The fall of the Roman Republic

I have a degree in modern history from the University of Oxford: that will give you the wrong idea of what I studied though. Oxford took modern history when I studied there to have begun with the acclamation of Diocletian in 285AD as Emperor of Rome: whatever you would conventionally think of  modern history, whether its industrial history, the history of democracy, of total war or even of nuclear war, I doubt you would start with the tetrarchy. I'm not being trivial here- periodisation within history matters. We identify something common about the centuries or decades or even years that we group together- and we use periods to make polemical points. One of my favourite books about history is John Pocock's Machiavellian Moment in which he groups the thought of early modern Englishmen and Americans by their allegiance to the Florentine Republican across a span of two centuries- a moment!

You can see the impact of periodisation by looking at the Roman Republic. In a wonderful history of the Roman republic Harriet Flower argues that there was not one but several Republics. She describes the early history of Rome in fascinating detail- leaves the middle years around the second punic war- and then advances into the late Republic. What's so interesting about her treatment of the late Republic is that she discards the conventional narrative. That narrative perpetuated by dozens if not hundreds of historians sees the Roman Republic ending with the demise of Julius Caesar, the rise of Octavian or a number of other markers in the 40s and 30sBC that mark a transition to Principate. At one point the Republic had fallen, at another the Principate had risen to replace it. The space from consuls to Princeps could be measured in milliseconds! Flower discards this image. She argues, convincingly, that what actually happened was that the REpublic ended in the 80sBC. From 80BC onwards custom after custom was discarded. Sulla attempted to reinvent the Republic in the 80s and it is the fall of his invention that we are watching as we watch Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, Cicero, Caelius, Cato and the rest battle on the streets of Rome and cross their individual Rubicons.

This matters because it reorientates our explanations for the fall of Rome's Republic. That matters because the fall of the Republic is the foundation myth of our own democracies- I will come later to what I think this means for our thinking about why democracies end. Rome's Republic was killed in the final analysis not in the 40s but in the 80s: the implications of this are vast because they tie Rome's fall to an existential crisis in the late Republic (130-100). This crisis was dual. On the one hand Rome had to work out whether its citizenship criteria should make it a city (Rome for the Romans) or a representative civilisation for the entire Italian Peninsular. This conflict broke into actual war in the Social Wars (91-88BC) but was a deep contradiction at the centre of Rome's incarnation as a European Empire. Secondly in the 100s, external military crisis- the invasion of the Cimbri and the Teutones and the war against Jugurtha- forced Marius the great general to widen the recruitment of the army. His military reforms meant that Rome's army changed in nature at the same time as Roman citizenship fluxed. Furthermore the failure to cope with invasion without reform of the military system indicated something was deeply wrong with the traditional structures of power. The Republic fell.

Lastly Flower tackles the Sullan effort to reform in the 80sBC. She argues that the republic that Sulla created was inherently unstable. She argues this because it was based on the rule of law not the rule of custom: it was brittle to the touch. Politicians like Cicero began to use extra legal mechanisms to attempt to shore up the rule of the Senate: when Cicero proclaims Catiline an enemy of the state and murders him, he follows in the line of previous aristocratic murderers (from the Gracchi brothers down!) in a practice of illegality which proclaimed the Republic ended. Put another way- the rule of law is useless without the rule of custom. Secondly she suggests that the key thing which undermined the Sullan republic was not so much the instability of its arrangements as the fact that by the end of its rule, nobody knew what freedom and republicanism actually meant. This insight is as old as Tacitus. Rome's Republic fell because its citizens had forgotten what it was to be Republican: as Tiberius strode into the senate, there was no Brutus because noone could remember a time before either anarchy or tyranny.

Remembering Cuba

John F. Kennedy's response to the Cuban missile crisis has become one of the icons of the Cold War. The film 13 days captures it well: Kennedy stood against the Chiefs of the Defence staff, along with his staff, and argued against an invasion of Cuba. At the last moment, the Americans received two messages from the Soviet leadership: in one the Soviets wrote that they did not want to go to war and asked the US for a guarantee of Cuban independence- after which they would withdraw their missiles. The next day, before the US had a chance to respond, the Soviets issued a second message over Moscow radio: this public offer was for a trade, Soviet missiles would leave Cuba if the Americans would withdraw their missiles from Turkey. On the night of the 27th, Kennedy and his colleagues came to a decision: they stood resolute and decided that they would ignore the second message, and respond to the first- they responded and the Russians decided to leave Cuba. This account is now under serious attack from historians: most notably Sheldon M. Stern who works on the papers surrounding the Cuban missile crisis.

Stern's arguments are based on the transcripts of the Excomm meetings in October and November 1962. They are interesting I think because they reveal something about the crisis and about the nature of memory. Stern's vision of the crisis sees JFK much more on his own: arguing not just against his military men, but also against people that previously we've seen as his supporters- people like his brother Robert Kennedy or his Defence Secretary Robert McNamara. Dean Rusk emerges in Stern's story as a far more important character than in the conventional story. Of course the difference between the two, according to Stern, comes down to the sources that they are using. Stern uses the actual words that were spoken- whereas most modern historians have relied upon the accounts from Robert Kennedy and others of those conversations. The differences between the two are fascinating: because they imply to me at least that the entire fabric of who took the decision, who said what and what was said is wrong.

Stern argues that some of this is down to lying: Robert Kennedy wanted to sell an image of himself in 1968 as a conciliator who would oppose Vietnam. Robert Mcnamara comes through Stern's book as one of the most Machiavellian operators of all, concerned with preserving his own image. Both reflected that those outside the Kennedy circle- Ambassador Adlai Stevenson or Secretary of State Rusk were insignificant. Neither wanted to acknowledge a difference with John Kennedy himself. That seems plausible to me as an account of why they might have construed the story- but I think it misses something important. The story that Stern tells is not one that is completely straightforward: he shows that members of the committee veered all over the place during their high level discussions. Rusk for instance advocated both invasion and conciliation. You would expect this- they were under massive stress. It is natural therefore that when politicians came to write their memoirs- they made the process look simpler and more straightforward and they also remembered the attitude they had taken that had turned out correctly.

