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!

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.

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.

Caravaggio

Why do we become especially focussed on some artists or, to be more precise, on some works of art?  There is often no obvious logic:  for me the disparate and idiosyncratic range goes from Bach’s Goldberg variations and Beethoven’s last string quartets on to Alice in Wonderland and Wind in the Willows. and finally ending with people like Edward Hopper and Hokusai.  There are several more I could list, of course, from Mozart and Shostakovich through to Rembrandt, Rubens and Renoir, Philip Pullman and so it goes on.

However, one among these is Caravaggio.  I was forcibly reminded of the impact of his work when we visited St John’s Co-cathedral in Malta recently, and saw that extraordinary painting, The Beheading of St John the Baptist.  It is one among several quite astonishing Caravaggio paintings, many of which are violent, and several extraordinarily compelling, but to see this work of art up close is to be reminded what an exceptional painting it is.

Why exceptional?  Perhaps I should start with the artist.   Caravaggio, whose name was Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, was born in Milan, and moved to Rome when he was in his twenties.  He rapidly achieved considerable renown as an artist, but this was balanced against his reputation as a violent and short-tempered man.  Frequently involved in vicious fights, he was often in trouble with the authorities.  Then, in 1606, after killing a man in a brawl, he faced a death sentence for murder, and he fled to  Naples. There he sought to rebuild his reputation, and work from that period was to result in him being recognised as one of the most prominent Italian painters of his generation.  However, his temper was never under control.  After spending time in Malta and Sicily, he returned to Naples, where he was involved in yet another terrible fight.  He survived, escaped, but soon after died in 1610, on his way from Naples to Rome, at that time in hope getting forgiveness for past sins.  The cause of his death remains controversial:  it was claimed he died of a fever, but some have suggested he was murdered or even died of lead poisoning.

Looking at the ‘Beheading’ canvas in terms of  its demonstration of technical skills by a painter, art historians have commented on two features of this painting: the realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, and the dramatic use of lighting, a form of chiaroscuro often referred to tenebrism. Bringing these characteristics together, the result was that he would paint his subjects highlighted against a dark setting by shafts of light.  However, elements of his paintings were very dark in another sense, with scenes often focussed on violent struggles, torture, and death, highlighted against shadowy backgrounds.

His working approach was distinctive.  He frequently used live models, generally dispensed with drawings, but instead painted historical  or allegorical scenes directly on to the canvas.  His innovative approach was key to inspiring what was to become known as the Baroque style, using contrast, movement, vivid detail, deep colours, and even elements of surprise to achieve a sense of awe.  The style evolved and dominated for a time, but eventually and inevitable fashions changed, and Caravaggio fell out of favour. It was in the 20th century that renewed interest in his work suddenly catapulted him to fame, to the point one art historian remarked: “What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting” (André Berne-Joffroy in Gilles Lambert’s book Caravaggio, Taschen, 2000).

As his work developed, he produced some quite literally amazing paintings.  Among earlier and well-known examples are The Fortune Teller, showing a boy having his palm read by a Romani girl, who is stealthily removing his ring as she strokes his hand; and The Cardsharps, in which a naïve but well-off youth falls victim to card cheats (both 1594).  Despite the quality of these masterworks, it is probably his paintings on religious themes that so clearly demonstrated his ability to combine realism with spirituality. Just as an example, one among the many outstanding images he produced was the Penitent Magdalene (1597), painting Mary at the moment when she has turned from her life as a courtesan and sits weeping on the floor, her jewels scattered around her.  Another, offering an explicit and demanding example of his often violent, realistic and yet compelling style is Judith Beheading Holofernes (1598).

Among so many others at this stage in his life, it’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas that is considered by many to be one of his most famous paintings, completed around 1601–1602.  It shows the episode known as ‘Doubting Thomas’.  The image achieves its intent by using a demonstrative gesture, as the doubting apostle puts his finger into Christ’s side wound, the latter guiding his hand. Thomas the unbeliever is depicted like a peasant, dressed in a robe torn at the shoulder and with dirt under his fingernails. The picture is presented in such a way that any observer is directly involved in the event, but also feels its intensity.

Teju Cole, in an essay in the New York Times in 23 September 2020 offers a superb introduction to Caravaggio’s work in his essay ‘In Dark Times, I Sought Out the Turmoil of Caravaggio’s Paintings’.  He tells us how the works the artist completed near the end of his life changed his understanding of both beauty and suffering. At one point he writes about visiting Naples, and wandering in the crowded “Spanish Quarter,” where Caravaggio lived and where he found the combination of high culture and low life that so appealed to him. “The streets of the quarter were narrow, the buildings tall; many walls were decorated with graffiti. It was easy to imagine it as a place where life had been boisterous and cheerful for a long time, a place of concealment and informality — just the thing for a man on the run.”

He went on to the Museo di Capodimonte, to see Caravaggio’s The Flagellation of Christ. “Christ stands at the column, life-size, and around him are three assailants, two of whom pull at him and the third of whom crouches, preparing a whip. As so often with Caravaggio, there is the story that is depicted, but beyond it, and often overwhelming it, is an intensification of mood accomplished through his use of unnatural shadow, simplified background and a limited colour palette. It is an image of brutal injustice, an image that makes us want to demand an answer to the obvious question, why should anyone be tortured.”

