Reggie's Blog

Blogging the Odyssey - Book 14

2012-03-01T12:50:00.002Z

First, the Sparknotes summary:

Odysseus finds Eumaeus outside his hut. Although Eumaeus doesn’t recognize the withered traveler as his master, he invites him inside. There Odysseus has a hearty meal of pork and listens as Eumaeus heaps praise upon the memory of his former master, whom he fears is lost for good, and scorn upon the behavior of his new masters, the vile suitors. Odysseus predicts that Eumaeus will see his master again quite soon, but Eumaeus will hear none of it—he has encountered too many vagabonds looking for a handout from Penelope in return for fabricated news of Odysseus. Still, Eumaeus takes a liking to his guest. He puts him up for the night and even lets him borrow a cloak to keep out the cold. When Eumaeus asks Odysseus about his origins, Odysseus lies that he is from Crete. He fought with Odysseus at Troy and made it home safely, he claims, but a trip that he made later to Egypt went awry, and he was reduced to poverty. It was during this trip, he says, that he heard that Odysseus was still alive.

Eumaios is one of the good characters of the epic: loyal, hospitable and god-fearing. Remember that hospitality is one of the key indices of civilised behaviour in the Homeric world.

He has some views about the gods' intervention in human affairs:

The blessed gods do not love wicked conduct,
but they honour justice and rightful deeds of men....

....The god gives one thing and withholds another,
as he wishes in his heart; for he can do all things.

There is something of a tension here between a view of the gods as just and a view of them as self-willed. However, this merely points to a broader tension in the Odyssey over the nature of the gods' actions and indeed whether or not they are really in charge.

Odysseus spends a large chunk of the Book telling Eumaios tall tales about what he's been up to. He did something similar with Athene in Book 13. Odysseus' "Cretan Lies", which he will go on to repeat later in the epic, have been the subject of some comment from scholars. To my mind, their most obvious implication is that Odysseus' narration of his wanderings in the first half of of the epic may be equally unreliable - but I'm not convinced that that's what we're supposed to think.

Yet again, we are alerted to the importance of kleos, renown, this time in one of Eumaios' references to Odysseus:

....He was hated by all the gods,
greatly, in that they did not fell him among the Trojans
or in the hands of his friends, when he had finished with war.
All the Akhaians would have made a tomb for him
and he would have won great fame [kleos] for his son thereafter.

Of course, we know from Book 11 that the promise of kleos after death is an empty one.

The Book ends on the slightly dubious note of Odysseus manipulating Eumaios into giving him a cloak.

Blogging the Odyssey - Book 13

2012-02-27T09:00:00.001Z

First, the Sparknotes summary:

The account of his wanderings now finished, Odysseus looks forward to leaving Scheria. The next day, Alcinous loads his gifts on board the ship that will carry Odysseus to Ithaca. Odysseus sets sail as soon as the sun goes down. He sleeps the whole night, while the Phaeacian crew commands the ship. He remains asleep even when the ship lands the next morning. The crew gently carries him and his gifts to shore and then sails for home.

When Poseidon spots Odysseus in Ithaca, he becomes enraged at the Phaeacians for assisting his nemesis. He complains to Zeus, who allows him to punish the Phaeacians. Just as their ship is pulling into harbor at Scheria, the prophecy mentioned at the end of Book 8 is fulfilled: the ship suddenly turns to stone and sinks to the bottom of the sea. The onlookers ashore immediately recognize the consummation of the prophecy and resolve to abandon their custom of helping wayward travelers.

Back in Ithaca, Odysseus wakes to find a country that he doesn’t recognize, for Athena has shrouded it in mist to conceal its true form while she plans his next move. At first, he curses the Phaeacians, whom he thinks have duped him and left him in some unknown land. But Athena, disguised as a shepherd, meets him and tells him that he is indeed in Ithaca. With characteristic cunning, Odysseus acts to conceal his identity from her until she reveals hers. Delighted by Odysseus’s tricks, Athena announces that it is time for Odysseus to use his wits to punish the suitors. She tells him to hide out in the hut of his swineherd, Eumaeus. She informs him that Telemachus has gone in search of news of him and gives him the appearance of an old vagabond so that no one will recognize him.

We have now passed the half-way point of the epic. The first 12 books were concerned with Odysseus' wanderings, and the next 12 books will be concerned with his homecoming in Ithaka. The Homeric scholar Geoffrey Kirk suggested that the poet had artificially lengthened the second half of the epic so that it would bear comparison with the Iliad.

Odysseus is naturally glad to be back:

Then much-suffering goodly Odysseus was glad,
rejoicing in his own land [gaiéi], and he kissed the fertile earth.
Straight away, he prayed to the nymphs, raising his hands:
"Water-nymphs, daughters of Zeus, never did I
think I would see you again: but now with gentle prayers
I hail you! And I will give you gifts, as I did before,
if the daughter of Zeus, the driver of spoil, kindly
allows me to live and my dear son to grow up.

This passage highlights several themes of the epic: the almost mystical bond between Odysseus and his native land; the role of the gods in human affairs; the importance of human piety; and Telemakhos' transition to manhood.

The gods play a prominent role in the Book: Poseidon is continuing to make trouble for everyone, while Athene reappears to serve as Odysseus' guide and protector.

Finally, there is further mention of kleos (fame, reputation).

Holocaust denial

2012-02-13T22:07:00.001Z

What is Holocaust denial?

Holocaust denial is a historical and political movement which denies the central features of the accepted historical account of the Nazi genocide against the Jews which was perpetrated between approximately 1941 and 1945.

The central features of Holocaust denial (which is also known as negationism and, somewhat euphemistically, as historical revisionism) are as follows:

The Nazi regime had no policy of carrying out the mass murder of Jews.
There is no convincing evidence of such a policy, and what alleged evidence exists is unreliable or fabricated.
While a large number of number of Jews were killed by the Nazis, the death toll was much lower than the commonly accepted figure of 6 million.
Atrocities committed by the Allies, such as the mass bombing of Germany and Stalin's Gulag, were comparable to the Nazis' crimes against the Jews.
The camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere did not use gas chambers for the purpose of homicide.
The Allies invented the story of the Holocaust as wartime propaganda.
The Jews promoted the story of the Holocaust to advance their interests: to make money or to protect the state of Israel.

There are usually clear political motives for negationism:

[I]nventors and disseminators of the myth have varied motives. Many are outright fascists or neo-Nazis, captivated by the idea of a powerful national-racial community, and admirers of Hitler.... They are right-wing German nationalists or philo-Germans who want to rehabilitate Germany's reputation tarnished by the crime of genocide. By absolving the Third Reich of systematic mass murder, including more than a million Jewish children, these Nazi apologists hope to increase fascism's appeal for today's world, enhance Hitler's statutre, and reinvigorate German nationalism. The same outfits that promote Holocaust denial also distribute audiocassettes of Nazi marching songs, videocassettes glorifying life in the Third Reich and German victories in the war, and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.... (Perry and Schweitzer, Anti-Semitism, p177)

Holocaust denial is not a new phenomenon. The publicisation of the Nazis' atrocities at the end of the War was immediately followed in some quarters by dismissal of the reports as propaganda. The French fascist Maurice Bardèche went down this road in his Nuremberg, ou la Terre Promise (1948). His countryman Paul Rassinier (1906-1967), the founding father of Holocaust denial, was embarked on the same course by 1950. Rassinier was a complex figure, a man of the pacifist left rather than the neo-Nazi right.

It took the passage of a generation for Holocaust denial to become a serious movement, and negationism is essentially a product of the 1960s and 70s. In 1964, Rassinier published The Drama of the European Jews. In the preceding two years, the American Harry Elmer Barnes, another figure whose roots were on the left, had published two pamphets, Revisionism and Brainwashing and Blasting the Historical Black-out. Barnes corresponded with Rassinier and cited his work. In 1969, David Hoggan, who knew Barnes personally, wrote a book entitled The Myth of the Six Million. In the 1970s, these figures were joined by the likes of Robert Faurisson, Ernst Zündel, Thies Christopherson (a former SS officer), Arthur Butz, Richard Verrall and the Institute for Historical Review.

The denial movement reached something of a peak in the late 1980s and early 90s, and has declined somewhat since then. Holocaust denial spread to the Muslim world in the 80s and 90s, where it has become inextricably linked with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its highest profile sponsor is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Holocaust denial is a crime in a number of European jurisdictions, including Germany, Austria, Belgium, France and Spain. In other countries, negationism has been the subject of legal proceedings, such as the Canadian case of R v Zündel (1985) and the English case of Irving v Penguin Books (2000).

Did Six Million Really Die?

As an example of the genre, here is an extract from Richard Verrall's tract Did Six Million Really Die? (1974).

"[W]ell into the war period, the Germans continued to implement the policy of Jewish emigration. The fall of France in 1940 enabled the German Government to open serious negotiations with the French for the transfer of European Jews to Madagascar.... Eventually, however, [the Madagascar plan] was rendered impractical by the progress of the war... and on February 10th, 1942, the Foreign Office was informed that the plan had been temporarily shelved. This ruling, sent to the Foreign Office by Luther’s assistant, Rademacher, is of great importance, because it demonstrates conclusively that the term “Final Solution” meant only the emigration of Jews, and also that transportation to the eastern ghettos and concentration camps such as Auschwitz constituted nothing but an alternative plan of evacuation.... Only a month later, however, on March 7th, 1942, Goebbels wrote a memorandum in favour of the Madagascar Plan as a “final solution” of the Jewish question....

....[W]hat reliable statistics there are, especially those relating to emigration, are sufficient to show that not a fraction of six million Jews could have been exterminated....

It should be emphasised straight away that there is not a single document in existence which proves that the Germans intended to, or carried out, the deliberate murder of Jews.... The documents which do survive, of course, make no mention at all of extermination.... The [bulk] of the programme is supposed to have begun in March 1942, with the deportation and concentration of European Jews in the eastern camps of the Polish Government-General, such as the giant industrial complex at Auschwitz near Cracow. The fantastic and quite groundless assumption throughout is that transportation to the East, supervised by Eichmann’s department, actually meant immediate extermination in ovens on arrival....

The complete lack of documentary evidence to support the existence of an extermination plan has led to the habit of re-interpreting the documents that do survive.... The Germans had an extraordinary propensity for recording everything on paper in the most careful detail, yet among the thousands of captured documents of the S.D. and Gestapo, the records of the Reich Security Head Office, the files of Himmler’s headquarters and Hitler’s own war directives there is not a single order for the extermination of Jews or anyone else....

Should anyone be misled into believing that the extermination of the Jews was “proved” at Nuremberg by “evidence”, he should consider the nature of the Trials themselves, based as they were on a total disregard of sound legal principles of any kind. The accusers acted as prosecutors, judges and executioners; “guilt” was assumed from the outset...."

What actually happened?

It is not clear exactly when the idea of exterminating the Jews of Europe through mass murder was conceived. Some historians have pointed to a notorious speech made by Hitler to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, which contained the following passage:

Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe!

Nevertheless, Nazi policy was not explicitly genocidal at this point. From 1939 to mid-1941, the Nazis were resolved to deport the Jews under their control to a remote part of their territories. There was talk of expelling the Jews to Madagascar, a plan that originated in late 19th century antisemitic circles.

In practice, the Holocaust can be said to have begun with the mass shootings of Jews in the East by the SS Einsatzgruppen that followed the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. However, there is some doubt as to when the Einsatzgruppen killings were converted into a policy of industrially organised mass murder, with the familiar paraphernalia of death camps and gas chambers.

The order to commence the Holocaust is sometimes identified as a document referring to a "final solution" of the Jewish question signed by Hermann Göring on 31 July 1941 at the behest of Reinhard Heydrich's office, but it is not clear whether this document really is the smoking gun. Later recollections by Rudolf Höss (the commandant of Auschwitz) and Adolf Eichmann also place the order to begin the Holocaust in broadly this period, but it has been doubted whether they were correctly remembering the sequence of events.

It is more probable that autumn 1941 marked the point at which genocide definitively became state policy. In August 1941, Hitler sanctioned an extension of the requirement for Jews to wear the yellow star badge, the purpose apparently being to facilitate future moves against them. In September, Hitler decided that all Jews would be removed from core German territory. In October, Himmler banned any further Jewish emigration. At the same time, various prominent Nazis - Heydrich, Eichmann, Franz Rademacher, Ehrard Wetzel and Paul Wurm - were talking about a "total solution" of the Jewish question, "extermination through special measures", and the use of gassing, which had previously been employed in the Nazi "euthanasia" programme. In November, Alfred Rosenberg, who had recently met with Himmler, was speaking of a "biological eradication" of European Jews. On 25 October, Hitler himself was reported as referring in conversation to his January 1939 speech and as speaking with seeming approval of the idea of exterminating the Jews. On 12 December, Hitler told a group of senior Nazis in a private speech that the "destruction of the Jews" would be carried out. In public speeches in January and February 1942, he used words like "extirpate" and "disappear" in relation to the Jews, and again recalled his speech of January 1939.

Meanwhile, ominous physical steps were beginning to be taken. Experimental gassing of Soviet POWs began at Auschwitz in autumn 1941. On 13 October 1941, Himmler gave the order for the construction of what became the Belzec death camp. Finally, gassings of Jews commenced at Chelmno on 8 December 1941.

From this point onwards, there was no going back. On 20 January 1942, the Wannsee Conference took place, at which the senior bureaucrats of the Nazi regime were charged with implementing the policy decision that had been taken. Deportations of Jews began on a large scale in the spring. The most intensive phase of the Holocaust, characterised by the operation of the "Operation Reinhard" death camps, lasted roughly from this time to autumn 1943.

The discovery of the Holocaust

People knew about the Holocaust long before the end of the War.

From the spring of 1942, the British government's Code and Cypher School intercepted encrypted radio messages sent by the death camps camps to Berlin. However, their contents did not give a clear picture of what was going on.

From December 1942, the Polish government-in-exile in London began to publish reports about death camps in Poland and the use of poison gas.

In mid-1944, three reports on mass murder at Auschwitz became available. These had been written by a mixture of Jewish and non-Jewish escapees (Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzlar, Jerzy Tabeau, and Arnost Rosin and Czeslaw Mordowicz). The first two reports were in circulation by June 1944, at which point the New York Times picked up the story. The following month, the Red Army discovered an abandoned death camp at Majdanek, which included gas chambers, and this discovery was publicised in August 1944.

The reports of genocide were initially greeted with some degree of disbelief. The First World War had produced lurid atrocity stories, and British and American society was accordingly wary of such things. Scepticism had been shown towards stories of Nazi persecutions of Jews in the 1930s, and there was some antisemitism in British and American society. The attitude of Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of the British Government's Joint Intelligence Committee, was not atypical. As late as summer 1943, he said:

It is true that there have been references to the use of gas chambers in other reports; but these references have usually, if not always, been equally vague, and since they have concerned the extermination of Jews, have usually emanated from Jewish sources.

Personally, I have never really understood the advantage of the gas chamber over the simple machine gun, or the equally simple starvation method. These stories may or may not be true, but in any event I submit we are putting out a statement on evidence which is far from conclusive, and which we have no means of assessing.

He also stated:

The Poles, and to a far greater extent the Jews, tend to exaggerate German atrocities in order to stoke us up....

I think that we weaken our case against the Germans by publically giving credence to atrocity stories for which we have no evidence. These mass executions in gas chambers remind me of the stories of employment of human corpses during the last war for the manufacture of fat, which was a grotesque lie and led to the true stories of German enormities being brushed aside as being mere propaganda.

In early 1944, Arthur Koestler wrote in the New York Times Magazine:

....[T]he other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn't believe a word of it. As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops, and their attitude is the same. They don't believe in concentration camps, they don't believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka, or Belzec....

Evidence of the Holocaust

The foundation of the Holocaust deniers' case is that no written order issued by Adolf Hitler survives mandating the extermination of the Jewish people. Indeed, both Hitler and his subordinates took care to speak euphemistically about the genocide that they were perpetrating, using terms such as Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), Auswanderung (emigration), Evakuierung (evacuation) and abtransportieren (deport), and speaking as if the Madagascar plan was still on the table.

Nevertheless, enough Nazis did put pen to paper to leave a fairly damning trail of evidence. Deniers therefore have to give an innocent meaning to sinister terms like Vernichtung (annihilation), auszurotten (extirpate) and abschaffen (liquidate, remove) which appear in the record. Some of the evidence for the policy of genocide is set out below.

1. A note made by Heinrich Himmler of a conversation with Hitler on 16 December 1941:

Jewish question / to be extirpated [auszurotten] as partisans.

2. A diary entry by Josef Goebbels for 15 February 1942:

The Führer gives expression once again to his opinion that he is determined to clear out the Jews in Europe. One must not have any sentimental moods here. The Jews have earned the catastrophe which they are experiencing today. They will also experience their own annihilation. We must speed up this process with a cold ruthlessness, and we are thereby performing an inestimable service for humanity, which has suffered and been tortured by the Jews for millennia.

3. A speech by Adolf Hitler delivered on 24 February 1942:

Today the idea of our National Socialist, and that of the fascist revolution, have conquered great and powerful states, and my prophecy will find its fulfilment, that through this war Aryan humankind will not be annihilated, but the Jew will be exterminated.... And only then, with the removal of these parasites, will a long period of understanding between nations, and with it true peace, come upon the suffering world.

4. A diary entry by Goebbels for 27 March 1942:

The Jews are now being pushed out of the General Government, beginning near Lublin, to the East. A pretty barbaric procedure is being applied here, and it is not to be described in any more detail, and not much is left of the Jews themselves. In general one may conclude that 60% of them must be liquidated, while only 40% can be put to work. The former Gauleiter of Vienna, who is carrying out this action, is doing it pretty prudently and with a procedure that doesn't work too conspicuously. The Jews are being punished barbarically, to be sure, but they have fully deserved it. The prophesy that the Fuhrer issued to them on the way, for the eventuality that they started a new world war, is beginning to realise itself in the most terrible manner.

5. Hitler's comments to the Hungarian dictator Horthy on 17 April 1943:

If the Jews [in Poland] didn't want to work, they were shot. If they couldn't work, they had to perish. They had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, from which a healthy body can be infected. That was not cruel; if one remembered that even innocent natural creatures like hares and deer had to be killed so that no harm was caused. Why should one spare the beasts who wanted to bring us bolshevism? Nations who did not rid themselves of Jews perished.

6. A speech to generals by Himmler on 5 May 1944:

The Jewish question has been solved within Germany itself and in general within the countries occupied by Germany. It was solved in an uncompromising fashion in accordance with the life and death struggle of our nation in which the existence of our blood is at stake. You can understand how difficult it was for me to carry out this soldierly order and which I carried out from obedience and from a sense of complete conviction.

7. Another speech to generals by Himmler on 24 May 1944:

Another question which was decisive for the inner security of the Reich in Europe was the Jewish question. It was uncompromisingly solved after orders and rational recognition. I believe, gentlemen, that you know me well enough to know that I am not a bloodthirsty person. I am not a man who takes pleasure or joy when something rough must be done. However, on the other hand I have such good nerves and such a developed sense of duty I could say that much for myself. When I recognise something as necessary, I can implement it without compromise. I have not considered myself entitled, this concerns especially the Jewish women and children, to allow the children to grow into the avengers who will murder our fathers and grandchildren. That would have been cowardly. Consequently, the question was uncompromisingly resolved.

8. A speech by Hitler to army officers on 26 May 1944:

By removing the Jew, I abolished in Germany the possibility to build up a revolutionary core or nucleus. One could naturally say to me: Yes, couldn't you have solved this more simply – or not simply since all other means would have been more complicated – but more humanely? My dear officers, we are engaged in a life or death struggle. If our opponents win in this struggle, then the German people would be extirpated.

Great Political Mistakes - Thatcher and the poll tax

2012-02-05T12:09:00.001Z

This is a documentary that was first broadcast on BBC4 in 2005.

The programme begins with Sir Anthony Meyer's quixotic challenge for the Conservative Party leadership in November 1989. Thatcher won, of course, but a sixth of her colleagues refused to vote for her, and others said that they would never vote for her again. The deputy chief whip, Tristran Garel-Jones, warned her that her enemies would return the following year and strike her down. How had Britain's longest-serving prime minister of modern times come to this pass? A large part of the answer lay in the poll tax.

Thatcher's desire to reform the system of local government rates went back to her time as a minister in Ted Heath's government in the 70s. The reasoning behind the case for reform was that it was unfair for non-ratepayers to vote in high-spending Labour councils whose revenue would then be raised from a limited body of property-owners. For some, this was part of the logic of electoral democracy. For others, it was an intolerable inequity.

In 1984, Thatch assembled a committee to come up with a replacement for the rates. Ironically, this was headed by one of the party's leading moderates, William Waldergrave. The committee looked at various alternatives before coming up with a proposal for what was termed the "community charge". Everyone would be required to pay the same sum to local government without reference to their assets or income.

The proposal was presented to her in 1985 by Waldergrave, Patrick Jenkin and the Environment Secretary, Kenneth Baker. Crucially, the Chancellor, Nigel Lawson was kept out of the loop. Lawson apparently read about the proposal for the new tax in the papers. He thought that it was a "colossal error of judgement" and tried to block it.

The tax wended it way through the machinery of government with little proper scrutiny. It was presented to the Cabinet at the same meeting at which Michael Heseltine resigned. It mostly escaped the attention of the press. Meanwhile, Thatcher described the community charge as her "flagship" and took the fateful decision to associate herself with it personally.

A proposal to phase the tax in over a number of years - known as "dual running" - was abandoned. This hardline approach was contrary to the wishes of Ken Baker, who had by now been replaced as Environment Secretary by Nicholas Ridley. Meanwhile, Nigel Lawson, whose relationship with Thatcher was fraying, refused to provide extra funding to ease the introduction of the tax.

The tax was introduced in Scotland in 1989, to the fury of the locals. It was clear that the same reaction would be reproduced when the tax arrived in England and Wales the following year. This was the context of Meyer's failed leadership bid. Yet Thatcher was not interested in departing from her policy. A riot in protest at the tax broke out in London in March 1990, but this only confirmed her in her stance. She wrote off the opposition to the tax as far-left agitation. She seemed not to perceive that the real problem lay with her own core supporters, who hated the tax. They did not riot - but they did vote.

As everyone who lived through that period must remember, the tax was wildly unpopular. Up to 70% of the public were against it. By summer 1990, non-payment was running at up to 50% in some areas. Closer to home, Michael Heseltine publicly attacked the tax in The Times. It was an ominous sign. Backbenchers realised that their seats were on the line - and to get rid of the poll tax they had to get rid of Thatcher.

By the end of November 1990, it was all over. Charles Powell assesses that the poll tax was 40% responsible for Thatcher's downfall - together with 20% attributable to her stance on Europe and 40% to her general autocratic style.

Portillo on Thatcher - The Lady's not for Spurning

2012-02-05T11:31:00.000Z

This is a BBC4 documentary from 2009 presented by the former Tory minister Michael Portillo. The programme comes across as being a little lightweight, though Portillo enjoys enviable access to a range of senior Tories, including David Cameron, Ken Clarke and Michael Howard.

Some of the Tories who appear in the programme appear to be weirdly starstruck by Thatch. Gerald Howarth MP ludicrously calls her "the salvation of the nation". Portillo himself describes her as a "role model" and says that he was inspired to enter politics by her.

To her many, many detractors, Thatcher is the archetypal Conservative - it is generally overlooked that she was not an ordinary Tory at all. Norman Lamont says that she was "a very untypical Conservative", and a product of the 1970s. Portillo notes that she never had a majority of Thatcherites even in her Cabinet. Her subsequent influence on the Conservative Party has been extraordinary, pulling a large section of it closer to the right wing of the American Republican Party than to the British Conservative tradition of Salisbury, Baldwin and Macmillan. She endorsed the winners of four party leadership contests following her deposition in 1990. Only with the coming of David Cameron in 2005 did her influence begin to wane (thank God).

In her time, Thatcher fulfilled a certain purpose. The British economy in the 1970s was in need of liberalisation and the trade union movement was in need of reining in. But by the time she had won her historic third term her dragons were all dead. Ken Clarke remarks that she was "slightly losing the plot" by this time: she became impatient and excessively self-reliant, and her judgement deserted her. She forgot that she had her own electorate - the parliamentary Conservative party. Even when she was challenged for the leadership by Michael Heseltine, a talented and dangerous opponent, it never even occurred to her to canvass MPs for their support. Portillo singles out her parliamentary private secretary, Peter Morrison, as the man who cocked up her 1990 leadership campaign, although he denies the rumour that he punched him.

The dramatic and ruthless manner of Thatcher's overthrow poisoned the Conservative Party for the next decade and a half. Her acolytes were devastated at the treacherous assassination of their heroine. In his memoirs, John Major sets out the basic claim of the Thatcher Myth:

Conservative MPs ejected a leader at the height of her powers, presiding over a healthy party, a quiescent nation and a benign set of outside circumstances. It really was not like that.

Thatcher had also been rather less extreme in office than her supporters liked to remember. Chris Patten observes that her energetic style masked a rather more cautious approach to governance. David Cameron too suggests that she wasn't as uncompromising as the myth suggests.

Why was she brought down? The first issue that precipitated her demise was the poll tax, which David Mellor calls "the biggest domestic political mistake since the Second World War". Thatcher forced the tax onto the statute books against the wishes of her Cabinet and much of her party. As the documentary notes, there is something rather bizarre about the issue of local government finance bringing down a prime minister.

The second issue was the European Community. It was Thatcher's "No, No, No" to Europe that precipitated her downfall - and it was hardline Euroscepticism that became the true Thatcherite faith in the 1990s and 2000s. In some ways, this was a strange development. Thatcher had consistently, if reluctantly, supported the European project throughout her political career until the late 1980s. While she famously said of Maastricht "I could never have signed that treaty", the fact remains that she had supported EEC entry in 1973, campaigned for a Yes vote in the 1975 referendum and signed the Single European Act in 1986. As Norman Lamont points out, the Conservative Party in general had not been atavistically Eurosceptic either (leaving aside marginal and eccentric figures like Enoch Powell). In fact, it was the left wing of the Labour Party that was riven by anti-Europeanism in the 1970s and 80s.

During the Major years, Thatcher mostly refrained from attacking her successor in public, but she assiduously undermined him in private. The Conservative backbenchers of the 1990s were in many cases young men who had been inspired by her to enter politics, and she encouraged them to join the epic rebellion against the enactment of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992-93. John Major adopted a much more collective style of leadership than Thatcher had. He lacked confidence and was not a great decision-maker - but he did succeed in holding the Conservative Party together, no thanks to the Thatcherite rebels.

When the Tories were annihilated in the 1997 general election, Thatcher phoned Portillo to commiserate with him on his defeat in Enfield Southgate. "The fightback begins here", she told him. Well, up to a point. Portillo himself decided that the party needed to modernise, but William Hague ended up retreating to the party's Thatcherite comfort zone, adopting what Portillo describes as "policies that were 20 years out of date". Labour wheeled her out as a bogeyman in the 2001 election campaign, while the Tories fought what Kenneth Clarke describes as "one of the quaintest election campaigns I have ever seen", focusing on the quintessentially Thatcherite theme of keeping the UK out of the Euro.

In the 2001 party leadership election, Thatcher endorsed IDS, a hardline Eurosceptic who had been serially disloyal to John Major in the 1990s. Thatch had withdrawn from public life by the time of the 2005 election, but some of the right-wing themes chosen by Michael Howard for the campaign had a Thatcherite feel to them. Only after Labour had won yet another term in office did Howard accept that the party needed to change.

Then came David Cameron. Cameron says that Thatch was an "incredible leader", and that he is trying to learn lessons from her success. But he distanced himself from her policies following his election as leader, and people who were close to Thatcher criticised him. All the same, Thatcher retained her iconic status. Gordon Brown thought that it was a good idea to have her over for tea at Number 10 in September 2007.

Islamism - A couple of further comments

2012-02-05T11:21:00.000Z

1. Shi'a Islamism

In my earlier post on Islamism, I focused on Sunni Islamism. I want to add a few comments on the phenomenon of Shi'a Islamism, as associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

One reason why Islamism runs counter to the historical Islamic tradition is that the political ethos of Sunni Islam is profoundly conservative. Sunnism has no tradition of radical political activism or attempting to overthrow the local rulers. Shi'ism, by contrast, was a heretical minority sect which never developed the same uniformly deferential attitude to political institutions. Ervand Abrahamian has written:

Although the Shii clergy agreed that only the Hidden Imam had full legitimacy, they differed sharply among themselves regarding the existing states - even Shii ones. Some argued that since all rulers were in essence usurpers, true believers should shun the authorities like the plague....

Others, however, argued that one should grudgingly accept the state. They claimed that bad government was better than no government; that many imams had categorically opposed armed insurrections; and that Imam Ali... had warned of the dangers of social chaos....

Others wholeheartedly accepted the state - esepcially after 1501, when the Safavids established a Shii dynasty in Iran. (Khomeinism, p18-19)

Modern Shi'a Islamism, while being influenced by Sunni Islamist ideologues like Sayyid Qutb and Abul A'la Maududi, is inextricably linked with the imposing figure of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, who ruled Iran from the 1979 Islamic Revolution until his death 10 years later.

The Khomeinist version of Shi'a Islamism envisages that the state will be ruled by Muslim clerics - a system known as velayat-e faqih ("guardianship of the jurist"). In fact, this doctrine has very shallow roots in Shi'a tradition. For most Shi'a scholars across most of Islamic history, velayat-e faqih meant simply legal guardianship in the non-political sense. This was also the view of most of the other senior ayatollahs in Khomeini's time, notably the highly respected Iraq-based Grand Ayatollah Abul-Qassim al-Khoei. Khomeini himself only gradually came round to his own theory. It is not taught in his early work Kashf al-Asrar, published in 1942, and it first seems to have appeared in a series of lectures in early 1970 which were published under the title Velayat-e Faqih.

Khomeini didn't think much of western liberal democracy:

Those who do not govern according to the laws of Allah are infidels, oppressive and corrupt. Islam is a State; Islam is a government.... What the nation wants is an Islamic Republic, not just a Republic, not a democratic republic nor a democratic Islamic republic. (Cited in Hussin Mutalib, Islam in Malaysia, p10)

The actual system of government that has developed in Iran is partially democratic. There is an elected president and parliament, although the country's "supreme leader" (rahbare moazzam) is always an ayatollah, currently Ali Khamenei. These partially democratic elements were essentially pragmatic concessions necessitated by the political situation in Iran at the time of the Islamic Revolution.

Khomeini's view of the state was highly absolutist. Rather astonishingly, he thought that the Islamic state could override even the God-given precepts of the Shari'ah itself. He wrote in a 1988 letter to Ali Khamenei, then the country's president:

From your comments during the Friday prayers it would appear that you do not believe it is correct... that the state is the most important of God's ordinances and has precedence over all other derived ordinances of God. Interpreting what I have said to mean that the state [only] has its powers within the framework of the ordinances of God contradicts my statements. If the powers of the state were [only] operational within the framework of the ordinances of God, the extent of God's sovereignty and the absolute trusteeship given to the Prophet would be a meaningless phenomenon devoid of content. (Cited in Schirazi and O'Kane, The Constitution of Iran, p230)

2. Islamofascism?

I broached the question of how closely contemporary Islamism resembles historical European fascism.

Malise Ruthven has written in his book A Fury For God that it is "much too reductive" to speak of Islamofascism. Nevertheless, the resemblances are "compelling":

In his explicit hostility to reason... it is not Marx, grandchild of the Enlightenment, but Nietzsche... whom [Osama bin Laden's mentor Abdullah] 'Azzam echoes. The attachment to the lost lands of Palestine, Bukhara and Spain (unlike a rational and humane concern for Palestinian rights) is, like Mussolini's evocations of Ancient Rome, nostalgic in its irredentism, its "obliteration of history from politics". The invocation of religion is consistent with the way fascism and Nazism used mythical modes of thought to mobilize unconscious or psychic forces in the pursuit of power....

In similar vein, Christopher Hitchens has written:

The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind.... Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression... and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals. It has been very interesting to observe lately the way in which al-Qaida has been striving to counterfeit and recycle the propaganda of the anti-globalist and green movements....

Technically, no form of Islam preaches racial superiority or proposes a master race. But in practice, Islamic fanatics operate a fascistic concept of the "pure" and the "exclusive" over the unclean and the kufar or profane.... In the attitude to Jews, it is clear that an inferior or unclean race is being talked about (which is why many Muslim extremists like the grand mufti of Jerusalem gravitated to Hitler's side).

My own position is that Islamism is not so much a variety of fascism as a variation on the older Counter-Enlightenment tradition of theocratic monarchism. Influences from this tradition on Islamic thought have been identified by the orientalist Bernard Lewis:

Among the components in the mood of anti-Westernism, and more especially of anti-Americanism, were certain intellectual influences coming from Europe. One of these was from Germany, where a negative view of America formed part of a school of thought by no means limited to the Nazis but including writers as diverse as Rainer Maria Rilke, Ernst Junger, and Martin Heidegger. In this perception, America was the ultimate example of civilization without culture: rich and comfortable, materially advanced but soulless and artificial; assembled or at best constructed, not grown; mechanical, not organic; technologically complex but lacking the spirituality and vitality of the rooted, human, national cultures of the Germans and other "authentic" peoples. German philosophy, and particularly the philosophy of education, enjoyed a considerable vogue among Arab and some other Muslim intellectuals in the thirties and early forties, and this philosophic anti-Americanism was part of the message.

The debate on Britishness

2012-02-05T11:15:00.001Z

One of the more unusual features of the last decade in politics was a debate on British identity and "Britishness". Though this has to a large extent been eclipsed by the financial crisis and the recession, it is worth reflecting on how the debate arose and what emerged from it.

The failure of multiculturalism?

