish the value of an asset- but since when has it been acceptable to think of people as assets? Lets be clear about this- Ronaldo if left to rot in the reserves would be deprived of a right you and I have- which is to move on and leave- imagine for example if you played for a club and hated all of its personel, were you at work you could leave- were you a football player you couldn't.

The problem though with Ronaldo's argument is not that he is wrong- but its that he is right and that that is part of the essential nature of a club sport. Think for a moment about the context of a world where players could move whenever they wanted and tear up contracts at a minute's notice. The result would be that fans would lose any sense of identity with a team- if my team is different every week then Arsenal fans couldn't hate Cole, Manchester United fans couldn't despise Robin Van Persie and everyone but Chelsea fans might have to learn how to find the part of John Terry that isn't an over excited yob. The point is that football teams are the recepticle for identity. People go and watch them because they support them and they support them because they see a continuity between this team and the one that they grew up supporting. Without constant presence in the dressing room, that would become pretty impossible to understand.

Footballers are paid a lot because they are entertainers- and part of their business as entertainers is manufacturing a club and team loyalty from fans. When a Ronaldo claims that he is a slave, he forgets that such slavery is the condition of the vast wealth that accrues to him. He has made his choice between luxury and freedom. Whether that choice should bind him for his entire career- whether you can justly sign away your life to slavery is one matter- but you cannot have football as we know it without the principle that players stay with clubs for a reasonable time. Cristiano will have to learn: his riches depend on his contract.

Persepolis: the personal meets the political and dances

Whatever you think about Iran today, its history over the last thirty years has been tragic. The war with Iraq killed a generation of young men, the internal repression of the Shah and the following Islamic republic was brutal and especially horrible to women. Iran is one of the oldest countries in the world- the title of this film, Persepolis, draws on memories of the capital of the Achaemenid dynasty which reigned in the Middle East over two and a half thousand years ago. Running through this film is a sense of the antiquity and majesty of Iranian culture- it should be no surprise that some of the greatest directors and greatest novelists of the twentieth century are Iranian despite the depradations of history upon the country. That history is what shapes the film Persepolis- it is about two stories- the story of Iran from the late seventies until the early nineties and the story of a young girl coming from the age of five to her early twenties. The artistic acheivement of Persepolis is the blending of these two stories and the reflection it encourages amongst us upon the ways that we deal with the vicissitudes of historical fortune.

From the first moment of the film to the last, we are confronted with a subjective viewing of objective reality. The leading character Marjane, her family and her friends come from reformist circles in Iran. Her uncle was a communist, imprisoned by the Shah and then imprisoned again by the new revolutionaries and executed by Khomeini. Her father and mother show tendencies towards liberalism of an undefined type: her mother has aspirations that Marjane should become an independent liberated woman- educated and cultivated- an equal to any man and a superior by virtue of her intelligence and charm to many. But all around them of course is the world of the Islamic revolution which swept aside the Shah in 1979 and rules in Iran to this day. This captures an interesting and important sociological split within Iran- between the middle class in Tehran who back the reformers and the religious groups who back the fundamentalists. There is a faint whiff of this when at one point one of the Satrapi's neighbours has to depend on her ex window cleaner who is now a director of the local hospital. Religious revolution in this case is also social revolution.

But more importantly than the description of the revolution and more interesting, is the description of how people coped with the revolution. Marjane coped in two ways- firstly by emigrating to Vienna when she was 14 and secondly on her return to Iran for her university years by covertly remaining liberal in an illiberal society. Her time in Vienna seems to have been unhappy, deprived of an identity in her adolescence she seems to have roamed through her time in Europe. There is a sense in which her time in Vienna tells us a lot about the way that people can cope with dislocation at various points in her life: Marjane simply was not ready for immigration. She survived but she was dislocated, felt she had to ignore or conceal her identity and was not able to be secure enough to integrate comfortably into someone else's culture. Without the sense that she was Iranian, she found it hard to ever feel comfortable around those who were European- her picture of her time in Austria is as an outsider, a laughing stock, someone who deserved pity because of her origins.

Coming back to Iran, we face the other side of the dilemma. Marjane has to conceal her liberal behaviour- the fact that she doesn't want to wear a tight veil, the fact that she is interested in dancing, alcohol and of course men. She takes on her religious teachers- telling them for instance that there is a contradiction between the way that they treat men and women. She is arrested by the religious police for holding hands with her boyfriend in public. The illiberal state essentially forces her hand, turning a temporary relationship based on physical and instant attraction into a marriage because of its repressive targetting of human affection. The Iranian state forces her into a divorce. In a sense the picture of the Iranian regulation we get is most succinctly expressed, when some religious guards pursue some of Marjane's friends from a party and because of their pursuit one of the friends slips and falls to his death as he escapes across a roof. Of course though Marjane copes- and the key is that she does cope, she ultimately finds a kind of security in the affection of those that she knows and loves and also in a reinforced sense of self. She decides that she will survive and she takes on the contradictions between her private and public self. Eventually she makes the decision to go back into exile- but the exiled Marjane is an adult- able to cope with the dislocation of exile.

All of this is told through the medium of a cartoon. This works incredibly well- firstly because the drawings done by the real Marjane Satrapi- are impressive and interesting. But secondly because the dislocation of moving to a cartoon reinforces the dislocation of the surrealism of many of the pictures. We are shown Marjane's state of mind at various points, expressed graphically- say with her at various points talking to God. That would not work as well in a realistic film- but it works in cartoons, belief has already been suspended and we can accept that we are seeing a vision of reality rather than reality itself. The subjective nature of the film reinforces the fact that what we are interested in here is the movement of a character through the movement of a nation, it is something that cinema has not often done well- but here as in say Max Ophul's Letter from an Unknown Woman- we need to remember in order to understand the film that it is a subjective vision. Cartoons make that easier to appreciate- easier to appreciate the dual movement of the film.

In some ways this film is a fairly straightforward tale- the difficulty is in telling what is the straightforward tale- is it the growing girl's story or the Iranian revolution's. To be honest it is the intersection, the blending between them, which is the most interesting thing about this. The sense that preservation of self is the key to survival of historical tragedy has a certain truth to it: in Marjane's case it helped her survive and escape. Hopefully it will help many others round the world in similar situations.

Walter Benjamin's last report

Walter Benjamin, essayist, literary critic, philosopher, was one of the most illustrious victims of the Nazi horrors that consumed so much of value in mid century Europe. Benjamin in the late 30s and early 40s was engaged by the Institute for Social Research in New York to write reports for them upon the literary situation in Europe. This report, written in March 1940, was the last of them and until now has remained unpublished in English- however the New Left Review has just published a translation from the French and now after all these years Benjamin's last reflections upon the literary scene of a Paris just about to fall to the Germans are available for us all to read. These reflections concern naturally a series of literary figures who have now vanished, one might ask therefore, whether unless one was to attempt a rehabilitation of these lost figures there was any point reading Benjamin's essay upon them- I think there is and hope here to suggest that there is something of universal application in the master's last survey of European literature.

