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The March of Folly

I often wonder where the place is to be found between being entertained, being made to think, and being constrained by academic rigour.  We want to read books about issues that excite us or that confuse us, about topics we want to explore, and often wish to read stimulating contributions without being subjected to the demands of academic precision.  We also like to spend time looking at ideas, even if they turn out to be rather slight, oversimplified, and possibly somewhat misleading.

Of all the fields where this is a problem, history must be at the forefront.  Histories are always exercises in the imagination, as we can never go back to the past, or not yet anyway!  As we read reconstructed accounts of the way things were, we both know they are based on the writer’s views, and often nothing more than that.  At the same time, we can be captured by a writer who appears to make the past ‘live’.  As we read, we know that another writer will come out with another book that will reveal all the shortfalls in the book we’ve just finished.  Revisions and rethinking will continue, and, we are assured, each new work will be better:  more insightful, more accurate.  Where’s the stopping point – no, where’s the starting point?  At which point is this particular contribution one worth considering?

Barbara Tuchman is a case in point.  A 20th Century historian, journalist and writer, born in 1912 (and died in1989), she was known for compelling popular histories, and won the  Pulitzer Prize twice, the first time for the Guns of August, a history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and the second for Stilwell and the American Experience in China, a 1971 biography of General Stillwell.  However, for many people it was her broad-brush review of world history, the March of Folly, that they read and enjoyed.

She attended the Walden School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Radcliffe College in 1933, having studied history and literature.  Working first as a researcher and journalist, it was following the Second World War, she began basic research for what would ultimately become the 1956 book Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour.  Its publication was the beginning of her commitment to historical research and writing, at a pace which soon saw her turning out a new book at approximately every four years.

She never claimed to be an academic and said that the norms of academic writing would have “stifled any writing capacity.”  She saw herself as having a literary approach to the writing of history, focussed on explanatory narratives rather than concentrating upon discovery and publication of newly discovered archival sources. Tuchman was “not a historian’s historian; she was a layperson’s historian who made the past interesting to millions of readers”.

The book has been described as concerned with ‘one of the most compelling paradoxes of history: the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests’.  Its four sections cover four major instances of government folly in human history: these are the Trojan’s decision to move a Greek wooden horse into their city; the failure of Popes in the Renaissance to stem the challenges that would lead to the Protestant Reformation; the catastrophic consequences of England’s policies relating to American colonies under King George III; and the United States’ mishandling of the Vietnam War.  This last topic takes up more than half of the book.

As a contribution to history, the book had a mixed reception.  The journal Foreign Affairs described the book as ‘in the Tuchman tradition: readable, entertaining, intelligent. It should lead a wide audience to think usefully about ‘the persistence of error.’  The New York Review of Books saw value in what Tuchman said, noting: “Systems and theories therefore should not be imposed on the past. The facts of the past should be allowed to speak for themselves. Why did history have to teach lessons anyway?  Why can’t history be studied and written and read for its own sake, as the record of human behavior…?”  The Review concluded “History is not a science, it is an art. History needs writers, or artists, who can communicate the past to readers, and that has been Tuchman’s calling.”

However, yet another review, Kirkus Reviews commented, “An exercise in historical interpretation such as this, tracing a single idea through a set of examples, is structured toward [Tuchman’s] weaknesses; and they are only too apparent. Tuchman applies the concept of folly to ‘historical mistakes’ with certain features in common: the policy taken was contrary to self-interest; it was not that of an individual (attributable to the individual’s character), but that of a group; it was not the only policy available; and it was pursued despite forebodings that it was mistaken. The only way to account for such self-destructive policies, in Tuchman’s view, is to label them follies; but that, as she seems unaware, puts them beyond rational explanation.

Similarly, another review criticised the book as having followed “the conventional, not to say threadbare, lines which the liberal media developed in the 1970s: that American involvement in Vietnam was, ab initio, an error which compounded itself  as it increased and was certain to fail all along. [Tuchman] thereby falls into a trap which a historian who seeks to draw lessons from the past should be particularly careful to avoid: to assume that what in the end did happen, had to happen.”  Finally, a review in the New York Times concluded “[A]ny way one approaches The March of Folly, it is unsatisfying, to say the least. Better books have been written about Vietnam, the American Revolution, the Renaissance Popes and the Trojan Horse. … Not only has [Tuchman] confined herself to the shallower wellsprings of history, she has committed the further sin of treating them superficially.”

These contrasting views from 1984 are illuminating, as they reflect the professional preferences and backgrounds of the reviewers.  A more recent commentary, Barbara Tuchman and the Unfinished March of Folly, by Armando Mariante appeared in the Brazilian Centre for International Relations.  The benefit of some distance from the original is revealing.  He comments “Barbara Tuchman died in 1989. Had she lived longer, she would have found no shortage of material for a new edition—a sort of Revisited March of Folly. The themes that haunted her—governments blind to reality, institutions acting against their own interests, and leaders trapped by hubris—have only grown more pronounced in the 21st century. From the invasion of Iraq to the climate crisis, from democratic erosion to reckless confrontations between nuclear powers, the world has continued along the same tragic trajectory she so carefully traced: the deliberate repetition of mistakes in the face of knowledge.”

His theme is clear, as is his perception of Tuchman.  He suggests many of the tragedies of history are not the result of ignorance, but of knowledge ignored or discarded.  Tuchman wasn’t trying to argue about error, but rather something worse, the stubborn persistence in error despite clear and repeated warnings.

We can think of many examples.  There’s the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 which can be described as a near-perfect reflection of her analysis of the Vietnam War 20 years earlier:   This was another conflict launched under false assumptions, driven by ideology, and resistant to correction even in the face of mounting disaster. Mariante suggests she had noted “the familiar manipulation of intelligence to justify policy, the suppression of dissenting voices, and the elevation of national prestige over prudent restraint.”

He has some other telling examples.  He suggests the COVID-19 pandemic, was a global crisis predicted by scientists, yet when it struck it was met with unpreparedness, denial, and politicisation.  He comments that she would have been “struck by how governments in many countries dismissed expert warnings, undermined public health authorities, and allowed ideology or image to outweigh clear medical guidance”.  He suggests she would have concluded the pandemic response wasn’t the lack of information, but a failure to act on what was already known—an archetypal march of folly, with devastating human cost.  More recently, if she had seen the recent U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, “she would likely see the familiar pattern of choosing force over diplomacy, ignoring historical context, and underestimating the dangers of escalation.”

Tuchman wasn’t trying to provide a detailed account of what happened back at the historical times she considered.  Rather she saw her account as ‘a ledger of warnings’.   From her perspective, history is not just a chronicle of the past—it is a mirror held up to the present. It is hard not to agree with Mariante, as he reflects on a world where people continue to make avoidable mistakes, that appears to almost deliberately forget what it once knew, and that as a result repeats tragedy of her ‘march of folly’.  If she had been a journalist, then her articles would be considered as offering an almost startling consistency.  Mariante suggests her voice still calls out, “not to admonish, but to remind us that knowledge and power without wisdom is peril. If the march of folly continues today, it is not because we do not know better—we do—but because we choose not to act on what we know. And in that choice, Tuchman might warn us, lies the gravest threat of all”.

I think that was the way in which many people saw her work.  However, others, like Keith Crook, saw Barbara Tuchman as a less than meritorious example of the popular history movement that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Crook summarises her model of folly as examining situations defined by actions being taken when there were feasible alternatives ignored in favour of the foolish course of action that was adopted.  However, The March of Folly is concerned with folly that should have been obvious at the time by rational observers, and her criteria included that it must be a group decision made “beyond any one political lifetime”.

Are these criteria met in her four examples?  As far as Crook sees it, possibly not in the eyes of an analytical historian. For that matter, he suggests, neither do many of the dozens of examples of historical folly that are included in her introductory chapter.  However, Crook isn’t offering unrelenting criticism, and balances his concerns about historical accuracy with other observations.  He notes how beautifully Tuchman uses the English language, as well as including very interesting anecdotes about the figures in her narratives. “For example, we learn that the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Francis Dashwood, was also a notorious rake who founded the infamous Hellfire Club. Make no mistake, this is a pleasant read for a reader interested in casual history, but is it good history?”

Here is the point:  it is clearly the case that she is wrong in many details, although some errors have only become apparent in the last forty years of continuing scholarship.  He is willing to concede she offers a great deal, but on the American Revolution he concludes “Overall, though this piece is masterfully written, I found it superficial and offering nothing new.”  That observation made me think.  Am I reading Tuchman on the American Revolution because I want a detailed and up-to-date review of the history of this event, or because she is offering a helpful and enlightening overview.  As he concludes: “I contend that Barbara Tuchman is a superb wordsmith but has aged poorly as a historian. By all means, read The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam for a masterclass in how to make history appear to come alive, but if one wishes to learn more about the historical follies covered in this book, there are much better options.”

Can I amend that closing comment: there are much better options available today, and Crook offers an interesting and important critique of The March of Folly.  Forty years after it appeared, we know so much more, and we are aware of many misunderstanding s that existed back in the 1980s.  Does that mean we can’t read and enjoy historical studies written back several years ago?

That takes me back to my initial comments.  We do want to read books about issues that excite us or that confuse us, about topics we want to explore, and often we wish to read stimulating contributions on a topic without being subjected to the demands of academic precision.  We also do like to spend time looking at ideas, even if they they turn out to be rather slight, oversimplified, and possibly somewhat misleading.  What we don’t like is to find ourselves embedded in non-fiction to then discover it isn’t non-fiction, it is a form of fiction closer to fantasy.  With so much being written in so many forms and in so many places, the task of judgement is almost impossible.  We read about some interesting research, and have relatively little confidence that this is accurate information, or sales-worthy exaggeration.

This must be especially critical in relation to works about the past.  History is a critical subject.  We can never experience the past.  Apart from physical objects, nothing else remains.  This includes both objects – clothes, swords, buildings and more – but also written records.  We are inclined to think that the written record from the time has to be a source of certainty.  However, we know enough to be confident that the written record of events in the past is as unreliable as the written record is of events today.  We read something happened:  then or now.  The explanation of anything more than physical matters is the result of interpretation, of what is included, what is left out, what is ‘understood’ and what has been ‘interpreted’.  That set of issues is further complicated by the fact that each successive piece of writing about an event is then also influenced by what has been written before, by the interests and prejudices of each succeeding commentator, and what has been learnt over time.

I sometimes go back to reading one of my older history books – Trevelyan on British History.  The story he tells is engaging, and paints a picture of how the Uk evolved from tribal enclaves through to a single unified (OK, almost unified) state.  It’s a compelling, fascinating account.  Today I am aware that much of it is incorrect in details, sometimes the result of misunderstandings, sometimes the result of relying on evidence that has since been overthrown, re-examined and re-interpreted.  I suppose this doesn’t concern me too much.  First of all, I believe that change is always taking place, and that the past isn’t just different but ‘a foreign country’.  Second, I am interested in the motives of writers, and know that putting pen to paper is a matter of what story you want to tell.

Does this concern me?  Not really, as I am well aware that I should read history books and articles and be clear in my own mind what it is I am considering.  If this is meant to be a ‘true account’ of what took place, I immediately read with caution.  If I am told these are the facts of what took place back then, I am equally cautious.  If the writer declares the account is intended to offer a picture of what took place at some point in time, based on what many agree was likely, I am reassured:  it’s a work in progress, and the author is being duly cautious.  If the writer is making it clear that this is a ‘story’, a faction if you like, offering a perspective on what might have happened, then I am intrigued to see what evidence is offered to support this version of the story of the past, but I am equally concerned to bear in mind that a good story doesn’t mean it is an accurate story.

My own view is that we need a current Barbara Tuchman, another articulate contemporary critic who will help us discern some of the latest examples of those ‘most compelling paradoxes of history: the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests’.  I am interested in how we view past actions, and what those accounts tell us about our views of human nature, of political and social systems and of so much more.  My personal interest is in viewing the past as providing insights into how the world we are living in today might have developed.  What I need from the books I read is to be encouraged to think, and to expand my understanding.  As I consider The March of Folly, I am hoping to be encouraged to think, but not to be persuaded this is some kind of final truth.  Perhaps I should ask, who should I be reading today who meets that need?