To return to The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, it is described as a very large oil painting by Caravaggio, measuring 3.7 m by 5.2 m, and is located in the Oratory of St John’s Co-Cathedral, in Valetta, Malta.  It is generally considered one of the greatest works of art.  According to Andrea Pomella in ‘Caravaggio: An Artist through Images’ (2005), it is not just widely considered to be Caravaggio’s masterpiece, but as well it is “one of the most important works in Western painting”.  Jonathan Jones  described it as one of the ten greatest works of art of all time: “Death and human cruelty are laid bare by this masterpiece, as its scale and shadow daunt and possess the mind.” (Jones, on ‘The 10 Greatest works of art ever’, The Guardian, 21 March 2014).

Saint John was the patron saint of the Knights of Malta and of the cathedral.  Caravaggio received a commission to paint this canvas for the church’s new oratory. Completed in 1608, it turned out to be his largest work, and the only one he signed, perhaps prophetically in his own blood, blood depicted as flowing onto the pavement from the saint’s neck.  Gruesome, terrifying even, but despite this The Grand Master of Malta was delighted, and it is recorded that he presented Caravaggio with a gold chain, two slaves, and various other rewards; the picture’s frame bears his coat of arms.

In his essay, Teju Cole offers a compelling account of his visit to Malta.  As he entered to room to see The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, he comments  “The effect is of having walked in on something horrible, something you wish to unsee.  The seven people depicted in the painting feel like real people in a real space, dwarfed by the dark background. The lighting, the monumental scale … the height at which the picture is hung and the distribution of dark and light all add to the impression that what you are seeing is an actual event: the two prisoners watching the execution; the servant girl with the gold plate; the old woman; the man directing the killing; the executioner reaching for the knife with which to finish the job; and St. John himself, prostrate on the floor, his neck spurting blood.”

A website devoted to his work describes the painting in detail:  “The structure recalls the monumental murals that Caravaggio must have studied in Rome. The building is Caravaggio’s most detailed architectural setting, and the only one that records an existing structure, the entrance and adjacent window in the main facade of the Grand Master’s Palace (now the Armory) in La Valletta.  The composition is classically simple, a large shallow space with a cluster of figures on the left balanced by a wall and a window on the right.  The dramatic impact of the composition almost obliterates its effectiveness as an abstract construction. It is a silent painting, intimate despite its great scale. The focus is first on the pointing index finger of the business-like warden, who forms the single vertical axis in the figure group, directing the operation. Only secondarily can Saint John’s body be found. It is over-life size, and the only horizontal figure. From the centre of the warden’s finger, the action fans out – to the executioner’s left hand, holding Saint John’s partially severed head in place like a butcher in an abattoir while he reaches with his right for his dagger to finish the process off neatly; to the platter, held low by Salome in anticipation of receiving the head; to the old woman. She is horrified, the only character responding sympathetically to the execution. Incredibly, she covers her ears rather than her eyes; are the sounds – those of the actual decapitation – worse than the sight?   Finally, we must allow – or force – ourselves to look past the deadly line of the glittering blade at the pathos of Saint John’s painfully bound body. A moment before he was a seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking human being like the others; now he is reduced to a mere fleshly carcass.”

Researching the painting, I discovered the existence of The Caravaggio Research Centre, ‘a project by the Factum Foundation, established in 2010 to provide academic and enthusiast access to three high-fidelity facsimiles of paintings by the renowned Baroque artist Caravaggio’.  The Foundation’s primary goal is to create high-resolution, accurate digital documentation of cultural heritage sites and artworks around the world. This documentation is intended to serve as a record for posterity and to enable the production of indistinguishable facsimiles, especially in cases where the original has been damaged, destroyed, lost, looted or where it is inaccessible to the wider public.  It does wonderful work.  However, facts are one thing, but does the Foundation or any of the many other commentaries explain the impact of the painting, or the extraordinary and ultimately tragic life of Caravaggio on the viewer?

The painting was completed in 1608.  Yet, by late August, he slipped from fame to being arrested and imprisoned, almost certainly  likely the result of yet another brawl, this time with an aristocratic knight, during which the door of a house was battered down and the knight seriously wounded. The result was simple:  Caravaggio was imprisoned by the Knights in Valetta.  However, he managed to escape. By December, he had been expelled from the Order “as a foul and rotten member”, a formal phrase used to banish people in all such cases.

He was in trouble.  Contemporary reports depict a man whose behaviour was becoming increasingly bizarre, which included sleeping fully armed and in his clothes; ripping up a painting at a slight word of criticism; and mocking local painters.   After only nine months in Sicily, Caravaggio returned to Naples in the late summer of 1609.  The news from Rome encouraged Caravaggio, and in the summer of 1610, he took a boat north to receive a pardon.  While facts are uncertain, it seems he died of fever on his way from Naples to Rome.

Over the years, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist had become badly damaged. though it did receive some restoration in the 1950s prior to going on exhibition in Rome in 1955-6, a key step in rebuilding Caravaggio’s reputation.  From March 1997 to March 1999, the painting underwent restoration in the Opificio delle Pietre Dure and Restoration Laboratories of Florence.  The state of the painting to be seen today represents a stunning recovery.  Following this work, in the summer of 2023 the windows in the oratory of the decollato were permanently shuttered and blocked off natural light in 2023.  Good or bad, it was a decision causing a public outcry amongst art historians, scholars and Maltese citizens.