Large-scale immigration has been a feature of British life since the end of the Second World War. While this almost inevitably led to a growth in racism and community tensions in some parts of British society, the widespread progressive view was that the best response to immigration from Asian, African and Caribbean cultures was American-style multiculturalism rather than French-style assimilation. In 1966, the great reforming Home Secretary Roy Jenkins said:

I do not regard [integration] as meaning the loss, by immigrants, of their own national characteristics and culture. I do not think that we need in this country a ‘melting pot’, which will turn everybody out in a common mould, as one of a series of carbon copies of someone’s misplaced vision of the stereotyped Englishman… I define integration, therefore, not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.

Lord Parekh, the leading academic theorist of multiculturalism, has this to say about it:

It is based on two basic beliefs. First, culture matters to people as an important source of their values and ideals, the basis of family cohesion, and the source of continuity. It therefore deserves respect and should not be undermined in a zeal for assimilationist integration.

Second, no culture is self-contained and self-authenticating. It has its strengths, and limitations, treasures and blind spots, and needs to engage in a critical dialogue with others. A multicultural society is one where cultures interact and learn from each other rather than one composed of sealed ghettos.

The other side of this coin is that Britishness was seen as a reactionary and backward notion. Linda Colley famously argued in 1992 that Britain was

an invented nation heavily dependent for its 'raison d’etre' on a broadly Protestant culture, on the threat and tonic of recurrent war, especially war with France, and on the triumphs, profits, and Otherness represented by a massive overseas empire.

To be sure, there was a tradition of patriotic feeling on the left, in which national pride was qualified by an awareness of the social injustices in contemporary British society. George Orwell is exemplary here:

In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.... Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery.... The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

Nevertheless, progressive thought both eschewed the notion of native British national sentiment and favoured cultural pluralism as a mechanism for addressing the issues arising out of large-scale immigration.

Britishness and British identity, by contrast, didn't pose a problem for the right, in either its moderate or militant guises. Most notoriously, there was the crude racism of the National Front, together with the slightly less crude ethnic chauvinism of the Powellite right. Then there was more traditional conservative patriotism, which was last on show in all its anachronistic pomp at the time of the Falklands War (it survives, in a more camp and less militaristic register, in the Last Night of the Proms). Finally, and increasingly, there was the anti-immigrant sentiment of the new right (as exemplified by this typically charm-free offering from Mark Steyn).

It was around the turn of the millennium that things started to change. The number of immigrants rose significantly in the 1990s. Asylum claims in particular increased substantially after Labour won the 1997 general election. In 2001, there came the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which raised questions around the relationship between multiculturalism and radical Islamism, and the "milltown riots", involving working-class white and Asian communities in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley.

What happened now was something very strange, at least by comparison with what had come before. Multiculturalism began to be attacked from the left. An early example of this was articulated by the Conservative politician David Willetts in 1998:

The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties which they themselves could face. If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask, "Why should I pay for them when they are doing things I wouldn’t do?" This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the US you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.

A lively debate developed on the centre-left. In 2005, the Blairite magazine Prospect addressed the subject of British identity. The Fabian Society got interested in the issue too, and subsequently chose as the theme of its 2006 conference "Who do we want to be? The future of Britishness". In 2005, Vince Cable wrote in a report for Demos:

While ‘multiculturalism’ may have played a positive role in encouraging respect for other faiths and traditions it has had the negative effects of stereotyping, of encouraging exaggerated deference to unrepresentative ‘community leaders’ and creating in the political world the dangerous – and erroneous – idea that Britain’s ethnic minorities are ‘vote banks’ rather than aggregations of individuals. And as Trevor Phillips among others has argued, it also detracts from the important task of creating a sense of shared identity called ‘Britishness’, and allows racialism to flourish behind an outward veneer of politeness and respect for different ways of life.

New Labour attempted to use legislation and executive orders to bolster British identity, notably in the form of school citizenship classes (2002), citizenship ceremonies (2004), the "Life in the UK" citizenship test (2005) and a relaxation of the rules on flying the union flag on public buildings (2007). (When I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s, you didn't regularly see union flags flying in public, either on public buildings or elsewhere. Displaying the flag was not far off being a political act - and a right-wing one to boot.) In 2008, Lord Goldsmith produced a report entitled Citizenship: Our Common Bond (which I blogged about here). Towards the end of the 2000s, both Labour and the Conservatives flirted with the idea of a British bill of rights to complement or replace the Human Rights Act.

Gordon Brown's interest in Britishness was well-known. One of his first acts in office was to publish a green paper entitled The Governance of Britain, which contained a section on national identity and citizenship. Two other Labour ministers, Ruth Kelly, and Liam Byrne, wrote a pamphlet for the Fabian Society in 2007 on the same subject.

This stuff matters

This debate cannot be dismissed as a frivolous jeu d'esprit which has rightly slipped down the agenda, to be replaced with more important matters now that the economy has crashed. Anxieties around culture and identity are central to the rise of extremist parties across Europe, from the Front National in France to Jobbik in Hungary:

[A]ll of their supporters share one core feature: their profound hostility towards immigration, multiculturalism and rising cultural and ethnic diversity. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that these citizens are motivated by feelings of economic competition from immigrants and minority groups, feelings of cultural threat are the most important driver of their support. For these citizens, the decisive motive is the feeling that immigration and rising diversity threaten their national culture, the unity of their national community and way of life.

In 2005, the ETHNOS consultancy found that there was a sense of resentment among white Brits about perceived favouritism shown to members of ethnic minorities, coupled with feelings of victimisation among those minorities themselves:

[M]any white participants said that they did not know any longer what it meant to be British. They felt strongly that many of the attributes which they thought of as essentially British were no longer observable in their everyday life.... [A] large proportion of the discussion focused on the decline of some idealised notion of Britishness that had existed in the past....

This was accompanied by confusion and dejection about contemporary Britishness. There was no equivalent sense of loss and decline in the groups made up of people from ethnic minorities. Their views were more focused on the difficulties of the present....

Most white participants in the study attributed what they perceived as a decline in Britishness to an increase in the ethnic minority population of Britain, which in turn placed financial demands on welfare services and encouraged the growth of moral pluralism, and the ‘politically correctness’ of national, regional and local government and of the European Union in dealing with ethnic minorities. Both white and Muslim respondents felt victimised, and the former predicted civil unrest as a result of growing tension between the white majority and the ethnic minority, especially Muslim, populations.

Islam, Islamism and Islamophobia

Since the 1990s, Britain's Muslim community has been at the centre of debates about integration and identity. This was something of a new development. Prior to the 1990s, the community fault-line had been defined by racial or national origin ("Asian", "Pakistani") rather than by religion.

The Satanic Verses controversy in 1989 was instrumental in this regard. Also of significance was an influx of Islamist ideas from abroad (spread by organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir and preachers like Omar Bakri) and concern over the fate of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya. Increasing concerns about the perceived threats of Islam and Islamophobia grew. In February 1997, the Runnymede Trust produced a milestone report entitled Islamophobia: A challenge for us all. The BNP shifted its generalised racism and anti-semitism to a focus on the Muslim community. Then came 9/11, followed by an influx of Muslim immigrants in the 2000s (the Muslim population reportedly increased from 1,591,000 in 2001 to 2,869,000 in 2010). Anxieties about culture and identity were not assuaged when Muslim schoolgirls unsuccessfully tried to use the Human Rights Act to challenge bans on wearing forms of Islamic dress (R (Begum) v Headteacher and Governors of Denbigh High School [2006] UKHL 15; R (X) v Head Teacher and Governors of Y School [2008] 2 All ER 249).

It is no coincidence that David Cameron delivered his condemnation last year of "state multiculturalism" in the context of a speech on radicalisation and Islamist terrorism. Indeed, it appears that cultural factors are an important driver of radicalisation. The Government's anti-radicalisation "Prevent" strategy notes:

Some recent academic work suggests that radicalisation occurs as people search for identity, meaning and community.... We note that organisations working on Prevent have also found evidence to support the theory that identity and community are essential factors in radicalisation....

[The 2010 Citizenship Survey] has also shown that people who distrust Parliament, who believe that ethnic and faith groups should not mix, and who see a conflict between being British and their own cultural identity are all likely to be more supportive of violent extremism.

What is Britishness anyway?

There have been numerous surveys on this question over the last few years.

In 2004, the 21st British Social Attitudes Survey included figures measuring the importance attached by respondents to different elements of Britishness:

% who say "very" or "fairly important"

Speak English - 87%
British Citizenship - 83%
Respect laws/institutions - 82%
Feel British - 74%
Born in Britain - 70%
Lived life in Britain - 69%
Sharing customs/traditions - 52%
Have British ancestry - 46%
Be a Christian - 31%

In 2005, the Commission for Racial Equality commissioned a survey on the same issue. This survey found that, while different participants bought into the concept of Britishness to differing degrees, there was a general consensus on what it consisted of. This consensus clustered around eight themes:

Geography. Britain was identified as an island nation with a distinctive topography of its own.
National symbols. In particular, the union flag and royal family were repeatedly mentioned.
People. The survey identified competing views of the British as being English; as being a mixture of English, Scottish and Welsh; and as being inherently diverse and multicultural.
Values and attitudes. Characteristically British attributes identified by the participants included freedom, fairness, tolerance, and also reserve, pride, a work ethic and a community spirit - together with drunkenness and hooliganism.
Cultural habits and behaviour. These include queueing, sport (football, cricket and rugby in particular) and certain types of food and drink.
Citizenship as a legal status, and possession of a passport.
The English language.
Achievements - political and historical, technological, sporting and cultural.

This is as persuasive a list as any survey is likely to turn up.

Moving forward?

In a sense, this whole debate is artificial. National identities are human constructs, not eternal verities dictated by God or Nature. Ethnic and cultural homogeneity is a bit of a myth. The American sociologist Professor Todd Gitlin has written, a little polemically:

[I]n the history of nations, there was rarely as much cultural homogeneity as partisans of purism imagine. Hyphenated nations, replete with complexities of language, religion and custom, were more the rule than the exception. A history of hyphenated identities is usually masked by the official cultivators of national uniformities. Bombastic jingos airbrush the complexities out and read their present day fantasies of monolithic nations back into the myths they call history.

Nevertheless, there are grounds for thinking that both the left and the right have got Britishness wrong - the right by distilling it into a narrow selection of icons and fetishes, and by linking it with a generalised hostility to immigrants, and the left by mistaking national sentiment for nationalism and trying to replace it with a multiculturalism which is too ill-defined to support a cohesive society. A 2008 report suggested:

Those on the left have misunderstood the form and function of patriotism but those on the right have got it wrong too: they think patriotism means adherence to a set of institutions, historical narratives and deference to certain manifestations of the mystic nation.... What makes it into the right’s pantheon of patriotism is largely determined by a narrow, historical and sometimes mythological set of beliefs about Britain, which are unbendable, unchanging and increasingly inaccessible....

The fetishisation of particular institutions and traditions as markers of patriotism has contributed to a disconnect between what people believe patriotism is in principle and how they feel it in reality.... The right often answers this complaint with a call to arms – to re-engage the public with those symbols and institutions, but this, like the left’s attempt to provide alternative narratives, gets patriotism quite wrong....

The question of how to ride the tiger of British national identity without it turning into an ugly exclusionist nationalism is one that still requires an answer.

Blogging the Odyssey - Book 12

2012-01-31T21:20:00.002Z

First, the Sparknotes summary:

Odysseus returns to Aeaea, where he buries Elpenor and spends one last night with Circe. She describes the obstacles that he will face on his voyage home and tells him how to negotiate them. As he sets sail, Odysseus passes Circe’s counsel on to his men. They approach the island of the lovely Sirens, and Odysseus, as instructed by Circe, plugs his men’s ears with beeswax and has them bind him to the mast of the ship. He alone hears their song flowing forth from the island, promising to reveal the future. The Sirens’ song is so seductive that Odysseus begs to be released from his fetters, but his faithful men only bind him tighter.

Once they have passed the Sirens’ island, Odysseus and his men must navigate the straits between Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla is a six-headed monster who, when ships pass, swallows one sailor for each head. Charybdis is an enormous whirlpool that threatens to swallow the entire ship. As instructed by Circe, Odysseus holds his course tight against the cliffs of Scylla’s lair. As he and his men stare at Charybdis on the other side of the strait, the heads of Scylla swoop down and gobble up six of the sailors.

Odysseus next comes to Thrinacia, the island of the Sun. He wants to avoid it entirely, but the outspoken Eurylochus persuades him to let his beleaguered crew rest there. A storm keeps them beached for a month, and at first the crew is content to survive on its provisions in the ship. When these run out, however, Eurylochus persuades the other crew members to disobey Odysseus and slaughter the cattle of the Sun. They do so one afternoon as Odysseus sleeps; when the Sun finds out, he asks Zeus to punish Odysseus and his men. Shortly after the Achaeans set sail from Thrinacia, Zeus kicks up another storm, which destroys the ship and sends the entire crew to its death beneath the waves. As had been predicted, only Odysseus survives, and he just barely. The storm sweeps him all the way back to Charybdis, which he narrowly escapes for the second time. Afloat on the broken timbers of his ship, he eventually reaches Ogygia, Calypso’s island. Odysseus here breaks from his story, stating to the Phaeacians that he sees no reason to repeat to them his account of his experience on Ogygia.

This is the last Book of the first half of the Odyssey, the part that deals with Odysseus' wanderings. From this point onwards, the narrative turns to the circumstances of his return and reintegration into his household and family in Ithaka.

This Book contains the well-known story of Odysseus and the Sirens, with Odysseus using Kirke's famous trick in order to become the first man ever to hear the song of the Sirens and survive.

The question of what song the Sirens sang later became something of a metaphor for obscure or unknowable knowledge, but Homer is quite explicit about the lyrics of the Sirens' song, if not its melody:

Come here, much-praised Odysseus, great glory of the Greeks,
halt your ship, so that you may listen to our voice.
For no-one has ever yet sailed past this black island
before hearing the honey-sweet voice of our mouths -
indeed, he has joy in it and sails on with greater knowledge.
For we know everything that in the wide land of Troy
the Argives and Trojans endured by the will of the gods,
and we know everything that happens on the fertile earth.

Some scholars have argued that the Sirens (together with certain other characters in Greek mythology) are evidence of an association in the ancient Greek male mind between women and danger. But arguably the most striking thing about the episode is that the Sirens try to tempt Odysseus not with offers of anything predictable - sex, or wealth, or even kleos - but with an offer of knowledge, expressed in beautiful music. A difficult proposition indeed to resist.

The song also gives us a whiff of the past, in the mention of the Trojan War - another indication of the importance of memory and nostalgia in the poem.

The dominant theme of the Book is perhaps the power of the gods. It is the anger of Hyperion, the sun-god, which seals the fate of Odysseus' remaining companions. Zeus makes another appearance as the king of the gods, to whose authority the other deities are subject.

Thatcher - The Downing Street Years

2012-01-28T15:03:00.001Z

This is a BBC series that was made in 1993 to coincide with the release of the first volume of Margaret Thatcher's memoirs, The Downing Street Years.

At the start of the series, we see a surprisingly young and feminine Thatch taking up the reins of government. She came to power in a time and place that are already quite remote from the Britain of 2012. The Britain of the 1970s - the "sick man of Europe" - was a land of power cuts and strikes in which the Chancellor of the Exchequer had gone cap in hand to the IMF and it was seriously suggested that the UK would be the first developed country in the world to go back to being a developing one. For Thatcher, the notion that Britain was in decline was intolerable. She likens the task that faced her to "trying to run up a down escalator".

Thatcher led a party that was already divided following her deposal of Edward Heath in 1975. Some of her closest colleagues were aristocratic "Wets" from the party's left wing - Heathites like Francis Pym and Jim Prior, and Peter Carrington, a wealthy hereditary peer. The Wets didn't like Thatcher at all, and it didn't help that she didn't share either their sex or their social background. Thatch was deeply, proudly middle-class, almost to the point of chippiness. She says that the old-school Tory grandees thought that "the grocer's daughter didn't really know how things were done". A meritocratic capitalist, she dismisses their sense of social responsibility as a "guilt complex" originating from their inherited wealth.

Amid the mounting damage of the 1979-81 recession and Thatcher's hardline economic policies, the Wets tried to force a move to the left of the sort that Ted Heath had executed a decade previously. Unemployment was heading for 3 million and inflation stood at 22%. Some ministers - including John Nott and John Biffen - duly moderated their policies, but the Iron Lady was having none of it. What seems to have saved her was the unswerving loyalty of the deputy prime minister, Willie Whitelaw. Whitelaw was an unlikely ally - an old-school aristocratic Tory who had hoped to succeed Heath - but his support proved to be invaluable. Every prime minister needs a Willie.

Fortunately for Thatcher, she was bailed out by General Galtieri (plus a suicidally inept Labour Party, though the series doesn't elaborate on this). As with Winston Churchill in World War II, Thatcher's political and character flaws turned into strengths in the circumstances of war. As Neil Kinnock wryly observes, Thatcher's greatest attribute was having the right enemies. General Galtieri came straight from Central Casting, as did Arthur Scargill, and indeed Kinnock himself and his predecessor Michael Foot.

Thatcher saw her mission as being to break the social democratic consensus that had dominated British politics since the Second World War. Her view of politics was absolutist and Manichaean. She makes it clear that she values toughness, clarity and "guts" above negotiation, compromise and "appeasement". Her ire was not reserved for those on the socialist left: Conservative moderates of the Wet persuasion were "traitors" who had unpardonably accepted the fact of Britain's decline. She says that she wanted to be respected, not liked, and she concedes that "diplomacy wasn't my forte". At one point, she says contemptuously: "They're a weak lot, some of them in Europe, you know. Weak. Feeble." This is in the context of the refusal of Britain's European partners to co-operate with the American bombing of Libya in 1986, so Thatcher is effectively saying that agreeing to everything that the Americans ask for is a mark of strength. She seems to think that the poll tax could have been made a success by sheer effort of will, if only her colleagues had kept their nerve.

At times, it seems that she saw running a government as not being essentially difficult to leading a religious sect. She explicitly speaks the language of religious faith when she explains the reason for her downfall following the resignations of Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe: "my trouble was that the believers had fallen away". She also says that she never had as many as six true blue Thatcherites in her team. A lesser politician might wonder what this said about the merits of her policies, but not Thatch.

Yet she comes across as being something more than a one-dimensional monomaniac. Her performance on camera is lively, and she speaks vigorously and intelligently. It is apparent that her profound seriousness is balanced by a degree of humour. She was quite capable of being flirtatious with men around her ("unmercifully", according to Alistair McAlpine), and she apparently had a soft spot for handsome male colleagues like Humphrey Atkins. She was considerate to those whom she worked closely with. She wept when her speechwriter gave her her famous quotation from St Francis of Assisi. She expected loyalty, but she showed it as well. She backed her trusted adviser Sir Alan Walters even when it meant alienating Nigel Lawson. She opposed the Major government's pit closure programme out of loyalty to the miners who had kept working during the Scargill strike, and she reveals that she vetoed a similar plan while in office.

Moreover, the series does not obscure the greatest irony of Margaret Thatcher's prime ministerial career: that the shrill right-wing ideologue showed the same instinct for political pragmatism that she despised in others. She signed up to the Lancaster House agreement that put Robert Mugabe in power in Zimbabwe. Her deal on Britain's EEC rebate, which has since entered Eurosceptic mythology as a glorious victory over the greasy foreigners, was in fact a compromise. She was furious that her demands had been watered down - but she accepted the deal. In the difficult aftermath of the Brighton bombing, she repeatedly executed U-turns on issues like the privatisation of British Leyland. When Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson tried to strongarm her into taking Britain into the ERM, she resisted - but she ended up doing just that. The makers of the series might have added that she also signed the Single European Act and the Anglo-Irish Agreement, increased NHS spending, failed to shrink the overall size of the state and maintained a top tax rate of 60%. It was only after she left office that she was able to give free rein to her ideological prejudices without having to worry about the mundane matters of staying in office and winning elections.

Another striking feature of Thatcher's time in office is that she was very lucky. In spite of later attempts by her followers to airbrush her image, the fact is that she was not a wildly popular, invincible leader. She could have been brought down by any number of real or hypothetical circumstances: the ravages of the 1979-81 recession, a mutiny of the Wets backed by Willie Whitelaw, a resurgent Labour Party led by Denis Healey, a failure to retake the Falklands, a failure to defeat the NUM, the toxic aftermath of the Westland affair (the seriousness of which is mostly forgotten today).... Whisperings about a change in leadership started as early as the time of her historic third election victory in 1987. When Willie Whitelaw retired the following year, she lost a very important restraining influence.

When the end came, it was famously dramatic. She had become increasingly autocratic and out of touch. She began to depend on unelected courtiers like Charles Powell, Bernard Ingham and Sir Alan Walters. In strenuously backing the poll tax, she succeeded in alienating many of her own supporters, not to mention swathes of Conservative voters. Most seriously, she made the fatal mistake of crossing her two closest allies, the Chancellor Nigel Lawson and the Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe. Red flags started to appear in 1989. Lord Carrington was dispatched by the men in grey suits to tell her that it was time to go. Lawson resigned from the Cabinet, and the pro-European backbencher Sir Anthony Meyer challenged her for the party leadership. The following year, her bullying of Geoffrey Howe came home to roost. On 1 November 1990, Howe resigned - and effectively took Thatcher with him.

Within days, her old enemy Michael Heseltine had launched a bid for the party leadership, and he won enough votes in the first round of the ensuing contest to force a second ballot. Thatcher's Cabinet colleagues realised that the game was up. They told her that they would back her if she fought on (with the exception of Malcolm Rifkind), but that she could not hope to win. Thatch took this advice - which was perfectly sound in itself - very personally. She describes it, in a phrase which has passed into the political lexicon, as "treachery with a smile on its face". She still seems to be in denial about what happened, perhaps not altogether surprisingly.

The Spirit Level debate

2012-01-27T08:54:00.004Z

It is now three years since Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's book The Spirit Level (TSL) was published, so enough time has now passed to allow the dust to settle on the debate that it generated.

The thesis of TSL is simple. For most of history, and in many countries today, finding the basic necessities of life has been the principal challenge for most people. In wealthy modern societies, however, this problem has largely been solved thanks to decades of economic development and growth. The incidence of social problems, such as ill health and violence, no longer correlates with the general overall wealth of a society. Instead, it correlates with something else - and that something is relative economic inequality within society.

This is not a new insight. There is a substantial body of evidence going back many years on the correlation between inequality and ill health and inequality and violence. However, TSL broke new ground in assembling a fairly comprehensive body of evidence linking inequality with a range of social pathologies, from homicides and mental illness to teenage pregnancies and prison population and from obesity to levels of numeracy and literacy. The authors also argued that inequality of outcome is related to inequality of opportunity, and that a lack of the former depresses the latter. In drawing these links, they drew both on international statistics and on figures from the different US states.

Interestingly, the authors also note that there has been a long-term rise in anxiety and depression which appears to be independent of inequality levels and which is attributable to the rise of mass society and the breakup of traditional small communities (which, of course, have their own problems and injustices).

Not surprisingly, TSL has been welcomed with open arms by the political left, but it is worth emphasising that its political implications are wide open to debate. Great political issues can rarely be settled by graphs and statistics. It is noteworthy that TSL has been praised by a number of figures on the right, including David Cameron, Michael Gove and writers in the Telegraph and the Economist. Here are some reasons why the thesis of TSL need not be incompatible with political conservatism:

Economic equality is a key issue for the left, but it doesn't follow that inequality need be of no concern for people on the right - particularly if it is the source of social problems which affect potential Conservative voters. In fact, there is a long history of concern about inequality among British Conservatives. "One Nation" Toryism takes its name from Disraeli's complaint that the rich and the poor formed two separate nations.
Recognising that inequality is problematic does not commit us to a particular political agenda in tackling it. The old-school socialist model of large-scale redistribution through high taxes and a big state is only one possible response. Some of the most egalitarian societies in TSL's data sets (Japan, New Hampshire) have unusually low levels of social spending because their markets work in such a way as to distribute wealth equitably. Meanwhile, in other, less equal societies, problems which are worsened by inequality, like crime and ill health, end up requiring increased public spending.
Inequality only comes to the foreground as a source of social problems in wealthy societies. It is still more important for developing countries to become rich than to become equal. To this extent, TSL need not be incompatible with free-market policies on global trade and development.

Having said this, there was something of a knee-jerk response to TSL in some sections of the political right. The assumption appears to have been that the research leads inexorably to the conclusion that radical redistributive policies ought to be put in place to engineer economic equality. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that criticism from this quarter was ideologically motivated. To be fair, Wilkinson and Pickett themselves are open to this sort of criticism too. While much of TSL is taken up with rather dry academic discussion, they do not succeed in maintaining a tone of Olympian scholarly objectivity in the book, and there are fairly clear indications that their political sympathies are on the left. Indeed, there is external evidence that Richard Wilkinson's political commitments are some distance to the left of centre.

There appear to have been three major critiques of the book: Christopher Snowdon's The Spirit Level Delusion, Peter Saunders' Beware False Prophets, and The Spirit Illusion by three Swedish researchers. Wilkinson and Pickett have produced a combined response to these criticisms (plus some additional material in the second edition of TSL), and the critics have in turn produced counter-responses to the response.

There are basically two categories of criticism of TSL. The first type of criticism seems to me to be questionable, while the second seems to be valid, at least in part. The overall result, in my opinion, is that the thesis of TSL is weakened but not discredited.

Critiques in the first category focus on technical questions relating to Wilkinson and Pickett's data. Sometimes, the critics suggest that the authors ought to have used data from more, or fewer, or different countries. Sometimes, they argue that they have wrongly identified correlations between inequality and specific social problems, drawn on inappropriate data sources or ignored researchers who have arrived at different conclusions. Wilkinson and Pickett reject these criticisms and accuse their critics of wanting to move the evidential goalposts because they don't like their conclusions. They affirm that statistical relationships between inequality and social problems have been repeatedly discovered and confirmed by other researchers using different data sets, and that TSL predicted the results of research that was published after the book came out.

A non-specialist like me isn't in a position to adjudicate this dispute, but my impression is that the criticisms made under this heading don't fundamentally affect the validity of TSL's thesis. The natural suspicion is that both sides of the debate are, to whatever degree, trying to cherry-pick the evidence and shift the goalposts in their preferred direction. However, the evidence cited by Wilkinson and Pickett, taken as a whole, is so substantial and varied that the technical criticisms made under this heading don't seem sufficient to refute it.

A more substantial criticism is that TSL mostly ignores the history and culture of different societies. It has been argued that incidences of the social problems identified by Wilkinson and Pickett correlate not (only) with economic inequality but with international cultural groupings: the Scandinavian countries often appear at one end of the graphs in TSL and the English-speaking countries at the other. It has similarly been argued that the divergences between different US states are explicable in terms of differences between Northern and Southern culture and the culture of caucasians and African Americans. It has also been argued that east Asian countries tend to cluster together despite having differing levels of inequality.

Part of the issue here is whether high levels of social cohesion are the result of economic equality or a cause of it. Peter Saunders writes:

Sweden and Japan... have the income distributions they have because of the kinds of societies they are. They are not cohesive societies because their incomes are equally distributed; their incomes are equally distributed because they evolved as remarkably cohesive societies. To explain why, we have to look to their histories and at factors like social homogeneity and closure, but The Spirit Level resists any such analysis.

Saunders has a partisan political agenda of his own, but these are reasonable criticisms. A simple causal model which singles out economic inequality as the cause of multifarious social problems is less attractive than a web of causation which posits different factors, including cultural ones, that influence and interact with each other. Wilkinson and Pickett succeed in establishing the basic point that economic inequality is associated with undesirable things happening in society - that much is difficult to deny in the light of the evidence - but inequality should not be used as a simple monocausal explanatory key for complex social problems, any more than simplistic ideas about sex differences should be used to promote a Mars-and-Venus model of human gender. To be fair, Wilkinson and Pickett insist that TSL isn't supposed to be a "theory of everything". But they do focus sharply on inequality without contextualising it, and they are much too quick to downplay the importance of historical and cultural factors. This approach is perhaps a reflection of their backgrounds, which are in "hard" science (epidemiology) rather than anthropology or the humanities.

So TSL ultimately succeeds in establishing its central thesis, that there is a relationship between inequality and social dysfunction, albeit we are entitled to question whether this relationship is always strong or straightforward. It is worth reiterating that this does not close the debate between left and right on economic policy, or indeed anything else. The data presented by Wilkinson and Pickett, however, deserves to shape political thinking on a range of key contemporary issues. It cannot be ignored.

Cameron on the European Court of Human Rights

2012-01-25T18:05:00.001Z

David Cameron has delivered a well publicised speech on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg.

The ECtHR is the guardian of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), a European human rights treaty that was drawn up in 1950, at a time when fascism, communism and the Second World War were still recent memories or present realities. In 1998, the ECHR was incorporated into UK domestic law through the Human Rights Act (HRA), but the UK remains bound in international law to comply with the rulings of the Strasbourg court. It should be noted that the ECtHR has nothing to do with the European Union, except insofar as the EU is a signatory to the ECHR. Instead, the ECtHR is part of the 47-nation Council of Europe, an organisation famously mainly for doing nothing other than running the Court.

It looks like the PM is concerned that the Court's cases are too numerous and trivial: he wants the caseload to be lighter, and focused on the more important complaints. He also wants the Court to show more respect for the discretion of national governments (a doctrine known in Strasbourg as the "margin of appreciation" or "subsidiarity"), in the face of "credible democratic anxiety" about the Court's activities. He suggested that

the very concept of rights is in danger of slipping from something noble to something discredited - and that should be of deep concern to us all.

And at the heart of this concern is not antipathy to human rights; it is anxiety that the concept of human rights is being distorted.

The ECtHR has certainly received sharp criticism, which I have blogged about elsewhere. Such criticism is associated with the political right, but it has been backed by Lord Hoffmann, a senior retired judge of impeccably liberal credentials. Criticism of the ECHR and the HRA is also commonplace in certain sections of the press, either because Euro-bashing sells papers or because the ECHR contains privacy protections that newspaper proprietors dislike. The most recent controversy over the Court arose last week, when it upheld a challenge by the radical Islamist activist Abu Qatada to an attempt by the UK Government to deport him to Jordan.

The Society of Conservative Lawyers has addressed the shortcomings of the ECHR/HRA system at some length, and their critique deserves to be quoted in extenso:

....A convention which was intended to protect “human rights and fundamental freedoms” has become associated instead in the public mind, not without some justification, with dubious compensation claims, complaints about the trivial, the protection of lawbreakers rather than the law abiding majority, a transfer of decision making on economic and social policy to judges and the enrichment of lawyers. “Human rights” claims feature significantly in compensation claims brought by prisoners, often for minor grievances....

The source of the current dissatisfaction with the HRA, lies, as we see it, in the way in which courts – particularly the European Court of Human Rights – have applied the statements of principle in the text of the Convention to areas far beyond those which the framers of the Convention, living in a continent emerging from the terror of totalitarian regimes, can have had in mind. We do not believe that “fundamental” human rights and freedoms should extend to the following:

(1) The creation of new torts. The Strasbourg court’s decisions have led to the fashioning of a number of new types of claim previously unknown to the common law. These typically involve claims for compensation against the State not for its own wrongdoing, but for failings on the part of its employees to act with sufficient skill and care to prevent or protect from the wrongdoing of others. Thus new causes of action have been created against the police for failing to prevent crime (Osman v United Kingdom; Rantsev v Cyprus) and against social services for failing to remove children from their parents (Z v United Kingdom [2001] 2 FLR 612).... [W]e consider that the fact that the HRA can be used as a “tort statute” has played a significant part in the creation of the Act’s poor image. For example a rash of compensation claims and awards for prisoners who did not receive heroin substitutes timeously has not improved the public perception of human rights....

(2) The creation of socio-economic rights. Elected representatives, assisted by their professional advisers, not judges, are best placed to make decisions on social welfare and the like....

(3) Exempting individuals or sections of society from compliance with national laws. National laws in themselves invariably represent a balancing of competing public and private interests by the legislature.... [T]his year the Supreme Court, following Strasbourg jurisprudence, has held that even where domestic law entitles a local authority landlord to a possession order against a tenant who is in breach of his tenancy, a possession order cannot be made if this would be “disproportionate” to the tenant’s right to respect for his family and private life under article 8 of the Convention. Law abiding citizens are mystified by such glosses and additions to unambiguous domestic legislation....

(4) Micro-managing or second guessing the acts of public authorities and officials. The legislation ought to make clear that the courts must respect the judgments of public officials or ministers in areas where decision making has been entrusted to them by Parliament. The Court’s role ought to be one of genuine review, rather than substitution of its own decision....

(5) Closely connected to (3) and (4) above, restrictions on the use of the concept of “proportionality”. We consider that many of the difficulties which have arisen with the HRA can be traced to this concept. For instance, as article 8 is applied it is not enough for a public authority to establish that an interference in a person’s family life was in accordance with a law democratically enacted, but a judge must additionally be satisfied that the interference was “proportionate”. This vague requirement, dependent upon what particular judges in a particular case consider to be appropriate, undermines legal certainty.... It is the principle of “proportionality” which has led to court decisions allowing foreigners convicted of criminal offences and illegal immigrants to be granted permission to stay in the UK, despite a detailed, democratically mandated, legal code governing this area....

Criticism of the Court, however, has not gone unchallenged. The Council of Europe itself is undertaking a reform project, known as the Interlaken Process, and in 2010 a new protocol reduced the number of judges needed to hear the most straightforward cases. Some have argued that criticisms of the Court are overblown. The president of the ECtHR, the British judge Sir Nicholas Bratza, has written, in reference to British cases before the Court:

[F]ew people today would dispute Strasbourg's 1978 ruling that the birching of a Manx schoolboy as a criminal sanction was unacceptable. Few would contest that the rules on contempt of court in operation at the time of the Thalidomide case were unsatisfactory, or deny that a journalist's right to protect his sources is a cornerstone of a free press.