Stern also suggests that the denouement of the crisis was diametrically opposed to the conventional account. Far from rejecting the second letter, Kennedy rejected the first letter and went to negotiate on the back of the second. The outcome- that America secretly withdrew its missiles from Turkey in exchange for a Soviet withdrawal from Cuba- might look the same but the clever acceptance of the first letter never happened. This is not a field that I am in any way expert on- and the reasons he gives for the US initial position on this (the lie about the letters) is important: Kennedy wanted to win the midterms and not to be seen to be soft on communism. Again though one wonders about the quality of memory- once you start repeating a story, does it become your story, once you start creating history, does it become history?

The Cuban missile crisis is something that occurred relatively recently: and yet its only due to the existence of these tapes that historians and others have not, according to Stern, made a major mistake about the course of the crisis. That makes me reflect upon the other events that we may have got wrong.   We don't have tapes for most of the crucial meetings of history: but if McNamara and Sorenson and Kennedy got the meetings of Excomm wrong, how likely is it that others back in the past recorded their meetings inaccurately? How sceptical should we be about our own sources? How sceptical about our own memories?

Architects

The first thing I noticed about Architects was the way that it threw me. Its been hard writing this review because what I remember most about the play is not an idea but a sense of confusion. Let me explain: when you enter the theatre in an abandoned warehouse in Bermondsey, you find yourself in a labyrinth. Through its twists and turns you eventually come to a bar- hopefully having found your friends you sit down and join them for a cup of tea (in my case) or a glass of wine or beer (if you are more adventurous or come in the evening!) and then the play begins. It begins with a pregnant woman removing a shoe from the interior of a model cow, then we have a speech about architecture and are informed that we are on a boat, a pleasure cruiser where everything that we could possibly want is available. Everything- yes that's everything- there is even the opportunity for women to have sex with Dolphins if they want- by again crawling into the model of a Dolphin and well, I'll leave the rest to your imagination.

This is unsettling- this was unsettling to me. It becomes clear as you proceed that this is really a re-telling of the myth of the Minotaur- a retelling in which the audience has become the virgins and youths sent from Athens to become the food of the minotaur in Crete. This retelling is subtle: many within the party I went with did not immediately get it, but it is definite. Its subtle because it is clothed in thoroughly modern clothing. We are presented with an image of the Minotaur story as it might look to a modern audience- filled with the coarse hedonism of modern life. Its also a story that retold in this fashion takes on ideas about totalitarianism: lost in the dark with others shouting that they don't need or want you around, you are reminded of the reality of democratic tyranny. It is not that we all fear execution as in the old days: but that we know execution as show trial. It is when as Bukharin found you convict yourself with the crowd that you too become of the horror of your own demise.

Ovid may not have imagined the uses to which his story could have been put in this sense. The features are there: we have Daedalus, the architect, the queen pregnant with the bull's child, the bull human itself roaming the world, children who dance in the air above and fall to the ground in death (see Icarus), the virgins and youths taken to death. In a prologue about architecture we are even told how to interpret the story: architecture, our actress tells us, is the way that the past is reinterpreted constantly by the present. The old materials, old forms, old ideas are neither discarded nor copied, but changed. A tradition is formed through its continual alteration and we speak, not just with each other, but with the past. She declaims about the neccessity of art and architecture making a statement about past and present, about future too. But this is where I was confused.

Because ultimately I could admire the cleverness, the subtle work of translation- even the Borgesian argument about the fact that copying is not possible anymore- but couldn't really see the point of any of it. Two things stuck in my mind: was the argument that only the Dionysian, ecstatic, sexual side of Greece had survived into the modern world, leaving the Appollan behind? Was the argument something about the nature of human relationships? Either I was not clever enough to see- or the problem with Architects was simple: its an amazing idea, its disturbing, but it functions on the level of style and not substance. If this is a statement, I'm not sure that its saying very much.

Sunday 12 January 1947

On Sunday 12 January 1947, Alistair Cooke recorded a letter from America. It is as ever an immensely well read and erudite document of its time- but it reflects its time and the mood of that long dead moment. Cooke recorded it whilst contemplating the election of the 80th US Congress. Like today's Congress, that Congress was a Republican Congress elected to face a Democratic President. Cooke's argument though is one that no one has made in popular print or on radio or television today- he tied his argument both to American history and to contemporary events. It is interesting to see how the world has changed since then and follow his thought.

Cooke compared the new Republican Congress to a different event which took place 70 years before he had made his broadcast. In Montana, when the West was still the West, Colonel George Custer led his troops into one of the United States's greatest military disasters. Custer's last stand became an example of heroism for the new Republic though- still recovering from the strain of civil war. Cooke suggested the new Congress like Custer was standing, for Americans as a set of heroes, embarking on a last stand- in this case an ideological last stand for capitalism. He did not elaborate on their success- and perhaps the recording, a brief five minutes was cut off, but it is a defining image of the fears of America at that point in history.

Three things instantly struck me as I listened to the letter- apart from the beauty of the language. The first was that the familiarity with which Cooke talks about Custer- of course seventy years ago is nothing in the lives of  men. There would have been living people who were alive when Custer died in 1947- Custer was as far away from Cooke as he read his letter as the Second World War is from you as you read this blog. Secondly the context of our lives has changed unutterably since the Cold War: for America to be making a last stand for capitalism in the manner of Custer, there must have been an aggressor, a foreign aggressor against whom to stand. In 1947 that aggressor existed in the Communist Soviet Union. Thirdly Cooke's artistic delivery is something we never really hear today: his talk, especially his final comment that the Republicans are making a last stand for capitalism is subject to two interpretations. One that the Republicans are like Custer making a futile stand after a foolish charge: the second that they are heroes. I don't think I've heard such subtle ambiguity on a news broadcast for a while.

Don't believe what you watch

Years ago, I visited a friend doing his PhD at Oxford. I mentioned Linda Colley's book 'Britons'- a book that when I went up to University was the staple of every aspiring undergraduate's library. He looked at me with scorn, 'That,' he said 'is a typical undergraduate's book'. Aside from demonstrating the famed art of the Oxbridge put down, my friend's comment had a serious point. Colley's book, he thought was clever and exciting but didn't do much new evidential research. I'm not qualified to comment about that volume- indeed I still rather like it- but I do think the point is well made. I've always been a bit wary myself of being the historian with the best ideas, and the least archival research. If each of us has his personal Charybdis, that is mine. Its an analogy that came to mind yesterday evening when I watched on 4oD a documentary by a chap called Francis Pryor.