The painting is really well presented at St Johns, done in such a way you cannot avoid its power, its horror, and its spiritual significance.  To visit the Cathedral and be able to see it restored to the state Caravaggio had intended is a memorable opportunity.  Can it be moved for exhibition in other countries?  I suspect that is unlikely.

I’m not competent to comment on whether or not it should be considered one of ‘the ten greatest works of art ever’.  What I can say is that it is an image that I can’t and don’t want to  shake off.  It is often said that great art should unsettle us:  for all his limits, mistakes and stupidities as a man, to my mind the artist Caravaggio achieved that end, absolutely.

The Culture of Hope

As I see it, destiny was determined to make Frederick Turner of interest.  Born in England on 19 November 1943, one day less than a year before me, he soon proved himself to be a wanderer, living in Africa before he went to university (Oxford, not Cambridge!).  He then became a US citizen, and from 1985 was at the University of Texas (after positions at the University of Bath in the UK, and UC Santa Barbara in California).  He is presently Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas.  More to the point, he is a prolific writer, poet and critic.  Among many others, his books include Shakespeare and the Nature of Time; Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; Natural Classicism: Essays on Literature and Science;  Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion and Education;  Beauty: The Value of Values; The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit; Shakespeare’s Twenty-first Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money; On the Field of Life, on the Battlefield of Truth, and  Natural Religion.

There’s much more.  He contributes essays, poetry, reviews, and translations to many periodicals, including Harper’s Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, The Wilson Quarterly, Poetry, Reason, Forbes ASAP, Society, The Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, The American Arts Quarterly, Pivot, New Literary History, Oral Tradition, First Things,  The Southern Review, The Yale Review, The Missouri Review, The Ontario Review, The National Review, The Partisan Review, Shenandoah, The Stanford Literary Review, American Enterprise, Lapham’s Quarterly, and , believe it or not, many more.   His work has been translated and published in Albanian, French, German, Japanese, Hungarian, Italian, Macedonian, Rumanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and other languages.

He’s a polymath.  He was first known for his Shakespeare criticism and for his scholarship in the field of English Renaissance philosophy.  More recently he has written on Renaissance science and art, Shakespearean theatre and performance, Christopher Marlowe, and explored several Shakespeare plays.  He is a founder of the literary-critical school known as Natural Classicism.  Another emphasis has been on the relationship between science and technology on one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other.  As a result he has been involved in groundbreaking studies of the neurobiology of aesthetics, the ritual and performative roots of the arts, and the humanistic implications of evolution, ecology, recombinant DNA technology, space travel, artificial intelligence, brain science, and chaos theory.  He has been awarded numerous prizes.   Did I say he’s a polymath?

His book The Future of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit assessed the chances for a revival of our cultural energies at the turn of the millennium, based on what was seen as the remarkable new developments in scientific cosmology and technology. It is this book, published in 1995, that is the starting point of these comments.  He made his intentions in writing his book clear:  “When one seeks for radical equality, and a total pruning of the tree of authority, one gets an Oliver Cromwell, a Napoleon, a Hitler, a Lenin, or a Stalin  instead. In recent times, the egalitarian commune movement has given birth to such monstrosities as Charlie Manson and Jimmy Jones.  Any of us who were involved in radical consciousness-raising groups in the sixties, seventies, and eighties can remember the oppressive atmosphere of thought control and authority, the way in which some unacknowledged leader emerged supported by a little coterie of moral enforcers and yes-men, and bullying of the weak or independent.”  He’s not frightened to make his views clear.  He has often been controversial.  He’s the ideal person for my last blog in this current series.

Thirty years ago, Turner proposed a radical agenda in The Culture of Hope, with its telling subtitle – A New Birth of the Classical Spirit.  Why did I read it?  Because he commented “This book is for those who have been shaken out of themselves by art, who have felt a piece of Mozart’s Magic Flute reach out and grab them by the heart, who have seen the grave look on Flora’s face as she steps out of Botticelli’s Primavera the way gods always do, lit by a light too powerful to be quite shown: for those who have heard a line of Shakespeare so that it rang and rang again in their ears – ‘Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul/Of the wide world dreaming of things to come.”  I felt I had to read it!

To continue to quote, but now from the book release:

“Turner recycles some material from earlier university press books for this, his grand synthesis that promises to overcome the stalemate in the culture wars. Proponent of a “third way” or “centrist” position, Turner (Arts and Humanities/Univ. of Texas, Dallas) rehearses the standard complaints about our culture in crisis. Unlike traditional conservatives, though, he ventures a prescription that goes beyond nostalgia for faith and values. A sober critic of the so-called avant-garde, Turner posits a “radical centre”—“a return to classical forms, genres and techniques in the arts” that is grounded in the latest research in anthropology and science. Turner fancies his “reconstructive postmodernism” a new paradigm on the intellectual horizon, and it’s hard to imagine anyone familiar with all the disciplines he brings together in this fascinating, if exhausting, book. A cogent critic of anti-foundationalist thought (be it feminist, Marxist, or linguistic), Turner reaffirms the need for hierarchy in the arts, for logic over force, and for beauty over relativism. His multiculturalism is truly pan-cultural, discovering the transcendent in all cultures. Turner’s idea of a “natural classicism” is remarkably transparent—he locates classical forms in nature itself. Some of his other ideas are a bit obscure, and his tendency toward unrelieved abstraction will turn off sympathetic readers. Turner’s immediate cure for cultural malaise is nothing less than a four-page manifesto that is certain to provoke debate, and his discussion of biology is sure to be used against him, despite his distinctly un-“bell curvish” ideas. Turner’s fictional “fable for the future”—a brave new world that resembles the utopian cyberspace of the Tofflers—flirts with kookiness. A superb critic of trendy feminist and multicultural ideas, Turner deserves a hearing in the ongoing debate: He’s Apollo to Camille Paglia’s Dionysus.”

