The Captain of Kopenich

On Tuesday I went to a play at the National Theatre with some friends- an adaptation of a German classic the Captain of Kopenich.

We opened at a prison with all the men (disrespectfully) listening to an old warden recounting stories about Sedan and the victory of the Prussians over the French. One of the prisoners to be released that day- Voigt- has no papers to be released with and therefore no legal personality in outside society. Those two sentences set up what is interesting about the Captain of Kopenich- as adopted at the National at the moment- on the one hand the cult of reminiscence and the military, on the other the man who has no name and therefore no chance within society. That is until he, by chance, comes across the uniform of a captain within the Germany army, masquerades as said Captain to get a passport, fails and eventually only succeeds in doing so by... you'll have to watch the play to find out but the realisation of his plan is amusing.

The point of the play seems to be specific to its time. The play is set by the director as though it was the 1930s in Germany. Great displays that resemble the silent film Metropolis are set up behind the set. You can see and feel the atmosphere of pre-war jingoism: we are off to fight the French at every opportunity. Perhaps its just what I've been reading recently, but there is a certain poignancy about those scenes- if the stress on Prussian militarism plays a bit much to type and prejudice. The point though is well made. Germany in 1910 and in 1930 was a heavy militarised society. Something of that cult of the military went into what happened in 1914. Jonathan Steinberg argues as much in his book about Bismark: so do Chris Clark and Norman Stone in their books which I have written about on this blog. The cult of the military was important to Germany: Prussia, founded as an army with a country attached, had founded the new German empire and founded it through military success.

The second dilemma is also true and perhaps even more interesting. Voigt has no papers and therefore no personality. The play doesn't really play with this as an idea enough. The play is set in 1910 when two things drive the creation of papers for people (don't forget that until 1914 most European states did not have passports). The first thing was conscription- the Boer war in Britain revealed that the British poor were just unable to fight for example. The second related phenomenon was the welfare state. To have either conscription or the welfare state you need to know who your citizens are. Taking England as an example, in the 18th Century noone knew how many Englishmen there were- quite simply because services were administered by parishes. As long as the clergyman or local notable knew who was who: it didn't matter what Whitehall thought. In a world with conscription and welfare, Whitehall and its equivalents have to know who people are. Voigt's dilemma is a real one but it is a much more modern one than the director gave it credit for: and its a German one for Bismark's welfare state was amongst the most advanced in Europe.

These are interesting ideas but the play at the National disappointed me because it did not really take them further- and the points it did make- gestures towards 1914 and the Nazis were too broad. Much of the first half of this Captain was made up of broad humour and platitude- both of which left me tired and grumpy. I confess at the interval I walked out in a mood, wondering if I should walk back in. The second half focussing on the military issue was much better but still just played either issue for laughs: both issues have more to them than the play revealed- a pity as it was based on a real case and the original text is supposed to be a classic (no doubt this was heavily adapted).

Ancient Israel

I'm fascinated by ancient Israel- not for religious reasons but because for religious reasons documents have survived from a very ancient civilisation and from some quite interesting people in that civilisation.  William Dever's book on the origins of Israel is really interesting, not primarily because of its theological content. It basically argues that one story in the Bible (the Exodus story) is less likely to be true than another story in the Bible (Judges) when it comes to explaining who were the Ancient Israelites. That's interesting because it sheds light on a question that I think is important. If we exclude for a  moment theological explanations about why the idea of monotheism arose, and leave those as beyond the bounds of this article: we are still left trying to account for why monotheism arose and what the inspiration for the religious literature of the Bible was in historical terms.

Dever's account basically argues that the people we call Israelites- he calls them proto-Israelites- were Canaanites. If you imagine the ancient world in the second millennia BC- you are imagining a world that has been hit by economic crisis. We know that many of the great ancient states of that era were disturbed: Egypt was invaded by mysterious 'sea peoples', the Myceneans vanished never again to rise. Dever posits that all this stuff had an impact on Canaan. Falling farm yields, rising prices, rising inequality: these are all the attributes of crisis. And in letters from the Kings of Canaan to the Egyptians we can see these crises impacting on Canaan in those ways.