Lost Connection

Every so often I read an article or a book that seems to capture the current moment and does so in a way that crystallises how I see the world.  I suppose this reflects my increasing confidence:  I am reading something that reassures me others see the world in the way I do.  It is always encouraging to read something that reaffirms what you felt was obvious but about which you weren’t quite certain.  However, such articles can also be seductive:  a good piece can be very persuasive, and shape how you think, drawing on anecdotes, perspectives and ways of seeing that make sense, leading to the conclusion that’s the way things are – and I knew it!

This is particularly the case when I read an article about how the world is different now.  It is especially tempting to be reminded about how things were when you were a child, moments and situations you recall as you look back fondly at events and people in your childhood, adolescence and even young adulthood.  On reflection, you conclude everything was simpler then, technology less intrusive, interactions more innocent.  Even though you recall there were some challenging moments in the past, overall you are prone to remember what was good, fun, interesting:  I suspect this is a form of defence mechanism, one that tends to push terrible events into the background, or take some of the sting out of them.  I don’t mean to imply that disasters are obliterated, but I believe we have the capacity to reduce their salience, at least some of the time.  Perhaps there were moments when your life was hard and discouraging, but on reflection the world seemed a nicer, happier place when you were young

I was reminded of this recently when I read a very compelling article by Rebecca Solnit.  She is an outstanding novelist, but she is also a stimulating essayist.  In late January she published an article in The Guardian, a deeply felt critique of capitalism today, and its focus on what she describes (based on a comment from a friend) as ‘the tyranny of the quantifiable’.  She described her views as an elegy to “deep immersion in the moment, of engaging with the world in an embodied and sensual way, whether it’s dancing or dog-walking, cake-decorating or dirt-biking.”  Her evident concern was that today “we are beset with the ideology of maximising having while minimising doing.”  She observes that this has long been capitalism’s narrative and is now it is also the tempting promise of technology.  “It is an ideology that steals from us relationships and connections and eventually our selves.”  As she saw it, the issue today is that we are encouraged to describe and value only that which our modern version of capitalism allows, and even encourages, while other aspects of our lives are overlooked or diminished.

As I read it, I had no doubt that what Solnit was offering a pointed and devastating critique.  In her essay she notes how Silicon Valley is concentrated on the quantifiable. “For decades, its oligarchs have preached that our criteria for what we do and how we do it should be convenience, efficiency, productivity, profitability. They have told us that to go out into the world, to interact with others, is perilous, unpleasant, inefficient, a waste of time, and that time is something we should hoard rather than spend.  This ends up meaning that we can minimise our presence in the world and maximise time spent working and online, which also means maximising alienation and isolation. This has involved a reordering of society right down to our retail landscapes … To embrace the tyranny of the quantifiable is to dismiss the subtle value of these daily acts out in the world and the ways they generate and maintain networks of relationships.  So we have withdrawn, while being constantly told this is good, and it has turned out to be bad in a thousand small ways, weakening public life and local institutions, isolating us.”

There’s worse.  Having convinced many people to avoid going out and have unmediated contact with other people, Solnit reports “Silicon Valley is now telling us we do not want to do our own thinking, creating or communicating with other humans.”  She quotes the sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle, who has followed the evolution of computer technologies since the 1970s.  Solnit reports that Turkle writes about her desire to raise an empathic child. “I knew that without the ability to spend quiet time alone, that would be impossible. But that was where screens began to get us into trouble. Our capacity for solitude is undermined as soon as we introduce a screen.”

Some of her examples seem almost unbelievably bizarre.   “You’ll never think alone again,” said one advertisement for an AI product called Cluely.  The ad seemed confused about what thinking is and oblivious to why we might want to do it ourselves. These companies often suggest that things we have always done are too hard to do.”   Her commentary on Cluely describes the way this startup marketed its AI assistant “with an advert featuring a young man wearing smart glasses, similar to those that first appeared as Google Glass in 2014 … Glasses of this type, which have internet access and tiny screens, operate on the premise that as you move through your day you need constant help, outsourcing basic decisions, checking facts, being reminded of appointments, in essence being babysat by your headgear.”

She continues “In the Cluely advert, the young man (who’s one of the product’s creators) gets a steady stream of prompts for talking to a young woman on their first date. So much of what tech offers is solutions to non-problems, or to problems that need to be solved through other means. Why is the young man incapable or afraid of talking without coaching? Is he really talking to his date or is he relaying instructions? How would she feel if she knew she were talking to an algorithm via her distracted date’s phone? With continued use, he may become even less capable of doing what we’ve all done for ever: converse, which is an act of collaborative improvisation.”

“We must presume that the point of a date is to establish a personal connection, but in this interaction it’s reframed as something like a business opportunity. The young man wants to impress the girl, but it’s hard not to conclude that if she is impressed, it won’t be with him, but with his dialogue coach!  Ned Resnikoff writes in his newsletter, chiming in with Turkle: “Cluely’s explicit promise is to abolish solitude – and, in effect, to abolish thought. All dialogue with one’s self is to be replaced by queries put to a large language model.”

Critiquing much of what we might choose to be the result of ingenious marketing can allow us to miss the deeper issues that Solnit addresses.  As she explains “The tyranny of the quantifiable tramples over the question of what it is we get from doing the work, why we might want to do it, how writing – which is mostly thinking – can be part of developing a self, a worldview, a set of ethics, a greater capacity to understand and use language.”

She also offers some scary examples.  She reports that someone had told her that she was “having a chatbot write her husband a poem for their anniversary, which made me wonder if the husband desired a polished product or an expression from the heart. In Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, the big-nosed title character ghostwrites love letters for his friend to the Roxanne both of them love. She comes to realise it’s the author of the letters she really loves. What happens when you realise the true love who touched your heart isn’t even human? Accepting it as your AI lover seems to be one answer.”

“One argument for AI companions is that they are always there for you: when you want them on, off when you want them off, with no needs of their own.  Yet behind this lies a capitalist argument that we’re here to get as much as possible and give as little as possible, to meet our own needs and dodge those of others.  In the real world, you get something from giving – at the very least, you get a sense of being someone with something to give, which is one measure of your own wealth, generosity and power.  We were designed to give; the gifts were meant to circulate. Love is too often discussed as a sort of good you want to stockpile, harvest, collect, even extract, but to be loved without loving is a sad accomplishment, a miser’s hoarding of someone else’s wealth. The work of loving is also the work of forging a self and a life. … and of confronting the unpredictable, the vulnerable or risky, the intimate, the embodied”.

It is very tempting to keep on quoting Solnit.  She is describing what people of my age see the world becoming.  I can’t help it:  I must quote her once more: “The capitalist agenda of maximising getting and minimising giving has some application in commerce but impoverishes life.  We are social animals who need to be with other humans, whether it’s at a carnival or funeral or the ordinary times in between. There is a sense of belonging that goes deeper than words when we are with people who care about us, and even more so when we are in alignment, whether it’s two people falling into step on a walk or a dozen dancing together or a congregation praying or 10,000 marching together.”

However, it was around this point that I stopped.  As I see it, the capitalist agenda is concerned with investing in products and services that clever people can persuade others they want.  Sometimes those products or services meet legitimate needs and interests; sometimes they create needs or desires that are trivial, inauthentic, or positively misleading.  However, hasn’t that always been the case?  Businessmen, politicians, priests and writers, aren’t they are all trying to sell us their vision?  They were doing that centuries ago, and they will be seeking to do so centuries into the future.  Helping us to see things ‘the right way’.  That’s an old story, and the capitalist system has only managed to organise the process a little more effectively.

Perhaps that isn’t the core of the issue.  Solnit is particularly exercised about AI and AI assistants.  She suggests that in order to assist you, these artificial intelligence systems offer what she describes as ‘agreeable sycophancy’.  There are real horror stories, of course, as users fall for financially crazy schemes, develop paranoia, begin to distrust family and friends, and even plunge them into suicidal despair, “with the helpful chatbot offering advice on how to kill yourself.”  Agreed, but that is nothing new.  The elderly, the young, confused teenagers and thwarted adults, they have all been susceptible to smart strangers or ‘helpful’ family members.  As much as that is true today, so it has been true over the centuries, as both the fiction and non-fiction of the past make clear.  We are gullible, and AI is merely another way to tap into our gullibility.

Solnit points out the danger of flatterers; that we need kind people in our lives who will tell us the truth when we’ve veered off course. She suggests that chatbots cannot do this, apparently because the only information they have about us is what we have supplied.  Really, is that the case?  I suspect it is the opposite, as con men have learnt over the years:  listen to the mark and then play back what they have told you, adding in the twist, the offer, the redemption.  She suggests it is the very rich who already suffer from sycophancy, from living in echo chambers, but this is a problem for all of us.  There are no end of friends and colleagues who will happily concur with our points of view, and then helpfully agree with the actions we propose.

Solnit quotes from Carissa Véliz, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI, who told a Rolling Stone reporter “Part of what keeps us sane is other people’s perspectives, which are often in tension with ours …When you say something questionable, others will challenge you, ask questions, defy you. It can be annoying, but it keeps us tied to reality, and it is the basis of a healthy democratic citizenry.”

Solnit sees the solution to these woes in connection.  She encourages us to distinguish between “the things real friends can do and AI cannot: bake you a cake or drive you home, hold your hand or live through a crisis or a celebration with you. And because of that difference people need to have real friends.  More than that, people need real communities and social support systems.  The solution to technology is not more technology. The solution to loneliness is each other, a wealth that should be available to most of us most of the time. We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust. Technology has stolen us from each other and in many ways from ourselves, and then tried to sell us substitutes. Stealing ourselves back, alas, is not as easy as walking out the door. We need somewhere to go and, more importantly, someone to go to who likewise desires to connect.”

The more I read, the more I was frustrated.   Solnit isn’t describing something that has suddenly arisen because of those chatbots and AI systems she described.  It has always been like this.  We are a confusing mixture of dependency and exploitation.  We depend on others, on our families, friends, workmates and even those we meet in shops, workplaces, playing fields and galleries.  At the same time, we cherish what we have as individuals, what we have acquired, what we have obtained from others for ourselves.  We sometimes are willing to pay the costs for borrowing or appropriation, but we also like to get what we can for as little cost as possible.

Much of human history, or that part of it which we can discover, is about people seeking to exploit others, balanced against those occasional, truly inspirational accounts where the dominating motive was giving rather than taking.  In the bookcase in our apartment, there is a wonderful collection of history books: Bloch on Feudal Society, Tuchman on The March of Folly, books on the rise and fall of the Medici, the decline and fall of Byzantium, and on the exploits of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan and Tamerlane, on the world of the Pharaohs and the wars of the 20th Century.  They depict the rise and fall of human aspirations, as great leaders tried to do something more than simply rule and exploit, but in every example it is also the case they illustrate how greed, selfishness and opportunity have thwarted noble aspirations.  As I see it, Solnit is describing more of the same:  like any others she seeks a world that never existed, where people lived in harmony, greed was banished, and cooperation and collaboration shaped experience.

We tend to resist the prophet in our time.  Solnit is a prophet, in her fiction and in this essay.  She concludes “We are told that machines will become like us, but in many ways they demand we become more like them.  To let that happen is to lose something immeasurably valuable.  That immeasurability is what makes this struggle difficult, but what cannot be measured can be described or at least evoked and valued. It cannot be boiled down to simple metrics such as efficiency and profitability.  Resisting the annexation of our hearts and minds by Silicon Valley requires us not just to set boundaries on our engagement with what they offer, but to cherish the alternatives.  Joy in ordinary things, in each other, in embodied life, and the language with which to value it, is essential to this resistance, which is resistance to dehumanisation.”

Is this essay call for action, or a voice in the wilderness?  We are inspired by writers who address major issues, and who dissect human nature and the political and economic systems we have devised.  We do need hope, to believe that things can be better, that we are more than animals with strangely larger brains than the rest.  As I read he essay I’m sure you know I wanted to believe that we will respond to her appeal, and humanity will shift its direction.  However, I suspect you also know that I doubted it.