What strikes any reader instantly is the thickness of the letter- as I said it is filled with forgotten names. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, Michael Leiris: these are shadows that have vanished from most people's histories of the world- and whilst they still may perhaps live locally in France to universal histories of European literature they are something less than a footnote. Benjamin though obviously knew them well- and reading this is to read a geography of the period as the axe was about to fall upon French civilisation. What you get is a geography- one might even say an ecology- of the world before the fall of everything. Benjamin relates all these figures to each other and to the greater figures outside his narrative, to Freud, to Jung, to Lautreamont and lastly to the void which was Hitler. The fascination of this essay lies in its picking over particularity: Benjamin gives us a sense of the landscape of 60 years ago, so vital that we could almost be there in the salon hearing the argument. But there is more to this, with his acute eye he also suggests ways in which the movements of these obscure figures suggest wider movements- greater intellectual arguments taking place. For example, he isolates surrealism's hostility to the very notion of positivism and hence to Freud, but shows that surrealism, incapable of a true metaphysical theory, has retreated to using Freudian language whilst condemning Freud and in the search for a guru surrealists have alighted on the figure of Jung.

His discussion of surrealism moves us on though to something which I think is very interesting about this essay- which is the way that Benjamin moves into discussing Hitler and Naziism. He begins with violence: which is something that binds together the surrealism of Paris with the Nazi movement. Benjamin argues that the exaltation of violence, mindless animal and vindictive violence is ssomethng that unites Naziism with surrealism. This 'physiognomy of Hitlerism' is something he detects in the salons of Parisian intellectual life and is a useful warning to us about the ways that to celebrate violence is to take part in a project of collaboration with Fascism (theres is a distinction between celebrating violence and celebrating defence incidentally).

Violence rests almost always on justification and Benjamin finds the justification of Naziism in Spengler. Oswald Spengler wrote a now forgotten but at the time very influential book called the Decline of the West. In it he did emense violence to history, twisting it as Benjamin argues into the form that would justify Nazi ideology and the justify the universal hatred between races that formed a pillar of Nazi thought. Spengler's arguments are odious and almost universally incorrect: but as Benjamin notes they were not opposed at the time, 'The intellectuals, as always, were the first to acclaim the builder of their own scaffold.' This sad observation and the argument that French intellectuals had been equally hospitable to the coming of Fascist thought in their Parisian salons is something that should not make us feel waves of self congratulation, rather it should be a warning to us that we too may encourage a viper of intellectual barbarism without knowing it, we need to be on our guard against our own minds.

This is a fascinating essay- I am not enough of a Benjamin expert to place it in the context of his thought- but there is so much here of wonder- where he talks of the beauty and effect of literature that I hardly think that matters. It is an essay everyone should read for the recovery of the time just before the violence of war past over the cultural world of the thirties- as a warning from history of the beauty that can be devoured and the danger of nourishing fascist thinking.

Should America have fought the War of Independence?

Matt Yglesias on his blog argues that the creation of the United States might well have been a mistake- that it would have been better for the Americans and British to have found a compromise and resolved their differences. It is an interesting argument. If you think about it, the UK and US and Canada all historically and presently have shared various ideals. We fought the Kaiser and Hitler together, were members of NATO and are allies in the War on Terror. We also support free trade, support international organisations like the WTO and generally are allies in the councils of most international bodies. The war between the Atlantic cousins has seemed to more illustrious men than even Matt Yglesias to have been a folly, Churchill lamented the split as did Conan Doyle. The world of Anglo-American union might have been a much better one- in which American strength came quicker into Europe to stop Naziism and Communism and British participation brought America to an earlier prominence.

But that presumes that everything went fine and that's the main problem with Yglesias's scenario. Go back to 1776 or even to 1780, let us say a deal was done. What would be the likelihood of every American accepting it? Furthermore what would be the likelihood of the deal holding? I can imagine scenarios in which a long protracted guerilla war poisoned the atmosphere. Furthermore what is the likelihood of Britain and America together being as successful in colonising the entire continent as the US was- would the Louisiana purchase have happened, would Spain have been left alone to fight for Florida or Mexico for Texas- would continental American expansion been diverted by European rivalries as say Oklahoma was swapped for Schleswig Holstein (don't laugh, France in 1763 swapped Martinique for Canada with Britain and the British were furious that they had got the worst of the bargain), would Russia say have hung on in Alaska instead of selling it to the new Republic? Such an outcome would have made every expansion of America a question of European politics, not merely of American politics. In a sense it was the war of independence which made the Monroe doctrine possible and furthermore the Monroe doctrine, supported tacitly by British naval power, that made the expansion of the US possible. There is another vast issue: in 1806 Britain abolished the slave trade- with the Southern states, the British could either have not abolished the slave trade or could have started a new American civil war, sixty years before the one that happened. And who could imagine what the result of that would have been?

Every moment in history depends on an infinite various lattice. Without America's creation would say great Anglo-Americans like Winston Churchill have ever been born not to mention such exclusively American or English personalities as Lincoln, Gladstone, Feynman, Elliot, Attlee or any of the rest of those that have inhabited the last couple of centuries and whose lives were predicated on the division of the two states. The problem is that reading back to 1776 involves so much guess work that even if we could prophesy that the effects of peace would have been good in the 18th Century, the effect of chaos is such that prediction of what Anglo-American union would have meant in the 19th and 20th centuries is a ridiculous parlour game. My suspision for what it is worth is that early independence made America turn paradoxically into an early ally for the UK, and furthermore that early independence strengthened the US- by emancipating it to singlemindedly pursue continental expansion. We can and shall never know- but we should always remember that whilst the union of the two Atlantic democracies might sound attractive- the reality could have been much much worse than the world in which we live today. Conjectural history is always attractive, but nothing within it is certain- if history teaches us anything, it is that human politics are chaotic and even the most prudent minds are unable to accurately construct the future, let alone an alternative past.

The value of a good story

Ian Appleby is entirely right when he suggests that it does not diminish a story when we try to understand its ideological and philosophical messages. Stories are wonderful ways of capturing ideas and taking us through them: if you think, as I do, that empathy is one of the most outstanding and underrated of intellectual faculties then you cannot but see stories as a vital form of communication. Understanding those stories means understanding the empathetic impact that they have on one- and means also understanding the world view out of which they come. For example I am not a radical Catholic, but Robert Bresson's films have taught me a lot about a certain strain within the modern church. Occasionally a story can expose a darkness in a contemporary attitude- Quentin Tarrentino's films expose for me a darkness in the way that people empathise in our society for example. You may not agree with my examples- but the central fact remains true, stories change us and propel us, we need to understand what they propel us to- what sympathies they create. We need to understand that, both so that we can understand ourselves and so that we can understand each other.