So the story he puts together goes like this. Groups of people in the Canaanite towns became frustrated and irritated and moved. They moved up into the hills around the coastal areas- into the hills near Jerusalem and began farming there. They elected their own chiefs. These chiefs fought with the Canaanite states below. He suggests this makes sense of the archaeological evidence which describes an increase in population in this hill country (and shows no record of the kinds of conquest that Joshua is said to have made)- and of Egyptian evidence which names Israel as the hill country. He devotes a lot of time to proving this- and I don't have either the expertise or the patience to rehearse the argument.

The implications though are really fascinating. Firstly they suggest that the Bible's attitudes to wealth and poverty are very much the attitudes of peasant farmers who were faced with inequality and mounting debt. The problem of debt slavery- so intrinsic to later societies right up until and beyond colonial Africa- is not unknown in the Bible and reflects this kind of societal transformation. Secondly the Bible's model of statehood must be influenced by this early history: so the Book of Judges becomes a very interesting text because it shows a movement from poverty and chieftenship to Kingship.

Italy and the First World War

In 1924, Miroslav Skalajkovic, the former political head of the Serb Foreign Ministry, said of the Italian invasion of Tripoli in 1911, 'all subsequent events [including the First World War] are nothing more than the evolution of that first aggression'.

Both Norman Stone and Chris Clark argue that the Italian invasion of Libya was the starting gun for the first world war. The reason is that the First World War started in the Balkans- as everyone knows. A Serb assassin's bullet was its first real shot. The roots of that moment though go back to Italy. Italy's invasion of Libya demonstrated the weakness of the Ottoman authorities- furthermore they demonstrated that Britain, Turkey's great power guarantor, no longer insisted upon Turkish independence. Sir Edward Grey, then the British Foreign Secretary, encouraged the Italians to attack Libya. What's interesting about this attack is that it starts the chain of events leading to World War One- because the Balkan states saw the Italian victory as the announcement that they too could start to prey on Turkey. It also was the first moment at which Arab nationalism- in the resistance to Italian forces- becomes an important factor in global affairs.

Its worth thinking about the Italian invasion though. The First World War partly came out of the weaknesses of the European power system- and in particular its two weakest states. The policy of Britain and France was effectively in 1914 that Austria had no right to exert its influence over Serbia after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. The Italian invasion was a consequence of the presumed weakness of the sick man of Europe. And this presumed weakness lent Italian and Russian policy makers a sense of urgency: if they did not strike quickly then another power would seize what they wanted. In 1912 for example during the Balkan war, Russia became terrified that Bulgaria might seize Constantinople- the long term Russian ambition. Russian policy makers during the period just before World War One were seeking to recreate the Balkans as an arena of little brother Slav states that they could sponsor- as opposed to independent actors.

Weakness and fear were main drivers in what happened in World War One. Clark disagrees with the thesis that Germany sponsored the war because of a terror about Russian power- the thesis that Stone supports. But paranoia is to be found in all European states: there were German generals who were scared about Russia, Britain feared Russian incursions on its Asiatic empire, France of course feared Germany and feared that Russia might in the end not need a French alliance for its ambitions to be fulfilled. The coming power of Russia destablised the European balance of power- but it is the interraction between that fear and the weakness of other powers that drives the action in World War One. The weakness of Austria and the Ottomans presented the opportunity for people to realise their fears of conquest: Russian or German domination in Vienna and Constantinople would it was feared lead to the enslavement of Europe to either Berlin or St Petersburg.

This helps explain I think something which I'd not thought about but which Clark points out is a paradox. The First World War began about the Balkans and its first subsidiary wars happened in Libya and in the Balkans but it was on the Western and Eastern Fronts that the war happened. The war did not take place between Italy and Serbia, Austria and Turkey but between Russia, France, Britain and Germany.

Apologies

Incidentally apologies for not publishing some comments over the summer- a long hiatus that was influenced primarily by stuff happening off line- but I really do apologise!

July

Christopher Clark quotes this fragment from Stefan Zweig. I thought it worth sharing

the wind in the trees, the twittering of the birds and the music floating across the park were at the same time part of my consciousness. I could clearly hear the melodies without being distracted, for the ear is so adaptable that a continuous noise, a roaring street, a rushing stream are quickly assimilated into one's awareness only an unexpected pause in the rhythm makes us prick our ears. [...] Suddenly the music stopped in the middle of a bar. I didn't know what piece they had played. I just sensed that the music had suddenly stopped. Instinctively I looked up from my book. The crowd, too, which was strolling through the trees in a single flowing mass, seemed to change; it, too, paused abruptly in its motion to and fro. Something must have happened.