Pryor produced three documentaries in 2004. They argued for a continuing British culture that underlay the Roman conquest, survived the dark ages and furthermore that this culture was not wiped out by a Saxon invasion- because the latter never happened. Now I must declare an interest: although I have never studied the Saxons properly myself, my ex-girlfriend was a student of Old English and so were many of my best friends as an undergraduate: I'm not sure their reaction would have been anything short of vitriolic to Mr Pryor's argument. Suffice it to say, I began watching sceptically and I have to say that I was not convinced by his arguments. There are many reasons why I think there probably was a massive disruption in the Dark Ages in Britain- there wasn't elsewhere in Europe and Peter Brown amongst others has changed historical minds on that. In Byzantium or Italy or even parts of France, the real crisis occured later- with the wars of Justinian or of the Persians or the Muslim Conquest.

But that's not what I want to argue with. You see the real fault of my friend's adversary- the undergraduate book- is not so much that its wrong but that it might be right, in the wrong way. Documentaries are striving to be news events: Mr Pryor in this documentary claims that his documentary breaks new ground and changes the world with its new insights. The problem is that no documentary could support such a stance. In this case for example, Mr Pryor's claims are not set against  the claims of historians who might disagree: Bryan Ward Perkins has written of the cataclysm that the fall of Rome represented for Britain (and the rest of the Western Empire) but he isn't invited as a contributor. Even when a contributor is invited to make an opposing case- as one is in the last documentary- their points are dismissed as facile and they appear to lose a rigged argument. The control of the narrator means that documentaries do not represent a place in which argument can be represented fairly. And a fair representation of the opposing argument together with the evidence for it is essential to actually understanding whether a novel argument about the past works.

So what am I saying? I am not capable of assessing Mr Pryor's evidence and deciding whether there isn't other evidence out there that he has neglected: however I am suspicious. The argument as with so many historical documentaries which seek to present 'new' evidence sounds too good to be true. Counter balancing evidence cannot be fairly represented because of the nature of the medium- nor can counterbalancing views. The fact that Mr Pryor is taking on a historical consensus does not mean he is right anymore than it means he is wrong: but for the non-expert it means that his views must be taken with a degree of caution. Ultimately to come back to my friend's point it is not the interesting idea but the idea that is tied to evidence that matters: and that must be tested in argument, either honest argument developed at length or argument within the literature. It can't be tested in an hour's television. Documentaries making bold claims should come with a disclaimer, let the watcher beware!

The Lavender Hill Mob

I often walk down Lavender Hill- its an unremarkable road near Clapham Junction in London and happens to be on my route back from work to home. My walk home- if I chose to do it- goes through Clapham and I'm accompanied by so many other Londoners on their way home. In our suits, we tread through the streets- umbrellas at the ready and with rucksacks and cases to enable us to complete the day's work at home. I'm sure the picture is the same in New York or in Paris or in Tokyo: its the uniform life of the professional middle class everywhere. In some cases its a kind of drudgery- and occasionally on my way home I start dreaming of far off lands and skies and trees, of other worlds and other work and of what I might do with a million pounds or three million or four million. I'm not a lottery player so will never win that kind of money and those dreams for me will always stay dreams.

The Lavender Hill Mob is about a dreamer. Henry Holland does not much like his life- he doesn't like his name for a start. He doesn't like his job at the Bank [of England] escorting gold round London. But he does have what I don't- a plan to get enough money to live the life he wants to lead. We get a sense of what that is in the first scene of a film, sitting in some bar in Rio, he chats to a pretty girl (welcome Audrey Hepburn in her first screen appearance), drinks a glass of something with the British Ambassador and is the life and soul of civilisation, a good fellow to boot. He allies with another dreamer- an artist called Pendlebury. The artist quotes Shakespeare and makes busts: he lives though by making replicas of the Eiffel Tower. Holland wants to be a proper person, Pendlebury a proper artist and all they need is money: cue plot.

They can dream about this plot because they know what they are doing. The film makers themselves were advised by the Bank of England about how to steal the gold in concern (that's the urban myth on IMDB and I rather like it, true or not :)). Holland is the man who guards the gold which goes out from the Bank. He is one of those people who is paid little to perform a responsible position. They can do so because they are 'honest' men- a line actually used in the film itself. This counterposition gives the opportunity for the crime but produces a lot of the comedy. Two rather fabulous middle aged men, quoting Shakespeare, hire some hoodlums in the same way you might hire graduate trainees (see what they can do on the job)- they proceed to get involved in a police chase which resembles something between a real chase and a pair of undergraduates stealing another college's mascot! One of the great comic moments in the film where a respectable landlady explains criminal argot to the police relies on the counterposition between her politeness and her language.

Coming back to Lavender Hill and my walk home, it seems now not so odd a counterposition. Whether Lavender Hill was more realistically down and out then than it now is doesn't really matter. Actually the comedy of the film is enhanced by the fact that this mob now comes from a postcode that every young professional in London seems to desire to live in!

Chinese Traditions

Mara Hvistendahl argues that China isn't undergoing a sexual revolutionl; it's rediscovering its past (Andrew Sullivan)

Changes in China are really important to the rest of the world today. Whether you are a believer in the Chinese rise or subscribe to theories that say China's glorious future is an illusion, you can't ignore the country. Its sheer size demands attention- not to mention the size of its economy and its army. We watch Chinese films, we eat Chinese food, in a couple of years time we'll probably listen to Chinese music in a way that our grandparents would never have done. So that makes understanding China really important and makes accounts of China as a place vital. We have received lots of those accounts over the last few years- but something sticks in my throat when I think about some of them.

The statement above was taken from Andrew Sullivan's blog. Sullivan writes a lot about sexuality from a particular perspective and he welcomes the rise of Chinese 'liberalism' regarding sex. Sullivan sees that as a positive thing. I've cited from one of his posts where he discusses a review of a book about Chinese attitudes to sex in the past. Sullivan's post makes one statement which is supported by the review he cites: China has not always been a conservative place when it comes to sex. However I think his insert might lead you, or me, to make two errors about the place of sex in Chinese society in the past and present and future- errors which I think have wider resonances for how we understand other societies.