History shows that our bad habits remain, despite emotional and inspirational pleas to change.  As any parent concerned about their aspirations for their child knows, no matter how they work hard to instill the values and behaviours that will make their child a better person and contribute to a better society, it’s not that simple.  Yes, that is what many parents want to achieve, but the outcomes can often seem rather discouraging:  practice falls short of hopeful aspirations, and that this is often the situation we like to believe is the result of the malign influence of others.  However, quite simply it may be because this is the way things are.

Silk Roads

When I was around seven years old, my friend Andrew told me about his father’s plan.  Back then, more than seventy years ago, his father worked for the Great Western Railway in the UK.  Apparently, one of the perks of his position was that he could have one long instance travel trip per year, in his holiday.  He could go from London to York, or to one of the railways stations in Devon or Cornwall.  Andrew told me that his dad had never taken one of these trips, but was saving them up:  when he retired he was going to travel from Paris to Moscow, and from there go on the Trans-Siberian railway all the way across to Vladivostok.

The trip by rail from Moscow would be 9,289 kms on the ‘Rosslya’ could be completed in some 7-10 days.  First class travel was labelled ‘SV’, private two berth compartments, and the train would offer samovars for hot water, dining cars, and attendants.  However, Andrew’s dad would take longer, stopping at various places along the way.  His itinerary included such exotic paces as Kirov, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, and Belgogorsk, with a side route that could take you to Ulaan Baatar and Beijing.

Well, that was it!  For the next few years, it was my plan too, although I had no ideas at to how to accomplish it.  At the time I learnt about it, the train was far less sophisticated than the current express, but I was convinced I would love it, despite any hardship.  However, what I didn’t realises at the time, it also was the start of a lifelong fascination with travel outside of Europe, and especially in Asia.  Of course, fascination is one thing, and being able to realise it is another, and when, some 30 years later, I began regular visits to North East and South East Asia, my travel was by air, and train journeys forgotten.  All of that was reawakened when I received a copy of a book about the Silk Road, and the exotic civilisations and countries strung out across that route.

 Back in 2002, Frances Wood published The Silk Road, a Folio Society volume.  It was lavishly illustrated, full of fascinating information, and, in some ways, a bit like a pirates’ treasure chest in that it was full of intriguing tidbits.  She begins by telling us that the silk road is “one of the most evocative of names, conjuring visions of camels laden with bales of luxurious brocades and diaphanous silks in all the colours of the rainbow.”  She quotes from James Elroy Flecker’s poem, The Golden Journey to Samarkand:

When those long caravans that cross the plain

With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells

Put forth no more for glory of for gain

Take no more solace from the palm-girt well.

Yes, this is about the distant, exotic world of the East – at least as we imagine it.  It has played a role in history over centuries, from Marco Polo to 18^th Century European explorers.  However, Frances Wood does a good job of keeping our feet on the ground, telling us that Silk Road was “only coined in 1877 by the German explorer and geographer Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen” (no, not the same one Snoopy was constantly engaging in aerial combat!).

Wood’s book is both engaging and frustrating.  She deftly introduces figures, place, events, and people from the many countries and centuries of Silk Road history.  However, each chapter leaves the reader wanting more, often because the accompanying illustrations are rather like postcards capturing moments in the past that deserve a whole book for each era and group that is depicted.  There is more to the story than this, however, because the image of the Silk Road is also concerned with luxury, riches, items distinctive and special, with luxury merchandise and access to what is exotic.  However, she also reminds us that there are many parts of the Silk Road that go through inhospitable terrain, with mountains, deserts, extreme weather, and frequently days with limited access to anything more than very basis food and drink.  Some days in parts of the journey there is the likelihood of bitter winds, and snow and ice, while at other stages the challenges come from heat, aridity, and isolation.  Now train travel is more like a rather special adventure, but not that long before it was risky and uncertain.  Does it mean we now see the Silk Road as rather exciting, even desirable?

Having read Frances Wood’s book, the Silk Road began to occupy a place in my thinking, and for reasons that I can’t quite explain, I began to wonder about making that cross-continental tri, but the other way round, beginning in Japan (well, OK, starting in Japan, next popping up to Vladivostok and then continuing on from there as my real starting point).  To begin in Japan wasn’t entirely without reason, as that would fit in with another of my fantasies, which was to buy my tickets in Tokyo, and commence this travel saga with a visit to the Mitsukoshi store in Nikonbashi, where I’d be able to purchase travel books, luggage, suitable clothing, cameras and binoculars and more!

Why the Mitsukoshi store?  Well, it is one of Japan’s finest retailers.  It is claimed to be the first store of its kind.  It had started trading in 1673 as a kimono store, until 1904 when it changed had change to become Japan’s first department store.  It is simply stunning.  It is huge, with two large lion statues at the main entrance (since 1914), and the ‘Statue of Sincerity’, an 11 metre wooden goddess in the centre of the building. Italian marble walls showing Mesozoic ammonite fossils surround the floors, combines with luxurious fixtures and fittings including high vaulted ceilings and a pipe organ that is played every week!  It appeals to the nostalgic in a country that revers traditions, although I read that just recently, Mitsukoshi advised the public that each of its department stores will abolish the ‘issuance of receipt by handwriting on Sunday, February 1, 2026.’  Plus ca change!

Clearly, travelling the Silk Road has to begin at Mitsukoshi Nihonbashi.  However, after dealing with a change in starting point and direction, the next issue is that we have to address is the fact the Silk Road isn’t what it once might have appeared to be: today, we know it is all about ‘Roads’.  This was made dramatically clear in 2015 when Peter Frankopan published The Silk Roads – and the key point was the ‘s’ at the end of the tile.  Ambitious, exciting, and for many academics frustrating, what Frankopan did was to help readers see there were new ways to look at the history of the past 2,000 years or more.  To put it simply, he wanted his readers to set aside the traditional view of Europeans that our world emerged from the Egyptians, followed by the Greeks, followed by the Romans.  He challenged this ‘Eurocentric’ view and suggests that the centre of the world was to be found further to the east, in the Caucasus, or in Iran, or even in those places often referred to as the “stans”.

The silk roads he describes are a complex series of trade, transport and migration paths along which people, goods, ideas, religions, disease and much else has flowed.   If Richthofen’s term the “silk road” is relatively recent,  Frankopan uses his term to describe a complex set of routes between China and the Mediterranean Sea, many of which which run through several of the world’s most disturbed and dangerous countries.  Christopher Marlowe called Persia/Iran “the middle of the world” back in 1587 but Frankopan goes much further back.  He notes that 2,000 years ago, as he depicts it, Chinese silks were worn by the Carthaginian elite, wealthy Iranians used Provencal pottery, and Indian spices found their way into Afghan and Roman cuisine.

The transfers were always in both directions.  Alexander’s military campaigns led him to the east, and  brought Greek culture to the Indus valley, as a result of which the Buddha was given a recognisably Greek form and Buddhist sculpture became popular. Christianity spread along the silk roads under the Romans. Islam more obviously did so, too. Scientific advances, philosophical ideas and much else was cross-fertilised by exposure across the east and west.

Not everything was beneficial however, and violence was a regular accompaniment for the traveller .  Frankopan documents the rise of the Mongols, who wreaked havoc as they went, and other chapters cover the spread of the Slavs and the rise of the Rus, as well as later sections documenting British and American meddling that had first been evident since the 19th century.  If his focus is on looking east he makes some salutary points.   The spread of the plague from Asia into Europe decimated Europe’s population, but he notes that because there were fewer workers, the price of labour rose, wealth was spread (a little) more evenly and as a consequence the resulting cultural acceleration of the Renaissance was enabled.

The Silk Roads is sub-titled ‘A New History of the World’.  It wasn’t an ideal choice of words.  Rather it might be better thought of a a corrective to most Western histories, offering insights and facts about some of the events taking place in Asia.  However, we are still awaiting an equally compelling history of the world to appear, one that also embraces Africa and Southern America.  Despite this and within its limits, it is an account that, as one reviewer put it, “is full of intriguing insights and some fascinating details.”  Among other comments he offers a salutary and important argument in support of the view that today the centre of global importance is shifting back to the East, as the international focus moving away from the Western-centric view which has been true of the last few centuries.

 Overall, The Silk Roads consists of 25 thematic chapters that set out to reframe one key part of global history by focusing on the region connecting the East and the West (as we term them), specifically Central Asia.  It examines early trade networks, before moving on to chart the spread of major religions, especially early Christianity’s reach and the rise of Islam.  As we move into later centuries, economics and politics become central, with the interaction between major powers, and growing trade across the steppes and into Northern Europe.  However, politics soon dominate, and we read about the Crusades and European dominance, on side side of the region, and Mongol expansions on the other.

Somehow the story becomes darker, with the impact of the great plague and the rise of new wealth, the latter a result of changing trade dynamics, imperial expansion, and shifting power blocs in the late 19th/early 20th century.  Alas, now Frankopan’s account becomes rather more familiar to many of his readers, with World War I, political compromise, genocide, and the ‘miserable’ ideological conflicts of the 20^th Century.

Professional historians have been rather.critical, perhaps unkindly so, as Frankopan was clearly writing for a broad audience.  According to one anthropologist and archaeologist, each chapter’s heading is highly intriguing: almost every one starts with ‘The Road to/of.  He adds that “Frankopan masterfully balances history with literature, so that the book is accessible even to those who are unfamiliar with history.”  Just so, and that’s a real strength.

Some commentators have concluded that the advent of the Silk Road caused countries to seek shared interests, often doing so as a result of exploitation and a lack of collaboration among European countries.  Certainly, in both East and West the rise fascism of reflected a change in the economic balance of power. In charting the shifting economic and political structure of Western countries, and in contrasting this with the Asian experience, Frankopan suggests the evidence can be seen as indicative of the weaknesses of the liberal democracy approach.

As some commentators have pointed out, Frankopan’s work can be seen as centrally concerned with the debate between Eurocentrism and non-Eurocentrism. Challenging Eurocentrism is amongst the biggest challenges in political economy, given so embedded are its assumptions that it is difficult to detach ourselves from the Eurocentric beliefs of western academics and commentators, not least with the dominant narrative of endogenous western development which emerged from the classic Orientalist distinction between the ‘rational’ West and ‘barbaric’ East.  Just as Edward Said’s Orientalism threw many assumptions into question, so by focusing on Persia and its contribution to the history of the world, Frankopan offers a fundamental and worthwhile assault on Eurocentrism through the re-orienting of world history away from a narrative justifying an inevitable Western emergence.

As Frankopan forges ahead with his re-assertion of the importance of Persia, commentators have observed opportunities are missed for his book to live up to its ambitious subtitle – to be ‘a new history of the world’, an oft-attempted and rarely achieved goal. As one reviewer suggested, if he had limited himself to simply detailing the history of the Persian world system – something he does with remarkable zeal, detail and passion – the scale of his ambition would have been met. But by striving for the world yet settling for just a fraction of the Eastern story of it, he has produced an incomplete world history but at least in doing so has made up for just some of the deficiencies in Eurocentrism.

The Silk Roads ends with the history of the modern-day Middle East. From this vantage point it becomes clear that this former heart of the world has become a bridge between, and product of, other powers – particularly the hegemonic West which, often inspired by Eurocentric assumptions, has remained heavily engaged in the region for more than a century. That this engagement has been either the product, or more contentiously the cause, of a troubled recent history for the region is well documented. Daily news reports still testify to the chaos across areas which once belonged to the Silk Roads.

However, Frankopan ends his volume with a surprisingly optimistic vision for the future of the region. ‘What we are witnessing,’ he claims, ‘are the birthing pains of a region that once dominated the intellectual, cultural and economic landscape and which is now re-emerging. We are seeing the signs of the world’s centre of gravity shifting – back to where it lay for millennia.’  It is a strong point, but having digested the latter portion of his 500-plus-page volume, it seems scarcely obvious that the countries which occupy the former Silk Roads will will ever become anything more than a bridge between the two focal points of geopolitical power: the established European and North American West, and the emerging Chinese and Indian East. It is far from clear that the power, patronage and prestige of seventh-century Baghdad are going to be repeated.