Nor does it seems strange in 2011 to suggest that child perpetrators, even of the most heinous offences, like the Jamie Bulger killers, should not be tried in an adult court. Rulings on the legal recognition of transsexuals and the lifting of the ban on homosexuals in the armed forces, meanwhile, are surely examples of where domestic UK law was lagging behind societal changes and was brought up to date as a direct consequence of the court's judgments. More recently, the finding that the indefinite retention of DNA samples of persons never convicted of an offence violated the right to private life, was widely applauded in British political and legal circles....

The criticism relating to interference is simply not borne out by the facts. The Strasbourg court has been particularly respectful of decisions emanating from courts in the UK since the coming into effect of the Human Rights Act, and this because of the very high quality of those judgments. To take 2011 as the most recent example: of the 955 applications against the UK decided, the court found a violation of the convention in just eight cases.

Nevertheless, there are genuine reasons for concern. The court's backlog has grown from 18,000 cases in 2001 to 86,000 cases in 2006 and over 150,000 cases in 2011. This backlog is concentrated on a particular group of member states with poor human rights records. It is also said that inadmissible applications comprise more than 90% of the Court’s caseload.

Before the last election, the Tories and the Lib Dems took directly opposing views on the HRA: the Tories wanted to replace it with a British bill of rights while the Lib Dems wanted to keep it. The result of the formation of the current coalition was that the issue was kicked off to a specialist committee, the Commission on a Bill of Rights (CBR).

The CBR has accepted in its interim advice to the Government that overuse of the ECtHR is a real problem:

The Court should be a court of last resort, and not a first port of call for all human rights issues. It should be adjudicating hundreds of cases a year, not thousands, and certainly not tens of thousands, and ensuring that the principle of subsidiarity is observed by national institutions with the primary responsibility for the protection of human rights and the provision of effective remedies for violations of the Convention rights.

The chairman of the CBR has suggested that there might be considered

some form of ‘democratic override’ or dialogue, in order to recognise the legitimate role of Parliaments and the democratic process in all of the Member States.... This could allow the effect of a Court decision to be overridden if such was the will of the Parliamentary Assembly or Committee of Ministers [of the Council of Europe], or perhaps of both acting collectively. A variant of this approach might be a power in the Committee of Ministers to determine that a Court judgment should not be enforced if it considered that that course of action was desirable and justifiable in the light of a clear expression of opinion by the relevant Member State’s most senior democratic institution. Another variant could be a requirement in respect of proposed ground-breaking findings of violations for the Court first to consult the other Council of Europe institutions and for the Court to take a collective expression of opinion into account.

It is still very unclear both how the Council of Europe will end up reforming the Court and how the debate in the UK regarding the HRA and a possible future British bill of rights will be resolved. What seems clear, however, is that the status quo cannot persist indefinitely. David Cameron is not a man who throws his weight behind lost causes.

The Time-traveller's Guide to Medieval England, Ian Mortimer

2012-01-23T17:00:00.001Z

This is an interesting book on the life and mores of 14th century England by the popular writer and historian Ian Mortimer.

Alongside the obvious continuities - geography, language, ethnicity - Mortimer outlines some deep differences between modern and mediaeval English society. One of the most striking differences was that there were a lot fewer people around back then. The population was around 5 million at the beginning of the century, or about half the size of modern Belgium. By the end of the century, following the Black Death, there were around 2.5 million Englishmen and women, a population comparable with that of modern Latvia. Large parts of Northumberland and Cumberland were seriously depopulated, as well as being menaced by the Scots. It would be the 17th century before the population reached the 5 million mark again.

Nearly 90% of people lived in the countryside, and those who didn't inhabited diminutive cities with enormous cathedrals towering over them. The largest city in the country was London, with 40,000 inhabitants, making it roughly the same size as modern Bishop's Stortford or Leamington Spa. Almost every other city had less than 10,000 inhabitants.

What people there were tended to be younger than their modern descendants. People died earlier, and fewer survived to old age. The median age of the English population today is 38 - back then it was 21, and only around 5% of people were over the age of 65. Life could be hard: crops did fail, famines did strike, and people did die. Disease was a major problem as well. Leprosy was not uncommon, and sufferers were social outcasts; tuberculosis was widespread too. Worse by far, there was the Black Death. This was a truly cataclysmic event - or, rather, series of events, since the plague returned in a number of waves. The commonly accepted figure of one third of the population dying may be an underestimate. Doctors did exist, and they had a large body of knowledge at their disposal, but much of what they thought they knew was useless or even harmful, being based on ideas like the ancient Greek theory of the humours and treatments like bloodletting. Nonetheless, a few remedies existed that worked, and there were even some anaesthetics available if you had the money to pay for them. Medicine was also intertwined with beliefs about religion, astrology and divination.

One consequence of the high death rate was that people grew up more quickly and took on greater responsibilities at a younger age. A boy would begin work at the age of 7; he might get married at 14 and join the army at 15. A girl might get married at 12; the engagement would have been arranged by the spouses' families while they were small children. On the subject of gender relations, women were widely regarded as weak, silly and conniving - after all, Eve had been a woman, hadn't she? - and there was a lack of protection against domestic violence and rape. On the other hand, "official" views on gender were not always borne out in women's lived experience, any more than they are in patriarchal societies around the world today.

Society was conspicuously violent by today's standards. It speaks volumes that it was compulsory for private citizens to own a weapon. There was a fairly complex system of constables, sheriffs and courts to keep crime in check, but justice was often rough and ready - the death penalty was widely used, and the lack of checks and balances in the system meant that it was open to corruption and brutality. It was a far cry from the age of legal aid and the Human Rights Act - a closer comparison would be with the justice systems of Russia, Nigeria or Colombia.

Yet side by side with the violence and death were found philanthropy, art and spirituality - sometimes even in the same individuals. People of all classes found respite in music, dancing and religious observance, and literary giants like Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland were in their prime. Mediaeval society was not as ignorant or benighted as we sometimes like to think. Literacy rates were as high as 20% or more in urban areas, and people travelled around more than we tend to realise. People were aware of happenings in the world beyond England, and nobody thought that the earth was flat.

The mediaeval world comes across as being smellier and less sanitary than the modern world. London in particular had a serious problem resulting from the volume of rubbish and waste products, though the authorities did try to reduce it. But people weren't as dirty as we might imagine: personal and domestic hygiene were issues for mediaeval people just as they are for us.

In mediaeval society, status and reputation were key. There was a complex social hierarchy with numerous divisions and subdivisions. At the top were the monarch, the aristocracy - who were beginning to switch from speaking French to English - and the dignitaries of the church. The peasants were at the bottom, although "peasant" was a very broad label which took in everyone from prosperous yeomen to villeins who were bound in service to the local lord. There were wide inequalities of wealth, from the nobility in their great halls and the merchants in their town houses to the urban poor in their tenements and the villeins in their one-room hovels. There were also sumptuary laws governing who could wear and eat what, though these were not always strictly observed.

The basis of the economy was fundamentally different. The basis of wealth was landholding, and the mercantile economy was quite closely regulated. As far as food was concerned, the diet was quite different from our own. Potatoes hadn't been discovered yet, for one thing, and carrots were neither orange nor edible. The greatest delicacy was sturgeon, the royal fish. Cattle and sheep were much smaller than today - it would be several centuries before selective breeding was invented.

Mortimer succeeds in conveying with depth and variety the nature of mediaeval English life and culture. In many ways, 14th century England come across a disorienting place - recognisably similar in some ways, very different in others, and not at all like the Blackadder version of history that most of us tend to slip into by default.

Labour - The Wilderness Years

2012-01-22T13:39:00.001Z

This is a series of BBC documentaries on the history of the Labour Party from 1979 to the coming of Tony Blair. It was originally broadcast in 1995 (when I remember watching it the first time around). Most of it consists of narrative, interspersed with numerous interviews with characters including a silver-haired Tony Benn, a younger (and considerably more coherent) John Prescott and a supporting cast of various party grandees, MPs and union leaders, from Peter Mandelson to Peter Shore and from Tony Banks to Tony Blair.

The series starts with Labour's 1979 election defeat and Jim Callaghan singing The Red Flag at Labour's old HQ in Transport House. At this point, the Labour Party was in serious trouble. Following five years of Labour government which had culminated in the Winter of Discontent, the voters had given Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives a comfortable majority of 44. Half of all trade unionists had voted against the Labour Party in the election. The party's response to this challenge from changing times and a changing electorate was to proceed to tear itself to pieces.

Some believed that what the electorate really wanted was more socialism. The leader of the party's insurgent left wing was Tony Benn - a man of extreme and somewhat eccentric views, but the first truly charismatic and able leader of the Labour left since Nye Bevan. He appears in the series - repeatedly - to explain silkily how Labour has been getting too capitalist since as long ago as 1974. The Labour MP Joe Ashton complains in a thick Yorkshire accent that Benn, a wealthy hereditary peer from a political dynasty, never really understood the working classes, whom he regarded as "noble savages". Roy Hattersley says more candidly that Benn's ideas and behaviour were "crazy" and "deplorable".

Benn backed the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, a pressure group which sought to change Labour's constitution so as to put more power into the hands of party activists, who were considerably to the left of ordinary Labour voters - indeed, it was rightly feared that Trotskyists had infiltrated the party. Matters were brought to a head at the unusually nasty 1980 party conference by hard-left activists, egged on by Benn. The union barons, who could usually be relied on to vote down the crazier proposals from the conference floor, were still smarting from their battles with the Callaghan government and backed the Bennites. The Labour Party constitution was accordingly shifted to the left. Callaghan resigned soon afterwards, hoping that his ally Denis Healey would succeed him, but the arrogant and abrasive Healey was narrowly defeated by the left-winger Michael Foot. Roy Jenkins and other leading figures on the Labour right decided that they had had enough and left the party to form the SDP. Not long afterwards, Healey, who had became Foot's deputy, was challenged by Tony Benn for the deputy leadership - a grossly self-indulgent act that led to a fratricidal internal battle which Healey won only by the skin of his teeth. And so it was that the Conservatives, then deeply unpopular for their harsh economic policies, were handed the next general election on a plate.

The disastrous 1983 election campaign delivered Labour's worst result since the 1930s. By a kind of poetic justice, Tony Benn lost his seat. Neil Kinnock, a man from the left of the party, took over as leader. A Welshman from the mining community, Kinnock was undisciplined in the way that he presented himself in public and was determined to remove the albatross of Bennite leftism from around the party's neck. This did not go down well in every quarter of the party. He clumsily attempted to sit on the fence during the miners' strike, and his famous condemnation of Derek Hatton and the Militant Tendency at the 1985 party conference drew accusations of treachery. Meanwhile, the Conservatives strolled to another landslide election victory.

Things were changing, however. Labour may have lost the 1987 election, but they lost slightly less heavily than they had in 1983. Kinnock was making some headway in changing his party. The Militant Tendency were expelled. There was no more talk of withdrawing from the EEC. The red flag was replaced as the party's symbol with the red rose - and a young television executive named Peter Mandelson became the party's director of communications.

The pace of change accelerated after the 1987 election, and Kinnock showed a Thatcherite ruthlessness in overruling his colleagues. There was a major policy review, and the commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament went. Two young protégés of Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, took up their first senior positions. Yet all was still not well. There were early sightings of the phenomenon of hostile Mandelsonian press briefings, victims of which included John Prescott and Michael Meacher. There was dissatisfaction with Kinnock's leadership, and some in the party were already coming round to the view that it was time for John Smith to take over (as it happens, these included Smith himself). The 1992 election campaign was disorganised, producing such episodes as the "war of Jennifer's ear" and the ill-fated Sheffield rally, and Neil Kinnock made the mistake of insisting that Labour's tax plans were published before the election.

The Conservatives won again in 1992 - but by a much smaller margin than in the three previous elections. Labour was starting to recover. John Smith took over the party leadership and was able to briefly sideline Peter Mandelson and to loosen trade union influence on the party through the introduction of One Member One Vote before he died suddenly on 11 May 1994. Now came the generational change. Smith had accepted that Blair was his probable successor, and Blair was backed for the leadership by Denis Healey and Roy Hattersley. Famously, Gordon Brown stood aside to allow him a clear run (Mandelson refuses to talk about any aspect of this in his interview). The road lay open to New Labour and Blairism.

The series provides a few endearing vignettes - Michael Foot's donkey jacket at armistice day 1981, Peter Tatchell putting on a faux-proletarian accent for the 1983 Bermondsey by-election, the Shadow Cabinet singing along to Queen's We Are the Champions. It is also revealed that the right-wing Labour MP John Golding was the moving spirit behind the infamous 1983 election manifesto. He claims that he was hoping to discredit the Bennite agenda by deliberately hanging it around the party's neck in an unwinnable election.

The interviewees settle various old, long-forgotten scores. Tony Banks snipes at Gerald Kaufman. Bryan Gould snipes at Denis Healey and Neil Kinnock. Tom Sawyer snipes at Tony Benn and Dennis Skinner. Tony Benn insists that he was right about everything all along, and sings, not particular well, a parody version of The Red Flag.

It is difficult to disagree with Tony Blair's diagnosis of Labour's ills as put forward in his interview: "society changed and the party didn't". As Tom Sawyer puts it, you can't say that the electorate are wrong.

Gay rights in Parliament

2012-01-17T22:17:00.004Z

In this post, I look at four parliamentary debates on key pieces of gay rights legislation that were introduced in Britain in the late 20th and early 21st century.

1. 1967 - Gay sex becomes legal

Gay sex and other forms of gay sexual behaviour between men were illegal in 20th century Britain.
In 1957, the Government-appointed Wolfenden Committee came down in favour of decriminalisation, but it was not until the enactment of the Sexual Offences Act 1967 that this was accomplished.

The bill that would later become the Act received its second reading in the House of Commons on 11 February 1966. There were 14 speakers in the debate, 8 in favour of the bill and 6 against. Conservative MPs tended to be against and Labour MPs tended to be for, but there were a number of exceptions to this rule (notably Humphrey Berkeley, the bill's Conservative sponsor).

The arguments put forward by the supporters of reform can be summarised as follows:

Homosexuality was innate, or at any rate not freely chosen. A fixed proportion of the population (perhaps around 5%) could be expected to be homosexual.
Not everything that was immoral should necessarily be illegal. The churches supported law reform. Most people would continue to find homosexuality distateful, but reform did not constitute a seal of approval on it.
There were practical problems with the existing law. It was difficult or impossible to enforce, and it encouraged blackmail.

The opponents of reform replied as follows:

Homosexuality was not innate, and law reform would increase the level of homosexual activity. Homosexual men engaged in recruitment, and reform would put young men in danger.
Reform would put a seal of approval on homosexuality.
Blackmail would continue because homosexuality would still carry a social stigma.

It is not altogether surprising to find ignorant and bigoted comments among the diehard oppoents of reform like Sir Cyril Osborne:

I know nothing, or very little, about what is called buggery, but from what I do know about it I hate it and I dislike it. It is time that someone spoke from my point of view as a straightforward, simple square.

I am rather tired of democracy being made safe for the pimps, the prostitutes, the spivs, the pansies and now, the queers. It is high time that we ordinary squares had some public attention and our point of view listened to.

Sir Spencer Summers likewise thought that society was going to pot:

It is a mistake to assume that the arguments for and against the Bill can be treated in isolation of the other changes in the outlook on moral standards going on at present. Today, sexual experience before marriage is widely accepted and practised by society. Universities regard fornication by students as no concern of theirs. Discipline in schools reinforced by the cane is frequently treated as assault. Less and less account is taken of marriage vows. The theme is that nobody is really to blame: it is his constitution, or his upbringing or his environment; or he is being provoked, and he needs treatment, not punishment.

It is perhaps more surprising to find supporters of the bill using what would today be regarded as crassly homophobic language. Berkeley thought that homosexuality was "a form of emotional retardedness", while Leo Abse called it a "terrible fate". Two supporters of the bill (Abse and Christopher Chataway) suggested that treatment of homosexuality would be easier if it were passed.

It was also the case that supporters of the bill agreed that young men under 21 should not be included in the reform. Opponents predicted that this age would soon be reduced.

2. 1987 - Section 28

Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 provided that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".

The provision had its origin in a private member's bill introduced into the Lords the previous year by the Earl of Halsbury. The bill did not attract Government support and got nowhere. The clause that became Section 28 was inserted into the 1987 Local Government Bill at its Committee stage in the Commons by David Wilshire, a Conservative backbencher, with the blessing of the Government. It was first debated in the House of Commons on 15 December 1987.

It is not widely known that Labour and the Liberals supported section 28: what they were seeking to do in the debate of 15 December was not to delete the clause but to water it down with amendments. The opposition parties professed to accept the principle that local authorities should not be promoting homosexuality; no doubt they also realised that there weren't many votes in gay rights in 1987.

The debate proceeded almost entirely along party lines: only Michael Brown, the Conservative member for Brigg and Cleethorpes, broke with his party. Michael Howard spoke for the Government, Jack Cunningham spoke for the Labour front bench, and Simon Hughes, who is now known to be bisexual, led for the Liberal Party.

The dominant sentiment on the Conservative side was the perceived need to protect children. There was a range of opinion in evidence. Michael Howard took a relatively mild line, saying at one point: "We are all against discrimination. We all want to protect civil rights." Such words could not have been spoken in 1966. Howard even complained that a Labour amendment intended to facilitate the fight against AIDS would make it more difficult to deal with the disease.

Other supporters of the clause were more robust. Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman made several unpleasant interventions, observing at one point: "I do not regard the practice of sodomy or buggery as being civilised". There wasn't that much overt bigotry, however, and it is only fair to note that some interventions on the Opposition side were intemperate as well: three Labour MPs explicitly described the clause as being fascist in nature (Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone and Tony Banks).

The opposition parties argued in this way:

Local authorities should not be promoting homosexuality or any other kind of sexuality. However, it was not possible to make people gay by proselytising them.
The clause as it stood was too broadly worded, and it would stop authorities from providing services to gay people and teachers from counselling gay pupils.
The issue was one of civil rights and pluralism. It was a fact that many people in the population were gay.
The Government had initially rejected the Halsbury bill and so had executed a U-turn by accepting Section 28. It had done this out of political opportunism.

Supporters of the clause inside and outside Parliament appealed to the example of a book called Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin. Ken Livingstone had no time for this: it was "[o]ne copy of one book in one teachers' centre that one teacher had taken out to read".

Harry Greenway, the Conservative member for Ealing North, thought that there was a problem that needed something like Section 28 to deal with it. His local authority had mounted a

long and sustained campaign... to have homosexual and lesbian relationships taught in schools as being as valid as heterosexual relationships....

For the past 18 months all advertisements of teaching posts in Ealing have contained invitations to men and women of any sexual orientation — to gay men and lesbian women and the rest of it — to apply for posts.... Only last week I received complaints in my surgery from parents who said that a homosexual recently appointed to a school makes up his face in school in front of the children, and they object to that....

In Ealing the schools have been invited to put on their notice boards invitations to children to ring gay and lesbian lines. That is wrong, because it is an incitement to children.

....Not many months ago Ealing council's education committee sent a letter home with children as young as five — some as young as four — in which was discussed the teaching that homosexual relationships were as valid as heterosexual relationships. Children of five, six and seven — or of any age — who carry about such material are carrying material which most of them would find offensive if they read it and which their parents certainly find infuriating. Some parents made bonfires of those letters. That is what they thought of them.

Interestingly, Greenway was one of only two MPs to appeal to religious morality in the debate (the other one was his colleague Nicholas Bennett). Religion, by contrast, had been at the forefront of the debate in 1966. There were other differences, too. The language of civil rights had not been used in 1966. In 1987, opponents of the Government did not concede that homosexuality was wrong or deservedly stigmatised.

Labour's attempt to water down Section 28 was defeated by 256 votes to 203.

3. 1999 - The age of consent

One of the social reforms of the early Blair years was the reduction in the age of consent for gay sex from 18 to 16. It had already been reduced from 21 to 18 in the Major years. As noted, these changes had been predicted by opponents of the 1967 Act.

The Government experienced difficulty in getting the reform past the House of Lords, which still contained several hundred hereditary peers until late 1999. The debate that we are concerned with took place on 13 April 1999 and related to the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill.

The whips in the Lords had allowed a free vote, and the party leaders in the Commons had all come down in favour of the bill, including the Tory leader William Hague. However a large majority of the speakers in the Lords debate divided along party lines: Labour and the Liberal Democrats for the bill and the Conservatives against it. Most crossbenchers supported the bill.

The case in favour of the bill was put in these terms:

It was a matter of civil rights and equality. Straight people could have sex at 16, so gay people should be able to as well.
Gay people will always exist, and young people will always have gay relationships. Criminalisation merely drives them underground and creates a climate of fear.
Moral objections to homosexuality should not determine what the law should be.
The bill was supported by young people's charities and by the medical profession.

The case against

The existing law was necessary to protect young people at a vulnerable time of life. Sexuality was not fixed at 16, and young people could be sucked into a life of homosexuality.
The equality argument was invalid because straight and gay sex were not equivalent.
The bill offended against morality and sent out the wrong message.
The bill would increase the risk of AIDS and other STDs.
The bill would pave the way for further changes in the law relating to homosexuality.

The strong emphasis on civil rights recalls the arguments over Section 28, and marks a break with the debates of the 60s. In other respects, however, the debate was distinctly retro. Even some supporters of the bill felt obliged to caveat their support. Lord Renfrew referred to "an antipathy which many people feel towards homosexual acts", while Lord Rowallan said: "Many of us in this House and outside it find the whole subject of homosexuality unpleasant. I admit that as a happily married man I find it difficult to appreciate...." These sentiments seem closer to those expressed in 1966 than to what one would expect from the heady days of Cool Britannia.

The eccentric Labour peer Lord Longford said, in the course of a somewhat rambling speech:

If any of my eight children or 26 grandchildren had been homosexual, no doubt my wife and I would have loved them. However, I cannot believe that there are many parents who prefer their son to be homosexual rather than inclined to favour women. It is contrary to the male nature. Women do not mind so much. A lot of women like homosexuals; they say they are not frightened of them. (I do not know whether they are frightened of elderly gentlemen either — I do not think they are.) They find homosexuals rather harmless, almost pathetic people and seem to like them.

Longford, of course, was a practising Catholic. As in 1966, a number of speakers were prepared to make explicitly religious arguments in their contributions, including Baroness Young, the leader of the opposition to the bill - although, interestingly, the bishops in the Lords were divided in their views. The most extreme statement of religious opposition to the bill came from a lay peer, Lord Ashbourne:

The law of Almighty God which Her Majesty solemnly promised, in her coronation oath, to maintain, views homosexual activity a crime at any age. The adolescent age range is one in which homosexuals are particularly interested, hence the importance of not lowering the age of consent to 16....

As for homosexuality, it is unnatural; it is a perversion; and it is repeatedly and firmly condemned in holy scripture....

This is an unrighteous Bill, and I trust and pray that Almighty God will give this House the courage to stand up to the Government when, as in today's Bill, they are wrong. That is our constitutional duty before God, the Monarch and the people of this United Kingdom. It is a duty from which we must not shrink.

Nevertheless, the changing times made themselves felt even in the red and gold of the Lords. A couple of the opponents of the bill self-consciously referred to the fact that they would be described as reactionaries and bigots. Several felt the need to deny explicitly that they were prejudiced against gay people. Lord Quirk, a Conservative opponent of the bill, stated, in words that were doubtless not intended to be patronising:

Homophobia to me is not just crass bigotry at its graceless worst: it is ignorant blindness to the manifest enrichment of our lives by homosexuals down the centuries.

There were also a number of self-conscious references to the advanced age of the peers in the chamber. Lord Freyberg, a twentysomething Crossbencher, said:

Sexuality and the age of consent are emotional topics and I was aware that the tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality common among my generation is a recent phenomenon. One cannot, however, expect people who are brought up to consider it a terrible thing — morally unacceptable, corrupting, shameful, something to be kept hidden and illegal to boot — to shed these bad associations even though attitudes to homosexuality have undergone a sea change in the past few decades. I therefore expected that some older Members would find it difficult to reason dispassionately. None the less, I was distressed by the prejudiced tone of the discussion and by the illogical and plainly ridiculous arguments expressed by people I respect from all sides of the House — some of which I have heard repeated tonight.

4. 2003 - The end of Section 28

Section 28 lingered on into the early 21st century. The provision was repealed in Scotland by the Scottish Parliament in 2000. The Labour Government attempted to introduce legislation in Westminster to repeal the provision in 2000, but was twice defeated on the issue in the Lords. Repeal finally came with the Local Government Act 2003, which passed the Lords and received Royal Assent on 18 September 2003.

By this time, Section 28 had become legally redundant. In particular, sex education in schools had become the responsibility of school governors and head teachers, rather than local authorities.

An amendment removing the Section was moved by the Lib Dems in Committee and carried with cross-party support. The issue reached the full House on 10 March 2003. The Conservatives decided not to oppose repeal overtly, but several amendments were proposed which were intended to preserve some of the effects of the Section. It was these amendments that formed the subject of the debate. The Conservatives and Labour offered their Members a free vote, though the Lib Dems were whipped to vote in favour. Some Conservatives spoke in favour of repeal, including Alan Duncan (who is gay himself) and John Bercow.

The arguments advanced against Section 28 were familiar. The provision offended against principles of equality and non-discrimination. It was not possible to turn people gay by promoting homosexuality, and Section 28 prevented gay pupils from being given proper support.

There was a noticeable death of overtly homophobic arguments from pro-Section 28 MPs. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown spoke for the Tory front bench. His speech was technocratic and heavy on education law. He spoke the language of compromise and asked innocently that the current Government sex education guidance should be enshrined in law. At one point, he lapsed into what might be classed as 1980s-style scaremongering:

Some of the material produced by health authorities is inappropriate. A rather nasty booklet has been produced by an organisation called PHACE West. I shall not subject the House to its contents except to say that it refers to practices called rimming and scat — I do not know what they mean. PHACE West is partly funded by public funds, and its booklet is available to children as young as 12.

His colleague Julian Brazier, who also opposed total repeal, insisted that the problem that needed to be dealt with was not homosexuality but the sexualisation of children in general. Most interestingly of all, David Wilshire popped up and insisted that Section 28 had really been a modest amendment about the misuse of public money:

When I arrived in the House for the first time in 1987, I had spent 11 years in local government at a time when various councils and councillors were wasting huge sums of public money and using large sums of public money to achieve social change that the overwhelming majority of people in this country did not want....

....No one took the trouble to tell me that, as a Government Back Bencher, I was not supposed to say or do anything, so I tabled an amendment. Little did I realise what I was unleashing when I did so....

To this day, I protest that section 28 has nothing to do with bigotry, and it certainly had nothing to do with bigotry when I introduced it.

My focus 15 years ago was on the use and misuse of taxpayers' money. It had nothing to do then — and it has nothing to do now — with lifestyles or making moral judgments.

Wilshire went on to note that Capital Gay magazine had said in 1988 that he was not a bigot - though it had taken the view that he was "confused", "ignorant", "illogical" and "stupid".

The most "traditionalist" speech in favour of keeping Section 28-style restrictions was made by Edward Leigh, a colourful and somewhat marginal figure from the right wing of the Conservative Party. He was prepared to talk candidly about his opposition, on the basis of religious morality, to homosexual acts. Even he, however, was less strident than some of his counterparts in past debates. He insisted that he had nothing against gay people and that Section 28 had not prevented objective discussion of homosexuality in schools. He adopted Wilshire's argument that the issue was one of public spending.

The most memorable speech was perhaps that of the Labour MP Chris Bryant. Bryant too was prepared to talk the language of religious morality, but from the opposite perspective from Leigh. As a gay former Anglican priest, he had strong views on the subject:

Section 28 was not brought in to protect children; it was brought in to make a declamation — that homosexuality was abnormal, immoral and wrong. That has caused profound damage, not only to homosexual men but to literally millions of wives. How many women, because their men have felt, in the society in which they lived, that they had to get married to cure themselves somehow of their homosexual tendencies, have ended up leading a miserable married life because they never really knew the person to whom they were married.... [M]illions of children of homosexual men have never been able to know their father properly.....

A declamatory law that says that homosexuality is not to be promoted, because in some way or another it is abnormal or immoral, leads to a greater sense that it is okay to bully somebody because they are homosexual. Section 28... is purely a declamatory law....

....[T]he single most important reason for getting rid of section 28 is its declamatory effect. The words that many gay men, lesbians and bisexuals find profoundly offensive are those that state that a local authority shall not 'promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.' I cannot imagine how anyone could have written that from any perspective, whether it be profoundly Christian or Muslim, without deliberately intending to be offensive.

....My problem with such a declamatory law is that it leads to an assumption of prejudice. Some hon. Members may believe that there is hardly any prejudice left against homosexuality in this country. Homosexuals are in nearly every soap opera on television and many celebrities feel able to come out. Indeed, many hon. Members on both sides of the House are honest about their sexuality and see it as something to be celebrated. But prejudice is alive and well. Many children speak of bullying. Being called a poof or a queer can be devastating for young people and they will do everything in their power to prevent that from being levelled at them if they happen to be homosexual.

The amendments were defeated by 370 votes to 78. And so Clause 28 passed into history, less with a bang than with a whimper.

A View from the Foothills, Chris Mullin

2012-01-16T10:02:00.001Z

This is one of the volumes of the acclaimed political diaries of Chris Mullin, the former Labour MP. It already appears to have become one of the standard inside accounts of the Blair years.

The story begins with Mullin's appointment to a very junior ministerial position at the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions in 1999. Mullin had previously been a substantial and respected figure on the British political scene. He had played a leading role in freeing the Birmingham Six. At the time we see him entering the government, he holds two important parliamentary positions, including the chairmanship of the influential Home Affairs Select Committee, and a third-tier ministerial job represents a significant step down. He initially refuses the appointment, and then, having accepted it, repeatedly complains about it. At 51, he has none of the deference of an ambitious thirtysomething desperate to get into the Cabinet, and he is not shy about arguing with his officials and refusing to conform with ministerial protocol.

Prescott's DETR is not a hospitable place for Mullin. He has an environmentalist streak, dislikes the prevalence of modern car and air travel, and thinks that the government is too close to the airline industry. He refuses to use an official car. He lobbies for the introduction of restrictions on the growth of leylandii, only to find the idea squashed by Number Ten on the grounds that it is too nanny-stateish. He works very hard, despite being told by his civil servants that his predecessor worked harder.

By 2001, he has had enough and returns to the backbenches and the Home Affairs Committee, where he talent-spots a younger David Cameron and helps to produce a report on drugs that so annoys the American Republicans that three Congressmen come to London to remonstrate with him about it. Within a couple of years, he is ready to return to government. Tony Blair plans to make him Secretary of State for International Development shortly after the Iraq War, but a duplicitous chief whip shafts him by reminding Blair that he had rebelled over the conflict. His position was that the invasion of Iraq should not go ahead without explicit UN authorisation (the famous "second resolution"), although he appeared to weaken briefly just before the big vote.

Instead, he ends up as the junior Africa minister at the Foreign Office, in which position he meets various charming and likeable African dictators who speak fluently the language of democracy and human rights while repressing and impoverishing their peoples. He is sacked by Blair after the 2005 election, for no very obvious reason.

John Prescott emerges as an incompetent, insecure and intrusive boss, though Mullin does warm to him somewhat over time. He seems to like Clare Short, and Jack Straw also comes out well. Gordon Brown emerges as a powerful figure: he is depicted as obsessive, wilful, paranoid, conspiratorial and quite weird. He has a habit of disappearing when blame is to be shared out.

Mullin started out on the Bennite left, and his political convictions are clearly on the left of centre. He is not an identikit Old Labour man, however. For example, while he thought that the part-privatisation of the air traffic control system was pointless and politically damaging, he had no ideological objection to it and was convinced that the unions' safety concerns were baseless. He shows respect and admiration for Tony Blair, together with cynicism, and quotes the great man as giving the following advice to a newly elected David Miliband: "Go around smiling at everyone and get other people to shoot them". Various entries provide a salutary reminder that the New Labour governments were never universally popular even during the high noon of Blairism - indeed, they were seriously unpopular in a number of quarters. Mullin is on good terms with Tony Benn and remains a paid-up member of CND.

Mullin himself comes across as a likeable character, sensitive, serious and somewhat ironic, though not without his own flaws. The picture of the government bureaucracy which he paints, with its office politics, scheming ministers and officials, pointless paperwork and badly written speeches, will be familiar to viewers of Yes, Minister and The Thick of It, and indeed to anyone who has ever worked for a large organisation.

Some notes on Islamism

2012-01-12T09:54:00.004Z

See now also here.

In this post, I want to trace some aspects of the history and ideology of the Islamist movement.

Background

Islamism is a political movement whose ideology is based on the religion of Islam. It is not synonymous with Islamic fundamentalism or with terrorism: there are plenty of fundamentalist Muslims who are not politically engaged, and only a minority of Islamists are aligned with the jihadi movement.

Islamism had its origins in the latter part of the 19th century, in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, the world's last major Islamic power (albeit one that was already secularising). Key early figures in the movement included Jamal-ad-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897), Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) and Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935). These men disagreed amongst themselves in some respects (notably, Afghani and Abduh were more open to modernity than Rida), but their ideas bore the essential features of modern Islamism - a veneration for the early Muslim community and the Islamic civilisation of the past combined with a deep indebtedness to Western modernity, mixed in with ideas of anti-colonialism, pan-Islamic unity, Islamic statehood and opposition to contemporary Muslim governments.

Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood

The foregoing figures influenced Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949), a key figure in 20th century Islamism. Banna was an Egyptian teacher, and in 1928 he founded the Society of the Muslim Brothers, otherwise known as the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun), the first major modern Islamist organisation and one which continues to be highly influential today. Banna's organisation grew rapidly:

By the late 1940s, the Muslim Brothers had established some two thousand branches throughout the country, boasting about one million members and sympathizers. To this must be added the society's branches in Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Sudan, and Mandatory Palestine.... (Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, p171)

The organisation had a somewhat sinister edge. Banna was an open admirer of Hitler and Mussolini (see below), and his own words had a distinctly totalitarian patina:

It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law in all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet. (Quoted in Hoveryda Fereydoun, The Broken Crescent, p56)

The organisation ran into problems after Banna's death, but his fellow countryman Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) subsequently emerged as its leading ideologue. Qutb was another somewhat sinister character, who ended up being hanged in one of Nasser's jails. He published a long list of writings, including a lengthy commentary on the Qur'an and a best-selling (and rather boring) Islamist tract entitled Milestones. He condemned the entire modern world, including nominally Muslim countries, for having fallen back into the state of jahiliyya ("ignorance") which had afflicted mankind before the coming of the prophet Muhammad. This practice of declaring other Muslims to be infidels (which is known as takfir) is particularly dangerous when combined with the classical Islamic doctrine that apostasy from the faith is to be punished with death.

Qutb has become fairly well known in the West since 9/11 as a leading ideologue of the Islamist movement. He influenced everyone, from entry-level democratic Islamists up to and including al-Qa'eda. He even made an impact on the Shi'as of Iran (as did Banna and the Indian activist Maududi, who we are about to meet). He was mentioned approvingly by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader and chief ideologue of al-Qa'eda, in his magnum opus Knights under the Prophet's Banner.

These days, the Muslim Brotherhood is a largely non-violent organisation. Zawahiri himself wrote a book, The Bitter Harvest, dedicated to criticising it for going soft, and he complains that it "lures thousands of young Muslim men into lines for elections... instead of into the lines of jihad". The Brotherhood's political vehicle in Egypt, the Freedom and Justice Party, is influenced by the Turkish AKP, a moderate Islamic party which accepts Turkey's secular constitution. The Brothers are more likely to be found engaging in grassroots campaigning than flying aircraft into office blocks, and they have switched from denouncing America and unveiled women to talking about economic policy and corruption. That said, the depth of the Brotherhood's commitment to democratic politics has been questioned, and claims of its non-violence need to be nuanced somewhat: most notably, the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas is a Brotherhood franchise.

Maududi and Jamaat-e-Islami

The grand old man of Islamism in the Indian subcontinent was the journalist and writer Abul A'la Maududi (1903-1979), who was active in political Islam from the 1920s onwards. Maududi has been credited with giving Islamism its Qur'anic backbone, prefiguring the role subsequently taken up by Sayyid Qutb. His forays into theology were not welcome to all Muslims. Ed Husain has written in his acclaimed memoir The Islamist that Maududi "translated the Koran according to his own whims, without reference to or within the paradigm of classical Muslim scholarship".

Like Qutb after him, Maududi affirmed that the present-day Islamic world had degenerated into jahiliyya and was in need of revival. In the political sphere, his ideas can be summarised as follows:

• "Islam, speaking from the view-point of political philosophy, is the very antithesis of secular Western democracy". This is because democracy vests legislative power in the people rather than in Allah. The mass of the people "are incapable of perceiving their own true interests". However, Allah has laid down certain rules for human behaviour, which are in man's best interests.

• An Islamic state should be ruled on fixed Islamic principles, and the common people should not be oppressed by a governing class. This would entail "a limited popular sovereignty under the suzerainty of God", which Mawdudi refers to as "theo-democracy".

• The Islamic state's "sphere of activity is coextensive with the whole of human life.... In such a state no one can regard any field of his affairs as personal and private." This did not mean that the Islamic state would be repressive and tyrannical: rather, it would be characterised by "balance and moderation". (Source: Mawdudi, Islamic Law and Constitution (1960))

A critical commentator has noted:

....al-Mawdudi's theocracy-cum-democracy is an ideological state in which legislators do not legislate, citizens only vote to reaffirm the permanent applicability of God's laws, women rarely venture outside their homes lest social discipline be disrupted, and non-Muslims are tolerated as foreign elements required to express their loyalty by means of paying a financial levy. (Y.M.Choueiri, Islamic Fundamentalism, p144)

Branches of Maududi's political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, continue to operate in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. On an international level, they are aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. Maududi's ideas also form a significant current within the Bangladeshi disapora in Britain, and it has been claimed that he is a major influence on adherents of the East London Mosque and the Muslim Council of Britain.

Hizb ut-Tahrir

Hizb ut-Tahrir was founded in 1953 by Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, a Palestinian judge. The party is sometimes seen as representing the next most exteme version of Islamism after the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami. It operates in over 40 countries, although it is banned in various parts of the Middle East and central and south Asia. The party's fundamental objective is to restore the mediaeval Islamic caliphate, in the form of a pan-Islamic state stretching from Andalusia to Java. The restoration of the caliphate has been a preoccupation for different groups of Muslims since its abolition in 1924 following the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

No existing Muslim countries are Islamic enough for Hizb's tastes:

The party accepts no compromises with other forms of political structure or legal provision. Sharia must be applied completely and immediately for any state to call itself Islamic. Existing states that consider themselves Islamic are rejected as falling far short of the ideal. Iran is considered far too gradualist, with large elements of its political structures derived from European political systems (elections, a parliament, and so forth) and many policies, according to Hizb ut-Tahrir, not fully based on Islamic principles: its foreign policy, for example, is criticised as infected by Iranian nationalism and state interests. Similarly, Saudi Arabia, as a monarchy, does not meet Hizb ut-Tahrir’s exacting standards. (International Crisis Group, Radical Islam in Central Asia: Responding to Hizb ut-Tahrir, p4)

Nabhani helpfully published a draft constitution for the caliphate in his 1953 book The Islamic State. His system has a distinctly authoritarian, illiberal character. Power would be concentrated in the hands of the caliph, who would be elected for life. Nabhani's state would not be a hospitable place for democrats, secularists, non-Muslims or women.

Hizb's world-view is strongly dualistic:

The whole world, whether it is the Islamic countries or the non-Islamic countries, are either Dar al-Islam or Dar al-Harb/Kufr and there is no third. (Hizb ut-Tahrir, The Ummah’s Charter, p18)

In similar vein, one of Hizb's publications is entitled The Inevitability of the Clash of Civilisations. Another tract opens with these words:

The fierce struggle between the Islamic thoughts and the Kufr thoughts, and between the Muslims and the Kuffar, has been intense ever since the dawn of Islam.... Kufr is an enemy of Islam, and this is why the Kuffar will be the enemies of the Muslims as long as there is Islam and Kufr in this world, Muslims and Kuffar, until all are resurrected. This is a decisive and a constant fact. (A.Q.Zallum, How the Khilafah was Destroyed, p1)

Hizb ut-Tahrir expressly rejects terrorism as a means of implementing its agenda. However, it is claimed that Hizb has a more ambivalent relationship with political violence than it would sometimes care to admit. It was allegedly involved in coup attempts in Jordan, Syria and Egypt in the 60s and 70s, and it has been accused more recently of infiltrating the Pakistani armed forces for the same purpose.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is active in the West and has had a presence in Britain since the 1980s. Between 1986 and 1996, the Syrian activist Omar Bakri Muhammad grew the party into a thriving Islamist organisation before leaving to form Al-Muhajiroun. This latter group, subsequently led by Anjem Choudary, was banned by the UK Government, and has since reappeared in various new incarnations, including "Islam4UK", "the Saviour Sect", "Al-Ghurabaa" and "Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah" (the last of which has the dubious distinction of having directly contributed to the formation of the EDL). Since the 7 July bombings, Hizb in Britain has undergone something of a process of moderation. It has complied with the Terrorism Act 2006 and has avoided being banned by successive Labour and Conservative governments. It is also said to have experienced a decline in recent years.

The Islamic revival

Why is Islamism a problem today? For several decades it looked as if Arab nationalism and socialism were the way of the future for the Muslim world. This began to change with the Islamic revival of the 1970s. The Arab armies had been defeated by Israel in the Six Day War, the Arab nationalist hero President Nasser was dead, and the influence of the Brotherhood was spreading. The British journalist Martin Bright has written:

In December 1972, an obscure Foreign Office mandarin returned from a tour of the Middle East a very puzzled man. Like most officials and experts at the time, James Craig believed the main threat to British interests in the region came from Arab nationalists and Marxist revolutionaries. But like the good diplomat he was, Craig kept his ear to the ground and the word on the street was intriguing: in Jordan and Lebanon the 48-year-old Arabist heard rumours of an Islamic revival.

Craig wrote to Sir Richard Beaumont, British ambassador to Egypt, who had picked up rumours of a similar revival in Egypt and circulated it to embassy staff across the Middle East to alert them and ask for feedback. “One theory put to me in Beirut,” he wrote, “was that, since Arab nationalism had failed, people are turning to the alternative of Islamic nationalism. I argued that this, too, had failed – indeed, it failed long ago. The reply was that the very length of time which had passed since this failure made it possible to consider giving it a second trial run.”

The Islamists of the 70s and 80s were on the way up. They were seen by Western governments as a bulwark against communism, and they drew for funding on Saudi oil money (the Saudis espouse a much older version of Islamic fundamentalism, the 18th century creed of Wahhabism). Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, flirted with them in Egypt, in return for which they assassinated him in 1981. In Pakistan, General Zia-ul-Haq seized power in 1977, bringing an "Islamization" programme in his wake. The year 1979 saw the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the entry of Islamists into government in Sudan and the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, which acted as a catalyst for the increased Islamification of Saudi Arabia.

During the 1980s, jihadis in Afghanistan waged war against the Soviet-backed regime before finally taking power in 1992. The mujahidin were a mixture of Islamists and more conservative traditional Muslims. It was from the Afghan jihadi movement that al-Qa'eda emerged at the end of the 1980s. Key figures in this connection were the Saudi militant Osama bin Laden and his mentor Abdullah Azzam (1941-1989), a Palestinian who had been involved in the Muslim Brotherhood and its Hamas offshoot. Bin Laden too was allied with the Brotherhood until the mid-1980s, and he was reportedly influenced both by Sayyid Qutb and by his brother Muhammad Qutb, whose lectures he is said to have attended as a student in Jeddah.

The Islamist cause was given a boost in the 1990s by the Gulf War and the conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. Islamists came to power in Sudan in 1989, and they would have done likewise in Algeria in 1991 had not the army stopped them, thereby triggering a bloody civil war. The Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in 1996, while in Turkey the country's first Islamist government was elected, only for the army to depose it the following year. By this time, Osama bin Laden had declared war on the United States and started the campaign that would culminate in the 9/11 attacks.

The jihadi extreme

A convenient guide to the mindset behind al-Qa'eda is provided by Osama bin Laden's "Letter to America", which was published in 2002. Bin Laden frames the jihad in which he is engaged as essentially defensive. He accuses the Americans of getting involved in wars against Muslims in Palestine, Afghanistan, Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and elsewhere (perhaps surprisingly, he also denounces the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). He repeatedly has a go at "the Jews", and he complains that the West isn't paying enough for Arab oil. As to the moral opprobrium of killing civilians, he retorts that it is American civilians who vote for pro-Israeli politicians, enlist in the US military and pay for the defence budget.

Some leftists in the West would agree with some of bin Laden's critique of American foreign policy, but it is important to understand that bin Laden is attacking America from the right. That is, from the theocratic far right - the right of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Joseph de Maistre, the Tsars and General Franco. Bin Laden complains that pro-Western governments in the Islamic world are repressive, but he wants to replace them not with liberal constitutional republics but with an Islamist caliphate ruled according to a fundamentalist interpretation of the Shari'ah. The very idea of democracy appears to scandalise him:

You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator.

In the moral sphere, he calls on America to embrace Islam and to "reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gamblings, and trading with interest". He was particularly scandalised that Bill Clinton got off so lightly for his shenanigans with Monica Lewinski "in the official Oval Office". George W. Bush was criticised for artlessly saying of al-Qa'eda that "they hate our freedoms", but he may not have been far wrong.

It is worth noting that one significant influence on al-Qa'eda is said to be the mediaeval scholar Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah, who also influenced Sayyid Qutb, the Wahhabis and others:

An essential component in the recruitment and training of members of Al-Qaeda and new arrivals in Afghanistan has been ‘Ilm al-Sharia’ (Knowledge of Islamic Law). Recruits had to attend lectures given by Osama Bin Laden and Ayyman al-Zawahri.... One of the main textual sources used was the work of a twelfth-century Muslim scholar, Ibn Taymiyya, who wrote at the time of the Mogul occupation and who professed the necessity for Muslims to oppose tyrannical rule by force. Ibn Taymiyya has long been a favourite with many in the Islamist movement, especially in Egypt, partly because they find in his writings a response to what they see as closer parallels to the modern political situation in the Muslim countries, and partly because, unlike many of the theological works favoured by the mainstream, those of Ibn Taymiyya seem to encourage direct action.

In fact, it might be conceding too much to define jihadism as having any real ideology beyond an intense but one-dimensional attachment to a hardline interpretation of Islam and a violent hatred of the West. As Lawrence Wright wrote à propos of a 1997 interview with CNN in which bin Laden proved surprisingly vague about his specific policy positions:

What is notable about this response, filled as usual with ritualistic locutions, is the complete absence of any real political plan, beyond imposing Sharia.... The radical Islamist movement has never had a clear idea of governing, or even much interest in it, as the Taliban would conclusively demonstrate. Purification was the goal; and whenever purity is paramount, terror is close at hand. (Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, p246)

Islamofascism?

In 2005, "Islamofascism" and similar formulations started to be used by the Bush White House in relation to militant Islamism. The term was criticised by some, but the comparison between extremist Islamism and European fascism has been made by several other commentators, including some, like Manfred Halpern and Maxime Rodinson, who had personal experience of historical fascist regimes.

Historically, Islamists have not been shy of absorbing influences from the European far right. Banna led the way here in the early days of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the early 1940s,

Anwar Sadat was told of the intention to establish paramilitary "shock battalions"....

The parallel with the Nazi SS was not accidental. Banna was an unabashed admirer of Hitler and Mussolini, who "guided their peoples to unity, order, regeneration, power, and glory." Authoritarian to the core, Banna demanded absolute loyalty from his subordinates....

Sadat gained an insight into this phenomenon as he listened to Banna praising Mussolini's defiance of the international community through his invasion of Ethiopia and Hitler's use of radio broadcasts to enlighten the German people. (Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, p171)

In similar vein, Nabhani was an associate of the notorious pro-Nazi cleric Hajj Amin al-Husayni, while Qutb is said to have been influenced by the French fascist sympathiser Alexis Carrel. Maududi readily acknowledged that the totalistic, all-embracing nature of Islamism resembled fascism and communism, although he firmly denied that it shared their tyrannical characteristics.

Having said all this, Islamism is arguably not so much a form of fascism as it is a manifestation of the broader Counter-Enlightenment tradition. Adherents of this tradition, whether they are Islamists, fundamentalist Christians or reactionary atheists, are profoundly hostile to the comfortable secular world of the post-Enlightenment capitalist West. In Islamist discourse, this takes the form of

a chain of hostility – hostility to the City, with its image of rootless, arrogant, greedy, decadent, frivolous cosmopolitanism; to the mind of the West, manifested in science and reason; to the settled bourgeois, whose existence is the antithesis of the self-sacrificing hero; and to the infidel, who must be crushed to make way for a world of pure faith. (I.Buruma and A.Margalit, Occidentalism, p11)

As a final point, the deeply sinister slogan "we love death", or "we love death as you love life", is a recurring feature of Islamist rhetoric. It has variously been found on the lips of Osama bin Laden, his associate Maulana Inyadullah, the 7/7 London bomber Shehzad Tanweer, the instigators of the 11/3 Madrid bombings, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Ekrima Sa'id Sabri, the Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, the Fort Hood murderer Nidal Hasan, the hardline British Palestinian activist Azzam Tamimi and the commander of the Chechen gang which seized the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow in 2002. It can apparently be traced back to the Muslim commander Khaled ibn al-Walid at the battle of Al-Qadisiya in 637 AD. (See further Natan Sharansky, Defending Identity, p233-234 and these reports from MEMRI, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the National Review and the Telegraph.) The phrase recalls the infamous Falangist cry "¡Viva la Muerte!" reportedly used by Franco's ally José Millán-Astray during the Spanish Civil War.

Three dangerous ideas

2012-01-12T09:53:00.001Z

1. The Theory of Everything (a.k.a. the One True Way)

A Theory of Everything is essentially a closed ideological system: an all-embracing description of human society - or the human condition, or the universe in its entirety - which denies the possibility of its own refutation. It typically takes the form of a political ideology or a religion.

The principal characteristic of a Theory of Everything is that it is monopolistic. Some of its individual claims may be narrower or less sweeping ("capitalism is an unsustainable economic system", "a supreme being exists"), but these claims form part of a broader narrative which provides a complete account of society, life or the cosmos. A Theory of Everything also disallows the possibility of its own rebuttal. It may be held to be validated by God, or self-evidently true, or the only possible conclusion from the empirical facts, or some combination of these. Any evidence that appears to disturb the theory must be either denied or subsumed by reinterpretation within the theory itself. As Sir Karl Popper said in relation to Marxism in Conjectures and Refutations:

In some of its earlier formulations (for example in Marx's analysis of the character of the "coming social revolution") their predictions were testable, and in fact falsified. Yet instead of accepting the refutations the followers of Marx re-interpreted both the theory and the evidence in order to make them agree. In this way they rescued the theory from refutation; but they did so at the price of adopting a device which made it irrefutable.

It might be said that any attempt to think analytically about life or the world necessitates some kind of overarching ideological framework. To this extent, secular democratic liberalism is just as much a Theory of Everything as is Marxism. But there are some important distinctions to be drawn. An ideological system can be more or less closed. Catholicism is more closed than Zen Buddhism. Mussolini's system was more closed than Edmund Burke's. It is also very important to note that ideological theories differ greatly in how far they demand to be enforced by state power. Ayatollah Khomeini said, in reference to his brand of Islamism:

Secular governments... are only concerned with the social order.... Islam and divine governments are not like that. These have commandments for everybody, everywhere, at any place, in any condition. If a person were to commit an immoral dirty deed right next to his house, Islamic governments have business with him.... [Islam] has rules for every person, even before birth, before his marriage, until his marriages, pregnancy, birth, until upbringing of the child, the education of the adult, until puberty, youth, until old age, until death, into the grave, and beyond the grave. (Cited in Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent, p476-7)

What is more, some ideologies are more monopolistic than others. For example, environmentalism and feminism make claims about particular aspects of the world rather than about the world as a whole - though they are frequently subsumed into broader-ranging ideologies such as liberalism and socialism.

Of course, the fact that a system of thought is a Theory of Everything doesn't mean that it isn't true. What it does mean, however, is that the system should be kept well away from the levers of political power. This is because, to put it bluntly, our human limitations mean that we can never be absolutely sure that any given ideological system is definitely correct. This point was made by J.S.Mill in his classic work On Liberty. Mill wrote, in the guise of a believing Christian:

The man who left on the memory of those who witnessed his life and conversation, such an impression of his moral grandeur, that eighteen subsequent centuries have done homage to him as the Almighty in person, was ignominiously put to death, as what? As a blasphemer. Men did not merely mistake their benefactor; they mistook him for the exact contrary of what he was, and treated him as that prodigy of impiety, which they themselves are now held to be, for their treatment of him.... These were, to all appearance, not bad men — not worse than men most commonly are, but rather the contrary; men who possessed in a full, or somewhat more than a full measure, the religious, moral, and patriotic feelings of their time and people: the very kind of men who, in all times, our own included, have every chance of passing through life blameless and respected. The high-priest who rent his garments when the words were pronounced, which, according to all the ideas of his country, constituted the blackest guilt, was in all probability quite as sincere in his horror and indignation, as the generality of respectable and pious men now are in the religious and moral sentiments they profess; and most of those who now shudder at his conduct, if they had lived in his time, and been born Jews, would have acted precisely as he did. Orthodox Christians who are tempted to think that those who stoned to death the first martyrs must have been worse men than they themselves are, ought to remember that one of those persecutors was Saint Paul.

If we can't be sure that a Theory of Everything is true, might it not still be necessary or useful? Maybe people need to be given a broad, all-embracing creed to believe in because society will fall apart if they start asking difficult questions and doubting the rightness of the way things are. The awful old reactionary intellectual Joseph de Maistre wrote in his Study on Sovereignty:

[T]o conduct himself well, man needs beliefs, not problems. His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas; and, when his reason awakes, all his opinions should be given, at least all those relating to his conduct. Nothing is more vital to him than prejudices. Let us not take this word in bad part. It does not necessarily signify false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, any opinions adopted without examination. Now, these kinds of opinion are essential to man; they are the real basis of his happiness and the palladium of empires. Without them, there can be neither religion, morality, nor government....

....Once let everyone rely on his individual reason in religion, and you will see immediately the rise of anarchy of belief or the annihilation of religious sovereignty. Likewise, if each man makes himself the judge of the principles of government you will see immediately the rise of civil anarchy or the annihilation of political sovereignty. Government is a true religion; it has its dogmas, its mysteries, its priests; to submit it to individual discussion is to destroy it....

De Maistre was no doubt right in the banal sense that societies without a certain body of unquestioned shared values will not be cohesive or well-functional. No doubt it would be, in general terms, a bad thing for large numbers of people to start doubting the legitimacy of Parliament's power to make laws or the police's right to enforce them. It also seems to be the case that human beings have a primal need for certainty about the way their world works. But de Maistre was writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and we know that he was wrong in his suppositions because we now know how the story ends. The liberal democracies of the West have not fallen apart as a result of their citizens thinking for themselves and electing their leaders. They have survived and prospered to become the most stable and responsibly governed states in the world.

De Maistre was right about the formidable power that ideas can have. In the form of a Theory of Everything, they can wreak havoc. The reason why we shouldn't bet on our chosen system being right is that the potential costs of doing so are too high. The consequences of being wrong can be atrocious. This is evident both from the repression and injustice of the sort of theocratic monarchies that de Maistre liked and from the more modern and refined forms of totalitarianism that the 20th century brought with it. Terry Eagleton wrote in his book Ideology:

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons - reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.

In similar vein, the physicist Steven Weinberg famously said that it takes religion to make good people do bad things. It might usefully be recalled here that Prof. Weinberg is a strong advocate of the ideology of Zionism and a defender of Israeli military operations. Christopher Hitchens, who liked Weinberg's bon mot so much that he incorporated it into his own act, was a former Trotskyist who became a defender of the aggressive and ideologically driven foreign policy of the Bush administration. We can't get away from this stuff. Ideologies, religious or secular, are dangerous things. They need to be watched carefully, particularly if they claim to be the One True Way.

2. Tribalism and Black-and-White Thinking

(I know that this is actually 2 ideas)

The tendency to create ingroups and outgroups is one of the most pervasive and insidious characteristics of human behaviour. It isn't difficult to think of reasons why this instinct might have proved advantageous in evolutionary terms, but it is equally easy to think of examples from recent and not-so-recent history of its horrendous consequences.

The pioneering academic research in this field was undertaken by Henri Tajfel in the early 1970s (see here, here and here). The work of social psychologists like Tajfel links in with that of cultural critics like Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex) and Edward Said (Orientalism), who argued - perhaps a little too forcefully - that men and Westerners had promoted images of women and Arabs respectively as dangerous, inferior Others.

The most obvious triggers of tribalistic behaviour may be ethnicity and sex, but Tajfel found that tribal instincts required little encouragement to come to the surface. Fairly obviously, we favour members of our own tribe above others (ingroup bias), but tribalism doesn't end there:

[W]e exaggerate the differences between our ingroup and other outgroups. Because perceived similarities are minimized and perceived differences are maximized, stereotypes are formed and reinforced. Another consequence is a phenomenon known as the outgroup homogeneity effect, whereby perceivers assume that there is a greater similarity among members of outgroups than among members of one's own group. In other words, there may be fine and subtle differences among "us", but "they" are all alike....

The outgroup homogeneity effect is common and evident around the world.... People from China, Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam seem themselves as different from one another, of course, but to many Western eyes they are all Asian. Business majors like to talk about "engineering types"; engineers talk about "business types"; liberals and conservatives see themselves as individuals but the other side as "one big mass of unthinking extremists"; teenagers lump together all "old people" and older adults talk about "all those rude teenagers"; and while the natives of California proclaim their cultural and ethnic diversity, outsiders talk of the "typical Californian". (S.Kassin, S.Fein and H.R.Markus, Social Psychology)

These tendencies link in with another human psychological quirk: a tendency towards black-and-white (or "dichotomous") thinking which disallows the possibility of ambiguity. A dichotomous view of the world is sometimes referred to as "Manichaean", in reference to an ancient religious sect which taught of a struggle between a good world of light and an evil world of darkness. The human tendency to engage in this sort of binary categorisation was the basis of the structuralist movement in anthropology, led by Claude Lévi-Strauss. It has also attracted the attention of psychologists (see e.g. here) and sociologists, most notably Theodor Adorno. In his work on the psychological roots of authoritarianism, Adorno famously claimed that "intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality".

The political consequences of all this are very predictable. We all know what happens when extreme and adversarial principles are perceived as being incarnated in opposing tribes. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, in reference to antisemitism:

Anti-Semitism is thus seen to be at bottom a form of Manichaeism. It explains the course of the world by the struggle of the principle of Good with the principle of Evil. Between these two principles no reconciliation is conceivable; one of them must triumph and the other be annihilated.... The reader understands that the anti-Semite does not have recourse to Manichaeism as a secondary principle of explanation. It is the original choice he makes of Manichaeism which explains and conditions anti-Semitism.

George W. Bush put it more simply: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists".

To be fair, it's not just Bush. We all do this. I do it and you do it. Tribalism and polar thinking are wired into our chimp brains. But we can at least try to channel them into relatively harmless outlets and not to inflict them upon our fellow human beings any more than is strictly necessary.

3. Utopianism

There seems to be a widespread tendency for humans to posit the existence in the past of a Golden Age of peace, order and plenty:

The idea of a Golden Age in the past, lost through man's fault, took shape in various ways, but it was more immediately suggested by the almost instinctive conviction (common to old races as to old individuals) that things must once have been better, just as men generally hope that things will be better in the future. (J.A.MacCulloch, s.v. "Fall (Ethnic)" in Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics)

As to the future, there seems to be a parallel conviction that one day an apocalypse will arrive in which the decadence of the present will be transformed into a utopia. This is often linked with the advent of a messianic figure and with disarray in society and the natural order.

Such utopian and apocalyptic ways of thinking, which I have written about more extensively elsewhere, can be dangerous. In recent years, it has been widely suggested that the Islamic doctrine of the apocalypse has influenced President Ahmadinejad's policies in Iran.

Blogging the Odyssey - Book 11

2011-12-28T12:31:00.002Z

First, the Sparknotes summary:

Odysseus travels to the River of Ocean in the land of the Cimmerians. There he pours libations and performs sacrifices as Circe earlier instructs him to do to attract the souls of the dead. The first to appear is that of Elpenor, the crewman who broke his neck falling from Circe’s roof. He begs Odysseus to return to Circe’s island and give his body a proper burial. Odysseus then speaks with the Theban prophet Tiresias, who reveals that Poseidon is punishing the Achaeans for blinding his son Polyphemus. He foretells Odysseus’s fate—that he will return home, reclaim his wife and palace from the wretched suitors, and then make another trip to a distant land to appease Poseidon. He warns Odysseus not to touch the flocks of the Sun when he reaches the land of Thrinacia; otherwise, he won’t return home without suffering much more hardship and losing all of his crew. When Tiresias departs, Odysseus calls other spirits toward him. He speaks with his mother, Anticleia, who updates him on the affairs of Ithaca and relates how she died of grief waiting for his return. He then meets the spirits of various famous men and heroes and hears the stories of their lives and deaths.

Odysseus now cuts short the tale and asks his Phaeacian hosts to allow him to sleep, but the king and queen urge him to continue, asking if he met any of the Greeks who fell at Troy in Hades. He relates his encounters there: he meets Agamemnon, who tells him of his murder at the hands of his wife, Clytemnestra. Next he meets Achilles, who asks about his son, Neoptolemus. Odysseus then tries to speak with Ajax, an Achaean who killed himself after he lost a contest with Odysseus over the arms of Achilles, but Ajax refuses to speak and slips away. He sees Heracles, King Minos, the hunter Orion, and others. He witnesses the punishment of Sisyphus, struggling eternally to push a boulder over a hill only to have it roll back down whenever it reaches the top. He then sees Tantalus, agonized by hunger and thirst. Tantalus sits in a pool of water overhung by bunches of grapes, but whenever he reaches for the grapes, they rise out of grasp, and whenever he bends down to drink, the water sinks out of reach. Odysseus soon finds himself mobbed by souls wishing to ask about their relatives in the world above. He becomes frightened, runs back to his ship, and immediately sails away.

This is the Nekuia or Book of the Dead.

In the Homeric understanding, the deceased do not have a proper, full afterlife in a heaven or a hell - they experience a joyless half-existence as wraiths in a shadowy realm of the dead. It is a bit like the primitive Israelite conception of sheol.

Odysseus interviews a succession of heroines and heroes - heroines first. We are reminded again of the story of Agamemnon and his death when Odysseus speaks with him. Odysseus' talk with Akhilleus is particularly striking. In the Iliad, Akhilleus famously said that he had chosen to win fame (kleos) on the battlefield instead of having a journey home (nostos) and a long life. It looks like he's now having second thoughts:

"No, do not speak well to me of death, glorious Odysseus.
I would prefer to live on earth as another man's serf,
the serf of a landless man, who has a scant livelihood,
than to rule over all of the decayed dead."

Despite his apparent indifference to his own continuing kleos, Akhilleus still appears to have concern for his father's honour (timé) in the land of the living.

Odysseus' mother Antikleia tells him that she died of grief at his absence, and that his father is going the same way. However, Teiresias lets Odysseus know that he will indeed enjoy a "honey-sweet homecoming" (noston meliédea). He also makes an enigmatic prophecy that Odysseus, after getting back to Ithaka, will have to make another journey to propitiate Poseidon's anger.

It is often said that the last part of Odysseus' visions - in which he actually seems to be walking around inside the underworld - is a later interpolation into the poem (lines 568-627). Only in this part of the Book do we seem to see a later conception of post mortem rewards and punishments.

Blogging the Odyssey - Book 10

2011-12-17T11:40:00.001Z

Here is the Sparknotes summary:

The Achaeans sail from the land of the Cyclopes to the home of Aeolus, ruler of the winds. Aeolus presents Odysseus with a bag containing all of the winds, and he stirs up a westerly wind to guide Odysseus and his crew home. Within ten days, they are in sight of Ithaca, but Odysseus’s shipmates, who think that Aeolus has secretly given Odysseus a fortune in gold and silver, tear the bag open. The winds escape and stir up a storm that brings Odysseus and his men back to Aeolia. This time, however, Aeolus refuses to help them, certain that the gods hate Odysseus and wish to do him harm.

Lacking wind, the Achaeans row to the land of the Laestrygonians, a race of powerful giants whose king, Antiphates, and unnamed queen turn Odysseus’s scouts into dinner. Odysseus and his remaining men flee toward their ships, but the Laestrygonians pelt the ships with boulders and sink them as they sit in the harbor. Only Odysseus’s ship escapes.

From there, Odysseus and his men travel to Aeaea, home of the beautiful witch-goddess Circe. Circe drugs a band of Odysseus’s men and turns them into pigs. When Odysseus goes to rescue them, Hermes approaches him in the form of a young man. He tells Odysseus to eat an herb called moly to protect himself from Circe’s drug and then lunge at her when she tries to strike him with her sword. Odysseus follows Hermes’ instructions, overpowering Circe and forcing her to change his men back to their human forms. Odysseus soon becomes Circe’s lover, and he and his men live with her in luxury for a year. When his men finally persuade him to continue the voyage homeward, Odysseus asks Circe for the way back to Ithaca. She replies he must sail to Hades, the realm of the dead, to speak with the spirit of Tiresias, a blind prophet who will tell him how to get home.

The next morning, Odysseus rouses his men for the imminent departure. He discovers, however, that the youngest man in his crew, Elpenor, had gotten drunk the previous night, slept on the roof, and, when he heard the men shouting and marching in the morning, fell from the roof and broke his neck. Odysseus explains to his men the course that they must take, which they are displeased to learn is rather meandering.

The folktales continue in this Book, with the well-known stories of Aiolos and Kirké, as well as the somewhat enigmatic account of the barbarous Laistrygonians, which I suspect comes from a longer and more detailed original story.

There is a famous passage in which Homer appears to be describing the land of the midnight sun:

For six days, we sailed for day and night alike;
on the seventh, we came to Lamos' steep citadel,
to Laistrygonian Telepylos, where the incoming
shepherd calls out and the outgoing shepherd answers him.
There, a man who does not sleep could have earned a double wage,
one by herding cattle, one by pasturing silver sheep,
for the paths of the night and the day run close.

The themes of identity and attachment to one's home continue to recur. When Kirké asks Odysseus to identify himself, she asks him where he is from and who his parents are: those are the components of his public identity. When Odysseus comes back to the remainder of his men after evading Kirké's magic, his men are described as being as happy as if they had come home to Ithaka.

Odysseus likes Kirké's place so much that he has to be reminded by his men to resume his journey home:

"...remember now your native land [patridos gaiés],
if it is the gods' will that you will be saved and come
to your high-roofed house [oikos] and to your native land [patrida gaian]."

But resume it he must. He can't stay with Kirké for ever: it's not the place for him. Like Kalypso's island and the land of the Phaiakians, it's a bit too perfect and un-human.

In order to press on with his journey, Odysseus is now going to have to make the furthest and most extreme trip of all, and commune with the spirits of the dead.