The first of these errors is to say that China is more liberal than the West when it comes to sex (or more conservative). This is an error for a very simple reason. There is no such thing as China. What do I mean? There is obviously a China which exists today and which people believe that they are a part of- just as there is a Britain or America. There is a China in the past as well that people believed that they were a part of. When a Chinese person believes they are part of this present China they might connect it with a history of a particular thing- including a particular word or their family's ancestral political commitment. But that does not mean what happened in the past determines what the content of China is in the future. Think very simply: there is nothing innately Chinese about Communism- anymore than there is something innately Russian about it or innately British about liberal democracy. If you had gone back to 1500 and introduced the concept that Russia and China were innately communist and Britain was innately democratic, the elites and peoples there would have fried you alive for saying it. Things happen to countries- but we should not read them back into the past or forward into the future.

The second of these errors is to say that every sexual liberalism or every sexual conservatism or every similar position is the same. There are a number of different reasons why modern Chinese liberalism about sex will be different from anything that went before. Firstly we understand the mechanics of sex in a different way today: noone in the 8th Century believed as we do in evolution. Secondly we see sex differently: contraception and pornography mean that any modern Chinese understanding of sex has more in common with a modern Western one than it does with an ancient Chinese one. This does not only apply to sex. A modern religious fundamentalist is not in the same position as a medieval one for a simple reason: he or she has almost certainly read more things. He or she participates in a culture where it is not assumed that one has to be Christian or Muslim. The belief either in sexual liberalism or religious fundamentalism may look the same- but it is not the same. This doesn't just work over time- but over space as well- its very likely that Chinese sexual liberalism or conservatism looks different to Western sexual liberalism or conservatism. Its also probable that my sexual liberalism or conservatism differs from yours- because we have different experiences to make our ideas out of.

Sullivan's statement is right and its useful to know that China has a 'liberal' past with relation to sexuality- but its fatal if we start saying that China is innately liberal or conservative- just as its fatal to say that about Britain or anywhere else. There have been liberal and conservative Chinese people and at times China has been liberal- over its entire history it may well have been on average more liberal than the West or less liberal. Ultimately though the past does not determine the future. Ultimately its dangerous to be essentialist about nations or any other group of human beings. We are as the crowd in the LIfe of Brian puts it, all individuals.

Christopher Hitchens and why I fail to write

This blog has been updated ridiculously infrequently recently- blame the laziness of your blogger and the demands of managers for that but you can blame something else too- that I was educated as a historian. One of the books I got for Christmas was Christopher Hitchens's essays- they are collected in a volume called 'Arguably' and as ever with Hitchens they are well written and fun to read. What strikes me though reading them and reading the rest of Hitchens's work is his strengths and weaknesses.

Hitchens was an amazing writer and obviously thought about writing a lot: his essays on writers show sparkle and panache. So when he writes about Anthony Powell, he provides wonderful snippets of why he thought Powell was an amazing novelist: a word here, a phrase there are shown to the reader as proofs of Powell's inventiveness with language and his mood. Hitchens illuminates through literature as well- in an essay on Newton he sums up the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge through a reference to Penelope Fitzgerald. He was also obviously a great journalist- I haven't yet got to those pieces but it strikes me even with them that it is mastery of the literary detail- the ability to sum up a subject in a phrase which marks him out.

The essay on Newton reveals his weaknesses though as well. Hitchens was confessedly not a scientist and when writing about the greatest scientist of them all, he turns to the alchemy and the mysticism. Neither was he much of a historian. He does not in the same essay probe why Newton- a greater figure than any reader of this blog or than Hitchens himself- believed in alchemy. Its a fundamental problem in his biographies of Orwell and Paine: they are gripping reads if only because you suddenly find yourself being an American revolutionary or a British socialist in 1940. But neither Hitchens nor we share the attitudes of those time: when we do our thoughts are repetitions whereas the originals were 'original'. Hitchens makes Paine and Orwell into our contemporaries- something no historian would ever do.

Hitchens therefore wrote quickly and wrote well- what he had to say was worth reading. I struggle with that demand- I don't write well and don't write quickly. I suspect something of that has with our different skills: I am not a journalist nor have the kind of close reading that Hitchens had or power to quickly summarise. As a historian- and a poor one- I live in constant fear of correction, of the fact that slips through my fingers and leaves me looking silly. I doubt Hitchens's books on Orwell or Paine would really be undermined by the revelation that Paine never wrote the Rights of Man and Orwell never imagined up Winston Smith: his Orwell and his Paine exist independently of the actual historical reality. What he did was amazing and was hard: harder in some ways than being fixated on the facts but it was different. Blogging would have suited Christopher Hitchens- sometimes it feels like it doesn't suit your present author!

Thoughts

I apologise again for too long a hiatus. Why did I not write for a while- well because I did not see a purpose in writing and because it became in some sense a chore which I did not understand. When I had that burst of activity earlier this year it was in some sense purposeless: I did not think about why I wrote merely that I wrote. So this post is an effort to redefine this blog- there are plenty of entries on it already and I suppose to offer a manifesto for myself about what this will now be about. It will not be filled with articles or thoughts which are complete: I'm unable to write those with the pressures of work and also just because I cannot do that. It will neither contain political content- which is why the title of blog which has always been a little odd, will now change. Ok what is it about?

One of the ideas that always haunted me when I came to start this thing was the idea of the political blog. For various reasons that's just run away from me. The other idea that I thought of as key to this enterprise was that this was really some kind of common place book. A place where I could gather the fragments of experience together and think about them. That's the idea from now on that I wish to explore. No comment on this blog will be final. No comment on this blog will be worked out beyond the instantaneous moment of idealisation and no comment will be personal. This blog will be about what I have read and what I have seen and what I have thought about- it will be a common place book: a record largely for myself of my own cultural life and my own thoughts. I'm not going to write about politics- partly for work reasons but partly because I think politics is too easy to write about in an unreflective way.

Why do I think blogging is therefore useful? Well I think it may be useful for me to filter those thoughts through others. Possibly its also useful because its a record for me of what I've read. Whether its useful for you to read it, I have no idea. I'm not abandoning readership even though I've become uncertain about it over the last few months- whether anyone read and whether that mattered. I suppose the more that this is a fragment of thought, the more it really matters to me- its a way of capturing my own internal monologue and this time I think that's a more realistic place to go from. Blogging not as a perfect review or an effort to recapture the world- but as a place to record a thought, an idea which may be mad, will be inconsistent but will I hope be useful and interesting to myself and possibly to you.