If an extremely unlikely situation, if I were to find myself to travelling on the Iron Road (rather than on a Silk Road), what would I see as I progressed from Vladivostok to Moscow?  Perhaps I’d do no more than notice the residues of once great centres, the remains of a focal region.  Or perhaps I would see that the middle, the crossing point between East and West, was beginning to rise again, and realise it is only our Eurocentrism, or our North American perspective, that is likely to ensure we are about to miss another iteration of the Silk Roads and their key role in human affairs.  Geomagnetic poles can reverse, and so can human affairs!

Muesli and other grumbles

For years I made my own muesli.  It was easy:  to a base of rolled oats, wheat bran, and wheat germ I added raisins, sultanas, and sometimes cashews.  At the beginning, I used to sprinkle pollen on top of the mix, which had marinated in milk (even from the night before), in the belief it would help reduce hay fever, but the pollen was added all the year round.   Over the years I became more adventurous and would sometimes add chopped-up dates and blueberries on top as well.  Eventually I gave up on the pollen.

All that changed in the 1990s, when I met David Southwick, a Melbourne entrepreneur, and though him Carolyn Cresswell, another innovative business developer.  I should let her tell her own story:

“It’s amazing where life can lead you…One day I was told that I was to lose my job as the business was to be sold. I immediately thought, “You could buy this little business! You love the muesli and you make it already!” My offer of $1,000 was eventually accepted and Carman’s was born. It was a life changing decision. Finishing my degree proved challenging as I made deliveries before morning lectures and balanced the books in the library during lunch breaks.”  I was to change from making my own muesli mix to buying Carman’s.  There are many reasons for this:  but principally it was delicious, and it was easier than making the mix myself. “

At the same time, Carolyn was committed to sustainable principles.  To quote again:

“Good food shouldn’t have a harmful impact on anything.  That’s why to us sustainability is about so much more than just the environment. It’s about caring for our suppliers and employees, nourishing local communities, and serving up delicious, nutritious goodies for you.  Over the past 30 years, we’ve achieved some remarkable things on our sustainability journey. But our next chapter promises to deliver even more goodness as we support the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”  

So, where’s the grumble?  In relation to Carman’s Muesli, it has to do with buying it in the supermarket.  The process should be simple.  All I have to do is go into the local supermarket, and to the aisle that contains cereals.  There are all of Carman’s varieties, including Untoasted Muesli – Natural Bircher.  Great.  Oops, that is the only variety that doesn’t come in the 1.5 kg pack!  It used to be available, but it hasn’t been the case for some weeks now.  The ‘toasted’ alternative is there, as it always is, but never the untoasted.  Smaller packs are there, but at a higher price per 100 g.  Grumble …

It’s not just Muesli.  For years I have typed blogs, articles and other notes and letters quite happily, using Microsoft Word.  For fifteen years (after a slightly fraught swop over) I have been an enthusiastic Apple user.  I’ve kept my software up to date, and – but only when I had to – I have upgraded the system software.  In the past year I graduated to a better Mac, a MacBook, and a new iPad.  The oldest item right now is my iPhone.  All good, all working seamlessly together.  Happy.

Almost happy, but just recently, I carried out my usual software update on my lovely desktop Mac, following the prompt from Apple.  I didn’t notice there were two options, one the next in the usual progression of versions, and the other something different with a much higher identifying number.  I pressed the button to start the upgrade.  That had two consequences.  The first was, as they say, just bad luck, as the computer froze in the upgrade process, and I wasn’t able to ‘unstick’ it.  The helpful people at the Apple Store managed to get it going again, with almost nothing lost.  However, the second problem was a hidden snag!

In the process of getting my desktop computer going again, I discovered programs had been updated.  One of these was Microsoft Word (I also discovered I had some strange new software packages, which I have tried to ignore – and I no longer use PowerPoint or Excel).  I opened Word and was instantly baffled.  Where were all those nice items across the top of the screen – those columns of options usually labelled ‘Home’, ‘Insert’, ‘Draw’ and so on.  Some items were still in place as I clicked from one are to another – like format, text size, bold and italics, numbering – but others seemed to have disappeared.  I couldn’t even find the icon to save my work!!  Later I learnt that some of those options were available to the side of the text I was producing, and after a few very tense days I discovered you could get many other options back by resorting to Classic View (makes me think of old cars in one of those Concours D’Elegance …).

What was this about?  It seems, if I’m not mistaken, that the program has been ‘simplified’ for the sake of the average user.  I realised that I was being encouraged to use one of the set formats.  There was a layout for a job application, a letter to the boss, a recommendation for action by a company member, and even a layout for a recipe and a travel diary.  I couldn’t find one for the 4-page Sheldrake blog.  Why not?  Well, I slowly realised that the latest version of Word is meant to be easier to use, simplified, reducing confusing choice.  I suspect that is another way of saying ‘dumbed down’.  You can restore an alternative version with most of the options I’ve come to love, but it seems unfamiliar users want it all made simple.  Until one of the choices is ‘Peter’s 4-page blog’ format, I am back to grumbling.

People in their 80s do grumble a lot.  I am aware of that weakness.  However, I don’t need to have it pointed out to me that I leave two spaces between a full-stop and the beginning of the next sentence, littering my text with many gaps with warning lines below.  Spelling corrections – fine.  Some basic inelegant forms of expression identified.  Fine again.  Trying to push me into conformity with other users’ over use of spaces.  No way.

Then the penny dropped.  The troubles I’d been facing over Carman’s Muesli, and the challenges of the ‘new Word’ are the same.  This is all about meeting the needs of the supplier, not the shopper.  Leaving the shelves of the supermarket laden with slow selling options, cramming all the Word options onto the row of icons above the page you’re typing, this is wasting the company’s time and energy, when they should be focussing on maximising returns and reducing costs.  All that stuff I used to explore in workshops about ‘the customer is king’ has gone, past history, archaic thinking.  Now the company is king, and the shopper in the store is merely a slightly annoying element at the end of the line.  I’d been aware of how this was changing the lives of suppliers, whose product sizes, shape, and colour usage had to fit what the store wanted (alone with increasingly complex product and cost codes).  Now those at the other end of the retail cycle are expected to meet the company’s needs.

I should have seen what was happening.  A prescient warning sign had the fate of product returns.  There used to be a place in the store where you could return a faulty product and talk to a staff member over what the problem was – giving helpful feedback to pass on to the suppliers.  A few years ago, I notice that these ‘Returns’ spots were occupied by a single person and a large waste bin:  too much trouble to return any items to a supplier or fix whatever was wrong.  Now the Returns counter has just about disappeared.  Why waste money and space on that.  Much easier to simply get the checkout and shelf filling staff to take whatever is at fault and that they can throw it away.  The ‘wastage rates’ at many businesses are extraordinarily high, and only a part of that is the so-called natural wastage of years ago (stealing) as more of it has to do with helping ‘overworked’ staff.

As I was getting rather tetchy about muesli and various computer programs, I decided to eat a banana. Good, but it reminded me of another example of the impact of companies. This is the story of bananas in the Western Hemisphere. While plantains and bananas have much more to be said about them across the world, one part of that complex story begins in the 1870s in Jamaica. There a sea captain, one Lorenzo Dow Baker, bought 170 stems of bananas which he had acquired in the hope he could sell them back in his home town, Philadelphia. It was a gamble that worked, and soon he had a growing business, eventually setting up the Boston Fruit Company (which later became the United Fruit Company, and then Chiquita Brands International, one of the big two fruit companies in North America, along with Fyffes).The success of his venture relied on refrigeration, keeping the fruit from ripening while being transported.

From that small beginning, a mammoth business emerged, with two companies developing a series of monopolies that ensured they controlled the banana business, and the economies of several Central American countries. The two businesses obtained land concessions and growers, took over the subsidiaries of some shipping companies, and built and controlled the rail infrastructure. In the end they dominated the economies of several countries, actions that became the source of the phrase a ‘banana republic.’  As holdings grew, they acquired more and more control of land, and more and more control of the governments and their policies in the places where they operated.

They faced challenges. The dominant banana variety in the first half of the 20^th Century was the Gros Michel Banana, but the variety slowly succumbed to the virulent Panama disease. As a result, the two companies switched to the Cavendish banana, which was a resistant strain, and which now dominates banana growing in the West. They also used their economic strength to ensure advantageous deals in the producer countries, keeping costs, transport, wages, and other expenses low. Market power was unrelenting, and soon most other banana varieties disappeared from grocery and supermarket chains. Today most chains, like Coles and Woolworths in Australia, only sell Cavendish bananas.

In seventy years, the Cavendish reigns supreme in the region. Producers make small profits (and for many producers their economic situation is marginal), but the big two companies continue to make extremely healthy profits, aided by steady improvements in transport, refrigeration, and disease mitigation strategies. At the other end of the supply chain, shoppers find that bananas seldom go down in price, spite of all the innovations and the latest technologies adopted by the two big suppliers.

It seems a common story. Just as with the software industry, where it is Microsoft and Apple, or the very profitable supermarket industry in Australia, with Coles and Woolworths, it is neither the suppliers nor the customers that reap the benefits, but the giants in the middle. Is this the economic world of the future? Those at either end of the economic system are largely excluded from the benefits of latest technologies in such areas as production, logistics, marketing, and finance:  customers continue to pay what the large companies demand, producers sell to those same large companies at close to production costs. The riches are gathered by the intermediaries, controlling both supply and distribution.

Does this mean the staff of these intermediaries are well paid, that they, at least, get the benefits of this distorted supply chain? Well, you know that is a trick question. Companies keep staff costs low in warehouses, manufacturing, and service areas. The people who benefit most from the current system are the managers at the top of the major companies, and the investors. What they want to do is ensure continuing dominance, by excluding as much competition as possible. Just in case you haven’t realised this, it is especially easy in a small distant country like Australia, where two major supermarket chains are to be found, Coles and Woolworths, which are said to have their most successful subsidiaries ‘down under.’

Perhaps I should stop coming up with examples and draw a rather long bow. It appears we are heading towards a very asymmetrical society, in countries like the USA, Australia and several others in Europe. That society comprises a small elite of extraordinarily rich people, running and owning shares in increasingly protected major enterprises. The elite employs a significant number of staff, on far less attractive salaries, who run and support the elites various companies:  those staff are under three types of pressure, as the companies seek to keep their wages under control to replace them by automatic systems and robots, or, if absolutely necessary, outsource the work to people in low income, third world countries.  The rest of society falls into two groups:  those working in low paid service roles of one kind or another, and self-employed workers who carve out areas where they offer support and help, in roles that range from gardening, plumbing and electrical work, through to tutoring, child minding and cleaning; and those that rely on charity.

Is this the new world? We have scrapped the old form of society with its four classes – aristocrats, upper class, middle class and working class (with various grading within each sector) – for a new structure – comprising the ultra-rich, the marginally paid workforce, the self-employed and the rejected poor. At the same time, we have scrapped the sense of community, of common concerns, where integrating activities from church to clubs and societies have been replaced by mass spectacles, with participation carefully structured with each group in its place, and no sense of common interest.

Just to complete this gloomy perspective, it seems we have lost our sense of the relationship between generations. The Boomers are slowly fading from view, now resorting to spending their saved money on booze, holidays, and electronic toys for the home. The next three generations are fighting hard to survive (unless they are members of the ultra-rich). That leaves the youngest generation, where they confront yet another challenge. As they mature more rapidly than generations before, often physically mature by the time they reach their teens, they simultaneously confront social development and learning needs that continued on into their twenties. All this, of course, rests on the presumption of continuing growth.

If you stand back from this situation, you would conclude we are facing collapse or radical change, as the present model appears unsustainable. History suggests that collapse is more likely than radical change. Those at the top will hang on for as long as they can, and those at the bottom seem to have lost revolutionary fervour. If the West collapses, will the East save us? Not Russia, for certain. China perhaps. Maybe India. Born just before the Boomers, my path is clear – drink gin and tonics and red wine while I can, and watch Rome burn. Oops, I mean watch the coming chaos with interest, aware I am completely powerless to do anything to stop the disaster in front of me.

PS:  I am not running for parliament, seeking to establish a new political party, nor am I able to advocate a path out of the mess. Just another person sitting in the Coliseum, watching.