So what is this Third Way?  A number of contributors to Philosophy Now in October 2019 suggested answers, and a few were published.  The topic was  “How to negotiate a path between capitalist & socialist excesses?   There were many similarities between the views expressed, of which these are just a selection.

Steve Foulger, from London, observed “In political philosophy a ‘Third Way’ is usually taken to mean a position that rejects the extreme views to be found at either end of the left/right spectrum. It is commonly seen as occupying a middle ground, rejecting radicalism. Its proponents often say it offers the best of both worlds, whilst detractors see it, unsurprisingly, as the worst of both.”  …. I believe Third Way proposals should reject the (monist) idea that there is one all-embracing solution to the problems of society, and instead accept value pluralism as its guiding principle. Values are vitally important to people, but they can be contradictory and indeed incommensurable. … my Third Way would involve a radical extension of democratic control into a largely devolved society.”

Similarly, at least to some extent, Jonathan Tipton, from Preston, Lancashire, suggested “In the last twenty five years, the ‘Third Way’ has denoted a distinct political ideology that argues in favour of the free-market, entrepreneurship, and against the nationalisation of industries, whilst still endorsing radical policies of social justice. It is commonly seen as a compromise between right-wing neoliberalism and leftist social democracy.” …

Tipton goes on to observe, “Arguably John Rawls offers the closest thing to a theoretical basis for Third Way values. In his influential book A Theory of Justice (1971), he put forward a thought-experiment, the ‘Original Position’. Imagine, he said, that a society’s values were to be decided by rational individuals behind ‘a veil of ignorance’ which would prevent them knowing anything about what their own place in that society would be, even of their own social status, gender, ethnicity, etc. Rawls thought that concern for their future wellbeing would impel them to create a society that was free-market but with a strong sense of social justice. It would therefore outwardly resemble a society modelled upon the Third Way. Social inequalities such as great wealth would be permitted if and only if they also benefited the least well off, through high taxes, or more employment”.  Appealing to a Rawls fan!…

Another contributor, Ian Rizzo, Zabbar, from Malta, commented:  “If only we could ditch the left-right-centre-populist ideological splits and focus on a Third Way based on reasonable rethinking and strong ethical, humanistic beliefs. …  A Third Way would recognise that the right balance ought to be maintained between markets, the state and the community. Risk should be appropriately rewarded, since the economy needs to be sustained with creativity and self-sufficiency; but not to the detriment of rewarding hard work. … . A Third Way would insist that the key to our wealth and happiness lies in measures to truly improve quality of life for all…  Such an objective can be reached if the Third Way is based on a philosophy where every human being is treated with equal dignity and respect. Tolerance of a diversity of views should go hand in hand with J.S. Mill’s ‘Harm Principle’ (people’s freedom should only be limited to prevent them doing harm to others).”

For Frank S Robinson of Albany, New York, there is a path for a ‘Third Way’ between rapacious capitalism and coercive communism.  “The answer is Enlightenment humanism. This philosophy celebrates the flourishing of individuals, recognizing that the only thing that can ultimately matter is the feelings of beings capable of feeling.  An important part of human flourishing is finding meaning. Most of us want to do that as freely as possible. This doesn’t mean disconnecting from society. Indeed, being embedded in social structures is part of how we flourish and find meaning. So we want a balance between freedom to do our own thing and the societal ties enabling us to relate to others. … Experience and rationality point to a society ruled by laws protecting us from harms by others – including capitalists – while otherwise leaving us as free as possible: free to pursue economic advantage, which makes society richer; and free to pursue happiness in our individual ways.”

Finally, Mark Bennett, Newmarket, ON asks if there is still a basis to strive for a Third Way. “Democracy is now under the influence of consumerism. … We channel our citizenship toward consumerism, giving tacit assent to our government to undergo a process of zoning. As Alain Badiou … reminds us that “1% of the global population possess 46% of the available resources while 50% of the global population possess nothing.  There seems to be no solution other than democracy. So for a Third Way, democracy must undergo an evolution in which we address both environmental and human needs. It must replace the effects of hegemony with a globalized citizenship. Jürgen Habermas writes, “politics must globalize too, in order to rein in the economy. It means expanding politics beyond the nation state”.

Can we have hope?