La Veuve de St Pierre: Responsibility and Orders

A central problem at the Nuremberg trial was, for those who do not remember it, a simple legal problem. Are you guilty of a crime if your excuse for committing it is that you were just following orders? It is a problem larger than the circumstances of Nuremberg merely- the trials established the principle in international law that you are guilty of any crime you commit, no matter the orders which force you into doing it. It is a philosophical problem whose pedigree stretches back in time- it was discussed for example during the Putney debates in the English Civil War. But it also has a contemporary salience- as the film La Veuve de St Pierre (the widow of St Pierre) describes. The film is set in the nineteenth century, 1849-50 to be precise, on the small French colony of St Pierre just off the coast of Newfoundland, the last remnant of French imperial possessions in North America. Two men murder an old fisherman. They are convicted: one of them dies swiftly following conviction but the other remains alive and is sentenced to the guillotine- which gives the title a double resonance, the guillotine in 19th Century French slang was called La Veuve- but the island has no guillotine and no executioner and so he has to wait, a prisoner, for the guillotine to arrive from Martinique and for an executioner to be found on the island.

Whilst he waits he becomes an object of sympathy for the commander of the garrison's wife, played by Juliette Binoche. She befriends him, gets him to plant her garden and eventually turns him into a model citizen on the island. He rebuilds the roofs of houses, takes sledges around, stops carriages wrecking cafes, generally is a good help and a good man. He even finds a wife on the island- getting her with child and then getting married to her. This creates a good amount of gossip- what exactly binds the Captain's wife to the prisoner, furthermore it puts pressure on the Captain himself. He is accused of fraternising with a prisoner, eventually he is accused of neglecting his legal duty and of sedition. The point of the story is less the redemption of a murderer, than the difficulties that that redemption creates. The murderer is in my view redeemed far too easily- the message of the film could be caricatured as give up drink and all your problems will disappear. But that is not a realistic message. What is realistic, what does make sense is the dilemma that such a miraculous transformation has for two individuals that it really impacts upon- the Captain and his wife. They are caught between the town officials, keen that justice take its course and that the majesty of law and state be respected, and the local populace with their own inclinations, which do not see the point of executing a good man.

That dilemma places them in a difficult position. At one point in the film, one character basically says that either the prisoner dies or you die- he is not at that point referring to the captain but he could as well be. The issue is that stark and it is the Nuremberg principle- at which point do you disobey what is an unjust order- at which point do you stop the process that leads to a crime by the state. The captain and his wife are in different positions here. For her sympathy is easy- it comes with no price- and her sympathy whilst it is more wideranging and impressive to the viewer of the film is also easier. She can afford compassion, she can afford to cry when the prisoner marries because his wife will soon be a widow. The Captain though has always a double pressure- his sympathy is constrained. The drama of the film is really the decision that he has to make about his future- does he lay down his life for a principle? Viewing the film in this way it makes much more sense. His love for his wife- which we see again and again through the movie- is weighed against his fears for her as a widow. His professionalism is weighed against his sense that this is the wrong thing to do and that he should stop it insofar as he has the power to, even if that delay or stop is ruinous for himself. In the end, he does make a decision- and from the first moment of the film when Binoche addresses us in the garb of a widow, we know what that decision will be. It is a brave decision and ultimately a futile one- but what it does is save his conscience at the cost of his life.

The film places this story into a stark landscape of northern mist, fog and snow. This is a beautifully filmed film- Binoche gives the kind of sensitive and thoughtful performance that we have come to expect from an actress of her standing. Daniel Auteil playing her husband is as I have argued the most interesting character, but he also gives a fantastic performance and the rest of the cast is good too. But it is more than that, the scenery and photography makes this a slow watch but an impressive one. Occasionally the director, one feels, has sacraficed speed for the enjoyment of a langorous shot of the landscape. There are some lovely movements with the camera, one can feel through the shooting the way that justice is often a matter of violence as much as of judgement. Foucault got that right in his histories of punishment and Leconte is eager to show us here, the impulsive violence that lies behind the system of courts and conviction. There is a semi-fascistic tone to this all, very much an emergence out of a France still reeling decades later from the memory of Vichy. Vichy permeates this film, it surrounds it and is embedded within it- indeed the point of the film is really about the responsibilities of minor officials when totalitarian or tyrannical government becomes the mode of the day. That has obvious resonances for European and world history in the 20th Century.

Coming back to Nuremberg, the most interesting issue there was of course the futility of resistance. If I don't agree to take a job at Auschwitz, somebody else will. What La Veuve de St Pierre argues is that that doesn't matter. It is still important to take the right decision, no matter whether realistically it can have any effect. We should revel in those who contradict through conscience the mistakes of their state and their government. Reading the film as a tract against the death penalty locates the drama in the wrong place- the characterisation of the convict is too thin to warrant an impressive argument- reading it as a treatment of the Nuremberg issue makes much more sense of the film and is a much more interesting argument.

America the Immigrant

This is a quick thought. Rereading Olivier Roy's classic on Islamic fundamentalism, Roy has a really interesting point that I don't think we think about enough. He suggests something about the nature of fundamentalism- the return to the 'fundamentals' of faith- which is incredibly interesting and makes a lot of sense. Roy argues that religion normally combines a belief with the workings of a society- religion is ultimately social, woven into the fabric of a country. Much of what we think of as traditional Christianity- the mitre of a bishop or the structure of a cathedral- is actually historically embedded within near Eastern and European culture for example. Roy argues though that the way that religious people identify with their faith changes with their conditions. Imagine for instance that you are thrust outside your local world, made to change your ideas about the way that people dress etc, you then go off and search for the fundamentals of your belief- and can be propelled in a variety of directions- amongst which fundamentalism is one attractive prospect, another is liberalism, a third is mysticism.

Lets leave aside the complexities of the situation for a moment; I think there is something interesting and basically true about Roy's observation and the way that he applies it to thinking about contemporary politics and the way that social change intersects with religious instability. But it is also an interesting thesis in another context. The difference between European and American societies at their base is quite a simple one- one that can be quickly caricatured. Europe is the land of the sedentary- life here has been the same for the last two thousand years and basically most of the people are the same as those who lived here thousands of years ago. America is the land of movement- the icons of American culture are the cowboys moving across the plains, the immigrants in their ships coming across the sea, the colonial architecture of the south and the buffalo praires of the north. Now that is a caricature which contains a lot of falsehood- but there is a certain truth to it. Americans start with a narrative of immigration- the Pilgrim Fathers for example- Europeans with a narrative of ancient history- Rome. One lives, to reverse Robert Kagan's argument, beyond history: the other is imbedded within it.