The something was the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria. Zweig's writing is so interesting- at once it combines an observation about 1914, how ordinary life was. One can almost imagine the crinolined crowds passing in front of the park, through the boulevards of 19th Century Vienna and then the 20th Century with all its horror arrived. At the same time Zweig says something important about memory and history: we remember change, the continuous strand of music is something we are acculturated too- we remember disruption not stillness. History as Gibbon put it was the record of the crimes, follies etc of human kind- I think Zweig gives us a reason here for Gibbon's statement: crime not kindness is a disturbance.

The future and the first world war

There isn't much that's more dangerous in diplomacy than assumptions about the future. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the arguments for the hardline position was that if the Russians are going to be around forever, it might be better to have a nuclear war now when America will win and the losses will be limited, rather than later when both great powers can unleash infinite destruction on each other. The same is true in the First World War. One of the motivating things in any war is the attitudes with which the parties enter the war. In the First War, that's most evident in the attitudes of Britain and France towards Serbia and Austria Hungary. Put bleakly the British and the French saw the plucky Serbs as the instigators of a new wave of nationalist and democratic history- in their imagination, they dressed the Serbs, as Byron had dressed the Greeks almost a hundred years before, with all the clothes of European liberty. Whereas they saw the Austrian monarchy as a doomed experiment that had run out of time, an empire and a power in decline. Neither of these impressions were particularly correct: Serbia was economically primitive, had low levels of education and an irredentist movement that destabilised the state. Austria on the other hand was stable, and to the eyes of many 21st century observers looks much more progressive than its nationalist neighbours.

The complacency of that judgement helped steer the Entente powers into a much more assertive Balkan policy, may have contributed to the origins of the war itself. It all stemmed from a basic teleology- that history was aiming in a particular direction. Of course history has no necessary direction: and the complacency of current understanding can swiftly become the obvious error the next generation despises.

Russian Power

A couple of years ago, I reviewed a book about the first world war by Norman Stone. Stone argued, I think convincingly, that at the root of the causes of the first world war lay a very simple calculation by German statesmen. They looked east and they saw Russia, when they saw Russia, they saw a rising curve of manpower, economic power, military power and cultural might that might be deployed within Europe. Von Moltke for example then argued that Germany had to fight a war soon- in 1912, 1914 or earlier- before it would inevitably lose such a war. Russia must be eliminated. Read this way the first war was in a sense a kind of success- the story of the 20th Century in Europe is largely the story of what didn't happen: Russia never dominated Europe in the way that Bethman Hollweg or Moltke believed it would.

Reading Christopher Clark though places a different emphasis on Russian power- because it was not Germany alone who was worried about Russian power. Both Britain and France saw the same things- British and French generals believed that Russia had the strongest military machine in Europe and that their economy and army was getting stronger. The consequences of this perception in Paris and London, according to Clark, also supported war. Clark argues that the French looked at Russian power and came to a simple conclusion: after 1920 Russia would no longer need France to assist it in the Balkans. France would return to isolation, whereas Russia would be able to make a positive case for Berlin to drop Vienna and do a deal over the Balkans. French hopes to retake Alsaace Lorraine would therefore fall away. France therefore as much as anyone needed a war swiftly, as then it would have Russia as an ally. For the French therefore, as well as the Germans, Russian growth was a reason to have an early war: not so that Russia could be wiped out but so that it might be engaged on French terms.

Britain too saw Russian growth as a threat. From 1815 onwards, the British had seen the greatest threat to their empire as lying in Russian ambition. Russia, not Germany, was the power that Britain had fought in the 19th Century, in the Crimean War. Both Disreali in the 1870s and Salisbury in the 1880s had directed their foreign policy to counter the ambitions of St Petersburg, not of Berlin. Although Britain and Russia had signed an entente in 1907, the British were consumed by agony about Russia right up until the outbreak of war in 1914. Quite simply, the British saw the Russians as their only colonial competitor in a huge swathe of key territory across Asia- from Persia to China- a swathe of territory that protected the jewel in the British crown, India. The British foreign policy elite saw the rise of Russia as a reason to keep the Tsar close and support his desires more emphatically- without that close alliance the British feared they would be taking on a Russian empire which was more powerful than ever before and more threatening to them than ever before. If Russian growth made Germans and the Frenchmen think about war more eagerly, Russian growth made the British abandon their neutrality.