I apologise for pausing- and I will try not to do so so often in the future!

Oxford Philosophy by Alan Bennet

I never saw Beyond the Fringe but this piece on Oxford Philosophy is brilliant.

Death

Roger Ebert, the film critic, expresses what it means beautifully here

That is what death means. We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear. Some years from now, at a funeral with a slide show, only one person will be able to say who we were. Then no one will know.  

I think he is right. I thought of my father when I read that, a far greater man than I will ever be, and thought of the way that even that memory fades with age. Death comes twice, once through absense and secondly through forgetfulness. The greatest commitment in the war poetry is

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them

Save of course we now do not. Not because we are wrong or evil in some way but because we never knew what we had to remember. To some extent that is what history is- its a device for remembering those who are gone, who are lost, who will never return. But it is an endeavour that will always fail. Its the same with growing in some ways- as we grow, we kill the previous parts of ourselves- the games we would play as children, the love that we left behind, the world we had lost. Reading Barnes's Sense of an Ending, I got taken more and more with the title- is there anything to human life which is not a sense of ending?

A favourite quotation

I was chatting to a friend this weekend about the origins of human rights- and dragged up this quotation from Sir Edward Coke, its one of my favourite quotations- and I thought it worth posting up.

We are but of yesterday (and therefore had need of the wisdom of those that were before us) and had been ignorant (if we had not received light and knowledge from our forefathers) and our daies upon the earth are but as a shadow in respect of the old ancient dayes and times past, wherein the laws have been by the wisdom of the most excellent men in many succession of ages, by long and continuall experience (the triall of light and truth), fined and refined, which no one man (being of so short a time) albeit he had in his head the wisdom of all the men in the world, in any one age could have effected or attained unto. And therefore it is optima regula, qua nulla est verior aut firmior in jure, Neminem oportet esse sapientiorem legibus: no man ought to take it upon himself to be wiser than the laws.

Coke said this in Calvin's case- a case about whether a Scot could claim rights under English law. The quotation though really isn't about the case itself- as much as it is about the principle of what is a law. It sits with some of the things that we have seen recently in Oakeshott- though I suspect Oakeshott did not derive his thinking from Coke's. Coke believed law was formed by tradition however there is a tension in his thought: notice his principles of fining and refining and the contrast between that and the resolution against change. Coke is in favour both of change and against it: the quotation incorporates a contradiction. 

The contradiction, I think, is not as important as one might think. Coke stated this during a case- it was a legal opinion rather than a philosophical argument. Coke was not writing a course in formal logic- rather he was writing a sentiment. His phrase was an argument within a political and legal realm: to make that argument the emotion is key, and Coke gets that emotion in his writing. It may not be great philosophy but the reason the phrase is requoted is that its both good politics and good law.

The sense of an Ending

"You just don't get it"

Julian Barnes's Sense of an Ending is filled with quotations- glimpses. It starts with quoted memories- ends with staccato sentences- and an explanation of events that we have already been told is unsatisfactory. The book expresses in one hundred painful pages the life of a man- Tony- who had two real loves,  Veronica a student he met at University and Margerate who he met later and married and had a child with. This review will be thick with spoilers- it can hardly avoid it. The sense of an ending is about what ending means and what looking back is- the main character says at one point that as young people we always anticipate the desperation and sadness of growing old, but not that of looking back on youth- well this is a novel about looking back. Looking back through the haze at old relationships and old sadnesses and old disappointments- at our failures and our distress. And at the fact that even now, after all has been done, the memory fades and ultimately we 'just don't get it' even when its long gone.


I don't make much of a pretence to understand this book- in 100 pages it includes more ideas than most manage in three or four hundred. The nature of the book though talks about something that I'm fascinated by- the nature of history and the nature of memory. Those two things are related- from the first historian Herodotus who said that his history was written to make the deeds of famous Greeks and barbarians safe for the world. Herodotus expressed it first- but that aspiration remains a source of why we do history. We write biographies and think about individuals- not merely because we believe that individuals cause social change- but because in some sense history undoes death. The question that everyone who thinks seriously about the past thinks about ultimately is whether we are coating the past with lies. To what extent can we really remember- I think this of people I have lost in my own life, through death and folly, they slowly slip down into sorrow. The smile I fell in love with, the glint of intelligence in the eye, the smiling eyes- all gone into everlasting fog.

Death and folly are two words that marry together and spend their time in this novel entertwined in each other's arms. Thanatos and Eros, according to Tony's friend Adrian, are tossed in battle, one against the other until the end of time and, as one quote from the novel, from Elliot, puts it are all that there really is to life. Memory though provides an inadequate guide to these things. Tony remembers what he chooses to remember. We all do this. Barnes captures the way that we have to tell narratives in order to ensure that we can survive events. That girl that Tony loved, he has to forget so that he can forget the fact that they broke up. Who has not been there- rhetorically convincing themselves that the error that they made was insignificant. The choice of memory, the framing of narratives is something that all historians and politicians know by instinct, we forget that we apply this to our real lives. Our lives are not realities- they are constructed- the road not taken rears ahead in our thought and is associated with either pain or pleasure, depending on our self dramatisation.

History is therefore meaningless unrest- the tale of a fool, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Again Barnes reminds us that this is not true. Our narratives, Tony's narratives are false but that does not mean that there is not a narrative- it just means it is inaccessible to us. There is a narrative in this novel: something horrific happened. But you won't know at the end what that something is. It is veiled in darkness. Similarly a suicide at the beggining of the book invites questions about why it happened- and those questions remain unanswered. Thinking again by the end of the book, Tony realises that the past can be interrogated in different ways. The suicide of a boy who made his girlfriend pregnant is significant to Tony as an adolescent because he wants to know about the boy and why he did it, by the end of the novel he is interested in the girl and how she coped. The questions are all legitimate- there are answers but without the dead boy, the parents who are long dead, even the girl herself- those answers have gone. A history master argues with Adrian about the meaning of these events- Adrian says that it is the reports of the individuals that decide what happened, the master the actions- neither and both are right. To some extent, the only way to know what has happened is to know what happened next- if Tony is guilty then that is right.