So far so conventional. But there is something else here which I think is more interesting than ruminations on European 'Greekness' and American 'Romanitas' and that is the nature of religion in the United States. We often forget that the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand were born in upheaval. Whatever comforting notions we have of immigration from 19th Century novelists like Dickens, immigration was a profoundly upsetting and disturbing experience. And that is true whether that immigration was from York to New York or New York to Utah. In the days before good communications, going meant never coming back, going meant never having contact again. In a sense what Roy describes as the impulse behind some Islamic fundamentalism today, provides us with an interesting analytical method to work out another great distinction in the modern world. Perhaps one of the reasons that America is prone to religious revival and also to fundamentalist movements, is that it is a society on the move. Few people in America live in their traditional communities and furthermore fewer even are not challenged by wider society. The process by which immigration and social disturbance forces you back upon 'pure' religion is an interesting one- and there is no reason to believe that it is more true of boys from Pakistan than of those from Peckham. American susceptibility to religious fervour might therefore in part derive from America's status as a nation of immigrants.

Of course I am going to hedge that- and I don't want anyone to believe that I mean any of these things absolutely- Americans and Europeans come in all shapes and sizes. But the two vague facts- that America is an immigrant community and that it is more religious than Europe- I don't think are unrelated. We should connect them more when we try and understand the two continents and when the two continents try and understand each other.

Harry to Galatasaray

Changing football clubs is normally something that football fans accept as part of life. Noone is neccessarily happy when they lose their best players- but whether its Cardiff City losing Ramsey this summer or Manchester United losing Ronaldo (if they do), it is something that happens to every football club and the alternative, that players would never move, would be a terrible idea. Equally though there are some transfers that just instantly strike you as wrong. Eight years ago, two Leeds fans were stabbed to death when the team travelled to Turkey to play Galatasaray in the UEFA cup, now one of the stars of that team has decided to move to Galatasaray. Harry Kewell in doing that has asked Leeds fans to move on and recognise the reality of modern football- that stars go where the money is, and that not to move would be to damage his career.

Well Kewell may argue that, and some of the more idiotic Leeds fans would definitely be wrong to take out reprisals upon the Australian forward. But it still doesn't alter the fact that what Kewell is doing is immoral. The fans of Galatasaray have not changed. Turkish football is still accompanied by unpleasant scenes and violence- for what is afterall only a game (anyone who says otherwise demonstrates that their idiocy is indeed authentic). There are two points here worth discussing: one is that morality still operates within the market. Just because someone offers you more money to do something, doesn't make that something right. It is an interesting thing to see, as soon as you do understand that principle, you can comprehend the fact that whenever a company performs an illegal or immoral act, those performing that act are culpable no less for the fact that they have been ordered to perform the act. Furthermore if corporate interest is not a moral defence, when it comes down to it ethics trumps economics.

But why is this immoral? Well Kewell is moving to a side whose fans murdered people who had gone to Turkey in order to support him and his teammates. The position of fans in football is often taken for granted and ignored- they are told to grow up and shut up, until it comes to season ticket sales and replica shirts. Kewell has made a lot of money off the fans who support his activity- no matter that there is no legal obligation or no economic obligation, there is a moral obligation for him to reciprocate their loyalty. Over years at Leeds, Kewell was supported and cheered by the Elland Road faithful. To go to a club where some of them were murdered, a club that has never acknowledged that murder, is to slap them in the face. To go to a traditional footballing rival is a decision that is absolutely fine- rivalries in football are not serious- but murder is serious. And if we consider that a player has reciprocal obligations to those that support his work, then he ought to avoid such a symbolic identification with those thugs that have in the past attacked the supporters who lauded him.

That this is immoral is beyond the question- Kewell shouldn't be banned from moving. Morality and law are different things in a liberal state. But that does not mean that he should not be condemned. The Australian has acted foolishly- and has acted in a way to demonstrate that money drives him, not consideration for others- like a corporate lawyer or a business man who makes their living from firing small people in order to replenish a good salary, Kewell has revealed himself to be longsighted enough to see the main chance, but blind to the moral judgements that he should be making.

The world and the academy

What unites Niccola Machiavelli, Edward Gibbon, John Le Carre, Austin Woolrych and Cicero? Obviously their high intelligence- but there is something else. Machiavilli, Gibbon, Le Carre and Cicero all share two characteristics- all of them are cultural figures, all of them are cultural figures who have said something important about humanity and none of them originally worked in the humanities. Machiavelli was a statesman and ambassador, Gibbon a country gentleman, militia commander and MP, Le Carre a spy, Woolrych a Harrods salesman and then soldier and Cicero the leading politician of the Roman Republic for a time- all of them used that knowledge though to put into argument and philosophy. As Gibbon put it the commander of the Hampshire militia had given the historian of the Roman Empire's decline invaluable material, and the historian of Rome's decline would not have emerged in my view without the commander being present. The same might be said of the others: to give another great example, Cornelius Tacitus, the greatest historian of Rome, understood the fear of Sejanus and Tiberius because he had lived through the reign of Domitian. Modern historians often dismiss Tacitus's account as being semi-hysterical: but the coolness which is so self evident from the lounges overlooking Harvard Yard is not so self evident when you have served through a reign like Domitian's. Experience helps us to understand the humanities in general.

The problem is not that universities exist- that is good and the world of history for example has expanded and become more rigorous thanks to the work of many professional historians over the years. But that the world of universities is too closed in on itself. Academic monographs are interesting to those involved but scarcely raise a smirk outside the academy, some academics even go so far as to disdain the idea that they have any responsibility to anyone who is not inside the tiny circles of a common room. The tradition of an amateur man of letters, so vital to the nineteenth century academic world and without which much of the history done today would be useless has died. That means that there is less connection between the academy and outside than there should be. Outside experience should fertilise the understanding of historical reality and novelistic inquiry, academic rigour should strengthen the processes of thought outside the groves of the university. The decline of the essay in some ways is a parallel process to this- the great essayists from Hume to Orwell were in touch with the intellectual climate and transmitted that to others on the outside better than journalists do today.

I suppose ultimately that is the hope for blogs, that they can fulfill part of that role. But there also has to be a relaxation of the snobberies on both sides- academics have to realise that you can do good work whilst being an amateur, others have to realise that they should take on what academics do and use it. Sir Alan Sugar's derision for academics on the Apprentice is well known- the worrying thing is that such a bigot is advising the Prime Minister of the day. Blogs like Stumbling and Mumbling, Willelm Buiter's, Ben Goldacre's or this humble effort can help but in order to do so- they need to be taken seriously both inside universities and outside them. We need to talk over the professional boundaries that infest knowledge- and academics need to take the effort to make rigour accessible seriously, whilst others need to make the effort to understand a greater part of their lives. That has an impact obviously on another subject which is the leisure available in modern society- part of the problem is that those naturally most receptive are those who work hardest- but the ultimate problem is one of attitudes on both sides. The fact that the gulf has developed and that academics have lost experience of the real world whilst the real world has stopped paying attention to academics is a tragedy, not merely for universities but for societies in general.