Arcadia

Why do some moments stick in our minds?  Often, they are memorable because they are both exceptional and unanticipated.  For me, one was in early March 1995 when the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Arcadia was on at the Playhouse Theatre in Melbourne.  Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was written in 1993 and premiered at the Royal National Theatre in London on 13 April 1993.  It employs what is known as a diachronic narrative method: it is  an exploration of two stories set in the same country house, one charting the interaction between two modern academics, and the other concerned with the residents back in the early 19th century, including aristocrats, tutors and even the fleeting presence, unseen on stage, of Lord Byron.  In shifting back and forth between 1809 and the 1990s it touches on subjects from landscape gardening to thermodynamics to chaos theory.

The 1809 story focuses on an extraordinarily gifted 13-year-old Thomasina Coverly and her handsome tutor Septimus Hodge.  Stoppard imagines this precocious girl, Thomasina, was beginning to toy around with ideas of the laws of thermodynamics and mathematical theory.  This topic is balanced by the 20th century story, in which a university professor, Bernard Nightingale and author Hannah Jarvis are visiting the elegant estate where Nightingale plans to conduct research on a literary scandal involving the poet Lord Byron, while Jarvis hopes to find out more about the so-called ‘Sidley Hermit’, a figure found in drawings of the house’s gardens.  The themes of the play include the philosophical implications of the second law of thermodynamics, Romantic literature and the English ‘picturesque’ style of garden design.

Kate Herbert’s review in The Melbourne Times, in late Feb 1995 offers a wonderful introduction to what I saw.  “We make of history what suits our politics and philosophy, even an earthly paradise – Arcady.  Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia, is impeccably crafted, perfectly structured, intelligent, witty and challenging. I cannot fault script, Simon Phillips production nor any individual performance.  In inimitable Stoppard fashion, Arcadia unravels a superb biographical-historical plot … [which] interweaves an aristocratic family of the late 18th century Romantic period of literature, painting, gardens and classical mathematics with the 20th century’s literary criticism, computer technology and chaos theory.  The result is a mind-bending intersection of worlds charged with sex and conflict.”

Kate Herbert suggests “History always eludes us. It is unscientific, as are natural phenomena and human nature. We cannot quantify it. The unpredictability is the rule, unlike quantum physics and relativity.”  She adds “The play captures the “decline from thinking to feeling” which was the social norm after the Age of Reason. The Romantics created their own chaos as have the Chaos Theorists today. We discover that ‘everything you thought you knew, was wrong’ both in life and in the drama.  The play is moving, passionate, analytical and inspired.”  She was right, a view further enhanced when four years later, during a visit to Winston Salem, North Carolina, I went to another production at Wake Forest University.

So much for when I saw it – but what as it that made this such an unforgettable experience?  Set in Sidley Park, an English country house in Derbyshire, the action takes place in both 1809/1812 and the present day (1993 in the original production). The activities of two modern scholars and the house’s current residents are juxtaposed with those of the people who lived there in the earlier period.  The play’s set features a large table, used by the characters in both past and present.  Props are not removed when the play switches time period; books, coffee mugs, quill pens, portfolios, and laptop computers appear together, blurring past and present. An ancient but still living tortoise also appears in every scene, perhaps as a symbol of long-suffering endurance and of the continuity of existence.

Arcadia explores the nature of evidence and truth in the context of modern ideas about history, mathematics, and physics. It shows how clues left by the past are interpreted in the present, by both laypeople and scholars. Stoppard has said that his initial inspiration came from reading James Gleick’s 1987 bestseller, Chaos: Making a New Science, “which is about this new kind of mathematics. That sounds fairly daunting if one’s talking about a play. I thought, here is a marvellous metaphor,” (quoted by Paul Delaney in Tom Stoppard in Conversation. UMP 1994. p. 224).

As the Wikipedia entry on the play explains “Besides chaos, the play attends to a wide array of subjects, including thermodynamics, computer algorithms, fractals, population dynamics, determinism (especially in the context of love and death), classics, landscape design, Romanticism vs Classicism, English literature (particularly poetry), Byron, 18^th Century Periodicals, modern academia and even South Pacific Botany.  These are all concrete topics of conversation; their more abstract resonances rise into epistemology, nihilism, and the origins of lust and madness”.  Stoppard was writing for an intellectual audience!

In Arcadia, Stoppard presents his audience with several highly complex but fundamental mathematical and scientific concepts. He also uses these theories and ideas to illuminate relationships among his characters, adding to their poignancy.  Arcadia’s complex themes are presented through a series of dichotomies. Most prominent is chaos versus order. The play’s characters and action embody this, moving from a settled social order, in which relationships arise, toward the final scene, where the social order – and even the separation of the two eras – dissolve in the party’s chaos, relationships collapse, and the characters die or disperse.  Yet within that chaos, order can still be found. As Valentine declares: “In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing.” Although the play’s world grows increasingly chaotic – with overlapping time periods, increasingly complex ideas, and ever greater variations in social norms and assumptions – connections and order can still be discerned. The characters attempt to find and articulate the order they perceive in their world, even as it is continually overturned.

One of the play’s main thematic concepts is chaos theory. Paul Edwards, in his essay “Science in Hapgood and Arcadia“, notes that “chaos mathematics is about the recovery of information from apparently chaotic and random systems where entropy is high. […] It is ‘asymmetric’ (unlike the equations of classical physics), yet it finds regularities that prove to be the regularities of nature itself. Strikingly, this mathematics can generate patterns of amazing complexity, but it also has the power to generate seemingly natural or organic shapes that defeat Newtonian geometry. The promise, then, (however questionable it is in reality) is that information, and by extension, nature itself, can overcome the tendency to increase in entropy”.  John Fleming, in his book Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order amid Chaos, makes a similar observation. “Deterministic chaos”, he writes, “deals with systems of unpredictable determinism. … [T]he uncertainty does not result in pure randomness, but rather in complex patterns. Traditionally, scientists expected dynamic systems to settle into stable, predictable behaviour.” But as systems respond to variations in input, they become more random or chaotic.  “Surprisingly, within these random states, windows of order reappear. […] There is order in chaos – an unpredictable order, but a determined order nonetheless, and not merely random behaviour.”

That centre-stage table with props from both time periods in place throughout the play is a vivid metaphor of the chaos/order dichotomy. As Paul Edwards, professor of English and History of Art at Bath Spa University, suggests:

At the end of the play, the table has accumulated a variety of objects that, if one saw them without having seen the play, would seem completely random and disordered. Entropy is high. But if one has seen the play, one has full information about the objects and the hidden ‘order’ of their arrangement, brought about by the performance itself. Entropy is low; this can be proved by reflecting that tomorrow night’s performance of the play will finish with the table in a virtually identical ‘disorder’ – which therefore cannot really be disorder at all.

Paul Edwards, The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, CUP, 178–183

A closely related theme in Arcadia is the opposition of Classicism and Romanticism. This appears most clearly in the running arguments between Noakes and Lady Croom about proposed changes to the garden. Their disagreements are about changing from the tidy order of Classic style to the rugged naturalism and Gothic mystery of the Romantic. A parallel dichotomy is expressed by Septimus and Thomasina: He instructs her in the Newtonian vision of the universe, while she keeps posing questions and proposing theories that undercut it. Hannah’s search for the hermit of Sidley Park also comments on this theme. “The whole Romantic sham!” she passionately exclaims to Bernard. “It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius … The decline from thinking to feeling.”

Another major theme is entropy and the irreversibility of time. Thomasina examines this scientifically, remarking that while Newtonian equations work both backwards and forwards, things in reality – like her rice pudding – cannot be “unstirred.” Heat, too, she notes, flows in only one direction (the second law of thermodynamics). This is embodied by the characters, who burn bridges in relationships, burn candles, and burn letters – and in the end, Thomasina herself (like a short-lived candle) burns to death.  Thomasina’s insights are an echo of the poem Darkness by her ‘real life’ contemporary, Lord Byron.  Written in 1816 , which was described as the  ‘The Year Without A Summer’ when atmospheric ash from the eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies fell.  Darkness depicts a world grown dark and cold because the sun has been extinguished.

The play’s end brings all these dichotomous themes together, showing that while things may appear to contradict – Romanticism and Classicism, intuition and logic, thought and feeling – they can exist, paradoxically, in the same time and space. Order is found amid the chaos.  At the same time, scientific and mathematical concepts in Arcadia include the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the concept of entropy.  Entropy is the measure of the randomness or disorder of a system which states that overall, the universe is evolving from order to disorder. At the same time, the second law of thermodynamics states that heat spontaneously flows in only one direction, from hotter to colder. These equations embody the ‘arrow of time’ and the eventual ‘heat death’ of the universe.  Thomasina captures the dark side of science.

In Arcadia, Stoppard uses all these concepts to reveal that “there is an underlying order to seemingly random events.” The characters discuss these topics, while their interactions reflect them. Often these discussions themselves create order and connections beneath the appearance of disunity. For example, both Thomasina’s theories on heat and Valentine’s search for a “signal” in the “noise” of the local grouse population refer to the physicist Joseph Fourier and his development of the Fourier transform, which he first used to analyse the physics of heat transfer but has since found wide application. Though the characters would seem to have little in common, their work relates to the same topic.

There is even more to this intellectual tour de force.  The play’s title was abbreviated from its initial version: Et in Arcadia ego.  Arcadia refers to the pastoral ideal, and the phrase literally translates, “and in Arcadia I am”. The tradition of placing a tomb in a pastoral idyll has a long history, and the phrase appears in Guercino’s painting dated in 1618-1622. Both the image and the motto are commonly linked with the phrase being spoken by Death: “I, too, am in Arcadia”.   In the play, Lady Croom, translates the phrase as “Here I am in Arcadia!” Thomasina drily comments, “Yes Mama, if you would have it so”. Septimus notices this and later, suspecting his pupil will appreciate the motto’s true meaning, offers the translation “Even in Arcadia, there am I”. He is right – “Oh, phooey to Death!” she exclaims.   Although these brief exchanges are the only direct references in the play to its title, they anticipate two main characters’ fates: Thomasina’s early death, and Septimus’s voluntary exile from life.

In a more obvious sense, the title also invokes the ideal of nature as an ordered paradise, while the estate’s landscape steadily evolves into a more irregular form. This provides a recurring image of the different ways in which “true nature” can be understood, and a homely parallel to Thomasina’s theoretical description of the natural world’s structure and entropic decline using mathematics.

Overall, Arcadia draws on several highly complex but fundamental mathematical and scientific concepts.  Having noted that one of the play’s main thematic concepts is chaos theory, Paul Edwards, (in ‘Science in Hapgood and Arcadia’), notes that “chaos mathematics is about the recovery of information from apparently chaotic and random systems where entropy is high. […] It is ‘asymmetric’ (unlike the equations of classical physics), yet it finds regularities that prove to be the regularities of nature itself. Strikingly, this mathematics can generate patterns of amazing complexity, but it also has the power to generate seemingly natural or organic shapes that defeat Newtonian geometry. The promise, then, (however questionable it is in reality) is that information, and by extension, nature itself, can overcome the tendency to increase in entropy”.  What a compelling perspective for a playwright, that there is order in chaos.  If it is an underlying and unpredictable order, there’s order nonetheless, and far from random.

In Arcadia, Stoppard draws on all these ideas as his characters discuss an almost bewildering variety of topics.  He reveals himself as a Levi-Straussian bricoleur.  In The Savage Mind Claude Levi-Strauss used the word bricolage to describe the characteristic patterns of mythological thought, which draw on a variety of things ‘at hand’,  putting objects, ideas and histories together in new ways, using them for purposes that weren’t previously considered.   Like Levi-Strauss analysing mythologies, Stoppard  is a contemporary bricoleur, taking what we know from 19th Century and contemporary science and technology and rethinking ideas, to explore unanticipated possibilities and interactions just as he uses Thomasina’s theories on heat and Valentine’s search for a ‘signal in the noise’ in that imagined analysis of the local grouse population.   Some ideas in the play recall Goethe’s novella Elective Affinities: Thomasina and Septimus have parallels in Goethe’s Ottilie and Eduard  and the historical section of Stoppard’s play is set in 1809, the year of Goethe’s novella.  There is so much more packed into this play, and if you’d like to dive into its riches, go along to a performance.