The Third Way has been defined as: “different and distinct from liberal capitalism with its unswerving belief in the merits of the free market and democratic socialism with its demand management and obsession with the state. The Third Way is in favour of growth, enterprise, entrepreneurship, and wealth creation but it is also in favour of greater social justice and it sees the state playing a major role in bringing this about.”  So as  Anthony Giddens of the LSE has noted: the Third Way rejects the so-called neo liberalism philosophy.  Indeed, the Third Way has been advocated by its proponents as a ‘radical-centrist’ approach, an alternative to both capitalism and what it regards as the traditional forms of socialism.

The more I have read about it, the Third Way has become harder to summarise, partly due to its flexible nature, putting ends before means, and prioritising achieving social justice rather than focusing on the methods by which it could be achieved.  One way to summarise the Third Way is to say it’s about ‘rights with responsibilities’, pairing the right to education with the responsibility to put effort towards achieving good grades.  On economics, a great deal of the emphasis is placed on tax revenue, and the means by which it is generated. The Third Way argues that growth is the best way to raise tax revenue, and that growth can be achieved through a free market economy, fiscal discipline and a ‘healthy human capital stock’.

The Third Way has been advocated by proponents as competitive socialism.  Anthony Giddens has been a prominent proponent of the Third Way, and has suggested it is a modernisation of socialism, achieved through the social democracy movement.  However, he argues that traditional socialist ideology, resting on the direct involvement of the state in economic management and planning, is flawed.  He has argued that justification for the idea of the managed economy barely exists any longer.  In defining the Third Way Blair once wrote: “The Third Way stands for a modernised social democracy, passionate in its commitment to social justice”, and he added: “The Third Way stands for a modernised social democracy, passionate in its commitment to social justice and the goals of the centre-left. … But it is a third way because it moves decisively beyond an Old Left preoccupied by state control, high taxation and producer interests; and a New Right treating public investment, and often the very notions of ‘society’ and collective endeavour, as evils to be undone.”

While it sounds encouraging, The Third Way has been criticized as being a vague ideology with no specific commitments:  “The Third Way is no more than a crude attempt to create a bogus coalition between the haves and the haves not:  bogus because it entices the haves by assuring them that the economy will be sound and their interests will not be threatened, while promising the have-nots a world free from poverty and injustice. Based on opportunism, it has no ideological commitment at all.”

All this takes us back to Frederick Turner.  With an undeniable religious underpinning, he argues that a culture of hope has to draw on such matters as the preservation of the richness and variety of life, and suggests we have to replace ‘environmentally unsound technologies with the more efficient, elegant and benign ones that the new science is making possible”.  He is an unashamed ecologist, but above all he seeks “a new aesthetic philosophy, critique, and theology, as humanistic as it is naturalistic, embodied in an art in which all these studies can be guided.”  Is this the voice we heard up to the end of the previous century?  Have we lost the confidence he exhibits?  At the end of this series of blogs, I fear our world has become more hierarchical, more exploitative and less humanistic.  I hope I am wrong.

DD81 – The Wreck of Western Culture

Do I want to be thought of as a ‘grumpy old man’?  Well, I am old, and I can be grumpy.  However, it is an epithet that implies recalcitrance, stuck in the past, and unable to see what is changing and the importance of rethinking past preconceptions.  I should also confess that I remember being impressed by The Wreck of Western Culture when I first read it, back in the early 2000s.  It was sweeping, bold, uncompromising, and articulate.  Twenty years later a defence of the ‘Western tradition’ seems rather quaint, and to many people rather seriously out of touch.  However, I suggest it does deserve another visit.

The author, John Carroll, was a professor of sociology when the book appeared.  The first edition was published in 1993, bit it was updated in 2004 with a subtitle added.  The key to John Carroll’s book is in that subtitle: Humanism Revisited.  According to John Carroll, Western culture has been dead on its feet for more than a century. “By 1900,” he commented, “it is all over.” By “it”, Carroll means a culture free from what he considers to be the devastating blight of humanism.  The humanist dilemma had been summed up succinctly by George Orwell in 1945: “As long as supernatural beliefs persist, men can be exploited by cunning priests and oligarchs, and the technical progress which is a prerequisite of a just society cannot be achieved. On the other hand, when men stop worshipping God they promptly start worshipping Man, with disastrous results.”  Predicated on the view that Western high culture is in a declining if not nihilistic mode, Carroll’s Humanism traces this decline to an epistemic tyranny of reason and its subjection of all other forms of knowing and understanding what is meant by ‘being’.

A review in The Age back in 2004, on ‘assessing Western culture’s wreck’ suggested The Wreck of Western Culture is concerned with the second part of the problem outlined by Orwell. A long time dying, Western culture was poisoned during the Reformation and Renaissance, which gave rise to self-regarding art and philosophy. The so-called Enlightenment was especially damaging, says Carroll: “The deification of reason leaves much human nature in the dark. The Enlightenment was in fact rather narrow-minded, naive about human motivation, about society and politics, always in danger of barricading itself inside an arid and abstract intellectualism.”  He suggests Western culture was finished off by the combined influence of Marx, Darwin and Freud, in whose name human lives were reduced to a set of economic, biological and psychoanalytical factors. In short, ours is a culture obsessed by what is claimed to be the nature of the skull beneath the skin.  Carroll castigates Freud for misconceiving the Oedipus complex; it is the antecedent Hamlet complex, he contends, that is the more precise agent of Western cultural ruination.