Shari'ah law in the UK

2011-12-17T11:04:00.002Z

The use of traditional Islamic religious law, or Shari'ah, in the UK has been advocated by various Muslim groups, ranging from the radical fringe to the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain. In 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and Lord Phillips, one of the country's most senior judges, made well-publicised remarks that appeared to express support for the idea. However, the notion of Shari'ah being enforced in the UK is a controversial one, and figures from across the political spectrum have united in opposing it.

On the face of it, calling for Shari'ah in the UK is an unusual demand. Classical Islamic scholars held that Shari'ah was not applicable in non-Muslim societies, and it never existed in systematic form outside the Islamic world.

How many British Muslims prefer Shari'ah law to British law or want it to be enforced in this country? Very, very roughly, surveys from the past few years seem to reveal a 2-to-1 split against Shari'ah. A poll conducted in 2006 by the Sunday Telegraph came up with a pro-Shari'ah figure of 40%. In the same year, a survey carried out by GfK NOP Social Research for Channel 4's Dispatches found pro-Shari'ah sentiment running at 30%. In 2007, a report by Policy Exchange put the figure at 28%. A 2008 report by the Centre for Social Cohesion found that the level of support for Shari'ah among Muslim students was 40%. These results were broadly consistent with a survey conducted in 2007-08 by the Centre for Islamic Pluralism, which reported that "[a]bout two-thirds of our interviewees" favoured UK law and opposed Shari'ah.

Where is Shari'ah enforced in the UK?

Shari'ah law is already being operated and enforced in the UK, although not much is known by non-Muslims about the country's Shari'ah infrastructure.

A 2009 report by Civitas claims that there are at least 85 Shari'ah courts in the country, which operate with varying degrees of formality. These include the following networks:

The Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (established in 2007), which has branches in London, Birmingham, Bradford, Nuneaton and Manchester. Some press reports have suggested that further branches might open in Cardiff, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
The Islamic Sharia Council (established in 1982), which comprises 13 councils, plus an additional 2 operating abroad. It is based in Leyton in London.
The Association of Muslim Lawyers (established in 1995), which operates 3 bodies.

Legally speaking, an arbitration tribunal like the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal can issue decisions that are enforceable in the civil courts, provided that the parties to the dispute in question have agreed by contract to accept the tribunal's jurisdiction. The governing statute is the Arbitration Act 1996. This jurisdiction is confined to civil and commercial disputes - family and criminal cases cannot be settled by arbitration. Shari'ah can, however, work its way into the family law system if a couple ask a judge to sanction an agreed settlement that has been drawn up on the basis on Shari'ah (a "consent order", in legal parlance).

The Shariah Councils do not purport to conduct arbitrations. Instead, they present themselves as more informal bodies which engage in a non-binding form of dispute resolution known as mediation. In practice, however, it has been said that the two categories of Shari'ah-based institutions overlap to a great extent. There have also been claims that Shari'ah arbitration tribunals have purported to conduct binding arbitrations on family law matters, and that Shariah Councils ask litigants to sign an agreement to abide by their decisions.

The Shari'ah bodies are kept busy. The Islamic Sharia Council reports that it handled 1,500 cases from 1982 to 1995, 3,000 from 1996 to 2002, another 1,500 from 2003 to 2005 and around 1,000 since 2006.

It is reported that some non-Muslims, mindful of the weight that Shari'ah carries in the Muslim community, are bringing cases before Shari'ah bodies. The founder of the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal has claimed that around 15% of the MAT's cases came from this source over 2011, compared to 5% in 2009.

What cases do Shari'ah courts consider?

Shari'ah cases overwhelmingly relate to family and marriage disputes. The Islamic Sharia Council states that 95% of all applications received by it relate to matrimonial matters. Of these, the majority are from women who are seeking a divorce from their husbands.

Shari'ah courts at work

There is some video footage of UK Shari'ah courts in session. The Guardian website offers a video of the Islamic Sharia Council at work. There is a longer video on the subject available from Channel 4's Dispatches programme.

As to narrative accounts, here is a description the Leyton branch of the Islamic Sharia Council:

In the back room of a converted corner shop... Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed is trying to save another marriage. He stretches across his desk and gently holds the hand of a young man with five o'clock shadow, whose eyes are red and swollen from crying. For more than an hour the man has been pleading with Sayeed to ask his ex-wife to give him a second chance. And for more than an hour, Sayeed has been quietly telling him that if his ex-wife does not want him back, there is nothing he can do. As the fraught meeting continues next door, one of Sayeed's colleagues... explains with a shrug, "He has come to us to ask for help, but if the woman is adamant and she doesn't want to reunite, what can we do?"...

The council... issues fatwas, or religious judgments, from two rooms that resemble a hard-up solicitors' practice, tucked away on a quiet terraced street of small family homes with roses in the front gardens....

This is an account of the Shariah Council based at the Birmingham Central Mosque:

The Shariah Council and the Family Support Service share a meeting room.... This meeting room is furnished in a modern style with desks, computers and filing cabinets and obviously functions as a working office. There is a notice on the door of the room which details times at which the office was open for enquiries. On one side of the longest desk in the meeting room there are larger high backed office chairs and on the other side of the desk smaller, office chairs....

Parties are originally dealt with by the Family Support Service. Two members of staff (both part time) are responsible for sifting the material or doing the preliminary work and when they reach a conclusion that the marriage is not viable or that the parties are insistent on separation or termination of the marriage the case is then put to the Shariah Council. They operate according to an unwritten code of practice. These functions have been delegated to the Family Support Service by the Shariah Council. The Shariah Council itself has four members, all of whom are volunteers. The panel is chaired by the chairman of the Mosque who is the fourth member. The members of the Council are chosen by the chairman of the Mosque on the basis of their knowledge of the Qur'an and Sunnah and also to ensure that the Council membership reflects different backgrounds.

The Shariah Council meets monthly, usually for about three to four hours at a time. Each case takes around five to six minutes since the preliminary work of testing whether the marriage is saveable has been done by the Family Support Service. They also give advice to the parties if there is anything which they notice that the parties should have taken into account before they got married; in particular, they advise applicants who had not registered their marriages under civil law to do this next time . The Council deals with around 150 cases a year. The Council works by consensus or by majority decision in the rare case of there being a dissenting voice. No reasons for decisions are given. Prior decisions are not understood as constituting binding precedents. The parties sometimes swear an oath and occasionally they bring a representative with them. People other than the parties are occasionally called to give evidence, including children. The Council has not called any expert witnesses to date. Parties may take their case to another Shariah Council if they are unhappy with the Council's decision.

Here is an account of the same council at work:

After being beaten repeatedly by her husband – who had also threatened to kill her – Jameela turned to her local Sharia council in a desperate bid for a way out of her marriage. Today she discovers the verdict. Playing nervously with her hands, the young mother-of-three listens as the panel of judges discuss whether they should grant her a divorce....

In an airless room in the bowels of the mosque, Jameela is asked to explain why she wants a divorce. She replies that her husband spends most of his time with his second wife – Islamic law allows men to have up to four wives – but complains he is abusive whenever he returns to her home.

Across the desk, Dr Mohammed Naseem, chair of the mosque’s Sharia council, sits alongside Talha Bokhari, a white-robed imam, and Amra Bone, the only woman sitting on an Islamic court in this country....

Although the judges appear sympathetic, they are concerned about the rights of the father, as Islamic law says he is still responsible for his children’s education. "For the sake of the children, you must keep up the façade of cordial relations," says Dr Naseem. "The worst thing that can happen to a child is to see the father and mother quarrelling."

Objections

The subject of Shari'ah law in the UK is fiercely controversial. Some of the criticism comes from far-right groups with an anti-immigration agenda. Other criticism is more serious-minded and less easy to brush aside.

One critic has argued that Shari'ah procedures are not truly voluntary or equitable:

First, voluntary arbitration is only acceptable if both parties genuinely consent. There is a good deal of intimidation of women in Muslim communities and the genuine consent of women could not be accepted as a reality. Second, women are not equal in sharia law.... Effectively the voice of a woman is half that of a man. Third, religious guidance is effective because individuals fear God or wish to remain in good standing with fellow believers.

Another report says:

Tanisha Jnagel, the community services team leader for Roshni Asian Women’s Aid in Nottingham... says that, in her experience, the Islamic Sharia Council will tend to try to balance the women’s interests against those of her husband, family and extended community. In many cases, this consultative approach can allow community leaders and family to pressure the women to withdraw plans to divorce or to return to abusive husbands.

An academic study has found:

Observation, case-file analysis and interviews revealed a troubling development for Muslim women using this space to obtain a Muslim divorce. For example, observing reconciliation sessions I became aware that several women had reluctantly agreed to attend the meetings and felt that they had little choice but to do so if they were to be issued with a divorce certificate. Of the ten women I observed in these sessions a staggering four had informed the religious scholar that they were party to civil injuctions issued against their husbands on the grounds of violence and threatening behaviour. In this way these privatised legal processes were ignoring not only state law intervention and due process but providing little protection and safety for the women in question. Furthermore the interviews and observation data revealed that husbands used this opportunity to negotiate reconciliation financial settlements for divorce and in many cases access to children. Settlements which in effect were being discussed under the shadow of law.

Some of the most stringent criticism has come from the One Law For All campaign:

In one case... a father who went to a civil court in order to gain the custody of his child had a “Worldwide Expulsion and Boycott Order” issued by the Sharia Council against him. He explained “they are still forcing me and my family to hand over the child, withdraw the case from the UK court, accept all their demands and allegations and keep apologising until they pardon me for taking the case to UK Family Court and ignoring their internal court.”

....Ismail Einashe, One Law for All’s Policy and Campaigns Coordinator, says: “My cousin was forced by her husband to seek a resolution at a Sharia Council. The only “choice” she was given was to stay with her husband or lose her children. I don’t think that can be a choice; how can it be? Every day dozens of women like her are bullied, and forced into Sharia courts across the country. How can we allow these women to have lesser rights? Is this really the way to foster social cohesion and to protect the most vulnerable in our society?”....

Fariborz Pooya, Chair of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, says: “Sharia law is not voluntary, but rather compulsory by its very nature. To deceptively talk of the voluntary nature of these courts is a means by which Islamic groups give legal cover and pretence to their discrimination. For the Government to accept this argument is akin to outsourcing the legal system to Islamic groups. This is detrimental to, and a betrayal of, the rights of our most vulnerable citizens to being equal before the law.”

What do the civil courts say about Shari'ah?

In 2008, the House of Lords ruled in EM (Lebanon) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2008] UKHL 64. This case concerned a Lebanese woman who was seeking asylum in order to avoid being sent back to Lebanon with her 12-year-old son. In Lebanon, Shari'ah family law would have given custody to her abusive husband. This was argued to be incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.

Lord Brown referred to this aspect of Shari'ah as "arbitrary and discriminatory" and as "wholly incompatible... with certain of the basic principles underlying the Convention". Lord Hope had this to say:

This system was described by counsel... as arbitrary and discriminatory. So it is, if it is to be measured by the human rights standards that we are obliged to apply by the Convention.... Under our law non-discrimination is a core principle for the protection of human rights. The fact is however that Shari'a law as it is applied in Lebanon was created by and for men in a male dominated society. The place of the mother in the life of a child under that system is quite different under that law from that which is guaranteed in the Contracting States by article 8 of the Convention read in conjunction with article 14. There is no place in it for equal rights between men and women. It is, as Lord Bingham points out, the product of a religious and cultural tradition that is respected and observed throughout much of the world. But by our standards the system is arbitrary because the law permits of no exceptions to its application, however strong the objections may be on the facts of any given case. It is discriminatory too because it denies women custody of their children after they have reached the age of custodial transfer simply because they are women.

The Convention is policed by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg, whose rulings are binding on the UK in international law. The ECtHR has been asked to rule on a number of occasions on Turkey's secularism legislation. In its judgment in Refah Partisi v Turkey (41340/98, 41342/98, 41343/98 and 41344/98), handed down on 13 February 2003, the Court questioned whether the introduction of Shari'ah law was compatible with the European liberal democratic tradition:

Even though these last two statements lend themselves to a number of different interpretations, their common denominator is that they both refer to religious or divine rules as the basis for the political regime which the speakers wished to bring into being.... [T]he statements concerned could reasonably have been understood as confirming statements made by Refah MPs which revealed the party’s intention of setting up a regime based on sharia....

The Court concurs in the Chamber’s view that sharia is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy, as set forth in the Convention:
Like the Constitutional Court, the Court considers that sharia, which faithfully reflects the dogmas and divine rules laid down by religion, is stable and invariable. Principles such as pluralism in the political sphere or the constant evolution of public freedoms have no place in it. The Court notes that, when read together, the offending statements, which contain explicit references to the introduction of sharia, are difficult to reconcile with the fundamental principles of democracy, as conceived in the Convention taken as a whole. It is difficult to declare one’s respect for democracy and human rights while at the same time supporting a regime based on sharia, which clearly diverges from Convention values, particularly with regard to its criminal law and criminal procedure, its rules on the legal status of women and the way it intervenes in all spheres of private and public life in accordance with religious precepts....
....When the former theocratic regime was dismantled and the republican regime was being set up, Turkey opted for a form of secularism which confined Islam and other religions to the sphere of private religious practice. Mindful of the importance for survival of the democratic regime of ensuring respect for the principle of secularism in Turkey, the Court considers that the Constitutional Court was justified in holding that Refah’s policy of establishing sharia was incompatible with democracy....

It is only fair to note that the ECtHR's decisions in this line of cases have attracted some criticism.

Legal reform

Earlier this year, the crossbench peer Baroness Cox tabled legislation in the House of Lords which would effectively outlaw Shari'ah-based arbitration. Legislative restrictions on Shari'ah-based arbitration were introduced in the Canadian province of Ontario in 2006.

Black Labour?

2011-12-13T13:27:00.000Z

The somewhat Gothic-sounding "Black Labour" appears to be the latest colour-based movement in British politics, following the Red Tories and Blue Labour.

The movement, insofar as it is a movement, has been launched by a document published by the think-tank Policy Network, accompanied by various other initiatives, including an article in the Guardian. Its authors are Graeme Cooke, a former Labour policy wonk, Adam Lent, who was the TUC's chief economist, Anthony Painter, a journalist, and Hopi Sen, a former Labour spin doctor.

Black Labour is essentially about promoting fiscal conservatism within a progressive political setting as a means of restoring Labour's reputation, shredded by the recession, for economic competence:

There is nothing right wing about fiscal conservatism. It simply means that those from whom the state borrows can have absolute confidence that it will meet its obligations to repay, come what may. This means adopting an approach which is careful, risk averse, and cautious....

Nor does fiscal conservatism mean failing to respond to an economic crisis. As we on the centre-left are not naïve enough to think markets are perfectly stable phenomena, we recognise the state will, on occasion, be required to step in to prevent collapse....

But being in a position to respond to a crisis requires preparation, usually by avoiding deficits in the good times.... [E]ffective Keynesianism requires fiscal conservatism.

The authors are not advocating the right-wing desideratum of a small state: fiscal conservatism doesn't mean limiting government spending to an arbitrary percentage of GDP. What it does mean, however, is accepting the principle that the country has to pay for what it spends, and that there will be less money around in future because of falling tax revenues and an ageing population. The authors go further and note that progressive politics is not simply about public spending: it is about "[s]tructural or institutional reforms, which affect the causes of inequality and injustice".

Much of this is inoffensive stuff, and difficult to argue with. As Ed Miliband hinted in his conference speech, any future Labour government will inherit the same straitened economic circumstances that are currently strangling George Osborne, and it will have to accept and prepare for the fact that the public spending strategy of the 2001-2006 period cannot be repeated. On the level of principle, there is no necessary conflict between maintaining budgetary discpline and implementing socially progressive policies. It has been pointed out that the iconic socialist Attlee government of 1945-1951 ran fiscally conservative policies in the aftermath of a world war that all but bankrupted the country (as, more recently, did the liberal Clinton administration in the US).

The main problem with Black Labour is that it is what Francis Maude calls a policy flavour rather than a concrete programme. It is highly lacking in specificity. Sen has candidly admitted this, as has Lent. True, there are some specific suggestions in the paper. The authors propose burying Gordon Brown's budgetary rules, and suggest that "one option might be a commitment to deliver a surplus on the public finances towards the end of a concrete timescale such as the lifetime of a single parliament". But these tentative suggestions are few and far between. Passages like the following are highly vague and non-specific:

Labour should be shaping this debate by developing detailed policies on how ideas such as a state investment bank, innovation-focused public procurement, reformed taxation, stronger consumer rights, and greater competition can be used to give the UK’s most innovative entrepreneurs real support while also improving pay and social mobility....

Underlying this is the recognition that welfare mechanisms are never preferable to a genuinely productive and balanced economy that raise the living standards of those on low and middle incomes. In the coming decade, the extra resources New Labour found to compensate for market-based inequality won’t be available. So deeper and more ambitious reforms must be confronted to ensure the economy works for working people.

Black Labour has already started attracting criticism. Inevitably, it has been seen as a rearguard action by New Labour against the Miliband dispensation, though this has been firmly denied. A piece on Liberal Conspiracy identifies four weaknesses in the project. An article on Labour List has argued, with much justice, that fiscal conservatism is a red herring because the current state of the public finances is largely attributable to the recession rather than to indiscipline on the part of Gordon Brown's spending policies.

I wonder where this new movement will go. It's not clear whether Blue Labour has a long-term future, though David Lammy's new book has been described by the FT as the movement's "first proper manifesto". And who talks about Phillip Blond now? It will be interesting to see if the Black Labour chaps are still around in 6 months' time.

The politics of Christmas?

2011-12-12T21:36:00.001Z

The think-tank Theos has produced a report entitled The Politics of Christmas. It is intelligently and vigorously written by a bona fide academic theologian, Stephen Holmes, but I'm sorry to say that I find it rather disappointing.

The thesis of the report is quite simple. It notes, correctly, that Christmas as we know it is a relatively modern invention:

In the middle of the nineteenth century, in Britain, but also in the United States, the celebration of Christmas was revived (in many places the festival was almost ignored up to that time). At the same time, however, the festival was reconfigured as a celebration of domesticity, where once it had been a public occasion for (temporary) subversion of the social order.

Once the Victorians got hold of Christmas, it was turned into a saccharine festival of family and private charity drained of any wider concerns about political power and social justice.

Not only is the modern British Christmas politically unsatisfactory, it is theologically unsatisfactory too. Its apolitical character stands in contrast (says the report) with the biblical story of the nativity:

It is a government census that forces Mary and Joseph to travel to Bethlehem, and that causes such overcrowding in the town that she is forced to use a stable as an antenatal suite. Despite the sanitised images on Christmas cards, it does not take very much thought to realise that a stable is not the most hygienic setting for a birth, and so we can add healthcare provision to the list of themes referenced. Herod is a dictator afraid of his position, and so orders his troops to commit an act of barbarous brutality in an attempt to eradicate a perceived threat. The family is homeless when Jesus is born; their flight into Egypt turns them into asylum seekers. It seems almost certain (given what we know of marriage customs of the day) that Mary was fourteen, perhaps fifteen, and, of course, as the story is told, Joseph is not her child’s father: Government bureaucracy; healthcare provision; brutal dictatorship; homelessness; asylum seekers; a single teenage mother – with this story in view, it might seem that we simply have to do politics at Christmas!

....[T]he story should bring us face-to-face with our views on homelessness, on asylum, on healthcare provision, on intervention in sovereign states whose authorities are repressing their citizens, on our attitude to foreign people resident in our nation, on our beliefs about gender politics.

So much for the report's thesis.

My first problem with the report is that is wildly anachronistic. To connect the narrative of the nativity story with modern debates about asylum seekers, healthcare, interventionist foreign policy and so on displays a deep lack of historical consciousness. In terms of biblical scholarship, it's the oldest trick in the book: generation after generation of scholars has looked into the New Testament and seen their own attitudes and beliefs staring back at them. One thinks of George Tyrrell's verdict on Adolf von Harnack's work on the historical Jesus: he had looked down a deep well only to see his own face reflected at the bottom.

The report's political agenda is very particular and tendentious. Homelessness, migration, healthcare, gender politics... it is the familiar agenda of the modern western left, transplanted wholesale into first-century Palestine. Now, I don't necessarily have a problem with this agenda in principle - this blog's editorial line is on the left of centre, after all - but it does call into question the credibility of the report's historical and theological analysis. Dr Holmes does not tell us whether he approves of (say) the government's NHS legislation, but there is a distinct suspicion that he doesn't, and that he is implicitly seeking to call Saints Matthew and Luke as witnesses to validate his positions on this and other policy issues.

While we're on the subject of historicity, the report's references to Christmas as the traditional occasion for festal inversion of the social order are historically correct (this particular Christmas tradition goes back to the Roman Saturnalia) but misleading. Such inversions - social superiors waiting on their subordinates at dinner and so forth - were surreal and carnivalesque in nature. They were not anchored in any political critique of contemporary society. There is no alternative, older tradition of political radicalism at Christmas to challenge the anodyne Victorian version.

But is this really any great loss? For me, the saddest thing about the report is the idea that there's something wrong with an annual pause in the unceasing bitterness of the political battle to make space for a bit of cheap sentimentality (to be fair, Holmes isn't against having a periodic political truce - he just thinks that Christmas is a bad time for it). "Nativity plays and carol services", he writes, "are not – or should not be – safe, comfortable, 'feel-good' moments through which we escape from reality". To which I am tempted to say - why the hell not?

It's true, of course, that the modern, post-Victorian Christmas can be a bit too crass and kitschy. But I'd suggest that the antidote to this is an authentic rediscovery of the spiritual element of the season - which goes back a long time before the Christian era - rather than putting together an identikit Guardianista political agenda and seeking to relate it to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

The report gets at least one thing right:

[S]tatistics concerning divorce and family break-up peak each year just after Christmas: on the one hand, traditional practices force family members to spend considerable time together, potentially highlighting an existing failure of a relationship in such a way that it can no longer be ignored; on the other, and perhaps more insidiously, Christmas traditions imagine and project a perfect family life, and so challenge as inadequate the life of every real family, which is of course multiply imperfect....

Yet this barely rises about the level of banality. The idea that Christmas can be stressful because it forces families into forced jollity is almost as much of a cliché as is the family Christmas itself. I think that the uptick in the divorce statistics is quite well known even outside legal circles.

At times, the report comes dangerously close to resembling a Craig Brown parody.

Dickens’ Christmas is not precisely apolitical - Scrooge’s attitude to the plight of (the family of) his employee, Bob Cratchit, is transformed utterly by the ghostly visitations – but the politics is carefully circumscribed. Personal charity is a proper yuletide attitude, and so gifts to Cratchit and his family are appropriate, but there is no place in the tale for querying the basis of the economic and social system that impoverishes Bob Cratchit in the first place or condemns Tiny Tim to a precarious life of dependence on random kindnesses just because of his disability. The transformed Scrooge is more generous, but no more political. He gives gifts to those in need, but does not begin to imagine challenging the system that keeps them needy.

I'm not making this up, I promise!

I'm sorry I've seen fit to be so disagreeable about what is a serious and well-intentioned contribution to public debate. Dr Holmes is clearly a gifted scholar, and I probably share some of his political prejudices. All the same, for me, this report strikes a very duff note indeed.

The myth of Winterval

2011-12-11T19:53:00.001Z

This is a post about one of the more pervasive British media myths of recent times: the notion that left-wing local authorities are replacing Christmas with an ersatz multicultural festival called "Winterval", in anticipation of or in response to pressure from minority communities in general and Muslims in particular.

Media blogger Kevin Arscott has produced a comprehensive analysis of the Winterval myth. Though somewhat polemical in tone, it is meticulously researched and documented. It kills the myth of Winterval stone dead, and should make uncomfortable reading for a succession of politicians, church leaders and journalists who have peddled the tale over the years.

It appears that Winterval was invented in 1997 by Mike Chubb, an employee of Birmingham City Council. Chubb was looking for an umbrella term to use as a brand name for a season of religious and secular events that were scheduled to take place between 20 November and 31 December 1997. The programme comprised

41 days and nights of activity that ranged from BBC Children in Need, to the Christmas Lights Switch On, to a Frankfurt Christmas Market, outdoor ice rink, Aston Hall by Candlelight, Diwali, shopping at Christmas, world class theatre and arts plus, of course, New Year's Eve with its massive 100,000 audience.

There was no question of attempting to appease Muslims or any other community, and the Winterval festivities included various traditional Christmas events and paraphernalia.

Winterval was a success. It was repeated once, the following year, and was then stopped. The myth, however, had only just begun. In the succeeding years, it would grow enormously in scope and influence, and would become a symbol for political and religious agendas that had little to do with the mundane matter of Birmingham City Council's marketing strategy in the late 1990s:

The myth was not just repeated... it was also gradually distorted to become ever more removed from the original misconception. What started as a myth that one council had rebranded or renamed Christmas became a pluralised, open-ended narrative that ‘councils’ and ‘authorities’ were in fact rebranding or renaming Christmas as ‘Winterval’.

The myth originated in 1998, the second year of Winterval, with a Christmas message from the Bishop of Birmingham, Mark Santer. Bishop Santer was a well-known member of the Church of England's evangelical wing. This is what he had to say:

I wonder what madness is in store for us this Christmas? I confess I laughed out loud when our city council came out with 'Winterval' as a way of not talking about Christmas! No doubt it was a well meaning attempt not to offend, not to exclude; not really to say anything at all. Once it was religious people who were seen as killjoys; think of the 17th century Puritans trying to ban Christmas festivities. Now, it seems, the secular world, which professes respect for all, is actually deeply embarrassed by faith.

Santer's message formed the basis for the first Winterval scare article, which was published by the Birmingham Sunday Mercury on 8 November 1998. Despite the fact that the Council immediately denied that Winterval was an attempt to replace Christmas, the story was picked up by the nationals the next day, and appeared in the Mail, the Sun, the Times, the Mirror and the Guardian. The early articles included the Council's denial, but to no avail. Within a couple of months, the myth had received 26 mentions. In the coming years, it would receive many more.

Interestingly, the myth gained rather than lost strength over the years. Up to 2004, it was mentioned 75 times in the press. By contrast, it received 207 mentions between 2005 and 2010.

How did the myth become so pervasive? The answer lies in the fact that it appealed simultaneously to two prominent and vocal constituencies: Christian leaders opposed to secularism and political conservatives opposed to multiculturalism. In the former camp, the myth was started by Bishop Santer of Birmingham and was repeated by Bishop Nigel McCullough of Manchester (2003), Archbishop John Sentamu of York (2006), Archbishop Barry Morgan of Wales (2007) and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey (2010). In the latter camp, the myth was repeated by William Hague (2000), David Cameron (2006 and 2007) and Eric Pickles (2010). "Winterval" provided a convenient and memorable brand name for wide-ranging concerns about religion, cultural identity, Islam, immigration and liberal politics.

The increasing popularity of the myth after 2005 reflects the increasing strength of these concerns. British troops were in Iraq, New Labour had just won a third term, and jihadis were attacking the London transport system. It is probably no coincidence that Muslims started to become mentioned specifically in Winterval stories around this time (though the Sun had already singled them out for special mention back in 1998). Meanwhile, in religious circles, figures like Lord Carey were expressing increasing concerns that Christians were suffering discrimination amidst a series of court cases in which the judiciary affirmed the secular character of modern British law. The Winterval story acted as a useful shorthand for all this. It was too good not to be true.

The tide didn't even begin to turn until 2006. In that year, Birmingham City Council took out a full page advert in the national press to announce that it still celebrates Christmas, while the first debunking of the myth was published in the Guardian. Mike Chubb finally surfaced to rebut the myth in 2008, and Kevin Arscott published his report in 2010. Last month, the impossible happened and the Mail published an apology relating to its use of the term "Winterval" in an article from September. It is likely that media outlets will be more circumspect in bandying the myth about in the future.

So much for Winterval. One wonders what "political correctness gone mad" story will rise up to replace it in the lead-up to Christmas each year. We probably won't have to wait for long to find out.

Blogging the Odyssey - Book 9

2011-12-06T21:06:00.001Z

First, the Sparknotes summary:

Reluctantly, Odysseus tells the Phaeacians the sorry tale of his wanderings. From Troy, the winds sweep him and his men to Ismarus, city of the Cicones. The men plunder the land and, carried away by greed, stay until the reinforced ranks of the Cicones turn on them and attack. Odysseus and his crew finally escape, having lost six men per ship. A storm sent by Zeus sweeps them along for nine days before bringing them to the land of the Lotus-eaters, where the natives give some of Odysseus’s men the intoxicating fruit of the lotus. As soon as they eat this fruit, they lose all thoughts of home and long for nothing more than to stay there eating more fruit. Only by dragging his men back to the ship and locking them up can Odysseus get them off the island.

Odysseus and his men then sail through the murky night to the land of the Cyclopes, a rough and uncivilized race of one-eyed giants. After making a meal of wild goats captured on an island offshore, they cross to the mainland. There they immediately come upon a cave full of sheep and crates of milk and cheese. The men advise Odysseus to snatch some of the food and hurry off, but, to his and his crew’s detriment, he decides to linger. The cave’s inhabitant soon returns—it is the Cyclops Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon. Polyphemus makes a show of hospitality at first, but he soon turns hostile. He devours two of Odysseus’s men on the spot and imprisons Odysseus and the rest in his cave for future meals.

Odysseus wants to take his sword to Polyphemus right then, but he knows that only Polyphemus is strong enough to move the rock that he has placed across the door of his cave. Odysseus thus devises and executes a plan. The next day, while Polyphemus is outside pasturing his sheep, Odysseus finds a wooden staff in the cave and hardens it in the fire. When Polyphemus returns, Odysseus gets him drunk on wine that he brought along from the ship. Feeling jovial, Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name. Odysseus replies that his name is “Nobody” (9.410). As soon as Polyphemus collapses with intoxication, Odysseus and a select group of his men drive the red-hot staff into his eye. Polyphemus wakes with a shriek, and his neighbors come to see what is wrong, but they leave as soon as he calls out, “Nobody’s killing me” (9.455). When morning comes, Odysseus and his men escape from the cave, unseen by the blind Polyphemus, by clinging to the bellies of the monster’s sheep as they go out to graze. Safe on board their ships and with Polyphemus’s flock on board as well, Odysseus calls to land and reveals his true identity. With his former prisoners now out of reach, the blind giant lifts up a prayer to his father, Poseidon, calling for vengeance on Odysseus.

Odysseus now finally tells Alkinoos who he is, taking the opportunity to boast about his reputation at the same time:

I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, known among
men for all my wiles, and my fame [kleos] reaches heaven.

He then explains how he yearns to get back to Ithaka. He sets out a kind of manifesto for the poem:

....Indeed, there is nothing
sweeter for me to look on than my homeland [gaiés].
Kalypso, the lovely goddess, kept me with her,
in her hollow caves, wanting me as her husband;
So too Kirke kept me in her palace, the wily
woman of Aiaié, wanting me as her husband;
but they never persuaded the heart in my breast.
So, nothing is sweeter than one's native land [patridos] and
parents, even if one dwells far off in a rich house [oikos]
in a foreign land, away from one's parents.

The desire to return home is the sentiment the animates the entire epic, and outwardly tempting offers like those of Kalypso - and Alkinoos - are just as much an obstacle as the violent adversaries whom Odysseus encounters.

Odysseus now begins his account of his travels. We are now in the realm of folklore, and parallels to Odysseus' adventures can be found in various other cultures around the world. As has been said in reference to the story of Polyphemos the cyclops:

The Polyphemos story is widely attested in folklore.... [I]n 1904 Oskar Hackman published a collection of 221 versions; more have come to light since then. They come from a geographical area stretching from England to Russia, down to Turkey and the Near East, and also to northern Africa. (Lowell Edmunds in J.M.Foley, A Companion to Ancient Epic)

There is an ongoing debate, which has lasted since antiquity, over whether the various locations visited by Odysseus have real-world counterparts. In 2004, one scholar wrote that around 80 theories regarding the geography of the Odyssey had been advanced in the previous 40 years, around 30 of which were illustrated by maps. It has been claimed that the Lotus-eaters lived in North Africa and that the island of the cyclopses was Sicily. Kalypso's island has been variously identified as one of the Azores and one of the islands of Malta, while Skherié has been located anywhere from Corfu to the Caribbean.

Odysseus' first port of call is the land of the Kikones, a Thracian tribe who had joined in the Trojan War on the side of the Trojans. After fighting with them, he sails to the land of the Lotus-eaters. The defining feature of these people is that they consume a narcotic-type plant which Homer calls lotos - needless to say, no-one knows exactly which plant he meant.

The Lotus-eaters episode sheds some light on the importance of memory in the epic. It is fundamentally memory which is motivating Odysseus to return to the once-familiar surroundings of his homeland, house and family. It is memory - remembrance of the Trojan War - that has just caused Odysseus to break down in tears twice in Book 8. The Lotus-eaters cause Odysseus' men to lose their memories - and this is no good at all. It is no more acceptable for them to stay in north Africa (or wherever) munching on lotoi than it was for Odysseus to set up home with Kalypso. Odysseus forcibly drags the unfortunate soldiers back to his ship and carries on with his journey.

The Polyphemos episode is too well known to need much comment. The cyclopses are the paradigm of uncivilised barbarians just as the Phaiakians represent the acme of civilisation. They have no communal public life. Polyphemos openly scorns the gods (apart from Poseidon), and he kills humans in the most violent way before eating them. When Odysseus tries to invoke the civilised Greek custom of guest-friendship and asks him for a guest-gift, he replies sarcastically that he will eat Odysseus last. The episode also, of course, highlights Odysseus' cleverness.

Finally, we get another sense that events are dictated by a force separate from and above the gods. In this case, this fate is termed Moira.