What more can I say?  Arcadia is a 20th Century intellectual masterpiece and a stunning play.  Vale Stoppard, who died 29 November 2025.  He will be missed; his plays will live on.

Inevitability

There is a popular strategy in looking back at past events to wonder ‘if only …’.  It’s tricky.  Any speculation about what could have been done is academic, but past events do shape the future.  Were the resulting outcomes inevitable?  Looking at alternatives may be worthwhile, as we might confront similar situations today, and thereby benefit from what we have learnt.

One example that has been on my mind is the decision to split British India in 1947, thereby creating the current nations of India and Pakistan (and a little later Bangladesh as well).  The process was described as the ‘Partition’ of India, and inthe process of allocating people to  the provinces between the two new countries many people were displaced, and two provinces, Bengal and Punjab, were actually split. As a result of the partition somewhere between 12 and 20 million people had to move, doing so based on religious lines.  The result was a refugee crisis, the inevitable consequence of the mass migration and population transfers that took place between the newly constituted countries.  Equally inevitably, there was trouble.  The process led to large-scale violence, and estimates of loss of life range from at least several hundred thousand up to possibly as many as two million people killed.

The events in 1947 had been preceded by a long history of tensions between Muslims and Hindus.  However, the outbreak of World War II in 1939 enhanced existing tensions when Lord Linlithgow, Viceroy of India, declared war on India’s behalf, and doing so without consulting Indian leaders.  This dramatically increased some of the underlying tensions in the country.  On one side Congress provincial ministries to resigned in protest.   On the other, the Muslim League held “Deliverance Day” (deliverance from Congress dominance) and supported Britain in the war effort.   The League’s action was followed in March 1940, at its annual three-day session in Lahore, when the leader of the All-India Muslim League observed that Muslims and Hindus were ‘irreconcilably opposed monolithic religious communities’ and as such, no settlement could be imposed without outraging one side or the other.

Perhaps seeking to defuse the situation, in August 1940, Linlithgow proposed that India be granted self-governing (dominion) status after the war. To allay Muslim fears of Hindu domination, the ‘August Offer’ was accompanied by the promise that a future constitution would consider the views of minorities.  Unsurprisingly neither Congress nor the Muslim League were satisfied with the offer, and both rejected it.   However, in March 1942, after the fall of Singapore and with the Americans supporting independence for India, Prime Minister Winson Churchill offered dominion status to India at the end of the war in return for the Congress’s support for the war effort.   Not wishing to lose the support of the Muslim League the offer included a clause stating that no part of the British Indian Empire would be forced to join the post-war dominion.  Both the League and the Congress party rejected this offer too.

In August 1942, Congress launched the Quit India Resolution, asking for major constitutional changes.  The British saw this act as the most serious threat to their rule since in nearly 100 years.  Alarmed, they immediately jailed the Congress leaders where they to remain until August 1945.  This left the Muslim League free for the next three years to spread its message.  Their leader admitted, “The war which nobody welcomed proved to be a blessing in disguise.”  The British accepted the League was the key representative of Muslim India

After the Second World War, change was in the air.  Labour won the 1945 General Election, and decided to end British rule in India.  In early 1947 Britain announced its intention of transferring power no later than June 1948, and issued their Cabinet Mission Plan.  This proposed preserving a united India which the British and Congress desired, while concurrently securing the League’s demand for a Pakistan.  The scheme was a federal arrangement consisting of three groups of provinces. Two of these would consist of small predominantly Muslim provinces, while the third would be made up of the large remaining Hindu region. The provinces would be autonomous, but the centre would retain control over defence, foreign affairs, and communications. Though the proposals did not include a truly independent Pakistan, the Muslim League accepted the proposals, but Congress leaders believed it would leave the centre weak, and rejected the suggested provincial groupings .

After the Cabinet Mission broke down, in July 1946 the Muslim League stated it was “preparing to launch a struggle” and that they had a plan.  If the Muslims were not granted a separate Pakistan then they would launch ‘direct action’. When asked to be specific, their leader Jinnah explained: “Go to the Congress and ask them their plans. When they take you into their confidence I will take you into mine. Why do you expect me alone to sit with folded hands? I also am going to make trouble.”.  He announced that 16 August 1946 was to be Direct Action Day, and warned Congress, “We do not want war. If you want war we accept your offer unhesitatingly. We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India.”.

On that morning, armed Muslim gangs gathered in Calcutta to hear the League’s Chief Minister of Bengal, who, in the words of historian Yasmin Khan, “if he did not explicitly incite violence certainly gave the crowd the impression that they could act with impunity, that neither the police nor the military would be called out and that the ministry would turn a blind eye to any action they unleashed in the city.” The same evening in Calcutta, Hindus were attacked by returning Muslim celebrants, an event later called the ‘Great Calcutta Killing of August 1946.’  The next day, Hindus struck back, and the violence continued for three days during which some 4,000 people died.  The violence wasn’t confined to the public sphere, but homes were entered and destroyed, women and children were attacked.  Although the Government of India and the Congress were shaken by the events, a Congress-led interim government was installed, with Jawaharlal Nehru as the ‘united’ India’s prime minister.

The communal violence spread.  UK Prime Minister Attlee appointed Mountbatten as India’s last Viceroy, giving him the task to oversee British India’s independence by 30 June 1948, with instructions to avoid partition and to preserve a united India, but with an adaptable authority to ensure a British withdrawal with minimal setbacks.  Mountbatten hoped to revive the Cabinet Mission scheme for a federal arrangement for India, but the tense situation led him to conclude that partition had become necessary for a quick transfer of power.

When Lord Mountbatten formally proposed an Indian Independence Plan on 3 June 1947, Congress’s leader Patel gave his approval and lobbied Nehru and the other Congress leaders to accept the proposal.  Knowing Gandhi’s deep concerns over partition, Patel advised him on  the perceived practical unworkability of any Congress-League coalition,  which seemed likely to lead to a further rise in violence, and even the threat of civil war. At the All-India Congress Committee meeting called to vote on the proposal, Patel said:

“I fully appreciate the fears of our brothers from [the Muslim-majority areas]. Nobody likes the division of India, and my heart is heavy. But the choice is between one division and many divisions. We must face facts. We cannot give way to emotionalism and sentimentality. The Working Committee has not acted out of fear. But I am afraid of one thing, that all our toil and hard work of these many years might go waste or prove unfruitful. My nine months in office have completely disillusioned me regarding the supposed merits of the Cabinet Mission Plan. … Freedom is coming. We have 75 to 80 percent of India, which we can make strong with our genius. The League can develop the rest of the country.” 

Menon, V. P. Transfer of Power in India. p. 385.

In June 1947, the nationalist leaders agreed to a partition of the country, despite it being in stark opposition to Gandhi’s views. The predominantly Hindu and Sikh areas were assigned to the new India and predominantly Muslim areas to the new nation of Pakistan, including a division of the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal into two parts.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the communal violence that followed the publication of the line of partition, the Radcliffe Line, was horrific.   At a press conference on 3 June 1947, Lord Mountbatten announced the date of independence – 14 August 1947 – and also outlined the details of the actual division of British India between the two new dominions in what became known as the ‘Mountbatten Plan’ or the ‘3 June Plan’.  This included the provision that Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims in the Punjab and Bengal legislative assemblies would meet and vote for partition. If a simple majority of either group wanted partition, these provinces would be divided.  The separate independence of Bengal was ruled out.

Indian political leaders accepted the Plan on 2 June.  The outcome was politically adroit.  The Muslim League’s demands for a separate country were conceded.  Congress’s position on unity was also acknowledged, while making Pakistan as small as possible.  One leader, Abul Kalam Azad, expressed concern over the likelihood of violent riots, but Mountbatten replied:

At least on this question I shall give you complete assurance. I shall see to it that there is no bloodshed and riot. I am a soldier and not a civilian. Once the partition is accepted in principle, I shall issue orders to see that there are no communal disturbances anywhere in the country. If there should be the slightest agitation, I shall adopt the sternest measures to nip the trouble in the bud.

On 18 July 1947, the British Parliament passed the India Independence Act that finalised the arrangements for partition.  The Government of India Act 1935 was adapted to provide a legal framework for the new dominions.  In the event, dividing both Punjab and Bengal, the two provinces with slim Muslim majorities caused tremendous problems, as the demographic distribution of Hindus and Muslims was complex and ‘messy’.  The new borders ran through the middle of villages, towns, fields, and more.  Further, when Pakistan was created, East and West Pakistan were separated by about 1,000 miles (some 1,600 km).  The commission also effectively sliced the large Sikh population in Punjab in half.  As a result, nearly the entirety of the Sikh community ultimately fled to areas that would become part of India.

Mountbatten administered the independence oath to Jinnah on the 14th, before leaving for India where the oath was scheduled on the midnight of the 15th.   On 14 August 1947, the new Dominion of Pakistan came into being with Muhammad Ali Jinnah sworn in as its first Governor-General in Karachi.  The following day, 15 August 1947, India, now the Dominion of India, became an independent country, with official ceremonies taking place in New Delhi, and with Jawaharlal Nehru appointed Prime Minister. Mountbatten remained in New Delhi for 10 months, serving as the first governor-general of an independent India until June 1948.  Gandhi remained in Bengal to work with the new refugees from the partitioned subcontinent.

The borders of the new countries were not published until August 17, two days after the end of British rule. This set the stage for an immediate escalation of communal violence in areas around the new borders. Many ordinary people did not understand what partition meant until they were in the middle of it, sometimes literally. If a border village was roughly evenly divided between Hindus and Muslims, one community could argue that the village rightly belonged to India or Pakistan by driving out or killing members of the other community.

The result was mass migration between the two newly formed states in the months immediately following the partition. There was little realisation that population transfers would be necessary because of the partitioning. Religious minorities were expected to stay put in the states there they were still residing. An exception was made for Punjab, where transfer was organized because of the communal violence affecting the province,  but this did not apply to any other provinces.  The population of undivided India in 1947 was about 390 million. Following the partition, there were perhaps 330 million people in India, 30 million in West Pakistan, and 30 million people in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). Once the boundaries were established, about 14.5 million people crossed the borders into what they hoped was the relative safety of a religious majority. The 1951 Census of Pakistan identified the number of displaced persons in Pakistan at 7,226,600, presumably all Muslims who had entered Pakistan from India; the 1951 Census of India counted 7,295,870 displaced persons, apparently all Hindus and Sikhs who had moved to India from Pakistan after partition.

During partition, the idea of a full population exchange was a contentious issue that led to differing opinions among Indian leaders.  Some supported the idea of a complete population exchange between India and Pakistan. This meant that all the 42 million Muslims in India would move to Pakistan, while all the 19 million Hindus, Sikhs and other minorities West and East Pakistan would migrate to India. Its rationale was based on the idea of ensuring lasting communal peace by eliminating the possibility of future inter-religious conflicts and reducing the risk of large-scale violence.  It suggested that such a population exchange, though harsh, was a practical solution to the communal problems that had led to Partition:  it was believed that the lingering presence of hostile minorities could lead to future instability.

These concerns were rejected, both by Nehru and Ghandi, and a full population exchange did not occur.  When a partial migration took place, the 14.5 million people who crossed borders did so amidst horrific violence, while millions remained where they had lived.  This was to have profound and continuing repercussions.  India retained a Muslim population, which was to grow to become a significant minority, while Pakistan’s Hindu and Sikh populations dwindled drastically over the decades due to migration and persecution.  The absence of a full exchange almost certainly contributed to enduring communal tensions and periodic conflicts over the  years.  We will never know if a full exchange might have prevented these issues.

The scale of population movements was huge.  As soon as the new borders were announced, roughly 15m Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs left (fled?) from their homes on one side of the newly demarcated borders to what they thought would be “shelter” on the other. Some people were able to take trains or buses from one country to another, but most were forced to flee on foot, joining refugee columns that stretched for miles. These columns were the target of frequent ambushes,  as were the trains that carried refugees across the new borders. In the course of that exodus, perhaps as many as 2 million  people were slaughtered in communal massacres (though the lack of any meaningful documentation has left open a wide range of estimates). Sikhs, settled astride Punjab’s new division, suffered the highest proportion of casualties.  While the worst of the violence took place during the first six weeks of partition, the consequences of those weeks have played out over the decades.