At one time, John Carroll was one of Australia’s most stimulating thinkers, and together with another thinker of the time, Michel Foucault from far away Europe, he saw a crucial antecedent and warning for the onset of humanism in Velasquez’s Las Meninas(1656).  In his analysis, the painting apparently subverts not only the social order in its depiction of the Spanish royal family, but by putting the viewer at the painting’s centre, calls into question the practice of art itself. For Carroll, Velasquez is “the most subtly brilliant harbinger of Western resentment”.  However, the approach used by Carroll and Foucault is very different – and indeed ideologically they are antithetical – but they do share an underlying anti-humanism. Carroll acknowledges the advances in the West towards unprecedented levels of physical health and material wellbeing, but mourns the diminution of words such as ‘sacred’, ‘noble’ and ‘honour’.   As others have noted, these aren’t terms normally associated with Foucault, who I guess Carroll would consider a nihilist.

In Carroll’s view, in seeking to remake themselves in their own (imperfect) image, the people of the West have lost their soul. The Wreck of Western Culture thus belongs to a negative strand within the Western intellectual tradition. Since the dawn of the Western history of thought, the idea of progress has been accompanied by the idea of decline. Carroll’s guiding light through much of his story is Friedrich Nietzsche, and indeed his style evinces a taste for the apocalyptic and the sublime that is not too distant from the turbulent genius of the German master.

It is Nietzsche who asked: “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”

He continues, “We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries’ old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth. From the sense that one is obliged to designate one thing as “red,” another as “cold,” and a third as “mute,” there arises a moral impulse in regard to truth. The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes.”

Nietzsche remains a devastating critic, and John Carroll picks of many of his points (if not his essentially subjective view of the world).  Displaying a dazzling eclecticism, Carroll shares with Nietzsche the ability to range across the width and breadth of the cultural landscape .  In the Wreck of Western Culture he makes good use of  artists’ contributions as much as that coming from philosophers and theologians.  There are many examples.  Thus the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin can be compared with the Hollywood director John Ford;  one chapter in the book convincingly treats a clutch of Ford’s John Wayne westerns as an epic example of modern myth-making.  Carroll makes it clear what art he thinks is worthy of attention: “High culture has its own hierarchy, with a few supreme masterpieces at the top. This study concentrates on those masterpieces.” He suggests that in the relatively zombie-like state today, thinkers and artists are generating relatively little worthwhile.  After all, it is relatively easy (and cheap?) to suggest modern art is pretty much summed up by Duchamp’s urinal, and Carroll moves on from such an easy target to savage Picasso as a “misogynistic psychopath who made women weep in real life, as well as on the canvas.”

Today there is a vast industry concerned with ‘explaining’ art.  Historians show us how imagery became more faithful to what was being seen, through the increasing understanding of perspective, sight lines, reference points and so much more.  Others explain what the artist was trying to achieve, how the work related to a commission, a place where it was to be displayed, how it was informed by beliefs, values and hopes.  I can still recall my giddy excitement as I read an analysis of The Ambassadors, by Hans Holbein the Younger, in John Carroll’s The Wreck of Western Culture.  He used that painting to explore what he argued we have lost through the gradual erosion of the spiritual by the scientific.  John Carroll might have been a little didactic (actually, quite a lot), but he did make me think.  I had the same experience reading  Michel Foucault’s exploration of Velázquez’ Las Meninas in his book The Order of Things.  Intellectually fascinating.

His approach was not universally liked at the time and has lost even more support in recent years.  However, in 2005 Michael Jensen wrote a review for the Sydney Anglicans journal.  He observed, “John Carroll, professor of sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is not afraid of big ideas. His 2004 book The Wreck of Western Culture, a substantial reworking of a 1993 effort, is a passionate, daring and sustained attack on the bloodlines of what we call “the West.”   He calls his book “a spiritual history of the West.”   He writes with a refreshing polemical zeal and with none of the hedging and over-qualifying so characteristic of academic prose.

His  claim is that “humanism” by which he means the intellectual and cultural movement originating in the Renaissance “has had its deficiencies exposed in the latter-day collapse of western culture. Most particularly, the humanist belief in the supremacy of the human free will as an alternative to obedience to God has been revealed as self-defeating not least by the devastating symbolism of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The strategy Carroll employs for demonstrating his thesis is a selectively genealogical one. In a deliberate snub of postmodern orthodoxy, he examines some of the finest works of high culture in the humanist half-millennium: Hamlet, Holbein’s The Ambassadors, Rembrandt and Poussin, Mozart and Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the novels of Henry James and the films of John Ford. It is an idiosyncratic choice and an unorthodox method, which Carroll justifies because these exceptional masterpieces have “tapped the deepest truths of their time” (p.9). His interaction with these works is stimulating and masterful and makes The Wreck of Western Culture a pleasure to read”, and his comments are thought provoking, at the least.