Guilt and responsibility depend on history, in Roman law it was intention that made a crime, a crime. I can only be responsible or guilty for things that have happened, not things as they might be after an act I commit in the future. As an implication, as we grow older we become more and more guilty. Moral personality is deeply involved in the novel. Who is to blame depends on the questions that we ask. If the past is uncertain, then so is moral responsibility. We live in a world without a view from nowhere, and that is all there is to say. This novel leaves me exhausted and pondering, personally, my own folly and my own death. Suicide said Camus is the most fundemental philosophical question- despite Camus's argument, I think Barnes goes further- we don't know what happens and why- what we can only know is that the philosophical subject is history, and the philosophical moment is historical.

Uncle Sam

Alan Sked's inaugural lecture at the LSE focussed on national icons: Professor Sked talked about the iconographic figures of the past- Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Lincoln etc- and spoke about the way in which those individuals had developed a mythic histories. Sked is obviously right on this broad point- and we can see how far that's true when we look at more obscure figures who have become national icons. Take Sam Wilson for example. A US merchant in the 1812 war who sold food to the US army, Sam Wilson became through a series of accidents (chronicled here) the image of America. He became Uncle Sam. The point about this is that Sam Wilson was a pretty ordinary person- he had none of the glamour of a Lincoln or a Frederick, wasn't ambiguous or anything special at all.

Why was he remembered? Ultimately that isn't a question that can be answered- there isn't a particular reason save for a catchy name and a clever set of poster makers why Sam Wilson should have been remembered. What's interesting about him though is that it demonstrates the need that the young republic had for some kind of myth. The US was founded in 1776: Uncle Sam lived through both its founding and the other great traumatic event of its early history, its war with its former colonial master Britain between 1812 and 1814. Before 1776, the US had been 13 individual colonies- diverse religiously, economically and racially from each other. The divides that split America right up until the modern era were geographic, focussed on states. To keep this country together, it needed mythic figures- Washington, Revere, Jefferson- who could become a focus for allegiance. In a sense, Sam's generation gave rise to so many of these icons because Sam's generation was the generation that made the United States. The essential icon in that sense was and is Lincoln: the President who stopped seccession.

That draws me though to a final point- and it reflects back on Professor Sked's lecture and a lot of the way that we view history today. Uncle Sam was a useful image for the United States because it reaffirmed national unity, it helped keep national peace. Historians may look at the man behind the image and say that he wasn't the same as the image that was eventually projected of him: indeed they may look behind some images like the image of John Bull and say he never existed. That's missing the point. The point of the image isn't that someone like that existed- its that someone like that was imagined to exist. National icons have a function and the function is the interesting bit about them as icons. We might want to study some of them independently- Lincoln to understand how a federal system can split into warring factions for example- but that's not studying their status as icons. As icons what's interesting is what they do and how they are used within political debates and discussions: how they become the substance of people's imaginations. This is where history can become innately political because if an icon is the meaning of a myth, destroying the icon is in some sense destroying the myth. But some myths are useful to us in politics...

A.J. Ayer on Logical Positivism

I've just discovered on youtube a fascinating set of programs presented by Bryan Magee. He interviewed in the seventies, leading philosophers about their ideas- so you have Iris Murdoch talking about literature and philosophy, Freddie Ayer on Russel and Frege, Hilary Putnam on the philosophy of science, John Searle on Wittgenstein etc etc. I've finished this particular broadcast: the others I'm currently working through- but this discussion between Ayer and Magee is fascinating.



There are three further parts to the interview.

Why is this so fascinating? The philosophical content is very interesting of course. I think there is something more though to it than this: Ayer was responsible for logical positivism coming to Oxford in the thirties- with language, logic and truth he began a conversation about it that lasted for the rest of the century. The conversation therefore records not just a thinker talking about a set of thoughts, but a thinker talking about his own impact, in his youth. During the fourth part, Magee asks Ayer to reflect on what he thinks of the weaknesses of logical positivism: Ayer's responses are very interesting because they show a wry detatchment from the Ayer of the 30s, a withdrawel from some positions, the adaptation of other positions. Its a perspective that is worth having and one I suspect that requires a certain type of maturity, confidence and longevity to attain to.

Oxford Philosophy: When Argy Bargy and Talky talky ruled the world

This dialogue and there are five further sections between Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire is an exploration of what Oxford philosophy meant in the middle years of the twentieth century when J.L. Austin dominated it. Its an important document philosophically of course- and I'll let you actually listen to what Berlin and Hampshire say- far more lucidly than I could ever- to discover that. However its also important as a cultural document: as whatsoever we think of Oxford philosophy and the contributions of Berlin, Hampshire, Ayer, Austin and others to it, we have to see it as a cultural moment as well as a philosophical moment. This was philosophy as reared probably for the last ever time on its own within a great university. Hampshire comments that there was no contact with the outside world- noone in Oxford during the 1930s cared about the outside world's opinion of their thinking, the outside world being both America and Cambridge at this point. Berlin tells of an Oxford dominated by schools of argy bargy (the analytical Pritchard) and talky talky (Collingwood and the Hegelians).

What's so interesting about this moment is that it was so insular. One might suggest for example that even in Oxford this was an insular group- they never had anything to do with the Inklings just down the road from Berlin's rooms in All Souls let alone with Cambridge or Princeton and Harvard. That culture whether in the Inklings or here with the analytical philosophers is obviously very powerful. They could focus on a set of texts that noone else understood- whether that is C.I. Lewis on perception or A.J. Ayer on Language, truth and logic. They were able to forge interesting questions in a very intense and concentrated fashion and in both the cases of the Inklings and the Oxford tradition, those questions produced great works- of literature and of philosophy. Concentration and insularity are undervalued today but are crucial for these very reasons: there was a point to having a life concentrated like that of a medieval monastery. What it produced was a common culture, a common reference point out of which the participants could emerge- and of course bitter rivalries- one thinks of Lewis and Tolkein, Ayer and Austin.

At the centre of the Analytical philosophers is Berlin. I remember reading in Berlin's writings a self depracatory statement that he believed his importance in life was his ability to knit together others. Berlin had a great mind and there is a reason that people still read what he had to say in later life- but its an important observation of his other skill, as a facilitator. Important I think as well because the group created a context for its members to operate within- thinking to Berlin's own Personal Impressions, one gets the sense of a thinker who knows who his audience are and knows how to appeal to them. This both gives him the confidence to move forward with his intellectual project- by the 40s definitely not within analytical philosophy- and also the security of having that project critiqued and accepted. It exposed the work to some blindnesses- Quentin Skinner later picked up on several of Berlin's methodological blindnesses- but it also enabled the work to happen. We underrate this often: recently thinking about Berlin I put him into a category of emigree intellectual, and obviously he along with Karl Popper and others was such an emigree (of a slightly earlier generation than Popper), but one's eventual intellectual group which one considers one's home is still vital to one's development. I don't think we can take the emigree out of Berlin, but neither can we dispense with the room in All Souls for our understanding of any of those that met there.