Given this the obvious question is:  Was there a better way to create an indepedent India?

Descartes’ Bones

There are many challenges in writing about other people, especially those whose ideas have become important to you, or more widely.  The challenge is simple:  do you talk about the ideas, and leave the author a disembodied voice, or do you address the person, a life lived, a network of relationships, and a history of events and actions?  In recent decades there has been an increasing interest in the person, sometimes to the point that revelations about the personal life and antipathies of a philosopher, historian or scientist can be used to set aside or side-step what they had said in terms of their contribution to understanding.  Russell Shorto came up with an interesting twist on this, using skeleton bones as the linking motif in his story on the history of Descartes and an exploration of his thinking.

Descartes’ Bones is a frustrating yet fascinating book.  In one sense it starts at the end.  Shorto’s account begins in 1650.  Descartes is in bed, dying in Pierre Chanut’s house in Stockholm.  Chanut was the French Ambassador to Sweden.  He was Descartes’ friend, and a worried man as it was he who had invited Descartes to visit.  Worse than that, it wasn’t just a very cold winter, but Descartes had earlier nursed Chanut as he’d been the one experiencing a fever, only for Chanut to recover and Descartes to catch the same illness.  In Descartes’ case it was a fever that was to prove fatal.  Christina, the 23 year old Queen of Sweden, had been a source of the invitation to Descartes to come to Stokholm, and she was to send her personal physician in an attempt to aid his recovery.  The physician failed to impress Descartes; he was dismissed, and the philosopher died shortly after.

However, beginning at the end isn’t always a good idea, and in this case misses out on all the activity – and hilarious issues – that surrounded Descartes as he developed his ideas.  Of course, it was relatively early in his career that he explained the result of his intensive introspection was to conclude ‘I think, therefore I am’ – a phrase which became known as cogito ergo sum and is inextricably bound to every account of his work.  His method of exercising doubt was to define this aspect of his work, which was to focus on reason.  However, while that is the Descartes we know about, Shorto makes it clear there is a lot more to be understood about his work and his approach.

In a sense, the trouble started with his book, Discourse on the Method.  He saw this as an opening salvo in a career that was to provide a basis for education, for understanding, and, most important, to replace the received wisdom of his forbears from Aristotle onwards.  Shorto tells us Descartes wanted to “reorient the way every human being thought”, and that meant influencing the approach of learning across all the disciplines pursued at the university, and in particular at the university in Utrecht.  Somewhat unwilling to jump into controversies himself, he allowed proxies to argue his approach.  Early on, this was Regius, the professor of medicine at that university, but they didn’t always agree.  Regius was happy to follow the work of Harvey on such matters as the circulation of blood in the body:  Descartes, beginning a career of arguing with all and sundry, believed the heart wasn’t a pump, as Harvey proposed, but a furnace, heating the blood which caused it to circulate.

However, the core of his approach was doubt, an approach that was almost designed to ensure that he was in conflict with most other people in the university.  They saw him as selling his approach through his own personal magnetism,  “encouraging his followers to forget what they had learnt from the ancient master”.  He was accused of emptying students minds so he could fill them with his own approach.  It was an approach to win friends!

Russell Shorto does go back to the beginning, especially the emergence of Descartes’ thinking.  He also goes well past his life, and we spend much of the book following a detective trail, seeking to find what had happened to his skeleton, and even where his skull ended up once it followed a different route from the rest of his bones.  In fact, Descartes is a small player in this book, which uses the wanderings of his skeleton as a framework to explore the emerging intellectual revolution that was to sweep through Europe.  OK, not sweep, but slowly and often controversially begin to change the intellectual path for academics, thinkers and even religious practitioners in the west.  Above all it is an amusing book, told as a story intended to be funny.  It is an enjoyable read.

However, while amusing, there are times Shorto’s account can be frustrating, as we hop back and forth in time.  It is somewhat odd to find, 154 pages in, that we are, in Shorto’s words, “back to the beginning”.  There is Descartes dying in Sweden and creating something of a problem.  It’s not just that he is far from home, as he was a Frenchman who had lived much of his life in Holland, but he was a Catholic and Sweden was Protestant.  Given his religious character, he is buried in a ‘forlorn’ cemetery, some distance away from Stockholm.  Eventually, sixteen years later, the deteriorating skeleton is disinterred, and the remains put into a two and one half feet copper coffin, ready for it to be transported to France.  This is where we learn that the French Ambassador is given permission “to take, as a personal relic, a bone of the right index finger”!

This is just one part of a very tangled story.  His skeleton got to France, but his skull didn’t make it.  Instead, the captain of the guard watching over the coffin before it was sent south decides on his own initiative that “Sweden should not ‘lose completely the remains of such a famous person’”.  The guardsman, Isaak Planström, kept the skull as “a rare relic of a philosophical saint” for the rest of his life.  However, a merchant, Olof Bång, later collected some property from the estate of a man who had died and owed him money, and one of the items was the skull.  In due course Bång’s son, Jonas Olofsson, was showing the skull to a local headmaster, Swen Hof.  The story has it, perhaps accurately, that Bång wanted to find an appropriate set of words to accompany the skull, which Hof provided, and which Bång wrote on the skull.  There on the skull, with the text in Latin, is a poem ‘celebrating Descartes’ genius and mourning the scattering of his remains.

What did this inscription say?

In Latin –

Parvula Cartesii fuit haec calvaria magni,
exuvias reliquas gallica busta tegunt;
sed laus ingenii too diffunditur orbe,
mistaque coelicolis mens pia semper ovat.

In English –

This small skull once belonged to the great Cartesius,
The rest of his remains are hidden far away in the
land of France;
But all around the circle of the globe his genius
is praised,
And his spirit still rejoices in the sphere of heaven.

Just in case you think that was all, Descartes’ skull has several other pieces of writing on it, most of which are now quite impossible to read.  It sems that once you’ve written something, others follow.  Certainly, that was evidently the case when I was young and in a London park you came across a tree where someone had carved something along the lines of:

PF loves PC

From the moment one such testimony to everlasting love was cut into a tree’s bark, others would follow, despite the fact that the collective effort for memorialise relationships could lead to the tree dying.  At least Descartes’ skull had the attribute of already being dead …  and perhaps that is similar to those people who spray paint their mutual love on walls?

There is much more to Shorto’s story than the adventures of a disembodied skull.  He reveals that Descartes was far from being a shrinking violet.  “He may have shied away from face-to-face confrontation, but his arrogance was rather spectacular, and when crossed he had a deeply malicious streak”.  We read that he considered Fermat’s mathematical endeavours as ‘shit’, and a colleague of his as writing ‘toilet paper’.  Not every comment was scatological, of course, and when writing about Pascal, he suggested that the only vacuum (the subject of the argument they were having) was a vacuum in Pascal’s skull!

He also makes it clear that Descartes had considerable belief in his own excellence, and Shorto remarks that he believed:

“The body was a machine; therefore it simply needs to be understood in all its parts in order for it to work properly.  In this regard, death was tantamount to a malfunction; locate and correct the errors and you solve the problem of death.  Descartes became convinced he would crack the body’s code and extend the human life span as much as a thousand years.  At one point in his career he was certain enough of his progress that he felt he would do it soon, provided, he wrote – and he seems to have missed the joke – that he was not prevented ‘by the brevity of life’”.

However, we also read that this ‘vainglorious’, self-centred and isolated man had one sign of a rather different perspective on family, when he fathered a daughter born out of wedlock.  That child was to be the love of his life, even though he kept the facts of her birth hidden., travelling with the mother, Helena, as his servant, and his daughter Francine as his ‘niece’. However, Francine came down with scarlet fever and died when she was five years old.

There is some evidence that this loss had a lasting effect on Descartes and his work, pushing him to take on physiology and anatomy.  This was to prove important.  Descartes had insisted that the physical and the mental were two distinct substances:  that left him with explaining how they interacted.  The puzzle was clear:  if your body needed food, how did the stomach’s need get transmitted to your mind, and then lead to other actions (walking to get something from a cupboard, for example).  It was his continuing dissections that gave him an answer.

Together with others Descartes noticed there was a small ‘nut shaped structure in the centre of the brain’, the pineal gland, and decided that this was the place where the physical and the mental came together:

“the principal seat of the soul, and the place in which our thoughts are formed.  The reason I believe this is that I cannot find any part of the brain, except this, which is not double … moreover it is situated in the most suitable place for this purpose, in the middle of all the [brain’s] concavities; and it is supported and surrounded by the little branches of the carotid arteries, which bring spirits into the brain.”

Overall, Descartes’s Bones is an enjoyable read rather than an academic review.  However, there are a couple of points that do deserve emphasis.  As a man who has been described as a wimp and a menace Descartes influence on philosophy has been considerable.  First and obviously among these, Descartes’ concept of the brain and how it was the focus of  separation between the soul and the physical body created what has proven to be an enduring ‘mind-body’ problem, which is still debated today, especially in contemporary in discussions about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and the nature of self.

In referring to its contemporary relevance, this analysis isn’t just a matter of philosophical speculation about the nature of the human mind.  His ideas still influence how we think about everything from health and well-being to personal responsibility and social dynamics.  Often referred to as ‘dualism’, his views stimulate argument and there are continuing attempts and even philosophical justifications to challenging Descartes’ divide.  Indeed, considerable contemporary research is devoted to moving beyond dualism, and to emphasizing that the mind and body are inextricably linked.  Many advocate a more integrated approach, not just as a matter of speculation, but as a basis for developing approaches into such areas as treatment for a variety of mental conditions and illnesses.  While Descartes might have lost his head through events subsequent to his death, his thinking is still alive.

Russell Shorto really is a frustrating writer as he hops between Descartes’ time, the years soon after, and then onto decades and even centuries later.  However, there is a purpose in his approach, as it encourages a focus on issues, rather than following a linear timescale and thereby having to keep several themes together.  That would be a complicated balancing act.

Instead, what he achieves is three fold.  He makes Descartes live, and instead of appearing as a dry yet brilliant philosopher, we begin to learn about the real person.  This is a dilemma, of course, as what is written should stand alone, separately from whether the author is a puritan or a drunkard.  Well, perhaps that is too idealistic a view, but the reality of the author has to be appreciated in a measured way, and not allow it to overwhelm insights and conclusions, even if they might be viewed with suitable caution.

Second, he brings home Descartes impact in a way that academic analyses often fail to achieve.  We get glimpses, albeit rather partially, that illustrate Descartes wasn’t a dry analyst, and that he spent much of his life worrying and hoping.  The worrying was evidence of his recognition that elements of what he had to say needed constant re-examination, and that nuances could sometimes get in the way of clarity.  At the same time, he was a man of curious passions and ambitions, and Shorto illustrates many of these limitations.

Third, the greatest strength of Descartes Bones is that it sets the scene – both for Descartes lifetime, and for the eras that followed – for a time in which ideas, bones, and even a skull wandered around Europe.  This isn’t philosophy, nor is it narrowly written history.  It is more an account of some of the odd figures that played a role in Descartes life and the ideas and controversies they contributed.  It’s a worthwhile book to read, and a good way to make you think about this curious thinker, offering an explanation as to why he is often seen as a wimp and a menace.  He did claim more than was justified, for certain, and he did back away from taking some of his arguments to their logical end, but he was a key thinker in a time of revolutionary ideas.

Hagia Sophia

Seeing a great building is a fascinating experience.  By a great building, in this case I mean one that is historic (there is quite a different commentary to be made about seeing a new but equally extraordinary construction, like one of the new Guggenheim museums).  To be clear, there are two reasons to consider a building as ‘great’:  first there are those considered so because of their history, the events in which they have played a part, the people with whom they’ve been associated; and second, those that are great in their own right, architecturally compelling and internally rich in such ways as to be striking, imposing, or simply intriguing.  Quite often the attraction of historic great buildings lies in the stories in which they played a part, the past events in which they were implicated, or even those which were based at home, a resting place or a meeting place, places that mattered in the conduct of human affairs.