Passionate Friends

David Lean's film Passionate Friends is an unknown- comparatively- gem. It stands comparison with some of the director's best work- both for being a subtle character study and for the brilliant displays of acting contained within it. Passionate Friends contains the simplest of simple stories. A woman, Mary, is in love with her friend Stephen, who is likewise in love with her, and yet she decides, for various reasons, to marry a rich and successful banker- Howard. The resulting love triangle plays its way out through the film- to much heart ache- as Mary is unable to sever herself from Howard but unable to forget that she truly loves Stephen. It might seem trite when expressed like that- but actually both cast and director manage to imbue it with meaning- using their skills as storytellers they gave the story layers and subtlety that the simple telling of it might well have missed.

Meaning is a hard thing for films to convey- especially when it comes to love, it is very easy to be trite and to sound trivial. That or one can end up lauding motherhood and apple pie- making points noone would refute. The interesting thing about this film is that it manages actually to say something about what love is and why it is successful. In the film shadowlands, a student turns to C.S. Lewis and tells him that we read to know that we are not alone, similarly in this film, I get the impression that the director is telling us that love is part of the growth of our personality outwards into the world. There is something here about love as communication. Time and time again Mary says to Stephen that she is unwilling to give herself up to him- he offers himself to her but she never is able to offer herself to him. Now one might argue that this reflects the comparative position of men and women at the time- and there is a feminist reading of this film- but I am not sure that is what Lean was driving at. Rather I think he was driving at the idea of love as sacrafice for both sexes- love as something that brings you out of yourself and for which you become a part of another unit, not a whole entire to itself. Its an interesting way of reflecting about love- but what Lean seems to argue here is that without it relationships will fail- they will always be bloodless. The argument between the husband's and the lover's love is between a love that exacts no price, has no passion and one that is passionate and enthusiastic, that is painful and expensive but ultimately more rewarding.

Pain and reward are bound up in this film with feeling. And Lean wants you to see the depth of a 'true love' throughout the film. So he provides us with texture. An essentially simple story has woven into it flashbacks which take us to the trajectory of the relationship between Stephen and Mary- their relationship is complex and terrifying. It binds them together- so that fortuitous accident means that they keep on meeting until the denoument. Those meetings reinforce the motif of depth. Whereas Mary and Howard have few meetings and they are always unhappy or worse- they are meetings whose tenor is light grey, insipid. The tone is set by the first shot of Howard as he falls asleep by the side of dancing- he is old, busy and does not throw himself into his life with Mary. Stephen does throw himself into his relationship with Mary- it might not work but it is not for lack of effort on his part- he cooks, helps her confront her husband and treats her with loving care. The direction here is incredibly skilled- Howard played by Rains is always wearing dark suits, Stephen played by Howard is always dressed sleekly. The fashions in this film are gorgeous. But it goes further than that, the camera work is fine- particularly in Switzerland and in some of the scenes, particularly one in Mary and Howard's living room, we see the choreography of direction exercised as well as it ever was. I have never seen the phrase 'would you like a cup of tea' sound so much like a dagger stabbed into a gut before. If there is amazing direction- there is also amazing acting: Rains and Trevor Howard in particular are fantastic, Ann Todd isn't as good but she still holds her own.

The only thing to say about the Passionate Friends is that it is an argument for all friendship to be passionate, it is an argument for love. The only response I could find to it was to love the film itself- wonderful acting, wonderful direction and a genuinely interesting thought about a subject on which humanity has said more than it has about just about anything else.

Queen of Spades

The Queen of Spades is a short story written by Pushkin. It is incredibly macabre. A young officer learns that one of his friend's grandmothers has a secret ability to win games of cards, having been told of how to win by the Comte de St Germain, the famous occult figure. She henceforward is able to win in every game she gambles in. She passes this secret on once, on the understanding that the man she passed it to would never use it ever again once he had played three times. The story concerns events set years afterwards, when a young officer, called Herman, who desires the secret and will do anything- including seducing the grandmother's young companion, to get the secret and obtain a fortune. The story sounds and is simple enough, it has macabre twists and dark moments aplenty.

But beyond the fantastic story, there is something else here. The story is not just a thrilling yarn, it is also a description of a society. Russia at the eve of the 19th Century was a society in flux. The social reforms of Peter the Great had produced a society where rank was assigned on the basis of service to the state. That left a society filled with minor civil servants and junior officers. A society one might think of useless butterflies. All of the characters in Pushkin's tale are beautiful and brilliant, but they are also all useless. They have charm and sophistication but they are all superfluous. The grandmother for instance was a beauty at the court of France, but her beauty has faded and now she is merely an imperious old woman, holding court at balls amongst the children of people she knew. Her grandson is an officer, fine eppaulettes but basically frivolous, he exists in the whirl of balls and losing games. Chasing princesses and cards, he lives for nothing but his idleness. Her companion Lizaveta is the most useful character, but she is confined by the demands of her Grandmother and her imperious hauteur. Lastly there is Herman.

Herman announces right at the beggining of the short story his attitude to cards:

Cards interest me very much but I am not in a position to risk the neccessary in the hope of acquiring the superfluous.

Herman's statement is incredibly interesting. It demonstrates a cleverness, a mannerdness which produces the paradox. But paradox is dangerous, it demonstrates cleverness but also demonstrates an ability to twist concepts around in a morally dubious way. Herman furthermore is developed from another story of Pushkin that involved the seduction of a girl called Lisa (again) by letters, as in a Richardson novel. The point of Herman therefore is that he is a skilled seducer with words, hiding his disdain for the superfluous, whilst really fiercely desiring it. Of course wealth in this world is superfluous, it is not needed for the good life, but on the other hand as there seems to be no view of the good life, wealth in a nihilist world is the only thing that is there to be desired. Herman is a logical decendant of Valmont and the other cynical schemers of 18th Century European high society.

Pushkin of course merges that high society with the darkness of witchcraft and psychological breakdown. This is high society with an undershade of the macabre. The macabre is there to denote the victims of the intrigues- what the 18th Century critics of High Society got, just like a Fellini, was the dark side of the worlld of balls and gamblers. The dark side here is partly deception and partly magic, in truth there is little difference between the supernatural and the natural here. Magic is just another form of deceit. Ultimately the macabre, Pushkin reminds us, is the essence of the courtly life- of the superfluous life.

On Plato's Crito and the meaning of the Law

Plato's Crito is the dialogue that deals with Socrates and his reaction to his execution. His friends, including Crito, come to him to ask him to escape- they offer him money and safety and Socrates turns them down. Crito argues that Socrates must escape, as his friends will make it easy, but also the people of Athens expect him to and furthermore will despise his friends if Socrates does not get away. More than that Socrates by failing to escape will be neglecting his children. He also argues that plenty of others have escaped in the past from similar circumstances. Socrates rejects such arguments- mainly on the basis that one owes an obligation to justice over the opinions of the many and furthermore that one owes an obligation to the laws of the state which brought you up, in the same way as you owe an obligation to your parents. They have made your success possible, they have made your education and your birth possible- therefore you owe them the principle obligation of your life- even an obligation to obey an unjust rule.