Jensen continues: “Crucial to the history Carroll traces is the famous sixteenth century debate over the freedom of the human will between the doyen of European humanism, Erasmus of Rotterdam and the German reformer Martin Luther. Carroll bravely reads Luther as more anti-humanist than anti-Roman Catholic. The irenic Erasmus was a reasonable man. If there is no human free will”, he argues, “why should the wicked reform? But Luther’s teaching of justification by faith alone meant a complete rejection of this reliance on human will and reason. For Luther, the human being is a slave to sin and sentenced to death; and must come, empty-handed, to the cross of the crucified Christ. Mere morality was a hopeless absurdity. The heart of the Protestant reformation, rooted in the writings of Paul, is an acknowledgement of the helplessness of the human as a result of sin and death and a need for absolute dependence on God. Humanism, with its alternative diagnosis of the basic goodness of human beings and their freedom to be moral, leads inevitably to the rejection of God. There are some mealy-mouthed versions of Christianity that espouse this kind of thinking, even today: but the calamities of history must be held up against them as evidence. Man has proved a very poor god; ultimately death still undoes him.”

Jensen considers Luther’s insight is as crucial today as it ever was. What Protestant – in other words, Biblical – Christianity offers is a radically different diagnosis of the human condition. The humanist vision has been played out in full and now offers no comfort to the human soul. Carroll offers his work as a contribution to the funeral of humanism, with a warning for us not to give it another run.

But what does he offer as an alternative?  Jensen suggests Carroll wants the West to start again, to reach back into the past and recapture that right “enthusiasm for man and his works that the Renaissance attempted to enshrine”. He means by this a simple delight in place of the infatuation with the human that has bought us so badly undone. Carroll writes: “The culture of the West will not be renewed until the moment it kills Luther’s monster [i.e. death], and once again achieves a death of death”. For Carroll, it is in the art of Poussin that a particular alternative is indicated. Though the Frenchman Poussin was a Roman Catholic, Carroll claims that in his pictures he was able to represent Luther’s great ideas. He, too, sees “darkness where the light of neither law nor reason shines” (p.70). He, too, sees the necessity for life and hope to come from outside sources and to be recognised as gifts. Yet he differs from Luther, writes Carroll, in that he appeals to a radically different divinity  ‘the sacred breath moving through the mythos’”.

At this point Jensen suggests Carroll loses him somewhat, and “a bit of precise writing on his part might have helped. Suffice to say that he reads the great works of culture as reflective of ‘the body of timeless, archetypal narratives that carry the eternal truths: the big stories on which every culture is founded, ones that are then told and retold to each coming generation’. It is in this mode that he considers theology, art, literature and philosophy: they are the things that a culture needs to survive, what Carroll has called in a previous book our ‘dreaming’”.

An exciting feature of Carroll’s work was his determination to take theology seriously and to read Luther and Calvin as major thinkers in the history of the West (which indeed they are). However, Carroll hangs back from a thoroughgoing endorsement of them, or from charting a clear alternative course for the Western individual. But that is not his intention: this book is ground-clearing rather than ground-breaking. Further, I would have been fascinated to see Western culture compared with Eastern or Islamic cultures. Are these less “wrecked” than ours? Admittedly, Carroll does briefly consider the clash of civilisations through the lens of the 9/11 conflict.

In any event, I read Carroll’s work and The Wreck of Western Cultura as Jensen did: “a full-blown challenge to the decadent culture we inhabit, a culture trying ever harder to assert a basic human goodness but everywhere having to deal with the destructive consequences of our will-to-power”.  Now it is twenty years later, and I have to reconsider my enthusiasm.  Certainly, humanism is in trouble, but not so much as the challenge from Christianity.  Now we seem to have become excessively materialistic and selfish, social cohesion falling apart as modern media allows us to find others like ourselves and any desire to find common ground diminished.

Indeed, today we can see the West is falling apart, and new thinking is coming from very different sources.  The values of family, social cohesion and a unified society are promoted by countries like China, but just as we begin to get excited about these ideas, we witness the high levels of compliance and control being exercised in the Peoples Republic.  Just as we can see evidence of the ‘wreck’ of western culture on the shoals of dominant capitalism, so Eastern countries are heading into trouble, trying to bludgeon acceptance rather than finding common ground.  This year I have been facilitating a discussion group for U3A, first on Truth and now on Belief.  Reviewing the past has been fun, but contemplating the mess we are in today is disheartening.  If humanism is failing, it seems the only alternative is to live in virtual isolation, sustained by entertaining technologies?  Not a good approach?  Can you offer any alternatives?

Civility

Stephen Carter is a fascinating thinker and writer, a legal scholar based at Yale, who has written on both legal and social issues.  He studied history at Stanford University, and law at Yale Law School in 1979.  He served as a law clerk, first for Judge Robinson III in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and then for US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1980-81.  He was appointed  a Professor of Law at Yale Law School from 1982. However, he is equally – if not more widely – known for his non-fiction books.  His first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, was wonderful:  published in 2002 it won numerous awards.  It was followed by several other novels, including two, New England White and Palace Council, which together with the Emperor of Ocean Park, are all set in in a fictional New England town.  He continues to publish both fiction and non-fiction.

In 1998 he published a book sometimes referred to as a self-help guide, sometimes as a reference work.  Civility has an intriguing subtitle: Manners, Morals and the Etiquette of Democracy.  At The Aspen Institute that year, he explained he believed civility was disintegrating because we have forgotten the obligations we owe to each other and are ‘awash instead in a sea of self-indulgence’.  I found his talk, and the book, fascinating:  now some 25 years later, I suspect I see it differently, not just because he wrote from an explicitly Christian perspective, (he claims that agreeing to his approach does not presuppose being Christian, or religious). But he makes it clear that being civil toward strangers, toward opponents, follows from an acknowledgment that every person is as much God’s creature as we are, and we owe it to others, even opponents, to treat them with respect, even awe. But he is saying more than this, that civility is a moral duty.  25 years later I find the Christian tone is less easy to accept.