Blogging the Odyssey - Book 8

2011-12-04T21:17:00.001Z

First, the Sparknotes summary:

The next day, Alcinous calls an assembly of his Phaeacian counselors. Athena, back from Athens, ensures attendance by spreading word that the topic of discussion will be the godlike visitor who recently appeared on the island. At the assembly, Alcinous proposes providing a ship for his visitor so that the man can return to his homeland. The measure is approved, and Alcinous invites the counselors to his palace for a feast and celebration of games in honor of his guest. There, a blind bard named Demodocus sings of the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles at Troy. Everyone listens with pleasure except Odysseus, who weeps at the painful memories that the story recalls. The king notices Odysseus’s grief and ends the feast so that the games can begin.

The games include the standard lineup of boxing, wrestling, racing, and throwing of the discus. At one point, Odysseus is asked to participate. Still overcome by his many hardships, he declines. One of the young athletes, Broadsea, then insults him, which goads his pride to action. Odysseus easily wins the discus toss and then challenges the Phaeacian athletes to any other form of competition they choose. The discussion becomes heated, but Alcinous diffuses the situation by insisting that Odysseus join them in another feast, at which the Phaeacian youth entertain him and prove their preeminence in song and dance. Demodocus performs again, this time a light song about a tryst between Ares and Aphrodite. Afterward, Alcinous and each of the young Phaeacian men, including Broadsea, give Odysseus gifts to take with him on his journey home.

At dinner that night, Odysseus asks Demodocus to sing of the Trojan horse and the sack of Troy, but as he listens to the accomplished minstrel he again breaks down. King Alcinous again notices and stops the music. He asks Odysseus at last to tell him who he is, where he is from, and where he is going.

In this Book, the civilised character of the Phaiakians continues to be apparent. We are in a world of law, custom, manners and decorum. Even confrontations turn out ok in the end. A brief dispute between Odysseus and a Phaiakian called Euryalos ends up being defused and concluded amicably.

One sign of the Phaiakians' civilisation is their observance of the key Greek practice of "guest-friendship", xenia (or xeinosyné in more authentically Homeric Greek). This, in essence, required a host to offer generous hospitality to a guest who arrived at his door, and included the giving of xeinia, or guest-gifts. Telemakhos has already benefited from xeinosyné on his travels, while the suitors who are occupying Odysseus' palace are perverting the institution with their misbehaviour. In this Book, of course, it is Odysseus who is the guest.

The bard Demodokos is sometimes thought of as a cameo appearance of Homer himself (insofar as there was an individual "Homer"). His light-hearted song about the adultery of Ares and Aphrodite has attracted critical attention since antiquity. Gladstone, in his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, ascribed it to "the influence of a perverted religion" and contrasted it with "the peculiar purity of [Homer's] mind". There has been some disagreement as to what, if anything, it means in the broader context of the plot. If nothing else, it resonates with the theme of marital fidelity and infidelity which underlies the story of Odysseus, Penelope and the suitors.

Demodokos' other songs highlight the painfulness that memory has for Odysseus. He cries twice when he is reminded of his sufferings. His priority remains to secure his return (nostos) to his homeland (patré, patris). Euryalos says when making up with him after their contretemps:

May the gods grant that you see your wife and come to your
homeland [patris], since you have long suffered woes far from your friends.

"Friends" is the translation of philoi, which has a broader meaning than the English term and includes family and other household members.

Finally, we are reminded once again of the importance of kleos, renown.

Juvenal, Satires

2011-12-01T22:32:00.002Z

If Juvenal was alive today, he would have a fighting chance of getting a column in the Daily Mail, or possibly This England. He can roughly be described as a more literary Simon Heffer, a more caustic Peter Hitchens or a cleverer Richard Littlejohn.

In many ways, his is the authentic voice of the social conservative through the ages, condemning modern urban decadence - whether attributable to immigration, materialism or female sexuality - and praising the superior virtues of the countryside and the past. It is not entirely clear how much of his own propaganda Juvenal believed. He may well have been pandering to the prejudices of his audience. Some scholars have argued that he is actually satirising the very attitudes that he expresses, though I suspect that this ironising interpretation lets him off the hook too easily.

He has quite a distinctive literary style. At best, it is witty, though it is perhaps a little artificial. It can be dense, fast-paced, even cryptic, and peppered with allusions that modern readers (including, in some cases, classical scholars) cannot easily understand.

Juvenal's Rome is a "monstrous city", blighted by crime, corruption and greed:

    To crime men owe their gardens, palaces, tables,
    their old silverware, the goblet with the embossed goat.
    Who can sleep for thinking of a greedy daughter-in-law's
    seducer, disgraced brides and teenage adulterers?
    Though nature resists it, anger writes my verse,
    such as it is.... (Satire 1)

    When was the horde of vices more swollen? When
    did the bosom of greed lie more open? When were dice
    played more brazenly?...
    Which of our grandfathers built so many villas, or
    dined by himself on seven courses?... (Satire 1)

Juvenal didn't like the city at all. It was too expensive, crowded and noisy. In fact, he'd rather have lived anywhere else:

    What place is so wretched and lonely that you would not
    think it worse to endure fires, houses constantly
    falling down, the thousand dangers of this barbarous
    city, and poets giving summer recitations.... (Satire 3)

He repeatedly returns to the themes of avarice and luxury, and shows evidence of an ascetic streak. One should not pray for worldly success, or even a long life, he says. This is the context of his famous coinage "mens sana in corpore sano", "a healthy mind in a healthy body":

    Pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body.
    Ask for a strong spirit with no fear of death,
    which counts a long life among the least of nature's
    gifts, which is able to bear any kind of pain,
    which does not get angry, desires nothing and thinks
    Hercules' griefs and hard labours better than the
    loves and dinners and feathers of Sardanapalus. (Satire 10)

He laments the decline of the old aristocracy and bemoans the fact that there were some ghastly nouveau riche types about the place. He can't be seen, however, as a spokesman of the Roman nobility. He argues that having great ancestors doesn't mean much, and that patrons shouldn't treat their clients boorishly. He thinks that writers and teachers aren't paid enough. Yet he is no populist, and he treats the common people - whom he saw as a fickle mob - with something like contempt. It is in this connection that he makes his famous "bread and circuses" jibe ("panem et circenses"), while pointing to the people's loss of political power under the imperial regime:

    ....for a long time now, since no-one buys our
    votes, we have left our duties; the people that bestowed
    power, fasces, legions, everything, is now
    inert and eagerly looks for only two things:
    bread and races.... (Satire 10)

He is very chauvinistic. He complains that being a true-born Roman doesn't count for anything these days. Even foreign ex-slaves were humiliating honourable Romans. He doesn't much like immigrants. What he says about Greek migrants is oddly similar to what later generations of nativists would say about the Irish or the Jews (whom he didn't like either):

    That race which is liked best by our rich countrymen,
    and which I flee from - I will now talk about them,
    and shame will not stop me. Romans, I cannot bear
    a Greek Rome - but how many of our scum are Greek?
    The Orontes has now flowed into the Tiber,
    bringing its language, its customs, its flutes and slanting
    harp-strings and its ancestral drums with it - and the
    girls who are told to sell themselves at the Circus.
    Down with men who like foreign whores in bright headscarves!
    ....This Greek comes from Sicyon, that one from Amydon,
    or else Andros, Samos, Tralles or Alabanda.
    They head for the Esquiline or the Viminal Hill -
    the parasites of great houses, and their future lords -
    quick-witted, utterly shameless, always ready with
    words, more eloquent than Isaeus. Say, what do
    you think that man is? He has brought the lot with him:
    teacher, orator, geometer, painter, trainer,
    augur, rope-dancer, doctor, magician: the hungry
    Greek knows all the trades.... (Satire 3)

Worse still, the Greeks were seducing Roman women, even the grandmothers.

This bring us on to another major theme of Juvenal's poetry. He dislikes sexually transgressive behaviour, and he is notoriously misogynistic. The notorious Satire 6, an extended diatribe against women, is a nasty little poem which is not rescued by its acerbic wit. Why, asks Juvenal, would you get married when you can kill yourself instead? Or, for that matter, when you can sleep with a boy?

The foremost of Juvenal's complaints against women is his assertion that they lack chastity (pudicitia) and are inclined to be unfaithful. He also accuses women of being demanding and argumentative. Nor are these the only accusations. It turns out that women are also - amongst other things - superstitious, cruel, extravagant, over-talkative, malicious, gossipy and too fond of make-up.

How have women come to be so out of control? The answer, it seems, lies in the soft weakness (luxuria) of present-day Roman culture, the product of years of peace and prosperity.

Satire 6 is famous for the tag "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" ("who will guard the guards themselves?"), which appears more than once, including in the following lines:

    I hear the advice that you give me, my old friends:
    "Lock the door and keep her in." But who will guard the
    guards themselves? Wives are crafty, and begin with them [i.e. by seducing the guards].
    The highest and the lowest have the same libido;
    she who pounds the pavements with dirty feet is no
    better than she who is carried by Syrian slaves.

Conversely, Juvenal lambasts effeminacy in men, which (he said) had started to corrupt even the simple barbarians whom the Romans had conquered. He suggests that the great Romans of the past would be disgusted by such goings-on.

Longing for a past golden age is a noteworthy feature of Juvenal's verse. He tends to locate the home of true virtue in two places: the countryside and the long-ago past. Things hadn't always been as bad as they were in his day. In former ages, people had been virtuous and content with simple living:

    Happy were our ancestors' forebears, happy was
    the time long ago when, ruled by kings and tribunes,
    they saw that Rome was in need of only one jail. (Satire 3)

    ....broken by age, men who had fought against
    Carthage or awful Pyrrhus or the Molossians' swords
    were given at last scarcely two acres for all their
    wounds; this recompense for their blood and toil
    never seemed to be less than they deserved or the
    meagre reward of an ungrateful country.... (Satire 14)

The Instructions of Šuruppak

2011-12-01T09:47:00.004Z

This is as good a candidate as any for the oldest piece of literature in the world. Composed in ancient Sumer, the world's oldest civilisation, it has been dated to the early to mid-3rd millennium BC.

It is a piece of what is known as "wisdom literature", like the Book of Proverbs in the Bible and the Greek poet Hesiod's Works and Days. It takes the form of a series of admonitions from the mythical King Šuruppak (or Shuruppak, or Shuruppag) to his son, the legendary hero Ziusudra, who was one of the forerunners of the Biblical character Noah. It was apparently a popular work in ancient Mesopotamia.

In spite of Šuruppak's kingly status, the ethos and content of the text cannot be described as royal, or even aristocratic. Rather, the work seems to have been conceived as a source of general, practical advice - of a highly conservative nature - for members of the propertied classes:

"....practical admonitions for wise and effective behavior...." (S.N.Kramer, The Sumerians)

"The admonitions... are generally practical, the overall purpose of which is to prepare any man to live a life of prudence in society and to master control over his own household, not necessarily a royal one." (Francis M. Macatangay, The Wisdom Instructions in the Book of Tobit)

"....a variety of popular sayings derived from daily life.... the document does not appear to present any distinctive, aristocratic values. Rather, the social references and inherent imagery of the admonitions seem to reflect the disposition of those involved in the management of large households." (Christopher B. Ansberry, Be wise, my son, and make my heart glad)

"These instructions... deal with the problems and temptations of normal life and how to deal effectively with them... the instructions are pragmatic, counseling right behaviour out of self-interest." (Thomas Smothers in Marvin E. Tate et al. (eds.), An Introduction to Wisdom Literature and the Psalms)

The text comes in three sections, and it consists of a long series of proverbs, mostly without very obvious connections between them. There are some recurring themes, however, and the phrase "do not" is repeated quite a lot.

Modern readers might be drawn to this text by the attraction and mystery of remote antiquity. Interestingly, the same sentiments animated the author. He begins by locating Šuruppak's advice in the deep and distant past:

In those days, in those far remote days, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years, at that time the wise one who knew how to speak in elaborate words lived in the Land....

Two themes of importance are those of family and authority. As noted, the generic form of the text is that of a father giving instructions to his son. The family envisaged appears to be a very traditional one (as befits the world's oldest piece of literature), with the patriarch at the top and the household slaves at the bottom. As Joel S. Burnett has written in Where is God?:

Parental authority within the household is paradigmatic for this model of instruction set in primordial times.... The setting of the family household is apparent in specific instructions.... The link between divine and parental authorities through the cosmic-household structure is reflected near the text's conclusion....

The last comment is a reference to this passage:

You should not speak arrogantly to your mother; that causes hatred for you. You should not question the words of your mother and your personal god. The mother, like [the god] Utu, gives birth to the man; the father, like a god, makes him bright [?]. The father is like a god: his words are reliable. The instructions of the father should be complied with.

It should be noted, however, that the Instructions are not a religious text and do not affirm the authority of the gods to any great degree. This is one reason why the comparisons that have been drawn to the Ten Commandments are not convincing.

Authority within the family was not confined to the parents - it embraced elder siblings too:

The elder brother is indeed like a father; the elder sister is indeed like a mother. Listen therefore to your elder brother, and you should be obedient to your elder sister as if she were your mother.

The text also refers to the importance of submission to sources of authority outside the family, which it again equates with age:

The instructions of an old man are precious; you should comply with them!

You should submit to the respected; you should be humble before the powerful.

Another matter of concern is that of gender. Gender divisions prevail within the family:

You tell your son to come to your home; you tell your daughter to go to her women's quarters.

A number of the admonitions seek to circumscribe male sexual behaviour:

You should not play around with a married young woman: the slander could be serious. My son, you should not sit alone in a chamber with a married woman.

You should not have sex with your slave girl: she will name you with disrespect.

You should not commit rape on someone's daughter; the courtyard will learn of it.

You should not buy a prostitute: she is the sharp edge of a sickle.

Women are also seen as being potentially threatening:

A woman with her own property ruins the house.

The wet-nurses in the women's quarters determine the fate of their lord.

Some of the other themes can be summarised quite briefly. They include the following:

the importance of community opinion and the possibility of slander;
exercising control over one's speech;
not getting involved in quarrels, whether as a protagonist or otherwise.

We may close with a few final random examples of the text's advice:

You should not vouch for someone: that man will have a hold on you; and you yourself, you should not let somebody vouch for you....

You should not boast; then your words will be trusted.

If you hire a worker, he will share the bread bag with you; he eats with you from the same bag, and finishes up the bag with you. Then he will quit working with you and, saying "I have to live on something", he will serve at the palace.

You should not pass judgment when you drink beer.

Statecraft, Margaret Thatcher

2011-11-30T10:04:00.000Z

It is not always appreciated that there are two Margaret Thatchers. One of them is the human being who served as Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from 1979 to 1990. This Thatcher was a successful politician with a streak of pragmatism who was flexible and sure-footed enough to win a record three general election victories. She was a right-winger, but she was a right-winger who signed the Single European Act, increased spending on the NHS, talked worriedly about global warming and maintained a top income tax rate of 60%. The other Thatcher is Thatcher the legend - the airbrushed hard-right icon who continues to inspire vicious, pathological loathing on the left and vacuous, cloying devotion on the right. Once freed from the practical constraints of office, Thatcher the person allowed herself to become increasingly indistinguishable from Thatcher the ultraconservative icon. Thatcher the person was a British Conservative. Thatcher the icon was an American Republican. And it was the latter, mythological Thatcher who wrote this book.

These are not novel observations on my part. They have been made in the past made by, amongst others, Sir John Major, who suffered more than most from the ascendancy of the Thatcher myth, and Chris Patten, who wrote in his review of this book:

One reason for Thatcher's success in politics was that she always knew (at least until near the end of her premiership) that it was wise to alight from the train before it hit the buffers. While denouncing the notion that politics was the art of the possible, that is exactly what she practised, albeit skillfully and bravely redefining the limits of political possibility....

That is not the Thatcher of these pages. What we have here is a manifesto for the hard right of the Republican party - Richard Perle with knobs on. It's a manifesto for Orange County, but not for modern Britain.

Perle himself is mentioned in the acknowledgements section, together with such rock-ribbed Republican stalwarts as Steve Forbes and Antonin Scalia. From the British side, the presence of the likes of Frederick Forsyth, Andrew Roberts and (dear God) Christopher Booker does not prepare the reader for a judicious, well-balanced disquisition on the world's problems. And so it proves.

Let's start with the good stuff. This is an intellectually respectable book. At its best, it is intelligent and insightful, and it can't be dismissed as brainless polemic. The prose is mostly sober, even forensic, and it has proper footnotes, even if a disproportionate number of them point to partisan right-wing sources. As for the content, Thatch makes some interesting points about post-Soviet Russia, and her survey of Asian politics is readable and informative. The ideology is certainly not wholly objectionable. Thatcher's love of freedom is patently sincere. As she reminds her readers, she has shown a rather greater willingness to criticise the Chinese government for its human rights abuses, both publicly and privately, than most other western politicians. She wants western-style democracy to spread around the world, and she emphasises her liberal credentials, noting that the main accusation against her during his premiership was that she placed too high a premium on individual freedom at the expense of communitarianism.

The problem is that her benign liberalism has strict limits. For one thing, her militarism is a little disturbing. For another, she is rather too fond of foreign statesmen whose regimes were anything but Jeffersonian democracies. She can perhaps just about be forgiven for praising Lee Kuan Yew, but it's more difficult to agree with her about the likes of General Pinochet (her most convincing argument in his defence is that he didn't kill as many people as Castro). Closer to home, it is odd that she doesn't seem to understand what was wrong with the Austrian far-right leader Jörg Haider - it is apparently enough that (1) he wasn't left-wing and (2) the EU didn't like him. She is even prepared to make excuses for Suharto of Indonesia, though she does appear to be a little uneasy about the man. By way of justification for her indulgence of right-wing dictators, she cites Jeanne Kirkpatrick's well-known 1979 essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards", a tawdry apologia for propping up third-world tyrants as long as they weren't communists.

If it sounds like Thatcher's worldview has more than a whiff of Cold War politics about it, that's because it does. In fact, the book begins with a triumphalist account of the end of the Cold War, in which she takes the West's eventual victory as a straightforward vindication of the hardline anticommunist policies pursued by Ronald Reagan and a certain M.Thatcher. Whatever element of truth there may be in this is in danger of getting lost in the self-congratulation. She makes no attempt to revisit in any detail the policy debates of the Cold War years. She shows no interest in understanding why the 'doves' might on occasion have had a point. She shies away from the brute fact that the grievous structural problems of 1980s communism were down to a lot more than Ronald Reagan's inflammatory rhetoric and defence budgets. By her account, she and Reagan were right, right, right and the rest of the western world - including most of mainland Europe - was wrong, wrong, wrong. This is history written by the victor, with a vengeance.

Thatcher's international outlook is unashamedly unilateralist. She rejects internationalism and criticises progressive ideas about international law and human rights. She argues firmly against undertaking humanitarian interventions in places like Somalia and Haiti. This is depressing stuff. It's easy to scoff at utopian ideas about internationalism and global governance, but I'm not absolutely convinced that Thatcher's alternative prescription of nationalist states armed with high defence budgets and pursuing unilateral foreign policies would pan out awfully well either. In fact, I have a feeling that it's already been tried. It it also worth noting that Thatch's somewhat Kissingerian views do not stop her from arguing at length that the West should have gone in harder and earlier in the former Yugoslavia, an issue about which she developed characteristically strong views.

Thatcher singles out the International Criminal Court (ICC) for criticism. Now, international justice is a notion that needs to be handled with some care, but the ICC is a strikingly dull, worthy and indeed conservative institution. It has spent most of its life to date investigating atrocities in hellholes like Darfur and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its benign character is abundantly clear to mainstream diplomatic opinion and to the 119 states that have become parties to it. As for the predictable concerns that it would be used as a political instrument to put US soldiers in the dock, the international community bent over backwards to accommodate American concerns, including handing Washington a veto over the court's proceedings. This was enough for Bill Clinton - but not, apparently, for his successors. In refusing to ratify the ICC statute, the United States has chosen to align itself with China, Iran, Cuba, Russia and North Korea. Few will agree with Thatcher that this is the company that the leading power of the free world ought to be keeping.

More broadly, international co-operation is a necessity, not a luxury. This is not utopianism, it is political fact. It is not difficult to draw up a list of serious global problems that can't be satisfactorily tackled by means of Thatcher's preferred approach of unilateralist nationalism and high defence spending: mass migration, the narcotics trade, water shortages, HIV/AIDS, and so depressingly on. It should probably come as no surprise that Thatcher seeks to let herself off the hook of having to deal with the greatest and most dangerous challenge of all - climate change - by the simple expedient of smudging all over the science and blaming concerns about the issue on "the usual suspects on the left" (who presumably include David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, Benjamin Netanyahu, John McCain and Mitt Romney). She also brushes aside the very serious problem of overpopulation, noting that western countries are experiencing falling fertility.

III

Thatcher doesn't like Europe at all. She spends two chapters excoriating the EU and all its works, and trots out her famous line that all the problems of her lifetime came from continental Europe and the solutions from elsewhere (read: the USA). She recants her pro-European past and says that signing the Single European Act was a mistake. She explicitly says that Enoch Powell - Enoch Powell! - was right about joining the EEC. Yet it can't be a coincidence that Thatch was in favour of British participation in the EEC for most of her career as a practising politician, and turned to outright Euroscepticism only late in the day - in her third term, when her judgement was failing, and later, when she retired and lost touch with the realities of day-to-day political life.

Thatch is honest enough to admit that her case against Europe isn't an economic or technocratic one - it is profoundly ideological. Her hostility begins with the notion of Europe itself. She correctly notes that what "Europe" means is multi-faceted, and then extrapolates from this observation to assert that the idea of Europe is "simply empty". This is an extraordinary claim. The idea of Europe is "empty"? Really? Empty? For all her name-dropping of Voltaire and Debussy, Thatcher appears to become historically and culturally illiterate when Europe hoves into view. Europe is not only the continent to which the UK belongs - a brute, unanswerable geographical fact - but also the place from which we derive our indigenous languages, great swathes of our philosophy, art and literature, much of our political history, much of our non-political history, our traditional religious faiths and the majority of our ethnic make-up. When Thatcher writes artlessly about "the Europeans", she is talking about us.

On a more practical level, the EU is by far our largest import and export market, and we are heavily entangled in the European financial system - which is precisely why the Euro crisis is such a problem for us even though we're not in the Euro. And what of our place in the world? Britain's days as a great power ended decades ago. Are we going to try and make a go of it alone? Are we going to depend on the goodwill of patrons in Washington who have different interests from us and would readily shaft us if it suited them? Or are we going to remain as a central member of a union of 500 million people which accounts for a fifth of global GDP? The question only has to be asked to be answered. Thatcher needn't take my word on this, either - Tony Blair reported in his memoirs that the same point about Britain's influence in the world and the need to get over our nationalistic neuroses has been made by Manmohan Singh and Thatch's old mucker Lee Kuan Yew.

True, some of Thatcher's criticisms of the EU are valid - but where they are right they are usually also trite. You don't get many points for pointing out that the Common Agricultural Policy is a bit of a racket. Nor is it an especially penetrating insight that the European pensions systems are in a bit of a mess. Thatch doesn't seem to have any really new or original arguments to advance. At times, she even lacks coherence. She seems to want to argue simultaneously both that the Euro will collapse in ruins and that it will inexorably lead to an undemocratic superstate. She claims that a European military capacity will be ineffective but that it will be effective enough to imperil the Atlantic alliance. It looks like any argument against Europe will do.

Thatch actually uses the frivolous tabloid scare-word "superstate", and argues for a fundamental renegotiation of the UK's relationship with the EU. She flirts heavily with the idea of withdrawal, and repeats the essentially frivolous proposal of bringing the UK into NAFTA. She doubts whether the former communist countries of eastern Europe should or even would accede to the EU, a position which now appears eccentric at best. At any rate, none of them seem very keen to leave, and there are half a dozen or more candidate countries queuing up to put themselves under the yoke of the Brussels tyranny. Perhaps Thatch knows something that they don't. Or perhaps not.

The last chapter of the book is entitled "Capitalism and its Critics". The first sentence contains the words "free-enterprise capitalism - capitalism for short". This sets the tone for the rest of the chapter, and indeed for large parts of the rest of the book. It's a bit like picking up a book by Heston Blumenthal and reading the words "pan fried salmon - or 'fish' for short". Thatcher seems unwilling to acknowledge any form of capitalism other than the unregulated, laissez-faire flavour. She doesn't really do nuance, as some of us have noticed over the years.

Yet Thatch herself shows an awareness that capitalism is a many varied thing. She refers to the traditional corporatist Japanese style of capitalism, which produced the postwar economic miracle after Japan's ignominious defeat in World War Two, only to dismiss it as overrated. In the Europe chapters, after making her ridiculous claim that the idea of Europe is "empty", she back-pedals to say that, insofar as it means anything, it means the social democratic form of capitalism. She has the honesty to acknowledge that the European model is more effective at ensuring stability and managing risk than the American model, but she takes the view that the cost of this in terms of depressing enterprise and job creation is too high to pay.

Thatch is entitled to hold these views, but it is difficult to take seriously her airy rejections of alternative models of capitalism. The social market model - as supported by conservative parties in France, Germany and elsewhere - has succeeded in delivering growth, employment and high living standards for hundreds of millions of people in Europe and elsewhere. It wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that she appears to believe that freemarket policies are the solution for any country's economic problems, at any time, anywhere. This kind of ideologically driven politics can be terribly damanging when applied to the rough fabric of the real world. It also sits uneasily with Thatcher's robust nationalism: political dogmatism is very un-British.

Thatcher argues that there is a moral case for freemarket capitalism, and unrepentantly reproduces her "no such thing as society" quote. If inequalities develop, that's just because human beings are unequal. She places the term "social justice" in scare quotes and says that the only form of justice that capitalism needs is a functioning court system and the rule of law. She does not address the argument that grossly unequal societies are more inclined to develop corrupt and biased judicial systems, and, for that matter, political systems.  Suharto could have told her that much. She also shows no recognition that high levels of inequality have wider social costs.

The flip side of Thatcher's cheerleading for laissez-faire capitalism is that she sees "socialism" everywhere, from centre-left European politicians to advocates of Third World development.  Her talk of "the organised international left" has a vaguely conspiratorial air. If one looks, one can find benign references in the book to people on the left of centre, but not many. There were repeated and rather tedious claims on the British left that Blair had accepted the Thatcher legacy, that he was the "son of Thatcher", and so on - yet Thatch repeatedly criticises Blair and the New Labour governments. Her view of left-leaning politics is caricatured, and seems not to have evolved since the days of Brezhnev and British Leyland. The left, she claims, believes that it is the state rather than business which creates wealth - a ridiculous idea which not even Karl Marx held to. Leftists also think (she says) that wealth is essentially communal - full-blooded socialists admittedly do believe something like this, but no-one on the mainstream centre-left does.

This tendentious, partisan view of the world vitiates the book. Thatcher makes no serious, sustained attempt to engage with criticism of her position. It is purely "this is what I think" - albeit supported with footnotes to publications by the Heritage Foundation and Sir Alan Walters - and it is therefore quite worthless as a textbook of politics or world affairs unless either (1) you're already pretty sure that you accept the premises of Thatcher's view of the world, or (2) you're prepared to go to the trouble of reading several other books in order to find out what the counter-arguments are to her various breezy assertions.  What this is is a textbook of Republican nationalist conservatism, for those who want to read such a thing.

Blogging the Odyssey - Book 7

2011-11-21T10:05:00.001Z

First, the Sparknotes summary:

On his way to the palace of Alcinous, the king of the Phaeacians, Odysseus is stopped by a young girl who is Athena in disguise. She offers to guide him to the king’s house and shrouds him in a protective mist that keeps the Phaeacians, a kind but somewhat xenophobic people, from harassing him. She also advises him to direct his plea for help to Arete, the wise and strong queen who will know how to get him home. Once Athena has delivered Odysseus to the palace, she departs from Scheria to her beloved city of Athens.

Odysseus finds the palace residents holding a festival in honor of Poseidon. He is struck by the splendor of the palace and the king’s opulence. As soon as he sees the queen, he throws himself at her feet, and the mist about him dissipates. At first, the king wonders if this wayward traveler might be a god, but without revealing his identity, Odysseus puts the king’s suspicions to rest by declaring that he is indeed a mortal. He then explains his predicament, and the king and queen gladly promise to see him off the next day in a Phaeacian ship.

Later that evening, when the king and queen are alone with Odysseus, the wise Arete recognizes the clothes that he is wearing as ones that she herself had made for her daughter Nausicaa. Suspicious, she interrogates Odysseus further. While still withholding his name, Odysseus responds by recounting the story of his journey from Calypso’s island and his encounter with Nausicaa that morning, which involved her giving him a set of clothes to wear. To absolve the princess for not accompanying him to the palace, Odysseus claims that it was his idea to come alone. Alcinous is so impressed with his visitor that he offers Odysseus his daughter’s hand in marriage.

This is a short little Book.

Odysseus is now in Skherie, the land of the Phaiakians. These are people who live at the distant end of the earth, and we discover that they are accustomed to mingle with the gods face to face. The decor in Alkinoos' palace is suitably extravagant:

Bronze were the walls that stretched this way and that, from the
threshold to the inner rooms, with a cyanus cornice.
Golden were the doors which closed in the well-built house,
and pillars of silver stood on the bronze threshold,
with a silver lintel above and a gold handle.
On each side were golden and silver dogs which
Hephaistos had made with his skilful talents
to guard the house of great-hearted Alkinoos;
they were immortal and ageless all their days.

This is a surreal, alien environment. It is no place for Odysseus. The hyper-civilised land of Skherie can no more be home for him than Kalypso's desert island could.

Odysseus is welcomed by the Phaiakian royals in accordance with proper ideas of hospitality. He is something of a hit with them. Queen Arete wonders aloud why he is wearing her daughter's clothes, but he gives a conciliatory reply and says that it was his idea not to come to the city openly in Nausikaa's company.

Alkinoos offers Odysseus not only Nausikaa's hand in marriage but also a house (oikos) and possessions (ktémata) among the Phaiakians. Kalypso has already made him a similar offer, but, again, Odysseus can't accept it. He makes it clear that he has to return to his fatherland (patris, patré), and that he will die happy if only he can do this:

But I bid you get on, as soon as dawn appears,
and take me, the unlucky one, to my homeland (patrés),
much-suffering as I am - let my life leave me if I
can see my possessions, slaves and great high-roofed house.

Again, we see the importance of honour and reputation. We are told about how Arete enjoys honour (timé) among the Phaiakians, and Odysseus prays to Zeus that he might grant fame (kleos) to Alkinoos.

We also catch a glimpse of the idea that human destiny is determined neither by humans nor by the gods, but by the fixed determination of Fate and/or the Fates, who spin a thread for each human being when s/he is born:

....But then he
shall suffer whatever Fate and the awesome spinners
spun for him with their thread when his mother bore him.

Blogging the Odyssey - Book 6

2011-11-17T18:16:00.002Z

First, the Sparknotes summary:

That night, Athena appears in a dream to the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, disguised as her friend. She encourages the young princess to go to the river the next day to wash her clothes so that she will appear more fetching to the many men courting her. The next morning, Nausicaa goes to the river, and while she and her handmaidens are naked, playing ball as their clothes dry on the ground, Odysseus wakes in the forest and encounters them. Naked himself, he humbly yet winningly pleads for their assistance, never revealing his identity. Nausicaa leaves him alone to wash the dirt and brine from his body, and Athena makes him look especially handsome, so that when Nausicaa sees him again she begins to fall in love with him. Afraid of causing a scene if she walks into the city with a strange man at her side, Nausicaa gives Odysseus directions to the palace and advice on how to approach Arete, queen of the Phaeacians, when he meets her. With a prayer to Athena for hospitality from the Phaeacians, Odysseus sets out for the palace.

Odysseus has now come to the far-off land of Skherie, which is inhabited by a people called the Phaiakians.

The heroine of this Book is Nausikaa, the teenage daughter of the local king, Alkinoos. She is one of Homer's more memorable characters. The book starts with Athene appearing to her disguised as one of her girl friends and telling her that she'd better go and wash her clothes because she's reached dating age now and she needs to look good. When she meets Odysseus, she marks him down as husband material, but she's reluctant to be seen hanging around with him in public in case people start talking.

Of course, Odysseus is far too old to have that kind of relationship with her, but he still treats her with gallantry. When he first begs her for help, he decides not to grasp her knees in the traditional Greek way in case the gesture is misunderstood - so he keeps his distance and says "I grasp your knees" instead. He's not called "crafty Odysseus" for nothing. This is what he has to say to her, laying it on with a trowel:

I grasp your knees, my lady. Are you god or mortal?
If you are one of the gods who live in wide heaven,
I say that Artemis, the daughter of great Zeus
is most like you in beauty and stature and height;
but if you are one of the mortals who live on earth,
thrice-blessed are your father and your lady mother, and
thrice-blessed are your brothers: greatly must their hearts
always be warmed with delight because of you,
when they see you in your prime entering the dance.
That man is more blessed in his heart above all others -
the man who gives you a rich dowry and takes you home.
For I have never seen such a mortal with my eyes,
neither man nor woman. I feel awe to look at you.

After the wildness and unreality of Kalypso's desert island, we are back in something approaching civilisation - a place of manners, courtship customs and chivalry. However, Skherie is still no fit home for Odysseus, for reasons that will become clear soon.

Finally, it is worth quoting Homer's wistful description of the gods' home, Olympus, which is implicitly contrasted with the flawed and hazardous world of human beings:

....silver-eyed Athene departed to
Olympus, where they say the gods' eternal seat is.
It is not shaken by winds, nor ever wet by
rains, nor does snow fall on it, but the cloudless
air is spread over it, and bright light is upon it.
There the blessed gods spend all their days in joy.

The letters of Pliny the Younger

2011-11-15T15:29:00.002Z

It's always nice to read someone else's letters, and these are some of the most famous letters in history.

Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (c.61-c.112 AD), known to history as Pliny the Younger, was a Roman lawyer, judge and public servant. Starting his legal career at 18, he inherited a considerable fortune from his uncle (Pliny the Elder) and went on to become a personal friend of the Emperor Trajan.

Pliny was a well-connected member of Roman high society, and his correspondents included the historians Tacitus, Suetonius and Fabius Rusticus; he also mentions the poets Martial and Silius Italicus. Other addressees comprised friends, colleagues and family members, including women.

He talks about bereavements, dinner parties, the affairs of the Senate, the art of oratory and events in his own life. He recounts ghost stories, provides a couple of well-known descriptions of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, and complains about lawyers in the Centumviral Court (the law court in which he spent most of his professional life) hiring claques to applaud their speeches. Some of his letters are poignant. Here is one to his wife, Calpurnia:

You write that you've been greatly affected by my absence, and that you have only one consolation - that you hold on to my books as a substitute for me, and that you often even lay them in my place. I'm glad that you miss me, and glad that you find comfort in these remedies. For my part, I read and re-read your letters, and I take them into my hands again and again as if they'd just arrived. But this makes me burn all the more with desire to see you: if your letters are so sweet to me, how sweet it is to hear you in person! Write as often as you can, even though it torments me as much as it delights me. (6.7)

And here is another one:

It is unbelievable how much desire for you holds me bound. The cause, firstly, is love - and also the fact that we are not used to being apart. So I lie awake thinking of you for a great part of the night, while by day, at the times when I used to see you, my own feet take me (I'm telling the complete truth) to your quarters - and then I slink back from the deserted threshold, feeling sick and sad, like a locked-out lover. There is only one time that is free from these torments, and that is when I am being worn out in the Forum and by the lawsuits of my friends. Judge what my life is like when my rest is in work and my solace is in misery and anxiety. (7.5)

The only real villain who appears in the letters (apart from the dead emperor Domitian, who was hated and feared by the Roman aristocracy) is Regulus, another lawyer. Pliny didn't like Regulus at all. He reports that he made a habit of wheedling legacies out of acquaintances on their deathbeds and ruined his own son's funeral with an ostentatious show of false grief. He was also quite a lot richer than Pliny.

In some respects, Pliny's attitudes were far from modern. He was no egalitarian, and he accepted the institution of slavery without question. However, he was capable of humanity towards slaves, as this somewhat self-satisfied but pleasingly un-lawyerly letter shows:

You write that Sabina, who nominated us as her legatees, did not give any instructions that her slave Modestus should be set free, but that she did confer a legacy on him in these words: "To Modestus, whom I have ordered to be set free". You ask me what I think about this. I have consulted with some legal experts. Their unanimous opinion is that he is not entitled either to his freedom, because it was not expressly granted to him, or to his legacy, because it was left to him as a slave. But this seems to me to be clearly wrong, and so I think that we should act as if Sabina had written what she herself thought she had written. I'm sure that you will agree with my opinion, since it is your habit to adhere scrupulously to the wishes of the deceased, which for honourable legatees are tantamout to a legal obligation. For to us, honour has no less force than necessity has for others. Let us therefore allow the slave to have his freedom, and let him enjoy his legacy as if Sabina had attended to everything with all due care - for she took such care in choosing her heirs well. (4.10)

This letter too is worth quoting in this connection:

It would take a long time, and would achieve nothing, to repeat in too much detail how it happened that I, a very unsociable man, came to be dining with a certain person - a man who in his own opinion is magnificent and thrifty but in my opinion is sordid and extravagant. He served some excellent food to himself and a few others, but cheap and small portions to the rest. He had even poured out three different types of wine in small flasks - not so that people could choose which to have, but so that no-one could refuse what they were given. He gave some of them to himself and a few of the rest of us, some to his less close friends (for he has different grades of friendship), and others to his and our former slaves. A man who was reclining close to me noticed this and asked if I approved of it. I said that I didn't. "So", he said, "what practice do you follow?" "I serve the same food to everyone - I am inviting them to dine, not to be categorised. I treat them equally in all respects, since I have made them equals at my table and couch." "Even the former slaves?" "Even them, for on such an occasion I think of them as fellow diners, not as former slaves." And he said: "That must cost you a lot." "Not at all." "How can that be?" "Because it's not the case that my former slaves drink the same as me, it's that I drink the same as them." (2.6)

It will be apparent that, at his worst, Pliny could be somewhat pompous and precious (and there are indications that his contemporaries thought the same). On the whole, however, he was a thoughtful and decent man, and he deserves to be remembered benignly.

The last of the ten Books of letters in the collection consists of correspondence between Pliny and the Emperor Trajan dating from Pliny's special assignment as imperial legate to the troubled province of Bithynia and Pontus (in the course of which Pliny died). It has been noted that Pliny seems to have been a bit too quick to ask for instructions from Trajan, who appears to be slightly irritated in some of his replies. It is in this Book that we find the famous exchange of letters on the subject of how to deal with the new sect of Christiani which had appeared and which was attracting not only urban-dwellers but people in the countryside too. Pliny didn't like the new movement much, but he didn't consider it too much of a threat to the state: "I found nothing except a perverse and extreme superstition", he reported to the Emperor, before going on to note that more people had started going to the temples again.

We may close with Pliny's own reflections on his life and career:

Very recently, when I had been speaking before the combined bench at the Centumviral Court, the memory came to me of how I had spoken in the past in the same way before the combined bench. My mind continued on this train of thought, as is a habit with me: I began to recall the men who had been my work colleagues in that court and in the other one. I was the only one left who had spoken in both courts: such has been the effect of all the vicissitudes and fragilities of human life and the fickleness of fortune. Some of those who were active back then have died, and others are in exile. Some have been persuaded to retire by age and ill health, and others are enjoying of their own volition all the blessings of leisure. Some have taken up military commands, and others have withdrawn from professional life due to their friendship with the Emperor. As for myself, how much has changed!... If you count the years, the length of time is short. If you look at what has changed, you would think that an age had passed. (4.24)

Blogging the Odyssey - Book 5

2011-10-31T18:31:00.004Z

As usual, we start with the Sparknotes summary:

All the gods except Poseidon gather again on Mount Olympus to discuss Odysseus’s fate. Athena’s speech in support of the hero prevails on Zeus to intervene. Hermes, messenger of the gods, is sent to Calypso’s island to tell her that Odysseus must at last be allowed to leave so he can return home. In reply, Calypso delivers an impassioned indictment of the male gods and their double standards. She complains that they are allowed to take mortal lovers while the affairs of the female gods must always be frustrated. In the end, she submits to the supreme will of Zeus. By now, Odysseus alone remains of the contingent that he led at Troy; his crew and the other boats in his force were all destroyed during his journeys. Calypso helps him build a new boat and stocks it with provisions from her island. With sadness, she watches as the object of her love sails away.

After eighteen days at sea, Odysseus spots Scheria, the island of the Phaeacians, his next destination appointed by the gods. Just then, Poseidon, returning from a trip to the land of the Ethiopians, spots him and realizes what the other gods have done in his absence. Poseidon stirs up a storm, which nearly drags Odysseus under the sea, but the goddess Ino comes to his rescue. She gives him a veil that keeps him safe after his ship is wrecked. Athena too comes to his rescue as he is tossed back and forth, now out to the deep sea, now against the jagged rocks of the coast. Finally, a river up the coast of the island answers Odysseus’s prayers and allows him to swim into its waters. He throws his protective veil back into the water as Ino had commanded him to do and walks inland to rest in the safe cover of a forest.

The power of the gods is very evident in this Book, both the malign power of Poseidon and the benevolent power of Athene and the other divinities who take Odysseus' side.

Zeus decides that it is time for Odysseus to go home, and sends Hermes to tell Kalypso to let him go. Kalypso is a nymph who lives on a desert island (called Ogygia) and is keeping Odysseus there. Odysseus has become her lover, but the romance appears to have gone out of their relationship, and at this point the hero is spending most of his time sitting on the seashore and crying.

Ogygia is no place for Odysseus, and Kalypso is no fit partner for him. The island is a remote and exotic place, and Kalypso is a goddess. She and Odysseus even eat different food - she dines on nectar and ambrosia, the food of the gods, while he eats normal human victuals. This and the next few Books will depict Odysseus in a variety of different and unsuitable locations, until eventually he is able to go back to the place and the social environment where he belongs.

We are given something of an insight into Kalypso and Odysseus' relationship by this remarkable passage, in which the goddess laments the hero's impending departure:

"If you knew in your mind how many woes you were
fated to suffer before reaching your homeland [patrida gaian],
you would stay here with me and live here as your home,
and you would be immortal, though you desire to see
your wife, whom you are always longing for every day.
I trust, indeed, that I am no worse than she is
in figure or statute, since it is not likely
that mortals rival gods in figure or beauty."
Clever Odysseus then answered her, and he said:
"Queen goddess, do not be angry; indeed I know
full well that to you thoughtful Penelope is
inferior in beauty, and she looks smaller:
she is mortal, and you are divine and ageless.
But yet I wish and I yearn every single day
to go home and to see the day of my return...."
So he spoke; and the sun set and the darkness fell.
They went to a corner of the hollow cave and
took pleasure in love, lingering beside each other.

Samuel Butler, who thought that the Odyssey had been written by a young woman, said: "Calypso's jealousy of Penelope is too prettily done for a man. A man would be sure to overdo it." Be that as it may, Odysseus' desire to return home to Penelope - which is certainly sincere - is easier to square with his willingness to carry on shagging a beautiful goddess in the meantime within the framework of Homeric morality and culture than it is with modern ideas of fidelity. At this point, incidentally, Odysseus has already slept with another female character, Kirke, whom we will meet in Book 10.

Kalypso is right: Odysseus is indeed in for a rough time before he reaches safety. Poseidon whips up a storm which Odysseus narrowly survives with a little help from the other gods. The danger of the storm and the helplessness of Odysseus are evident in the narrative. It will be several Books before we learn exactly why Poseidon has such anger for Odysseus.

It's worth noting that the importance of kleos (renown) features again in this Book.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter

2011-10-31T18:29:00.001Z

This is a classic political essay by the American historian Richard Hofstadter that was first published in the November 1964 issue of Harper's Magazine.

Hofstadter's subject is the strand of American politics that tends towards "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy" and that had revealed itself in moral panics over such issues as immigration, Mormonism and Freemasonry. He makes clear that he is not using the term "paranoid" in its psychiatric sense - the problem was that the ideas that he outlined were embraced not simply by mentally deranged fantasists but by "normal" people.

Hofstadter's principal target was the conservative revival associated with Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign; he also takes swipes at Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society. Consistent with this, the essay tends to be quoted today by liberals against their conservative opponents (to the understandable annoyance of the latter), but Hofstadter makes it explicitly clear that his targets are not confined to the political right. Among the guilty men whom he fingers are the left-wing Populists of the late 19th century, as well as some sections of the anti-slavery movement and the pacifist opposition to World War I. It wasn't enough for slavery to be a moral evil - it had to be the product of a conspiracy of slaveowners. It wasn't enough for the Great War to be an atrocious bloodbath - the hidden hand of arms manufacturers had to be involved. Closer to Hofstadter's own time, he pointed to the symmetrical racist paranoia of segregationist Southerners and radical Black separatists.

Nor did Hofstadter see the paranoiacs as always being wrong. Sometimes there were reds under the bed:

Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivably pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality and freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time an actual laxity in security allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be faulted.

Nonetheless, there is little doubt that Hofstadter regarded the phenomenon he was writing about as being misguided and pernicious.

Historically, Hofstadter starts with the first great conspiracy theory of modern times - the Masonic conspiracy theory of the French Revolution. He blames the Scottish writer John Robison, rather than the better-known Augustin Barruel, for bringing the theory to America. This essentially right-wing moral panic was followed a generation later, in the 1820s and 30s, by a left-wing anti-Masonic scare. This in turn was succeeded by an anti-Catholic scare, in which it was seriously claimed that a conspiracy existed to subject the United States to the rule of the Austrian Habsburg emperor.

In more recent times, such ideas were replaced by McCarthyism and the notion that the United Nations was a front for international communism. Hofstadter writes:

The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism....

The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy... has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents... so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.

Hofstadter draws an interesting distinction here. The old paranoiacs feared that their country was about to be taken away from them by Masons, bankers or priests. Their modern descendants thought that it already had been taken away from them by assorted cosmopolitans, socialists, intellectuals and other traitors. Hofstadter observes that "the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all".

In the paranoid mindset, says Hofstadter, no compromise with the enemy is possible - only annihilation will suffice. The enemy is archetypally evil. Hofstadter further claims that the enemy is in fact merely a self-projection of the paraoiacs themselves, but I wonder whether this piece of armchair psychology is entirely correct.

Hofstadter is more convincing when he writes:

The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will.

It is precisely this fallacious way of thinking, which no doubt has some kind of evolutionary origin, that underlies a great deal of conspiracy theorising. Effects must have simple - and preferably personalised - causes. Explaining an important event as the outcome of long-term trends or mere chance is less satisfying than looking for a conscious actor who has sought to bring it about. Impersonal socio-economic forces are harder and less intuitively plausible to think with than individuals or groups. I suspect that we all have these mental blind-spots to some extent.

Hofstadter's work is obviously applicable outside the ambit of hard-right American politics. Indeed, he himself noted parallels between his ideas and Norman Cohn's historical work on apocalyptic sects in Europe. Paranoia and conspiracism, and the psychological forces that drive them, are not the monopoly of any political movement, any country or any time.

The Qur'an

2011-10-23T15:14:00.002+01:00

New review on my other blog.

Works and Days, Hesiod

2011-10-23T11:52:00.008+01:00

This is one of the oldest works of western literature, probably older even than Homer.

Hesiod (Hésiodos) was not a jovial, happy-go-lucky man. "The earth", he proclaims, "is full of ills, and the sea is full of them". He is one of the great pessimists and cynics of classical antiquity - and, if what he says about his life story is correct, he had every reason to be.

There are those who see the biographical details in the Works and Days as literary devices, but they are probably true enough. Hesiod came from a village called Askra in Boiotia (modern Viotia), which he portrays as a godforsaken hole. He calls the place "miserable" and says that it is "poor in winter, hard in summer and never good". Life was tough for the local peasant farmers who sought to make a living from the soil. Hesiod speaks as a hard-bitten frontiersman, although in spite of his complaints he seems to prefer a simple life over one of luxury.

Hesiod's pessimism was expressed on a broad scale. He recounts the famous myth of the lost Golden Age, from which (he says) the debased human condition of the present day has declined. He predicts that things are going to get even worse in the future: there will be a collapse in moral standards, accompanied by widespread strife and wickedness. Readers may recognise this as the archetypal myth of present or coming decadence, which tends to occur in apocalyptic religious beliefs, as well as in the political credos of communism, fascism and the Daily Mail. In most cases, the myth tends to end with a final act of deliverance - the second coming of Christ, the judgment of Allah, the proletarian revolution. But Hesiod (like the Daily Mail) stops at the decadence stage of the narrative: he does not go on to prophesy the usual ultimate victory of the good guys.

Hesiod addresses the poem to his spendthrift brother, Perses, whom he accuses of having bribed the local judges to award him the lion's share of their inheritance. This glaring injustice deeply affected Hesiod. The themes of the poem accordingly include justice (Diké, personalised as a goddess), corruption and the power over the strong over the weak - though even the strong, says Hesiod, are subject to the vengeance of the gods if they act immorally. For all the bleakness of his outlook, Hesiod had a high view of the gods and believed in divine justice. What goes around, comes around.

The principal theme of the poem is work - work in general and agricultural work in particular. Zeus has decreed that humans must work for a living as the cost of their receiving the gift of fire from Prometheus. Life is tough, runs the general message of the poem, but if you work hard you might do ok:

But you, Perses - always remember my command,
and work, O worthy man, so that hunger may be
your enemy, and noble, fair-crowned Demeter
may love you and may fill your storehouse with produce;
hunger is a most fit comrade for the idle -
gods and men are angry at the man who lives an
idle life...
...But you must set your own work in order,
so that your barns are full of produce in season.
By work it is that men are many-flocked and rich;
and if they work they are much dearer to the gods.
Work is no disgrace; idleness is a disgrace.

Hesiod has been described as the first economist, and a case can be made for seeing him as the first capitalist, with his famous lines on the two Strifes - one Strife being the malign force that stirs up conflicts and the other being healthy competition that inspires men to work harder and increase their wealth. There is also a definite seam of characteristic rural conservatism in the text. Hesiod recommends saving up food, paying one's debts, neighbourliness, shunning gossip and religious piety. He offers more general advice about living life with good sense and in line with contemporary social customs and religious practices. It is tempting to see this purely and simply as a manifestation of the traditional peasant culture that prevailed across rural Europe, and no doubt beyond, before the coming of the industrial revolution and modern urban society. That said, scholars have seen various parallels and influences in Hesiod's poetry which link him with the advanced overseas civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel and elsewhere. It looks like the crusty old boy was more of a cosmopolitan than he would care to admit.

Quite a lot of the text is taken up with practical advice about farming and country living (and, perhaps oddly, seafaring), much of which is probably traditional or proverbial in nature. It breathes the authentic scent and spirit of archaic rural Greece:

And on both your feet bind boots of slaughtered ox-hide,
tight-fitting, with their insides lined thickly with wool.
When the frost comes in season, stitch together the
skins of firstborn kids with ox-sinew, so you may
put them over your back to avoid the rain; on
your head put a woollen cap so your ears stay dry;
for cold is the dawn when Boreas [the north wind] has borne down,
and at dawn there is spread on the earth from starry
heaven a fruitful mist, over the works of men.

Finally, Hesiod was suspicious of women. It is to him that we owe the first telling of the myth of the beautiful but deceitful Pandora. He also comes out with stuff like this:

Let not a tight-skirted woman deceive your mind,
wily and chattering, trying to get your barn.
Whoever trusts a woman - that man trusts villains.

And this:

And take a wife home for yourself at the right time,
when you are not very far short of thirty years
and not much over; that is the right time to marry;
she should be in the fourth or fifth year of her youth.
Marry a virgin, to teach her careful habits.
Above all, marry a woman who lives nearby,
thinking with care, so the neighbours do not mock you.
For a man obtains nothing better than a wife
who is good, but nothing grimmer than a bad one,
a greedy one, who burns her husband without fire,
strong though he is, and makes him old before his time.

History does not record Mrs Hesiod's side of the story.

Blogging the Odyssey - Book 4

2011-10-23T11:52:00.007+01:00

Here is the Sparknotes summary:

In Sparta, the king and queen, Menelaus and Helen, are celebrating the separate marriages of their son and daughter. They happily greet Pisistratus and Telemachus, the latter of whom they soon recognize as the son of Odysseus because of the clear family resemblance. As they all feast, the king and queen recount with melancholy the many examples of Odysseus’s cunning at Troy. Helen recalls how Odysseus dressed as a beggar to infiltrate the city’s walls. Menelaus tells the famous story of the Trojan horse, Odysseus’s masterful gambit that allowed the Greeks to sneak into Troy and slaughter the Trojans. The following day, Menelaus recounts his own return from Troy. He says that, stranded in Egypt, he was forced to capture Proteus, the divine Old Man of the Sea. Proteus told him the way back to Sparta and then informed him of the fates of Agamemnon and Ajax, another Greek hero, who survived Troy only to perish back in Greece. Proteus also told him news of Odysseus—that he was still alive but was imprisoned by Calypso on her island. Buoyed by this report, Telemachus and Pisistratus return to Pylos to set sail for Ithaca.

Meanwhile, the suitors at Odysseus’s house learn of Telemachus’s voyage and prepare to ambush him upon his return. The herald Medon overhears their plans and reports them to Penelope. She becomes distraught when she reflects that she may soon lose her son in addition to her husband, but Athena sends a phantom in the form of Penelope’s sister, Iphthime, to reassure her. Iphthime tells her not to worry, for the goddess will protect Telemachus.

This is the last book of the so-called "Telemachy" - the part of the Odyssey that focuses on Telemakhos and his journeys in search of news of Odysseus. In the next Book, Odysseus himself will come into the action, but for now we continue to see Telemakhos grow into manhood in the footsteps of his dad.

The opening passage of the Book sheds light on the nature of Homeric Greek marriage, characterised as it was by the exchanging of daughters, sons and property:

They came to the vale of ravined Lakedaimon
and went to the house of renowned Menelaos.
They found him feasting his many kinsmen for the
wedding of his son and of his faultless daughter.
He was giving his daughter to Akhilleus' son,
for at Troy he had promised and pledged to give her
to him, and the gods were fulfilling their marriage.
He was sending her with horses and chariots
to the glorious city where the groom was king.
He had brought Alector's daughter from Sparta for
his son, strong, beloved Megapenthes, born of
a slave; for the gods gave Helen no more offspring
once she bore her lovely daughter Hermione,
who had the beauty of golden Aphrodite.

When Telemakhos joins the revelry, Helen and Menelaos recognise him without much difficulty. As we have come to realise by now, he is patently his father's son. This is what Helen says:

"I have never seen such likeness in anyone,
neither man nor woman - I feel awe to see it -
as he looks like he is great-hearted Odysseus'
son, Telemakhos, whom that man left in his house
as a baby, when, because of me, the dog-eyed,
the Akhaians went to Troy to wage fierce war."
Answering her, fair-haired Menelaos spoke up:
"I too now see the same resemblance as you, wife:
for that is what that man's feet looked like, and his hands,
and the looks of his eyes, and his head and his hair."

We also discover that Telemakhos looks different because he is of royal blood:

"...For in you your parents' lineage is not lost,
and you are of the lineage of sceptered kings,
nursed by Zeus, for base men could not beget such sons."

Helen, incidentally, comes across as a distinctly dodgy character, serving drugs to the men with their wine and telling them how silly she had been to go to Troy and how happy it had made her when Odysseus killed Trojan men. This is somewhat undercut by Menelaos recounting how she very nearly betrayed the Greeks hidden in the Trojan horse. Penelope also appears in the action, though at this point she is still being portrayed as something of an emotional female.

Aside from this, we have some familiar recurring motifs. The story of Agamemnon and Aigisthos is told again, for the third time. Both for Telemakhos and for us, the time of investigating and learning about the returns (nostoi) of the Greek heroes from Troy is drawing to a close - from now on, we will be focusing on Odysseus, who, having been talked about a lot in the previous four Books, is about to enter the action. We are also reminded again of the importance of kleos, repute. This is how Penelope describes Odysseus:

"Long ago I lost my lion-hearted husband,
who surpassed the Danaans in every virtue,
a good man, whose fame [kleos] runs wide through Greece and Argos...."

Ultimate Risk, Adam Raphael

2011-10-23T11:51:00.003+01:00

This is a fascinating and absorbing account of the Lloyd's crisis of the 1990s, written by a journalist who was a Lloyd's Name at the time.

Lloyd's had its roots in Mr Edward Lloyd's coffee shop in 17th century London. The market was incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1871. It was part of the old City establishment - a blue-blooded sort of place where the underwriters came from a common background and knew each other and each other's families. The market functioned to a huge extent on trust - and, by and large, the system worked. The most distinctive feature of the market was that it drew its capital from external sleeping partners - the Names - who put up some of their assets for investment at the price of accepting unlimited liability for any losses. This is the "ultimate risk" of the book's title. This quirky arrangement functioned well for nearly all of the Names nearly all of the time. There were occasional losses and scandals, but the surprising thing was not that such events occurred but rather how uncommon they were.

The first danger signs surfaced in the 1960s. A series of misfortunes - notably Hurricane Betsy, which hit the United States in 1965 - led to uncomfortable losses. New members began to stop signing up, and existing Names resigned. In 1969, a report was commissioned from Lord Cromer, a former Governor of the Bank of England. Cromer pointed to the conflicts of interest inherent in the system and stated frankly that the market was in need of major reform. This wasn't what the old guard wanted to hear, and the report was largely shelved. Its contents didn't become public knowledge for another 20 years.

In one respect, however, Cromer's recommendations were implemented - it become a lot easier to invest in Lloyd's. Before Cromer, a Name had to have assets of £75,000, and a deposit of £35,000 would allow him to underwrite business worth £180,000. After Cromer, a Name had to have assets of only £50,000, and a deposit of £35,000 would allow him to take on business worth £350,000. A separate class of 'mini-Names' was also created: these needed assets of only £37,500. You couldn't include your house in your asset figure, but you could put forward a bank guarantee secured against it. Moreover, any assets deposited with Lloyd's would carry on earning money: shares, for example, would continue (hopefully) to rise in value and to pay dividends. It should also be said that the tax regime maintained by the Labour governments of the 1970s created unwitting incentives to invest in the insurance market.

The size of the market increased considerably in the 1970s and 1980s, and the old ways started to break down. The bonds of trust and honour began to fray. There was a series of embarrassing scandals, including the Sasse affair (1976-1980), in which, for the first time in Lloyd's history, some Names refused to pay claims on the grounds that they had been the victims of fraud. There were unfortunate misunderstandings with the Inland Revenue. Underwriters allotted their friends and family to low-risk "baby" syndicates, a practice that was widely regarded as fair game until it was banned in the 80s. A couple of duets of colourful characters - Ian Postgate and Ken Grob, Peter Cameron-Webb and Peter Dixon - ended up making the headlines for all the wrong reasons, and a former chairman, Sir Peter Green, was censured for "discreditable conduct". Some attempts were made to get Lloyd's house in order. Two important reports were commissioned in 1979 and 1986, and a chief executive was brought in from outside the market (only to leave a couple of years later). However, Lloyd's was still granted valuable legal immunities in the Lloyd's Act 1982 and the landmark Financial Services Act 1986.

If all that had been wrong with Lloyd's was a few rogue underwriters, the market could probably have survived, no doubt with some of its problems being lessened by the general wave of modernisation and professionalisation that broke through the gentlemanly world of the City in the Thatcher years. Unfortunately, this was not the end of the story. Unbeknown to the tens of thousands of people who had pledged their life savings to the insurance market, something almost unimaginably devastating was about to hit.

People had always known that there was something dodgy about asbestos. The substance had had a bad reputation as far back as Roman times. By the early decades of the 20th century, the health risks associated with it were documented and known to members of the medical and insurance communities. After the Second World War, the evidence continued to mount up, and by the 1960s the asbestos industry had begun to panic. At the same time, a change in American law enabled private individuals to sue asbestos companies, and in 1971 a test case produced a landmark verdict in favour of the plaintiff (or rather, the plaintiff's widow). The floodgates had swung open. It will be a long time before they close again: as of 2005, the total cost of asbestos-related litigation in the US alone was estimated at over $250bn, and the bill is continuing to mount up.

None of this would have mattered very much to the staid world of the British insurance industry, had not Lloyd's spent the previous three decades insuring and reinsuring liability risks for American companies using very broadly worded policies (some American insurers, by contrast, wouldn't touch asbestos manufacturers). The colossal risks arising out of asbestos litigation began working their way inexorably along the insurance chain, and claims were starting to hit the London market by the mid-1970s. Some insiders realised where things might be headed and sought to dispose of their liabilities while they still could. Others were less worried, and indeed some of them - most famously, an underwriter called Richard Outhwaite, whose Names numbered in the thousands - willingly took over their colleagues' risks.

By the early 1980s, an Asbestos Working Party had been set up and Lloyd's auditors were beginning to make worried noises. Not much of this penetrated to the outside world, however. There were a few danger signs. In the mid-80s, some syndicates started to leave past trading years open - the significance of an open year being that the Names who had been on the syndicate for that year would continue to be saddled indefinitely with the entirety of its past liabilities unless someone else could be found to take them off their hands. Another red flag appeared in 1986, when Richard Outhwaite began making cash calls on his Names. Most Names, however, were oblivious to what was afoot, and new recruits continued to stream in. Lloyd's membership peaked in 1988 at 32,433, up from 18,552 in 1980, 6,001 in 1970 and less than 2,000 at the end of World War II. This continued growth in the number of Names later gave fuel to a conspiracy theory that Lloyd's had followed a deliberate policy of "recruit to dilute" in order to soak up the looming losses, an allegation that was rejected by the courts in the case of Jaffray v Lloyd's.

It was in 1991 that the shit started to hit the fan, when Lloyd's made the landmark announcement that it had lost half a billion pounds in the 1988 trading year - its first loss-making year in a generation. The annual loss figure jumped to £2bn in 1992 and then to nearly £3bn in 1993. By this time, over 90% of active Names, along with thousands of others who had tried to get out of the market, were trapped on an open year on at least one of their syndicates. The misery was not equally spread. For the 1990 accounting year, for example, the average loss per Name was £100,000, but 2% of Names lost over £250,000 and nearly 20% lost between £100,000 and £250,000. Overall, it was reported that 70% of the losses fell on 30% of the Names. The result was that different Names' interests were divergent, and they formed into camps of moderates and militants. By the time the crisis ended, there had been 500 bankruptcies and at least 15 suicides, to say nothing of the countless Names who were reduced to destitution and who lost their homes or marriages.

Inevitably, everyone ended up in court. Richard Outhwaite's investors took the lead in going to the High Court in 1989, with their case eventually settling in 1992. Within a year, more than 15,000 other Names had either issued writs or were actively considering doing so; there followed the biggest torrent of litigation in British legal history. A case management conference held by Mr Justice Saville in an attempt to impose some kind of order on the various sets of proceedings is said to have cost £2 million in legal fees by itself. A number of the cases were successful, but they didn't provide a panacaea for the Names, not least because the people obliged to pay the damages - i.e. the insurers of the Lloyd's agents who were the defendants - were ultimately other Names, or even the very Names who were bringing the cases.

It wasn't just asbestos that the Names had to grapple with. There were also long-term pollution claims, as well as claims from a series of natural and man-made disasters that took place in the late 1980s - Piper Alpha, Hurricane Hugo, Hurricane Gilbert, the Exxon Valdez and others. Plus, something else had developed that served to amplify further the problems facing Lloyd's - the infamous 'LMX spiral'. This phenomenon was connected to the growth of the reinsurance market in the 1980s. As thousands of new Names came on board, the general demand for insurance cover did not expand to meet the extra capacity, so it was filled up instead with reinsurance business - that is, syndicates insuring each other's risks. The reinsurance market at Lloyd's developed in a dangerously incestuous way. What ended up happening was that large-scale liabilities were concentrated within a limited number of reinsurance syndicates and sold and re-sold within those syndicates. According to classic insurance principles, the risks should have been spread widely and thinly.

The LMX spiral was not a new development - it had made an appearance at the time of Hurricane Betsy in the 1960s, and it has been sighted more recently since - but its effects in the late 80s were uniquely destructive. Again, when the losses came, they fell out in a disproportionate way. Because the spiral liabilities were concentrated in quite small numbers of syndicates - with cryptic names like Feltrim 540 and Gooda Walker 164 - a few thousand unfortunate individuals were faced with immense losses. The losses of the Names represented by one members' agency, Lime Street, were said to have averaged £2 million each. An odd quirk of Lime Street is that it targeted London tennis clubs for recruitment, so the ruined Names included the likes of Buster Mottram and Virginia Wade.

It was noted that the worst hit syndicates were disproportionately composed of external Names rather than market professionals. This led inevitably to allegations of conspiracy and fraud, but such allegations were dismissed by an independent inquiry chaired by the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. Market professionals had a better idea than lay investors of which syndicates to avoid, but some of them still got badly burned, and in any event no-one had deliberately been dumping external Names into the spiral. Here as elsewhere, the Lloyd's saga owed less to conspiracy than it did to cock-up.

The Names didn't receive universal public sympathy. There was a feeling in many quarters that a bunch of greedy millionaires had taken a foolish risk and had got their come-uppance. But this rather facile view was based on a deep ignorance of who the Names actually were. There was a time when the membership of Lloyd's had represented an exclusive club of British high society, but those days had gone by the time of the crash. True, there were still some judges and minor royals, along with Jeffrey Archer and Ted Heath. But many of the Names who had been recruited in the 70s and 80s were middle-income professionals and retired people trying to supplement their pensions. The truly rich tend not to sign up to unlimited liability for the sake of a few thousand pounds extra a year, but a provincial dentist with school fees to pay just might.

The Names didn't have much protection against the risks they were taking on. Lloyd's agents were far from generous with information, and most investors who came on board in the 70s and 80s had no idea what they were getting into. New Names were supposed to be alerted to the risks of unlimited liability at their "Rota interview", but in practice this doesn't seem to have deterred anyone. Former Names say that the interview didn't make the risks clear to them; Lloyd's officers reply that prospective Names tended to be bent on joining and weren't interested in listening to warnings. If Names wanted to limit their exposure, they could buy a "stop-loss" policy, but this would cut out above a certain level of losses - and, because stop-loss policies were underwritten within the market, losses covered by the policies would end up being paid for by other Names.

We now know enough to extend the story beyond the end of the book (which was published in 1994). Lloyd's today is a very different beast from the Lloyd's of the 1980s. In 1996, all pre-1993 business of the market was compulsorily transferred to a specially created corporate group called Equitas. The vast majority of the individual Names have now gone, being replaced by corporate investors with limited liability. The market is now regulated by the FSA, and it would be impossible for the events of the 80s and 90s to recur again. All the same, the story of the Lloyd's collapse stands as a sobering tale of human error, and one which has been explicitly likened to the financial crisis of our own times.

Blogging the Odyssey - Book 3

2011-10-10T20:10:00.001+01:00

First, the Sparknotes summary:

At Pylos, Telemachus and Mentor (Athena in disguise) witness an impressive religious ceremony in which dozens of bulls are sacrificed to Poseidon, the god of the sea. Although Telemachus has little experience with public speaking, Mentor gives him the encouragement that he needs to approach Nestor, the city’s king, and ask him about Odysseus. Nestor, however, has no information about the Greek hero. He recounts that after the fall of Troy a falling-out occurred between Agamemnon and Menelaus, the two Greek brothers who had led the expedition. Menelaus set sail for Greece immediately, while Agamemnon decided to wait a day and continue sacrificing on the shores of Troy. Nestor went with Menelaus, while Odysseus stayed with Agamemnon, and he has heard no news of Odysseus. He says that he can only pray that Athena will show Telemachus the kindness that she showed Odysseus. He adds that he has heard that suitors have taken over the prince’s house in Ithaca and that he hopes that Telemachus will achieve the renown in defense of his father that Orestes, son of Agamemnon, won in defense of his father.