In truth, it was not just what the division between argy bargy and talky talky meant when it was taught which gave Berlin and Austin and Ayer their background, it was the fact that they all knew within a narrow Oxford context, what those two titles meant.

Property and the Body

However harsh you think your view of justice is, you are unlikely to be as harsh as the justices of Anjou and Maine. The customary of the two provinces of France, written in the early 15th Century, suggested that for crimes such as rape, the murder of a pregnant woman or murder (including suicide) not merely should the offender be punished with death- but their house should be torn down, their fields despoiled, their vines stripped out and any forests they owned chopped down. This they called 'ravaire' or ravage. This punishment is really interesting- Alexander Murray in his work on suicide from which I take this suggests it marked a different boundary of the body from ours. In the medieval world, the body extended not merely to the form of the person but to their chattels and their land. Not merely that but the crime of the individual might well be visited upon the family. Medieval writers justified this by reference to the Book of Numbers, where two people, Dathan and Abiram are swallowed by the earth along with all their families for the sin of blasphemy.

These points that Murray raises are very interesting- because they point right into a conceptual distinction in terms of the way that individuals have been thought about. In the past this notion of the individual extended further than it does today- not merely outwards into property but also outwards into different persons. This raises questions though about the way that they understood those differences. Individuals had their consciousness of that individuality mediated for them through a different prism than that available to us today. The problem with history often is that all we have is the prism- the law code, the theological treatise- we don't have the individual experience of that, the inner consciousness of what that meant. We can only infer from our own empathetic understanding- in most cases. Murray is one of the best historians I've read on this kind of history- and I have no doubt in the rest of his second volume on suicide he will dwell more on this- but its an almost impossible task and reminds me of the fact that the difference between us and the past is precisely the reason why we find it difficult to put flesh into the husk of evidence that we have been left.

What is a murder?

The content of murder is often debated within our own society. It is not so long ago that suicide was deemed to be a type of murder- we shall discuss that more in the future. Plenty of people see abortion as a type of murder- others do not. Some see contraception as another type of murder. There are definite arguments that euthanasia is a species of murder: whether in the same sense as suicide or the added coercion of relatives keen to see an inheritance. The content of murder shifts generation by generation: is death in war murder? Some people think that Tony Blair and George Bush are murderers- others that they were merely leaders of states that went to war. Murder isn't an obvious concept to us- but one meaning has drifted away from us and its interesting to think about why that's so.

The original meaning of the word murder is not unlawful killing: it is unlawful secret killing. Secrecy really worried medieval society. The secret murder concerned the legal authorities and they took great pains to advertise when a murder or a suicide had been published. This is one reason why, as Alexander Murray documents, suicides were buried at crossroads or on the shores of rivers. They were buried with the instrument they had used to kill themselves- the noose, the knife- to demonstrate that the law knew the manner of their deaths and advertised to all passers by that they had died in this grisly way. You could see this as the basis for public hangings too: the law advertising that this killing had been found unlawful, that it was not one of these murders that would never be detected. The law fixed epistemologically what had happened to a person: uncertainty in this sense allowed a violation of the law, was a challenge to the legal model of knowledge.

Nobody uses murder in this sense today. Despite its uncertain range- our murders are all well murders. We know when someone has been unlawfully killed- and unsolved cases are more often than not unsolved murders, rather than unsolved because noone can be sure about a natural death. There are two reasons for this. The first is the most obvious and will not detain us: we just know a lot more about what a natural death or a murder looks like. From being able to detect DNA on a knife, to being able to register poison in a bloodstream, we know far more than our medieval ancestors did. The second is interesting though and its about the powers of the state. The medieval state had no police force, had no registry of identity, worked through local elites and had no social services. Its infrastructure of knowledge was not inferior neccessarily, but was less statistical and more moulded by a local elite than the modern state.

This is a guess and it would be interesting to know when and how the meaning of murder changed- but my guess is that it has something to do with the changing nature not of science but of the state. Probably that changing nature is what has led us to abandon some of the practices of our ancestors- public execution for one. The impact it has on the way in which the content of the concept of murder has changed is also interesting: thinking about it the only type of murder where we become worried about the boundaries between death and murder today is euthanasia. That may be the exception that proves the rule about our evolving understanding of what the rule means.

Into the Abyss

Werner Herzog says in his film at the beggining that he opposes the death penalty. One might assume this is a film which opposes the death penalty, which campaigns against it- but if you did think that you would be wrong. What Herzog does is describe what happened in a particular case. In 2001, in Conroe, Texas, two 19 year olds, Jason Burkett and Michael Perry shot a nurse Sandra Stotler- and later her son and his friend. According to the police, the killing was motivated by Perry and Burkett's desire to steal Stotler's car. That was all that they wanted- a red sports car- and for that as the officer on the case said, three people died. By the end of the film that three becomes four, because Michael Perry was executed in July 2010. Burkett faces a forty year prison term and will be released- if he receives parole- in 2042 when he will be 59. The film describes these events and interviews the families of the victims, people who knew Burkett and Perry in Texas, the killers themselves- Perry is interviewed eight days before his execution and an interview with Burkett's current wife. Interviews with the Prison Chaplain who holds the ankle of each prisoner as the lethal injection is administered and with a former captain of the death squad at the jail are included in the film. All in all this is neither a light nor a pleasant film: its a good film.

Some critics have argued that Herzog didn't really know what he was doing with the film- that it is not polemical enough or whimsical enough. I think the film is powerful as a description rather than a political polemic. Herzog may say he is against the death penalty but this is neither an expose of a clear injustice nor is it a statistical argument. It is an observation. As such though it has an argument but it requires the viewer to switch their attention from the political to the personal context for what happens in the film. We hear plenty about the lives that the two perpetrators lived up until the murders, hear plenty about what they were like outside the jail (Jason Burkett sounds like a thug for example) and hear about their troubled up bringings (particularly Burkett's). Burkett's father is interviewed in incredibly powerful scenes- himself a convict in prison for a similar time to his son, the sheer sense of his own failure is a difficult and important thing for Herzog and the viewer to capture. When he describes the feeling of being locked to his own son in handcuffs as they leave the court house, the feeling of despair is probably the greatest I have felt in a cinema.