There are plenty of good arguments for such a stance- Thomas Hobbes elaborated on them in his Leviathan. But I think there is something slightly interesting about how Socrates puts this case. He builds into his case an assumption that the law of Athens is that he should die. He is right, that is what the formal law of Athens says. What neither Socrates or Crito observe though is that there is a distinction between the formal and informal law of the state. This is perhaps a distinction that an Englishman might make as the British constitution formally looks very different from the way that it operates in practice, informal understandings are almost laws in the UK. I think they are almost laws elsewhere too. Arguably we see that in Crito, as the informal objective of the legal judgement, recognised by everyone who made it, was that it was a sentence of exile- we'll kill you (but we won't guard you until the execution and we expect you, even want you, to escape from our sentence). Socrates in that sense is showing his contempt for the laws of Athens by staying: his argument about the laws of Athens sets the laws against the people. This is an interesting understanding of the law- but in reality it places the letter of the law against its spirit.

The meaning of the law is a hard thing to assess. Socrates' actions may well have been intended to bring out by his suicide the distinction between the letter and the spirit of the law. to point out the law's absurdity. Perhaps though it also reflects Socrates' innate anti-democratism- ultimately his argument earlier in Crito is that the people cannot judge the justice of a case- informal procedure in a democracy though ultimately relies on popular understanding- Socrates places experts and laws above the people and holds democracy in aristocratic contempt. When we look at his death through the lense of Crito, we can see Socrates as a martyr against democracy for the principle of legal obscurantism.

Eva/Eve

Eve is one of the most beautiful films ever made- it is sensuously shot with a jazz score that is sumptuous and elegant. The movie moves slinkily through its scenes, along with its fabuluous female star, Jeanne Moreau, the definition of sixties French cinema and one of the icons of the last century. Jean-Luc Goddard once wrote in his journal that 'all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun', he was wrong- and Eva proves he was wrong, actually all you need for a movie is a girl, if the girl happens to be Jeanne Moreau. This is a story in which nothing much happens- a man, Tyvian Jones, who has just written a novel which has been adapted for a film, meets a woman, Eva, in Venice. He discards everything- wife, money, reputation- in order to make her his mistress and ultimately he fails to get anywhere with her. He falls in love with someone who cares nothing for him- and he is destroyed, turned from a proud potentate of luxury into a wrecked human being. It is such a simple premise- and one that so many great films have been made about- think the great film noirs: Out of the Past, Double Indemnity or Born to Kill.

What makes Eva extraordinary though is the simplicity of the plot- there are no thrills here, we have a femme fatale and nothing else, no murders, no crimes, no nothing- there is just the brutal examination of two people- a man and a woman and how their desire functions. Let us start by thinking about the man in this film. Played by Stanley Baker, Tyvian is a fop and a flop. He is a man without substance- we learn that he is duplicitous and unlikable, vain and thoughtless. He is guided by desire- he has never absorbed anything of meaning in his life, discards the feelings of others with a casualness born of a playboy outlook. By the end of the film he mutters religious analogies- beleiving that in some sense that women are more powerful than men, that Adam came out of Eve's rib, but that reveals his failure as a character rather than his perceptiveness as an observor. The reason that he falls a victim to Eve is not male weakness, but his own. Led by desires, we see by the end of the movie that all he desires is resistance to his desires. In truth, he desires not to have but to conquer, he desires the elation of conquest and thinks of the world as potential property. Because Eve resists his desire to make her his mistress, his property she becomes an object of fascination.

And what of her, what of Eve. A Salon reviewer said that she reminded a psychologist friend of his of classic cases of functional schizoids. There is definitely something amazing in the performance. Eve spends most of the film in absolute silence, Moreau just uses the amazing jazz score and her own body, not to mention some astounding camera work, to create the sense of Eve's allure. She is sexy, as sexy as the jazz music she listens to (jazz being as it is the most sexual of musical genres). She is a high class whore. But to be honest the ultimate sense I got from Eve was of emptiness, not of unhappiness or happiness, but of emptiness. What characterised her was a glittering boredom, this is decadence- the decadence of La Dolce Vita in Italy at the time but decadence worn thin. All Moreau can enjoy is twisting men, foppish idiots, round her finger. She takes no joy in human life. Her moods swing massively and her impulsiveness, her disorder is part of her allure- its what makes her the object that is not predictable, that cannot be owned. But also it is what makes her in part fundamentally empty. Does she care who is with her in every mood? No- she is so wrapped in an internal world, that prince or pauper, both are nothing to her. All she desires is money to fuel her jazz habit, the jazz that is the soundtrack to her life.

Between these two characters you see a massive battle develop- in truth it is no contest, neither in acting nor in character can the insipid Tryvian compete with the mesmeric Eve. But the contest is interesting as it opens up the emptiness of that kind of life- a life whose meaning is an endless circle of parties. In that sense Eve is the perfect counterpoint to Sex and the City- decadence lived creates a voracious desire after possession, a desire that can never be fulfilled.

Of pickpockets and prostitutes.

8th July 1774 saw two women convicted of picking the pocket of a Londoner, John White, at the Old Bailey. The account of what happened is fascinating, partly because of what it does not say, as much as for what it does tell us.

Hannah Ramsey , and Sarah Mackdonald , of the Parish of St. Brides , were indicted for privately stealing 6 Guineas, from the Person of John White , the 26th of June last. The Prosecutor depos'd, That be going along Fleet Street about Eleven a-Clock at Night, met with the Prisoners, who ask'd him to go with them to one of their Lodgings, but he refusing to do that, they carried him down into an Alley, and there being talking with them, Mackdonald was before him, and Ramsey either behind or on one Side of him, and that he perceived the Hand of Ramsey near his Pocket, and saw her take it away, that he thereupon put his Hand in his Pocket, and his Money was gone, and that he was sure that he had his Money but just before, that he charg'd her with taking it, and got them secur'd, and sent them to the Compter, but the Constable did not search them. The Watchman depos'd, That Ramsey denied that she had any Money, but half a Crown, which the Prosecutor gave her to lie with them. The Jury found Hannah Ramsey guilty of the Indictment. Death . But found Sarah Mackdonald guilty of Felony only, but not of privately taking from the Person . Transportation .

There are a number of things, apart from the severity of the punishment for a trivial offence, which stand out to me about the record of the trial. The first is the flimsiness of the machinery of justice- constables in Hanoverian London were not neccessarily efficient- they were not trained, they had no central organisation and as in this case, they could prove almost useless. Any police officer today on catching a criminal would search them- for this constable a search was too much work.