Telemachus then asks Nestor about Agamemnon’s fate. Nestor explains that Agamemnon returned from Troy to find that Aegisthus, a base coward who remained behind while the Greeks fought in Troy, had seduced and married his wife, Clytemnestra. With her approval, Aegisthus murdered Agamemnon. He would have then taken over Agamemnon’s kingdom had not Orestes, who was in exile in Athens, returned and killed Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Nestor holds the courage of Orestes up as an example for Telemachus. He sends his own son Pisistratus along to accompany Telemachus to Sparta, and the two set out by land the next day. Athena, who reveals her divinity by shedding the form of Mentor and changing into an eagle before the entire court of Pylos, stays behind to protect Telemachus’s ship and its crew.

Telemakhos has now travelled from the island of Ithaka in north-west Greece to the town of Pylos in south-west Greece, in search of news of Odysseus. The Book begins and ends with the communal piety of public sacrifices, a sign that the characters involved (unlike, say, the suitors on Ithaka) are maintaining a proper relationship with the gods. Athene stays in the action, too, and we have the unusual spectacle of her pretending to be a human praying to a god and secretly granting her own prayer.

The garrulous old man Nestor retells a story that Zeus has already alluded to in Book 1 - the story of Orestes. In short, while King Agamemnon was away fighting the Trojan War, his wife Klytaimnestra was seduced by the villain Aigisthos. When Agamemnon came back home, Aigisthos killed him. The parallels to the story of Odysseus, Penelope and the suitors don't need to be emphasised. The story has a happy ending, though, for Agamemnon's son Orestes turns up and kills both Aisigthos and his mother. Note that there is no moral censure attached to his deed (though this will change in later Greek literature). This is not a society where you call the police when things start kicking off. Blood vengeance is the way these things are handled, even if it involves knifing your mum.

The question is whether Telemakhos will have the bottle to sort out his household like Orestes did, albeit in his case no matricide will be involved. We are implicitly reassured that he will. Old Nestor marvels at how much he talks like Odysseus. Again, Homer is telling us that he is a chip off the old block.

Finally, the themes of reputation and fame (kleos) continue to appear, as they have in the previous books. These things counted for a lot in Homeric society.

The Old Testament: A Very Short Introduction, Michael Coogan

2011-10-08T11:49:00.000+01:00

New review on my other blog.

Blogging the Odyssey - Book 2

2011-10-05T09:22:00.000+01:00

Again, let's start with the Sparknotes summary:

When the assembly meets the next day, Aegyptius, a wise Ithacan elder, speaks first. He praises Telemachus for stepping into his father’s shoes, noting that this occasion marks the first time that the assembly has been called since Odysseus left. Telemachus then gives an impassioned speech in which he laments the loss of both his father and his father’s home—his mother’s suitors, the sons of Ithaca’s elders, have taken it over. He rebukes them for consuming his father’s oxen and sheep as they pursue their courtship day in and day out when any decent man would simply go to Penelope’s father, Icarius, and ask him for her hand in marriage.

Antinous blames the impasse on Penelope, who, he says, seduces every suitor but will commit to none of them. He reminds the suitors of a ruse that she concocted to put off remarrying: Penelope maintained that she would choose a husband as soon as she finished weaving a burial shroud for her elderly father-in-law, Laertes. But each night, she carefully undid the knitting that she had completed during the day, so that the shroud would never be finished. If Penelope can make no decision, Antinous declares, then she should be sent back to Icarius so that he can choose a new husband for her. The dutiful Telemachus refuses to throw his mother out and calls upon the gods to punish the suitors. At that moment, a pair of eagles, locked in combat, appears overhead. The soothsayer Halitherses interprets their struggle as a portent of Odysseus’s imminent return and warns the suitors that they will face a massacre if they don’t leave. The suitors balk at such foolishness, and the meeting ends in deadlock.

As Telemachus is preparing for his trip to Pylos and Sparta, Athena visits him again, this time disguised as Mentor, another old friend of Odysseus. She encourages him and predicts that his journey will be fruitful. She then sets out to town and, assuming the disguise of Telemachus himself, collects a loyal crew to man his ship. Telemachus himself tells none of the household servants of his trip for fear that his departure will upset his mother. He tells only Eurycleia, his wise and aged nurse. She pleads with him not to take to the open sea as his father did, but he puts her fears to rest by saying that he knows that a god is at his side.

This Book sees Telemakhos stepping into his father's shoes by beginning to take up the public role of leader of the community. The importance of the father/son relationship is again noted, and it looks like Telemakhos is a chip off the old block:

Telemakhos, you will not be small or foolish
if indeed your father's strength is planted in you,
such a man was he to fulfil both deeds and words....
But if you are not the son of him and his wife,
I have no hope that you will fulfil what you intend....
But yet, since you will not now be small or foolish,
and Odysseus' cleverness has not quite failed you,
I have hope indeed that you will fulfil these things.

Telemakhos is sometimes referred to simply as 'the dear son of Odysseus' (Odysséos philos huios) rather than by name.

Like Odysseus, Telemakhos now has to leave his fatherland (patris gaia - he uses the term himself) - but in his case it is a temporary journey, aimed at finding news of his father. We don't feel much anxiety about his chances of success. In fact, there isn't much suspense in the Book generally. We get the sense that Odysseus' return is imminent and that the suitors are going to come to a sticky end. What we don't know at this point is exactly how this is going to happen.

This Book deals with public space, which isn't the place for women, but female characters do come into the narrative. For one thing, we meet the loyal maidservant Eurykleia again. For another, we hear the well-known story of Penelope unpicking the shroud. We are also told expressly that she isn't a woman to be underestimated:

But if she still irks for long the sons of the Greeks,
using those gifts of mind which Athene gave her,
knowledge of beautiful handiwork, and good sense,
and cleverness, like no woman of old possessed,
none of the lovely-haired Greek women of old times,
Tyro or Alkmene or fair-crowned Mykene -
not one of them had a mind like Penelope...

This is not a conventional depiction of femininity. Nonetheless, it is made clear that Penelope is at the disposal of Telemakhos, the master of the household, and that she would otherwise be under the tutelage of her father, Ikarios.

On the divine level, Athene is continuing to work as the patron of Odysseus and his family. Zeus sends a favourable omen as well, in the form of two eagles - only for the suitor Eurymakhos to reject it. The latter manages to speak harshly to an old man in the process, thereby violating another norm of traditional Greek society.

Blogging the Odyssey - Book 1

2011-10-02T19:19:00.000+01:00

I'll start with a synopsis of the plot, taken from Sparknotes:

The story begins ten years after the end of the Trojan War.... All of the Greek heroes except Odysseus have returned home. Odysseus languishes on the remote island Ogygia with the goddess Calypso, who has fallen in love with him and refuses to let him leave. Meanwhile, a mob of suitors is devouring his estate in Ithaca and courting his wife, Penelope, in hopes of taking over his kingdom. His son, Telemachus, an infant when Odysseus left but now a young man, is helpless to stop them. He has resigned himself to the likelihood that his father is dead.

With the consent of Zeus, Athena travels to Ithaca to speak with Telemachus. Assuming the form of Odysseus’s old friend Mentes, Athena predicts that Odysseus is still alive and that he will soon return to Ithaca. She advises Telemachus to call together the suitors and announce their banishment from his father’s estate. She then tells him that he must make a journey to Pylos and Sparta to ask for any news of his father. After this conversation, Telemachus encounters Penelope in the suitors’ quarters, upset over a song that the court bard is singing.... [T]he bard sings of the sufferings experienced by the Greeks on their return from Troy, and his song makes the bereaved Penelope more miserable than she already is. To Penelope’s surprise, Telemachus rebukes her. He reminds her that Odysseus isn’t the only Greek to not return from Troy and that, if she doesn’t like the music in the men’s quarters, she should retire to her own chamber and let him look after her interests among the suitors. He then gives the suitors notice that he will hold an assembly the next day at which they will be ordered to leave his father’s estate. Antinous and Eurymachus, two particularly defiant suitors, rebuke Telemachus and ask the identity of the visitor with whom he has just been speaking. Although Telemachus suspects that his visitor was a goddess in disguise, he tells them only that the man was a friend of his father.

The Book begins with one of the most famous openings in Western literature:

Tell, Muse, of the many-turned man, who wandered far
when he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy:
many were the men he met and cities he saw,
many the woes he suffered at sea in his heart,
trying to save his life and bring back his comrades -
but yet he did not save his comrades as he wished;
for they all perished through their own recklessness - fools -
for they ate the cattle of Hyperion, the
sun; and he denied to them a day of return.

As this introduction indicates, the Odyssey is about estrangement and alienation, about wandering, homeland and return. Book 1 doesn't tell us much about Odysseus' own wanderings - yet - but it sets up the central problem of the epic, which is that he is separated from his house (oikos), his property (kteata) and his fatherland (patris gaia). The basic message of the Odyssey is that you can't be a person - and, specifically, you can't be a man - without a context.

This means finding both your correct geographical place and your correct social place. For Odysseus and Telemakhos, this is bound up with the father-son relationship. It is already clear from Book 1 that this is a relationship of prime importance. Telemakhos is presented at home in Ithaka without his father. His grandfather, Laertes, is still around, but the old boy has retired and pottered off to his country farm. We learn that Telemakhos looks like his dad, but he seems to be having some sort of identity crisis:

My mother says that I am his son, but I do
not know that; for no man knows his own parentage.
How I wish I were the son of some blessed man
who was cut off by old age in his own estates.

Note the reference to the importance of dying among one's own property. It is also worth noting that both Telemakhos and the suitor Eurymakhos separately question the identity of the disguised Athene by asking where "his" home is and who "his" family are. For Homer,* home, fatherland and family define who you are. If you don't have one or more of them, you've got a problem.

* = There was no such person as Homer. The Odyssey emerged from a longstanding bardic tradition, though a single poet was probably responsible for constructing the poem as we have it today. The poem used to be dated to the 700s BC, but more recent scholarship points to a date in the 600s or 500s. It may have been composed in Euboea (modern Evia).

A lot of this is bound up with manhood, and the Book doesn't really have any powerful female voices. There is Athene, of course, but she is (1) somewhat androgynous and (2) a goddess, which doesn't really count. Penelope, who will later become a more substantial figure, is introduced as a teary-eyed woman who tells the bard to stop singing about soldiers coming home because it upsets her - only to be reprimanded by Telemakhos, who tells her to mind her own business because he holds the power, the kratos, in the house.

This isn't to say that the Book has a crude view of male-female relations. Take this passage, which describes Telemachus going to his bedroom:

There he went, to his bed, with his mind full of thoughts;
with him, carrying burning torches, went the wise
Eurykleia, daughter of Ops, Peisenor's son;
Laertes had bought her long ago with his wealth,
for twenty cattle, when she was still a young girl;
he honoured her like his dear wife in the house,
but he never slept with her and angered his wife.
She brought burning torches with him; she loved him most
of the house-maids; she had nursed him as a baby.

The "him" in the last lines is obviously Telemakhos, but she was Odysseus' wet-nurse too. We will hear more about Eurykleia later.

Another theme of the Book is the divide between gods and men. Gods run the show; men worship them and earn their favour through sacrifices. There is an interesting passage where Zeus complains about humans blaming the gods for their suffering when it's not really the gods' fault, but it is unclear how far this is supposed to be taken as ironic (it comes off a bit like a politician complaining to his colleagues about the ingratitude of the voters).

I liked this description of Athene:

So she spoke, and bound to her feet lovely sandals
of divine gold, which bore her over the sea and
over boundless country like the breath of the wind;
she took her strong spear, with its tip of sharp bronze, large,
stout and heavy, with which she subdues the ranks of
heroes in her anger, the daughter of great Zeus.

The narrative is well-crafted and well-structured, with enough circumstantial detail but not too much. As Matthew Arnold said, Homer's literary style is "eminently plain and direct". There is also a lightness and charm about the text, which distinguishes it somewhat from the Iliad.

It is worth noting the importance of timé (honour) and kleos (renown) as concepts in the narrative. Homeric society was notoriously competitive and preoccupied with notions of honour.

Being British, Matthew d'Ancona (ed.)

2011-10-01T11:21:00.000+01:00

This is an anthology of pieces reflecting on modern British identity. It was originally conceived as a contribution to the debate on Britishness initiated by Gordon Brown (who wrote the Foreword). A project like this could very easily degenerate into a banal celebration of what the writers conceive to be British values and history, but it is a more substantial little volume than that.

There are 35 different contributions from Brits from all backgrounds and political alignments. The result is that the book offers a plurality of voices, forming a sometimes harmonious and occasionally discordant chorus.

There are relatively straightforward political pieces from Douglas Murray on the right and John Kampfer on the left. There is a witty contribution by the writer John O'Farrell. The unionist academic Prof. Paul Bew has a chapter about Britain and Ireland, and the constitutional expert Prof. Anthony King offers some thoughtful reflections from his perspective as a Canadian emigré. Piers Morgan's entry is quite entertaining. Alex James of Blur has a endearing chapter on the countryside which has nothing to do with Britishness but is fun to read. Best of all, there is nothing at all from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. The least attractive contribution is a tedious and tone-deaf piece by Michael Gove in which the strange wee man has a go at Gordon Brown and the EU. The quintessentially New Labour contribution of Michael Wills, then a underling at the Ministry of Justice, is fairly unimpressive too.

Some of the most interesting contributions come from members of immigrant communities. There is a self-consciously patriotic chapter by Muhammad Abdul Bari, who was serving as the secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain when he wrote it. The community worker Raja Miah writes that right-wing indigenous Brits are too insistent on British Muslims integrating into British society without really understanding the barriers that they face - but equally worries that figures in his community are equating integration with "selling out" and teaching Muslim children a narrative of anti-British resentment. The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, reminds us of how quickly and thoroughly British Jews assimilated into the cultural mainstream, at the price of the extinction of the Yiddish language.

The philosopher John Gray compares the United Kingdom to a miniature version of the Habsburg Empire - a collection of territories and peoples assembled over the course of history and united under a royal house and a loose identity ("British") which falls short of a nationality. Gray goes on to draw comparisons with Canada and Spain, two other multinational states which have managed to survive as free and reasonably cohesive societies, in spite of the best efforts of General Franco and the Bloc Québecois. The result is that British identity is not bound up with ethnicity or with the confession of a religious faith or a civic creed. Archbishop Rowan Williams, whose prose is as harmlessly donnish as ever, adds the point that the winners in every round of civil strife and war have had to share the same small island with the losers after their victory (though Ireland problematises this idea somewhat).

Such versions of Britishness are a good deal more encouraging than the self-denigrating version which is current in some circles. This flagellant historiography claims that Britishness was created in the 18th century as an anti-French, anti-Catholic discourse and developed into an unpleasant form of militaristic and racist imperialism. Its legacy, it is said, survives in the widespread delusion that Britain remains a great world power and can ignore the continent 20 miles from her coast from where she acquired her languages, her indigenous peoples, most of her high culture, her traditional religions and much of her political history. There is some truth in this narrative - though it's not as if, say, the French or the Germans can lay claim to a more pluralistic or pacifist history - but it is very evidently distorted.

It may be as well to close with some words from the Anglo-Jewish businessman Sir Victor Blank. He had this to say, taking as his point of departure a friend's ceremony of admission to citizenship:

As my friend filed in for his citizenship rite, the local cerk politely handed him the lyrics to "God Save the Queen", only to assure him with a pat on the shoulder: "Don't worry. You don't have to sing if you don't want to."

It was, I suppose, a reflection of the diffidence, the sense of apology, the reluctance to engage in any public display of national affection beyond the football terraces, that is also part of our national character. But while I recognise that it is unfashionable to cite the example of our cousins across the Atlantic with anything short of a sneer, an American-style sense of shared national narrative would go a long way towards reinforcing the cement of "belonging" on which a sustainable definition of Britishness will depend.

Singing "God Save the Queen" does not preclude republican sentiments any more than voicing pride in our armed forces need forestall debate on the rights and wrongs of the Iraq war, or prevent us from speaking out over our shameful failure to act more assertively to confront outrages like the situation in Darfur or Robert Mugabe's assault on his own people in Zimbabwe. Celebrating the achievements of the British Empire in our state schools need not blind students to the injustices sometimes committed in its name. Teaching Shakespeare and Rushdie, Darwin and Hobbes, Thatcher and Blair, need not trample on anyone's religious beliefs or political sensibilities....

We Brits, they will say, don't do national narrative. We let it take care of itself. We don't do national pride. It's undignified, cheesy.

The fact is, we can no longer afford not to.

This perhaps puts it a little too strongly, but Blank has a point. The days when everyone knew what Britishness and British citizenship entailed because they came from the same white Christian monoculture are long gone. So, for that matter, are the days when multiculturalism enjoyed uncritical acceptance among right-thinking liberal opinion formers. It remains to be seen whether our society is capable of constructing and maintaining a pluralistic and inclusive brand of Britishness without playing into the hands of petty Eurosceptics or the BNP.

Fascism, Roger Griffin

2011-09-25T17:12:00.001+01:00

"It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.... I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else."

So wrote George Orwell. This is a book which is essentially dedicated to the opposite view: that fascism exists as a coherent phenomenon which can be defined and studied. It is a reader compiled by one of the great academic experts on the subject, the Oxford Brookes scholar Roger Griffin.

Griffin has selected 213 texts on the phenomenon of fascism, beginning with protofascist texts from the Italy of 1914 and ending with Primo Levi. His selection takes in both texts from the high noon of Italian and German fascism in the 1930s and the rantings of more recent neo-fascists, crypto-fascists, Holocaust deniers and so forth, from Alain de Benoist and the MSI to our own dear John Tyndall and David Irving. He even looks at some of the more obscure variants of fascism in places like Estonia, Belgium, Hungary and - courtesy of the faintly ridiculous character of Eoin O'Duffy - the Irish Free State. He also includes a useful selection of political and scholarly interpretations of the phenomenon of fascism from sources ranging from Russian communists to academic sociologists to Harold Laski and Renzo de Felice to Klaus Theweleit and his theory that fascism had something to do with "the phallus climbing to a higher level".

There is no generally agreed definition of fascism - indeed, prior to the 1960s, scholars were reluctant to recognise fascism as having any coherent ideological content at all. Griffin's approach is to define the "mythic core" of fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism - "palingenetic" being an archaic term meaning "concerned with rebirth". In the various places where it operated, fascism consistently promoted the idea that the nation had fallen into decadence and stood in need of revolutionary regeneration. This conviction was sometimes expressed through the metaphors of disease and health, and it was bound up with a preoccupation with youth and the future. The promised rebirth could be presented as the return of a past golden age - the grandeur of the Roman Empire, for example, or the "First" and "Second" Reichs of German history. These ideas were pioneered by Mussolini in Italy. Mussolini started off as a socialist, but from the early part of his career he stayed (as Griffin says) "remarkably faithful to a single core myth, that of the creation of a new Italy based on a regenerated national community". However, as Griffin is also aware, the myths of decadence and rebirth are too deeply engrained in the human psyche to see them as purely fascist motifs.

So much for palingenetic ultranationalism. What were the other features of fascism that emerge from the texts?

Most importantly, it was an anti-Enlightenment, anti-liberal movement, rejecting the values of pluralism, rationality and constitutional governance in favour of a charismatic, irrationalist politics which promised to create a spiritually recharged totalitarian society. Here is the Brazilian fascist leader Plínio Salgado:

The soul of a people awakens through courage, through faith, through continuous regimentation, through permanent indoctrination, through perfect discipline, through ever-renewed hope, through spiritually uplifting moments, through high morale, through ceaseless struggle against soporific liberals and literary prejudices, against depersonalizing cosmopolitanism, against crude opportunism, against the general aimlessness which peoples without historical destiny are forced into by degrading pragmatism, against the premature decrepitude of generations corroded by scepticism, and, most of all, against the pestilential stagnation, the moral swamps in which decadent races go under and nationalities are enslaved.

The soul of a people awakens through the spread of sound, generous ideas, ideas of courage, force, national ambition, in complete contrast to emasculating passivity, to the gangrene of negativity, to the cancer of materialism.

Yet part of the fundamental ambivalence of fascism was that the movement was also anti-conservative. It demanded the creation of a new, all-embracing national community rather than a return to a premodern world of kings, princes and pontiffs. This side of fascism is downplayed by, for example, Umberto Eco, who appears to see it as a traditionalist, élitist movement. But the ethos of fascism was not aristocratic or reactionary: it was populist and revolutionary. Nor did it have much time for the modern aristocracy of big business. Fascists loathed communism, but they also attacked capitalism and promised to bring about a form of "national socialism" within an organic corporative state. José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange Española, had this to say:

Well then: if communism puts an end to many good things, such as family attachments and national sentiment; if it provides neither bread nor freedom and makes us subservient to a foreign country, what is to be done? We are not going to resign ourselves to the continuation of the capitalist regime. One thing today is painfully obvious: the crisis of the capitalist system and its devastating consequences which communism is doing nothing to attenuate. What is to be done, then? Are we in a cul-de-sac? Is there no way of placating the hunger of the masses for bread and justice? Do we have to choose between the desperation of the bourgeois regime and the slavery of Russia?...

The National Syndicalist Movement, conscious that it has strength and reason on its side, will keep up the assault on all its enemies: the right, the left, communism, capitalism. For the Fatherland, Bread and Justice.... We will impose a new order of things, without people starving, without professional politicians, without bosses, without usurers, without speculators.

Neither right, nor left! Neither communism nor capitalism! A national regime. The National Syndicalist regime!

It is worth noting in this connection that the widespread stereotype of fascists as small-minded small shopkeepers is of limited accuracy. Fascism had something of an anti-bourgeois ethos. After World War II, the Belgian fascist leader Léon Degrelle wrote from his exile in Franco's Spain of "the asphyxiating conservatism of the bourgeois with his gloves and starched collars, with no vision, red in the face through eating too much rich food and drinking too much claret". The nationalism, militarism and anti-Marxism of the fascist movement mean that it is most naturally placed on the far right of the political spectrum - much as this irritates some modern-day right-wingers who clearly don't like the idea of having the bad guys on their side - but this classification is something of an over-simplification.

One frequent misconception is that fascism equated with racism. This was undoubtedly true in the case of its German variant, which was morbidly obsessed with racial doctrines, but fascists generally had only limited interest in racial matters. Mussolini said:

We Fascists acknowledge the existence of races, their differences and their hierarchy, but we do not propose to present ourselves to the world as the embodiment of the White race set against other races, we do not intend to make ourselves the preachers of segregation and of racial hatreds when we see that our fiercest critics are not the Negroes of Harlem - who could profitably use their time to take care of their colleagues who are daily and Christianly lynched in the United States - but are mostly genuine Whites in Europe and America.

Nonetheless, one finds undeniable evidence of antisemitism even in texts emanating from outside the Nazi movement.

Inevitably, there are limits to Griffin's scope. He passes over the Croatian Ustaše, despite its "profound analogies" with fascism. He also avoids the various old-school conservative regimes that borrowed fascist trappings without really becoming fascist in spirit. These included Franco's Spain - in which the Falange was forcibly merged with the conservative Comunión Tradicionalista and converted into a claque for the Caudillo - Schuschnigg's Austria and Tojo's Japan.

In all, this is a valuable and informative collection of texts written both by and about fascist movements, and I have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone with a serious interest in the subject.

Architects of the Resurrection, R.M.Douglas

2011-09-11T17:26:00.000+01:00

When scholars are looking for an Irish example of fascism, they generally light on a group called the National Guard, better known as the Blueshirts. This was a short-lived organisation led by a complete idiot which failed to get close to the levers of power and ended up being subsumed into the mainstream conservative Fine Gael party in 1933. In fact, most historians have come to the conclusion that the Blueshirts weren't really proper fascists, not least because most of them didn't have any very coherent political beliefs beyond a dislike of the IRA and Eamon de Valera's economic policies.

In this book, the historian Ray Douglas seeks to identify an alternative Irish manifestation of fascism: a charming little organisation called Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, or 'Architects of the Resurrection' (Labour supporters dubbed it Áilteoirí na hAiséirghe, 'Clowns of the Resurrection'). This group was active during and after the Second World War, though it lingered on in some form until the 1970s. More contentiously, Douglas argues that Irish society in general was a great deal more receptive to extreme right-wing ideas than is generally admitted today.

Mid-century Ireland is generally seen by historians as a staid, even dull sort of place. Its leaders had served their political apprenticeship in the conservative constitutional institutions of the United Kingdom, and, once the Civil War and the Blueshirt episode were out of the way, they proceeded to govern their country in a fairly competent but unimaginative way, taking care to insulate her from the shocks and hazards that participation in World War II would have entailed. Only (it is said) with the coming of Séan Lemass and T.K.Whitaker at the end of the 1950s did Ireland start to move into the modern western European mainstream.

Douglas is having none of this. For him, Ireland, from before independence to the postwar period, was anything but staid and sleepy. In fact, it was an unstable polity afflicted by widespread anti-democratic, antisemitic and pro-fascist prejudice. The dastardly Brits had ruled the place with an iron fist, and this legacy of authoritarianism survived for years afterwards. As the Free Staters and republicans alternated in government in the years after the Civil War, each side refused to recognise the legitimacy of the other. There was a red scare in the 30s, coupled with widespread support for Franco, Mussolini, Salazar, and, to a lesser extent, Hitler. There was much antisemitic feeling at both popular and élite levels. During the War, lots of people cheered for the Germans, and, when wartime censorship was lifted in 1945, reports of the Nazi death camps were largely ignored or dismissed as Allied propaganda.

This view of things is open to serious question. Douglas in fact concedes that "it was improbable that [far-right] doctrines... could have thrown down a successful challenge to the parliamentary regime", and limits himself to suggesting that a "substantial constituency" for such ideas existed. But if this was so, it is surprising that no such constituency shows up in the election results of the time. It is an inescapable fact that the Irish electorate repeatedly returned democratic, left-leaning, anti-fascist Fianna Fáil governments to power between 1932 and 1948, giving many votes in addition to the socialist Labour Party. The main opposition was formed by the establishment conservatives of Fine Gael. By contrast, the performance of Aiséirghe and other far-right cliques was dismal: Aiséirghe itself never managed more than a smattering of local council seats. As for popular allegiances in World War II, it is no secret (despite what Douglas claims) that plenty of Irish people were sympathetic to the Germans, just as others were sympathetic to the Allies, but for the most part this was nothing more or less than a reflex of tribal anti-Britishness. It was enemy-of-my-enemy stuff rather than proof of any real commitment to the principles of Nazism.

The evidence for Irish extreme right-wingery is questionable for other reasons too. Even if you're Irish, the chances are that you've never heard of Aiséirghe - or Aontas Gaedheal, the People's National Party, the Irish Unity Association, an Córas Gaedhealach, St Patrick's Anti-Communist League, the Irish Social Credit Party, the Irish Christian Front or the various other hard-right groupuscles of the time - and the reason for this is that they were small, short-lived organisations with overlapping memberships and little lasting political influence. Moreover, while admiring fascist dictators may seem rather obscene in hindsight, praise for the likes of Mussolini and even Hitler was not an Irish speciality and did not necessarily mean that the praiser wanted to create a totalitarian state at home. There were enough people in democratic Britain and America, including some left-wingers, who were prepared to give kudos to the Duce and the Führer as strong leaders who had put their nations to work, made the trains run on time and stood up against Bolshevism. Something similar might be said of the prevalence of antisemitism. To the extent that some Irishmen did gravitate to the far right, their ideas often seem to have owed less to the new, radical doctrines of fascism and Nazism than they did to the much older traditions of Catholic reactionary conservatism and militant Irish nationalism. This was true even of Aiséirghe.

One suspects that Douglas is advancing his fascists-under-the-bed thesis largely because he wants to put forward a new and provocative argument. His own undisguised political commitments may also have something to do with it. Perhaps his thesis will prove to be a useful stimulus to future research.

The would-be Gaelic Führer - or, rather, the Cennaire Stáit - was the somewhat unlikely figure of Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin, a tax consultant who had been born plain old Gerard Cunningham in pre-partition Belfast in 1910. Following a certain amount of political experimentation, Ó Cuinneagáin had by 1940 come to embrace pro-fascist views. After a couple of years of hanging around Dublin with various other extreme-rightists and building up a successful cultural nationalist organisation called Craobh na hAiséirghe, he struck out in 1942 and founded his own far-right political party, Ailtirí na hAiséirghe (or Ailtirí na hAiséirí, as it would be written in modern Irish).

Aiséirghe did not slavishly model itself on its overseas cousins, and its members sometimes exhibited a reluctance to accept the "fascist" label, particularly after it became clear that the Axis powers were going to lose the Second World War. Nonetheless, its ideology was quite close to that of continental fascism. The group's pronouncements echoed the quintessentially fascist discourse of revolutionary national rebirth from present-day democratic decadence. It praised youth, looked forward to a "new Ireland", and, demographically speaking, consisted largely of teenagers and twentysomethings. It didn't like Jews or Freemasons. It sought to achieve its desired transformation of Irish society through the medium of a militaristic totalitarian state ruled by a single dominant leader and organised on a corporatist basis. The new régime would build an autarchic economy, undertake massive public works projects (including, for some reason, electrifying the canals) and thereby solve the problems of emigration and unemployment. Northern Ireland would be invaded and forcibly reunited with the rest of the Irish nation.

Most fascist parties had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with traditional organised religion, but this was Ireland, and Aiséirghe had a militantly, if not apocalyptically, Catholic outlook. It prophesied that Ireland would become the spiritual epicentre of the world - a kind of new, supercharged Vatican - with no shortage of temporal power to go with its religious influence. Ó Cuinneagáin appears to have been somewhat preoccupied with this rather bizarre vision: his enthusiasm was not shared by all of Aiséirghe's supporters (or, indeed, by the conservative Irish church). The Cennaire even thought that shared Christian faith would help to win over the northern Prods to the new totalitarian regime once the Aiséirghe divisions had marched into Belfast and Londonderry.

Another Irish speciality was Aiséirghe's militant support for the Irish language, not only as an integral part of Irish nationhood but also as a means of insulating the population against foreign-imported cultural decadence and liberalism. The shift from English to Gaeilge was to be accomplished by a mixture of sackings, taxes and criminal penalties. Aiséirghe generously proposed to allow a transitional period of 5 years.

A tough, autocratic and prickly man who lacked charisma and political talent, Ó Cuinneagáin never got close to realising his dreams. Douglas estimates that, even it its height, the party never had more than a couple of thousand members. It was humiliated in the 1943 and 1944 general elections, despite receiving a veiled endorsement from the Nazis. In 1943, three out of its four candidates lost their deposits, and this figure increased to seven out of seven in 1944. Within the Dáil, its most enthusiastic supporter was the somewhat eccentric and marginal figure of Oliver J. Flanagan, who was then in his mid-20s. The party had some very modest success in the 1945 local elections - 9 out of 31 of their candidates were elected - and this may have been due in part to Aiséirghe's part in some anti-British riots following VE Day. Douglas reads a bit more into this essentially unimpressive result than seems warranted.

It appears from Douglas's account that quite a few of Aiséirghe's supporters didn't actually agree with its specific policies. Many simply seem to have admired the party's diehard nationalist ethos and its promises of national rebirth and an end to partition. This is underlined by the fact that the second preferences of most of the party's voters in the 1944 elections went to democratic establishment parties (mainly Fianna Fáil and Labour). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the party's combination of ultra-nationalism and militarism also appears to have attracted quite a few IRA men.

If Aiséirghe ever had got within striking distance of power, it is very unlikely that the de Valera government would have sat idly by and let the Cennaire and his friends goosestep into Leinster House. As it was, they were treated unfavourably by the wartime censors, and the police developed a habit of banning their demonstrations. Meanwhile, spies and diplomats from Britain, the US and Germany kept an eye on them. The American minister in Dublin, David Gray, reported attending a séance in which the ghost of the former British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour had expressly warned him about the activities of a fifth-columnist group called "Ashereee".

In fact, Aiséirghe ended up doing the authorities' job for them by helpfully having a major internal argument in 1945. This led to a split from which the movement never recovered. They stood only one candidate in the 1948 general election, and he lost his deposit. By then, the party had been overshadowed by Clann na Poblachta, a newly formed republican outfit which entered government as part of a rainbow coalition after the 1948 elections. It may be noted that CnaP, which was considerably more successful than Aiséirghe, was a democratic populist party with a leaning to the left. Its rapid success provides further confirmation that the Irish voters had no very deep commitment to fascist ideas.

Aiséirghe was forced to give up the lease on its Harcourt Street office in 1949. Its party newspaper lingered on for some years after that, with its last edition appearing in 1975. Ó Cuinneagáin died in 1990, having never quite reconciled himself to the direction that Irish and world history had taken.

This is a book strictly for aficionados of Irish history and extreme right-wing politics. Anyone else is likely to find it rather specialised and perhaps rather dull. Douglas deserves credit for his extensive research, but his work seems unlikely to lead to any radical change in historians' views of the period which it covers. To put it bluntly, Aiséirghe didn't matter that much then and doesn't matter that much now. It was never more than a minor movement in a society which broadly accepted the democratic settlement enshrined in the 1922 and 1937 constitutions. Fascism didn't have much more success in Ireland than it did in Britain. The Blueshirts remain the only major exemplar of an Irish quasi-fascist movement, and they are not a particularly convincing one at that.

Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, A.V.Dicey

2011-09-08T13:05:00.000+01:00

New post on my constitutional law blog.