Likewise Herzog captures something about the families of the victims that I think we seldom do. What is left for them after a murder? It must feel like so much has gone, senselessly, into the past. Both the family members of victims we see here look and feel anguished: interestingly both are siblings and the sense of loss is palpable- almost unbearable at points. The important thing about these sections of the film is not that it does not make you feel angry- or at least did not make me feel angry- it made me feel compassion and sadness. There are two feelings on the screen during the film- when you see the Burkett's father, you feel the anguish of honesty about failure- when you see the families of the victims, you see the anguish of loss. These two very different emotions suffuse a film that really is about two types of abyss, one of sin, the other of death. Looking at it another way, what Herzog presents is a murder which has produced two devastating consequences- shame and despair.

The interviews with the two murderers fit into the rest of the film slightly askew. Reviewers have asked why Herzog didn't probe these men more- he asks questions but does not strive for a gotcha moment where the killer breaks down in tears. Nor does he probe the stories of either man. Both deny the murders now. Perry until his death insisted that a police conviction was coerced. Both blame the other man. Herzog seems clear that they did it though- even though Burkett's wife insists he did not. Neither admit to any guilt: Perry says that he feels sorry for those who have visited the atrocity of what he calls murder upon him. Burkett's father clearly does believe his son did something. Burkett's wife- a post-prison acquisition who he has hugged but not spent time with outside of prison- clearly disagrees. Some of the most uncomfortable scenes in the film involve her talking about her love for the convict. The emptiness, particularly from Perry, is terrifying but it stands between the two emotions I discussed above- between shame and despair is what caused both- emptiness, an abyss.

That sense of a parenthesis that lies around the devastation of the event is something that Herzog plays upon. The two most redemptive images of the film come from the prison chaplain and the captain of the death squad, for them parentheses are moments of pity (in the first case- the parenthesis around a pause to watch a squirrel) or common sense (that life in the latter case is the dash between death and birth on a tombstone) but the director plays with that parenthesis throughout. He plays with what might be called the abyss- with the abyss between interviewee and interviewer inside a prison where glass separates them physically, the abyss between two lovers separated by a wall, the abyss which defines our lives and gives meaning to them. Lastly the abyss that is the event itself that determined all this: Herzog makes a point of showing us that the murders happened for almost no reason. All this devastation and destruction came from a moment that seemed thoughtless, that itself was an abyss where action took over from deliberation, where 'I want' trammelled up the consequence of that desire. Where 72 hours of possession of a sports car justified the murders of three people.

Herzog is against the death penalty, but though his film is about death row, its not about the death penalty. Its about the ways in which we can destroy our own lives, slipping into worlds where violence is a convention, where you learn to read in prison, where the sins of the fathers become the sins of the sons and so on infinitum down to the end of recorded time. Herzog's vision of that is dark- between the parenthesis of shame and despair, you find nothingness, the nothingness of sin. The redeeming moments of  this film are moments when the chaplain and death captain tell us about other ways of thinking about moments, ways that bring out the positive nature of life, but over them hangs a stench of what happened ten years ago and the consequences that to this day continue to unravel from that one event.

Michael Oakeshott's history of ideas

Embedded within Oakeshott's account of politics is an account of history and in particular the history of ideology. Oakeshott faces a problem with ideology, because having dismissed empirical attempts to discuss politics, he faces in the essay on political education the challenge of the thinker who suggests that ideology is the basis for our political decisions. Oakeshott wants and needs to dismiss this account of the way in which ideology is generated because if ideology can be sat outside of a political tradition, it provides a means of critique which is outside of the political languages to which Oakeshott wants to confine his political education. Essentially if Oakeshott is wrong about ideology, then one can turn away from his political education without losing anything: because national traditions are not sufficient alone to generate political ideas.

This challenge gives rise to one of Oakeshott's most interesting statements:

The pedigree of every political ideology shows it to be the creature, not of premeditation in advance of political activity, but of meditation upon a manner of politics.

This is a very radical statement. Essentially what the philosopher means is that there is no ideological position that doesn't develop out of an empirical situation. Politics proceeds before any conception of the right path within it. Oakeshott provides what he thinks of as clear historical cases of this happening:

consider Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government, read in America and France in the eighteenth century as a statement of abstract principles to be put into practice, regarded there as a preface to political activity. But so far from being a preface, it has all the marks of a postscript and its power to guide derived from its roots in actual political experience. Here, set down in abstract terms, is a brief conspectus of the manner in which Englishmen were accustomed to go about the business of attending to their arrrangements- a brilliant abridgement of the political habits of Englishmen. 

Leave aside whether Oakeshott's history is correct, what he is arguing here is that political argument arises out of national traditions of thinking and is inspired by particular historical moments or understandings of them. Oakeshott doesn't deny that new ideas occur but he suggests that they are intimations, born from within the system of politics as it functions, hence he suggests that women's suffrage happened because there was an inconsistency in the law rather than because of an abstract right that was discovered to appertain to women.


This is a very radical and important move within Oakeshott's philosophy- he later suggests that such movements within a tradition may be unconscious, the Russian revolution was as Russian as it was Marxist (for him). This is not merely a truism in Oakeshott's mind: because its the basis for saying that if you want to understand a political movement, you must understand not the abstraction which the political actor mouthed, but the society from whence he or she sprung. If you think about that for a second it becomes a very interesting observation: take Locke: Professor Oakeshott is quite simply wrong if he thinks Locke's treatise was motivated either by what Locke believed England was like or what England was actually like in 1682. What Locke was motivated by was a desire to shape England into a different realm, but his context was as Dutch as it was English and as Protestant as it was either. Oakeshott dismisses the relevance of non-national context- and furthermore of context which is not empirical. The contrast with Neitsche for whom the empirical context is nothing, but for whom the context of abstraction is everything: so Neitsche says that the reason that there is no definition of punishment is because that concept has been described in an infinity of different ways. Oakeshott downplays the ideological and the non-empirical because what he wants is this separate language of politics that cannot be reduced to its abstraction.