Secondly there is the fascinating question of what happened. White's story was believed. But there are two stories here. The story of the women is that they were prostitutes and that the 'prosecutor' (ie White) gave them money to sleep with him and then charged them before the court with theft. We have no idea what happened- I have no idea who White was or who these women were. If White were a powerful man with good connections he might well have obtained a conviction in this manner against a couple of prostitutes to save his reputation or even after a dispute about money. There is of course a third option which is that White was a troublesome client for one prostitute, the other turned up, they fled White and ultimately he prosecuted. We don't know- its equally possible that the prostitution story was invented. What it does tell us is the prostitution story was not an unliely one- that a single man on Fleet Street in 1774 might be searching for sex. Equally it demonstrates that contemporaries saw prostitution and theft as close partners- the idea that often it is the most poor and desperate women who go into prostitution receives some support.

Without knowing more, we cannot speculate more- but this strikes me as a fascinating case that could reveal much detail about the sexual and class structures of 18th Century London- not to mention about the way that the criminal justice system worked then.

Mouchette

Mouchette is a dark and disturbing film. Some critics consider it too depressing to be comfortable viewing- even amongst the work of Robert Bresson, the grim Catholic master of the directors, many view it as the saddest and most wretched of his works. Devoid of grace, devoid of religion, the world that Mouchette portrays is ultimately a pagan one. This is the Catholic view of Paganism and ultimately it is Bresson's commentary upon the depressing nature of the world and our inability to get out of that world. Despite that Bresson leaves us in no doubt of his underlying sympathy for human beings- this is not as say Lars Von Trier's films often are an assualt on the very idea of being human, rather this is an assault on the merely human. Central to the film is the character of Mouchette, played exquisitely by Nadine Nortier who never appeared in another film but fills this one with her character, her emotion and more than anything her expressive face. Nortier's performance is enough to convince one that though the world is depressing there are things worth fighting for within it.

Mouchette is a heart rending film- perhaps because it is so close to reality. The film is set in a small peasant village at some time in the mid-twentieth century. Mouchette is a fourteen year old girl- at a brutal convent school- whose mother is dying and whose father and brother are alcoholic wastes of space. She is a loner, hated by the other girls in her school, excluded from their games and their growing up. Bresson captures a real moment of adolescent exclusion- he shows the other girls trying on perfume, an emblem of their budding sexuality, Mouchette excluded hides behind a hillock and throws mud at them. They ignore her, riding off with the sexy older boys. Mouchette cannot even touch these little princesses and half in despite, half in envy she hates them. Bresson really captures that truth about what it is to be a loner and an adolescent- the sort of half light that you dwell in more than any other director I have ever seen.

He also captures the fact that so many dislike Mouchette because she is actually not that likable. Watching the film, it made me question how as a parent you could love Mouchette- of course you could and would but she is unbearable in many scenes. She mumbles obscenities towards the adults in view- often without provocation. Like most teenagers she dwells in an imaginery world where a man who brutalises her is her lover and she lives amidst a dream. She is often surly, she is definitely ignorant. But as I write it I know I am being too harsh- for there are lovable things about her- and perhaps Bresson's greatest acheivement in Mouchette is that despite all of those things I mention above- it is hard to come out of this film without liking its main character. She is sympathetic, she bears the whole weight of her family and her lonely self sufficiency is the kind of dreaminess that alternately bears the names madness, introspection and independence. You can see that this is a girl who with nurturing could become an amazing twenty five year old.

Nurturing though is the key and part of the issue in the film is that she attempts all the time to reach out to others and they always knock her back. Solitude is her only refuge. In that sense death is her only refuge and becomes her spiritual retreat. Like the ancient philosophers unable to seek out other humans through the grace of God and the light of scripture, the only force that the grim Bresson acknowledges as enabling human social interraction in a positive way, she is reduced to the end of suicide. Every time she knocks at other people's doors the door is thrown back into her face- her father holds her in contempt, her teacher beats her up, her schoolmates ignore her, her brother is oblivious to her, only once on a dodgem car driving it against a boy she spotted does she seem to attain any happiness. Nortier's flirtatious smile at that point lights up her face and we see Mouchette as she might be, shyly smiling behind her curls, instead of scowling at a world of hate and siding with drunkards, criminals and fools against that world. As Christ did so she does- siding with the outcast, but unlike the living God she cannot remake for a few society, she has to retreat as the philosopher into death.

The film is eschatological but it is also a meditation upon the role of the sexes in French society. What I found interesting in that sense was the way that it balances and can be framed against another great film, Summer with Monica, by perhaps the only director whose vision matches that of Bresson, Ingmar Bergman. Bergman's film is about in part the way that men's lives repeat those of their fathers. Bresson does the same thing but for women- all the women in this family despite the warnings from the previous generation, are drawn towards the useless men who drink all day and brawl all night. The point though similarly to Bergman is that such dysfunctional backgrounds cause a longing for love that creates a vulnerability. Like Bergman's protagonist Mouchette desires love so much, she will assume that any gesture from anyone, however inappropriate, is a gesture of love. But what Bergman and Bresson's films have in common: and perhaps is a theme of the 20th Century, is that the men in them are much less vital than the women.

But that is a side point, ultimately this is a film about the darkness of the human soul. It is about the darkness that surrounds us, and the way that without a Catholic faith, in Bresson's view we are abandoned to the darkness of our own society without a fragile and quietist faith. What Bresson believed and it is a belief that I do not believe myself is that the fall corroded humanity, corroded it to such an extent that only through sainthood- only through what Rosselini described in his life of St Francis- could human redemption be acheived. Mouchette is not totally evil- she could be redeemed but not in our society or by our actions according to Bresson. If you, as I do, think that one of the themes of cinematic thought is the search for sainthood in the world after the great wars, then Mouchette is the darkest Catholic argument, the most pessimistic suggestion, and in a place where Catholicism and Calvinism become the same it rejects the Arminian conscience of most cinema, stressing the degree to which we are lost as upon a darkling plain, that the sea of faith is at the ebb and sun falling down the sky.

The Truth of Lord Hailsham

Iain Dale's new total politics site has a really interesting feature- which I recomend exploring- a collection of old good political speeches. Amongst those I was casually scanning this afternoon thinking of writing a blogpost about is a speech by Lord Hailsham, Tory Cabinet Minister, candidate to be Prime Minister in the 1960s, father of another cabinet minister and Conservative intellectual, made in 1992. Being neither a conservative nor a christian (though sympathetic to both streams of thought) I do not want to comment on their relationship. But I was seized immediatly by the fact that Hailsham identified a major enemy- nihilism and postulated a coherent philosophical view against that nihilism.