These conclusions of Clark's (and it must be emphasized in all three cases, he identifies individuals rather than the entire foreign policy community as holding these views) support another statement. I always believed that the end of the First World War marked the moment where European politics changed forever: that in 1919 with Wilson's fourteen points, Europe for the first time became subject to an extra European power. Reading Clark suggests to me that picture is not true. Europe's slow decline from a position of complete independence from the rest of the world was a cause not a consequence of World War One.

Serbia pre-1914

Christopher Clark's book on the origins of the First World War is a triumph in one way at least. Its a topic that has been 'done to death' over the years. I've read innumerable studies myself about it from the classic (AJP Taylor) to the more modern (Norman Stone)- and the basic contours of the crisis which provoked the war are familiar to almost everyone who knows anything about European history. We are all jaded when it comes to 1914- which is why saying something new (at least to those who aren't experts) is so intriguing. Clark's newest work on the origins of the war does indeed start with something new- he starts where so few books about the war start- not in London, Berlin, Paris, Petersburg or Vienna but in Belgrade.

Of course once you think about it Serbia is one of the most interesting players in the war. All the major powers could have a realistic thought about deterring each other or even winning the war: at least that thought could apply to Germany, Russia and Britain and to France and Austria by virtue of their alliances to the big three. Serbia though could have no realistic chance of winning a war with Austria. Secondly we often forget that the twentieth century began as well as ended with a terrorist atrocity that provoked conflict: in 2001 September 11th led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, in 1914 the death of the Archduke led to the invasion of Serbia and World War One. Of course the conflicts that were produced were entirely different in nature, length, scope and size: but the original pistol shot was similar- an act of a multinational terrorist network that had an intriguing relationship with a state apparatus.

What the case of Serbia reveals interestingly is the link between terrorism, nationalism and modernity. The story Clark tells is one in which those three concepts interlock through the first two decades of the twentieth century to produce the crazy calculation of July 1914. Serbia in the early twentieth century was an economically backward place, heavily dependant on external parties- mostly the French for its continued solvency, and largely rural. Its population were illiterate and its politics were unstable. In 1903, the then Serbian King and his wife had been murdered, and the politics of Serbia were torn between on the one hand democratic civilian politicians who came to prominence in the democratic regime that succeeded him, and on the other the military network of conspirators that got rid of him. Fused with this unstable scenario was a sense of nationalistic irredentism in which the Serbs claimed vast swathes of the Balkans- from parts of Bulgaria all the way to Montenegro. Often these areas were no longer inhabited by people who deemed themselves Serbs: hence ironically that the first lands of greater Serbia to be returned to Serbia post the Balkan Wars (1912-13) were governed as colonies.

What Clark draws out though is an interesting sense of how these factors became intertwined. For example, irredentism made sense to a nation with a growing peasant population but without a manufacturing base (save for making plum jam!). Nationalism worked as a uniting force in a nation that was basically illiterate and where the main unifying force was the power of popular song. The army, in a country without a manufacturing base, became the only route out of the village. Terrorism was an acceptable alternative form of diplomacy in a country without any democratic strength- giving Serbia plausible deniability when for example terrorists supported rebellion in Macedonia in 1907. The conditions of July 1914 flowed out of the politics of a deeply dysfunctional society: a society in which politicians may have been aware of the activities of their own security services because of their insertion of double agents into those services. The picture of Serbia on the edge of war is a vivid one and makes sense of the seemingly mad decisions that the Serbs made- decisions which precipitated Austrian invasion.

Hard as it may be for me to recognise the politicians in charge of Serbia made what seemed to them rational decisions. One of the more penetrating points made by Robert McNamara in the Fog of War (the Erroll Morris documentary about his career) is that we cannot assume our opponents are irrational: they merely proceed from different premises. In the Cuban missile crisis, Castro, Kennedy and Krushchev were all rational actors: the same was true in Serbia in 1914.

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.