This building, the Hagia Sophia, has been important for centuries, as a religious centre, as a landmark, and as a meeting place. The photograph shows it in 2025, with one of its minarets under repair.  If it’s only seen from the outside, the building offers only a limited sense of its amazing interior, and the history that interior reveals.  To the casual external observer, it is big, somewhat squat, with some evidence of its complicated past.  Briefly, from around 360 AD through to 1453 AD (with a few minor interruptions), it was a major Eastern Orthodox church, the greatest in Christendom, with a dome that was unequalled until Brunelleschi’s in Florence in the 15^th Century. One of the Hagia Sophia’s interruptions was between 1204 and 1261 when for a short time it became a Roman Catholic church.  Following that, from 1453 to 1934, it was a Sunni Moslem mosque.  Then, in 1935 it was deconsecrated and became a museum, a major attraction for visitors to Istanbul.  In 2020 it reverted back to being a Sunni mosque once more, but this time one that is still allowing tourists to visit.

For those who might be hoping for a kind of striking beauty, outside it appears to be rather big but not especially graceful.  One of the minarets was under refurbishment in 2025 which was somewhat disconcerting to those who want their travel photographic images to mirror some kind of unrealistic form of perfection.  The reality of repair got in the way!  There are gardens around the building, nicely tended, but unremarkable.  More to the point, the few trees tin the gardens gave rather little shade, in a location that is often hot, and sometimes unrelentingly so.  It is only on entering that you realise the true beauty is inside.

What you see was built by Justinian 1 between 532 and 537 AD and was formerly called the Temple of God’s Holy Wisdom.  It was the world’s largest cathedral for nearly a thousand years, and was considered as the quintessential example of Eastern Orthodox church design.  In various iterations it was to remain a religious centre until 1931, when it was closed to the public, only to re-open in 1935 as a museum.  In 2020, it was reclassified back as a mosque, a controversial decision which remains widely debated.  As a major tourist attraction, visitors today can freely enter the first floor of the building, but the ground floor is restricted to worshippers and their invitees.

It is impossible to briefly describe the many features of the Hagia Sophia.  It is regarded as one of the greatest surviving examples of Byzantine architecture.  It used masonry in its construction, but it is the decorations inside that have ensured its fame.  The interior is decorated with mosaics, marble pillars, paintings, and other items of great artistic value. As it was being constructed in the Sixth Century AD, Justinian achieved his vision by his determination to oversee the completion of what was to be the greatest cathedral ever built up to that time.  The basilica was simultaneously the culminating architectural achievement of late antiquity together with being recognised as a masterpiece of Byzantine architectural style. Its influence, both physically and liturgically, has been widespread and enduring .

Of particular interest is the complex structure of the vast interior. The central nave is covered by a huge dome, which rises to 55.6 metres (182 ft 5 in) above floor level and rests on an arcade of 40 arched windows. Not perfect, however, as repairs to its structure have left the dome somewhat elliptical, with the diameter varying between 31.24 and 30.86 metres (102 ft 6 in and 101 ft 3 in).   At the western entrance and along the eastern liturgical side, there are arched openings extended by half domes of identical diameter to the central dome, built up to create an overall vast oblong interior crowned by the central dome with its uninterrupted span of 76.2 metres (250 ft).

The overall design is clearly geometric and is said to be based on mathematical formulae from Heron of Alexandria, which avoided the use of irrational numbers for its construction.  Research suggests the architects used Hero’s proposed values for constructing the vaults. The measurements were calculated using a side-and-diagonal number progression, which results in squares defined by the numbers 12 and 17, with 12 defining the side of the square and 17 its diagonal, numbers which had been used as standard values as early as cuneiform Babylonian texts.  Each of the four sides of the great square at the centre is approximately 31 metres long, previously thought to be the equivalent of 100 Byzantine feet. However recent research has determined the side of the central square of Hagia Sophia is not 100 Byzantine feet but instead 99 feet. This measurement is not only rational, but it is also embedded in a system of number progression (70/99) used in the applied mathematics of antiquity.

Over the centuries, there have been restorations and enhancements.  One remarkable moment was in 1453 when 21 year old Mehmet II decided not to obliterate all the mosque’s Christian mosaics when he conquered Constantinople:  he was not there simply to destroy.  Another and more recent phase was the 19th-century restoration ordered by Sultan Abdulmejid I, which was completed between 1847 and 1849 by eight hundred workers supervised by the Swiss-Italian architect brothers, Gaspare and Guiseppi Fossati.  Given concerns about stability and evident slippage, the brothers consolidated the dome with a restraining iron chain.  At the same time they strengthened the vaults, straightened the columns, and revised the decoration of the exterior and the interior of the building.   Upper gallery mosaics were exposed and cleaned, but many were re-covered ‘for protection against further damage’.

Restoration did more than preserve.  Eight new gigantic circular-framed discs were hung from the cornices on each of the four piers on either side of the apse and the west doors, designed by Kazasker Mustafa Izzet Efendi, and emblazoning the names of Muhammad, Allah, the first four caliphs and the two grandsons of Muhammad.  They are simply stunning.

Given continuing deterioration and problems, the need for restoration continued, aggravated  by decisions like those during in the Second World War when the minarets of the mosque housed machine guns!  Sadly, today the condition of the structure continues to deteriorate, and it was included in the 1996 and 1998 Watch Lists of the World Monuments Fund.  The building’s copper roof had cracked, causing water to leak down over the fragile frescoes and mosaics. Moisture entered from below, increasing the humidity level within the mosque.  Work has been undertaken to repair of the cracked roof, and preserve the dome’s interior.  Despite all the care that has been shown, major problems remain.  Most experts have concluded the dome will collapse soon, a tragic outcome signaling the end of this remarkable building. Thrilling to see, the Hagia Sophia is close to the end of its life, unless amazing and unlikely efforts are made to save it:  indeed some suspect it might collapse before 2040.

Aigai

We were in the second half of our cruise, travelling down the eastern coast of Greece, when the ship stopped at Thessaloniki.  As on other days, there were various land tours we could select, but at this stage in our cruise there was only one choice, to go to Vergina, on an excursion described as In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great.  To be going to Vergina might seem rather odd:  it  is a relatively new town, established in 1922 in the aftermath of the Treaty of Lausanne, an agreement that had officially resolved the conflict that had initially arisen between the Ottoman Empire, and various European countries including Greece.  The treaty delimited the boundaries of Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey, and, among other provisions included the agreement that all the islands, islets and other territories in the Aegean Sea (Eastern Mediterranean in the original text) beyond three miles from the Turkish shores were ceded to Greece, (with some minor exceptions).

If Vergina is a recent establishment, it is best known as the site of ancient Aigai  the first capital of Macedon.  Back in 336 BC Philip II was assassinated in Aigai’s theatre and his son, Alexander the Great, was proclaimed king. While the resting place of Alexander the Great is unknown, researchers uncovered three tombs at Vergina in 1977, in a location that was part of what had been Aigai.

This was to be an extraordinary visit, and even the first stage of the visit was memorable!  The coach trip from Thessaloniki stopped in Vergina, and we had a fairly long walk to a park area, in which all we could see was an open grassy area, and around it several trees, and small modern building, and some slightly raised areas.  Our tour guide went off, and we tried to find shade from a very hot sun.  When were we going to go to the site of the tombs?  The tour guide returned and led us over to an almost invisible entrance that took us inside that slightly raised area:  the tombs had been uncovered by archaeologists and then re-covered once they had been studied.  Just inside, we stopped, to get accustomed to the darkened interior.

This gave us the opportunity to learn about Aigai.  The area where it was built was formerly  covered by a series of  villages, which together formed an important population centre by 1,000 BC.  In the 7th century BC, the Macedonian expansion in the region subdued local populations, establishing the dynasty at Aigai.  Archaeologic research has shown  Aigai developed as an organized collection of villages, a group of aristocratic tribes,  and it never became a large city.  From Aigai the Macedonians spread to the central part of Macedonia.  In the first half of the 5th century BC Aigai became the capital of Macedonia, characterised by court luxury supported by merchants coming from all over the ancient world bringing  valuable goods including perfume, carved ornaments and jewellery.

At the beginning of the 4th century BC, the Macedonian capital was moved northeast to Pella, but Aigai retained its role as the sacred city of the Macedonian kingdom, the site of a royal palace and royal tombs.  However, by the 3^rd Century BC Alexander’s heirs were involved in bitter struggles.  The city never recovered, and visiting mercenaries plundered many of the tombs.  Collapse continued, the Romans overthrew the Macedonian kingdom in 168 BC, and withing the next six hundred years the city disappeared, first by human means and later a landslide destroyed what had been remained or had been rebuilt.  Aigai disappeared.

In the middle of the 19^th Century, archaeologists had become interested in the burial mounds around Vergina, some believing the long-lost site of Aigai was in the vicinity. Excavations began in 1861 but had to be abandoned because of the risk of malaria.  In 1937, the University of Thessaloniki resumed the excavations, by the 1950s and 1960s much of royal capital had been uncovered.  One Greek archaeologist  was convinced that a hill called the Great Tumulus covered the tombs of the Macedonian kings, and in 1977, a dig at the site revealed four buried tombs, two of which had never been disturbed.  It was concluded these were the tombs of Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, and Alexander IV, his son.  Further research in 1987 revealed a burial cluster of  queens, including Queen Euridice (mother of Alexander II, and Grandmother of Alexander the Great).

All this does little to prepare visitors for the treasures that have been found.  The museum of the tumulus of Philip II was built over the tombs,  leaving them in situ and showing the site as it was before the archaeological excavations.  Inside there are four tombs.  The two most important (tombs II and III) had not been ransacked and contained the main treasures of the museum.  The larger room in Tomb II included a marble chest, and in it was a closed coffin (larnax) made of 24-carat gold and weighing 11 kilograms (24 lb). together with a golden wreath of 313 oak leaves and 68 acorns, weighing 717 grams (25.3 oz), the golden grave crown of Philip II.   This room also included the richly carved burial bed on which Philip II was laid, several exquisite silver utensils for the funeral feast, along with such items as gold-adorned suits of armour and weapons.  All are now on display for visitors.

In the antechamber was another chest with another golden coffin containing the bones of a woman wrapped in a golden-purple cloth with a golden diadem decorated with flowers and enamel, indicating a queen,  possibly Philip II’s Thracian wife, Meda, who by tradition sacrificed herself at the funeral.

In 1978 Tomb III was discovered, also near the tomb of Philip, which is thought to belong Alexander IV of Macedon, son of Alexander the Great.  Like Tomb II, but smaller and also undisturbed, the main room contained a cremated body, in a silver funerary urn a golden oak wreath.

As with Tomb II, inside exquisite silver utensils and weaponry indicating royal status were still in place.  A narrow frieze with a chariot race by a great painter decorated the walls of the tomb. The remains of a wooden mortuary couch adorned with gold and ivory is regarded as notable for its exquisite representation of Dionysos with a flute-player and a satyr.

Finally, the tomb has one other remarkable and moderately well-preserved feature.  This is an astonishing mural, dated from around 350 BC.  It depicts the Abduction of Persephone by Hades,  the God of the Underworld, with a silent Demeter and the three unprejudiced Fates present at the event, accompanied by Hermes, the Guide of Souls, leading the way, and a scared nymph witnessing the horrifying event.   Regarded as a unique example of ancient painting, it is believed to be the work of the famous artist Nicomachus of Thebes.  It is also considered to be one of the few surviving depictions of the ancient mystic views of afterlife.  The image below shows part of the painting

The challenge with visiting a site like this is there are so many extraordinary visual images – and they make my words rather superfluous.  Sadly, next to Tombs II and III is another, the remains thought to be those of Philip II, but tomb robbers stole all of Tomb IV’s  contents.

How had these tombs been preserved?  The tumulus was constructed at the beginning of the third century BC by Antigonos Gonatas, perhaps over smaller individual tumuli to protect the royal tombs from further pillaging after marauding Galati had looted and destroyed the cemetery. The hill material contained many earlier funeral stele.  Could Gonatas have imagined that some 2,200 years later his actions had ensured we were able to enter the tumulus and, despite tomb robbers destroying some of the original material, much of the original structure and contents remained, a remarkable testimony to a key historical era.