Hailsham argues that there are two ways of thinking about the world- one is experiential and experimental but Hailsham suggests that the experimental view of the world collapses after its encounter with the problem of induction, he proposes an alternative view of the world. He suggests that

There is, I believe, no answer to this argument unless, of course, we have what, in discussing the nature of human understanding, Locke called an 'innate idea', at least in the field of the observable, that things make some sort of sense, and that at least to some limited extent our reason can achieve it. In the field which is open to observation, measurement, and repeated experimentation we can readily accept this. It is indeed the hypothesis upon which the whole dramatic development of the physical sciences is based.

Now this is a reversion to a kind of theory of ideas- a Platonic sense that a word describes exactly the idea behind it and that idea is reflected in the world. It is interesting that Hailsham comes to argue this because the position he advocates is easily refuted and as problematic as any naive support for induction.

Such an argument for instance neglects the facts that we do not use these words to always embody the same ideas. There is a problem in that there is no way for example to say that the English are right to define Peppermint Tea as being part of Tea as a class, whereas the French define it as a Tizane. There is no particular reason to prefer one arrangement or another. There is no essential teaness to which both might be related. The relationship of words to the reality they refer to is not simple- nor is it in any way determined, rather it is socially constructed. Think of it simply in terms of the way that we describe social position- middle class might mean one thing to you, another to me- to argue that one perception is right and one is wrong is nonsensical. That doesn't mean at all that there is no reality, merely that our languages for describing it, our ideas that constitute it are unstable and socially constructed. There is ultimately no such thing as a river- but you'll get wet if you jump in one.

Hailsham is a Platonist- and the rest of his talk depends on the assertion that our words about the world are stable. He needs to know that our ways of describing the world are the only and best for the rest of his talk to work. It is an interesting problem- because he is ultimately wrong about that- words do not automatically map onto the world in such an easy way, nor do ideas. Rather we classify things as we need to use them: we do classify them in 'real' ways but those classifications are arbitrary. That does not mean that there is no truth- more it means that there is no true pattern of words to describe that truth with. There are false patterns of words, false patterns of numbers, but no uniquely true conception of the world and definitely no intrinsic ideas which relate to words and concepts in our minds. Hailsham wants to ground his philosophy on one set of rigid ideas, but in truth he is wrong- he is wrong because there is not merely one set of ideas that describe the world, there is an infinite set of terms, defined only by its relationship to reality which describe the world. Everything is a collective noun ultimately for a collection of phenomena- so long as I do not map inconsistantly I am speaking truth, but there are an infinity of ways to express what I see as reality.

Burleigh's Court

In 1572 William Cecil became Baron Burleigh, soon afterwards he became a knight of the garter as well to add to his glittering array of titles. The Cecil I have described so far has too much of the modern about him, too much of the religious radical and masterly scholar-politician. Perhaps though the most interesting conclusion of Alford's biography is that Cecil was a courtier also and a dynast, he was a man who in his house Theobalds placed the heredity of the English nobility as a massive tapestry upon his walls. He was obsessed by cartography partly because he was obsessed with the places that people came from- and also their unique histories- he engraved for instance all over his copies of the first maps of the world such details as the geneaologies of the Polish Kings and the titles of the French monarchs. His political mastery stemmed in part from the fact that he shared the preoccupations of the English nobility- Cecil combined being Elizabeth's Secretary of State (until 1572 when he was elevated to being Lord Treasurer) with being Master of the Court of Wards- an ancient office with responsiblity for orphaned noblemen. As such he designed and presided over the education of the Duke of Rutland and the Earl of Oxford.

Oxford is an interesting case. Cecil had two daughters- Anne and Elizabeth. Anne married the Earl of Oxford- formerly her father's ward- when she was 15 and he was in his early twenties. Cecil endeavoured to acheive the match on the grounds of its importance dynastically- a relationship with the Earls of Oxford placed his family on a secure footing as important aristocrats. The marriage was a failure- Oxford repeatedly threatened to and did desert Anne- but Cecil strived hard to make it work. Even using his own powers of patronage to protect Oxford from the queen. His kinship made Oxford an important figure within Cecil's world. Elizabeth too was married to a noble family- marrying William Wentworth- again the son of a major peer, Lord Wentworth. Both Elizabeth and her husband died soon after the wedding- but the wedding substantiated for Cecil the connection with the Wentworths. Indeed Cecil himself was seen as an avenue by his own family for their rise- he was petitioned by his mother Jane Cecil for her relatives to receive preferrment at his hands. The classic politics of sixteenth century connection worked in the case of Cecil- perhaps most astonishingly in the fact that it was his son Robert Cecil who eventually succeeded him as Elizabeth's chief minister.

For all this structure to work, and Cecil required a massive income for example to generate the funds behind what Alford calls the most ambitious aristocratic building project in Elizabethan England (at Theobalds, a house that Cecil almost remodelled, at Cecil House which he too shaped and at Burleigh which he expanded), Cecil had to be a courtier. We often think of him as the classic minister- the shade in the background but that is a false perception. Cecil was a courtier par excellence- and his poise as a devoted public servant was in reality the skilful mask of an experienced courtier. His position at court and his closeness to the monarch was vital to his political career- as Alford comments the moment at which we can really see its importance is the first months of 1587, around the time when Mary Queen of Scots was executed.

Mary was tried for treason by a commission, in 1586, chaired by Burleigh, who reccomended that she die. Elizabeth sat for months upon that reccomendation, being petitioned by Parliament and her council to move. On 1st February 1587, Elizabeth handed over to her secretary Davison a signed warrant for Mary to be executed. Davision immediatly handed this to Cecil and fearing that she would change her mind, Cecil sent it to Mary's prison and she was indeed killed. Elizabeth was furious, she thought she had the time to change her mind- Davison was sent to the Tower for his pains, and Burleigh was in disgrace. Cecil spent 6 months at court being shunned by Elizabeth- she would not speak to him, she would not see him unless to scream abuse in his direction. From February to June, the monarch and her chief minister did not talk. Alford argues that relations between them were never the same again- but more impressively argues that Cecil was terrified of the impact that his disgrace had. Simply put he was out in the cold and that meant that all his preferrments and his power dried up- suddenly he was nothing.

For Cecil who took pride in being from a family who had served the crown for three generations this was terrible. It took away his ladder to success and also undermined his identity as a crown servant- what this episode demonstrates to us is how crucial that identity was to him. To see Cecil solely as a Protestant firebrand, whirling away from Elizabeth's conservatism, is to misunderstand the man. He was a very complicated character- part of him was a Protestant firebrand. But another part was a courtier who dreamed of founding a dynasty- Theobalds was supposed to strike awe into the hearts of those who visited it. It was supposed to be the seat of a new dynasty of royal advisors. Cecil's character was always complex- unlike say Henry Ireton or Oliver Cromwell, Cecil respected aristocratic honour alongside the Protestant reformation. He was William Cecil the Edwardian councillor, but we should never forget he was also Lord Burleigh, knight of the garter.