His overall thesis is that basic good manners have become a casualty of our postmodern culture. He argues that civility is disintegrating because we have forgotten the obligations we owe to each other and are lost instead in a sea of self-indulgence. Neither liberals nor conservatives can help us much, Carter explains, because each political movement, in a different way, exemplifies what has become the principal value of modern America: that what matters most is not the needs or hopes of others, but simply getting what we want. Taking inspiration from the Abolitionist sermons of the nineteenth century, Carter proposes to rebuild our public and private lives around the fundamental rule that we must love our neighbours. He investigates many of the fundamental institutions of society and in the book he illustrates how each one of us must do more to promote the virtue of civility.

Civility is in three sections.  The first part of is devoted to exploring the idea of “The Collapse of the Three-Legged Stool,” a reference to three legs supporting civility, the home, the school and the place of worship:  “If all three institutions work together, mutually reinforcing the moral understandings that the others are teaching, then the children are likely to learn what they should. If any one of them fails—if even one of the legs should break—then the task is much harder, and perhaps impossible. The metaphorical stool topples”(p. 229)

The middle section of the book explores what he calls “Incivility’s Instruments.” Among these are demonizing opponents, not listening to others, fighting words , market language, the technologies of incivility (including the internet), and law. Looking back, American society seems even worse off now some two and a half decades later.  The corrosive effects of America’s national political and economic environments make it harder to keep being civil.  The final part, “Civilizing the Twenty-First Century,” is almost poignant, because it is clear that we have failed to follow his call for action:  instead of increased civility in public life, we have two contending camps each accusing the other of being a mortal threat to society, each seeing itself as the only true defender of democracy.

Throughout the book he notes various ‘duties’ that civility requires us to observe, and it is a tough yet clear agenda.  The first duty is that “Our duty to be civil towards others does not depend on whether we like them or not.” (page 35).  It’s a comment that reminds me of the oft-cited idea of ‘blind justice’. He goes on to propose a second rule, that “Civility requires that we sacrifice for strangers, not just for the people we happen to know’ (page 58).  Just four pages later he adds “Civility has two parts:  generosity, even when it is costly, and trust, even when there is risk”. These comments become more pointed as we read on that “Civility creates not merely a negative duty not to do harm, but an affirmative duty to do good” (page 71).  Now, even more focussed, he adds “Civility requires a commitment to live a common moral life, so we should try to follow the norms of the community if the norms are not actually immoral (page 87).  The next rule, which he admits is a ‘hard one’, is “We must come into the presence of our fellow human beings with a sense of awe and gratitude” (page102).

He remains practical: “Civility assumes that we will disagree: it requires us not to mask our differences, but to resolve them respectfully’ (Page 132).  He adds the obvious corollary: “Civility requires that we listen to others with knowledge of the possibility that they are right and we are wrong.” (page 139).  Finally, in case we missed it, he notes “Civility requires resistance to the dominance of social life by the values of the marketplace.  Thus the basic principles of civility – generosity and trust- should apply as fully in the market and in politics as in every other human endeavour” (page 173).   He’s realistic, too “Civility allows criticism of others, and sometimes even requires it, but the criticism must always be civil” (page 217).  After suggesting legislation be last resort to settle disputes, he adds “Teaching civility, by word and example, is an obligation of the family.  The state must not interfere with the family’s effort to create a coherent moral universe for its children’ (page 230).  It’s getting tricky and he adds “Civility values diversity, disagreement, and the possibility or resistance, and therefore the state must not use education to try to standardise our children” (page 242).

In 2012, Carter was interviewed in the Yale publication Reflections, on the topic of Civil Thoughts on Uncivil Times, fourteen years after the book first appeared. In this extract from the interview, he raises and sometimes reiterates some important points:

REFLECTIONS: Has the moral mood of the nation changed in recent decades?

STEPHEN CARTER:  “The late religious philosopher Henry Nelson Wieman coined the phrase “traffic society” to refer to a culture so steeped in generalized impersonal regulation that people are treated in effect like automobiles rather than human beings. That seems to me the direction in which we’re headed. It isn’t that any particular law or rule is particularly bad (although there are some clunkers out there), but that the sheer weight of rules displaces other goods.  Let me give you an example of what I mean. Fifteen or twenty years ago, a college student in California decided to attend classes naked. When criticized, he insisted that he had the right to do it. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. The point his critics made was that whether or not he had the right, what he was doing was wrong.  Nowadays, this sort of argument is quite difficult to make. Once a claim of right has been asserted, the asserter (often aided by the media) expects all critics to shut up. It is as though the establishment of legality ends questions of morality. A public conversation premised on that vacuous notion isn’t worthy of the name.”

“Edmund Burke, in an early essay, bemoaned the way that lawyers and theologians had divided up the world, so that nobody dared act without consulting both. Few people are very frightened any longer of the theologians. The lawyers of his day have morphed into the bureaucrats of ours; and the bureaucrats scare everybody.  One predictable result of a heavy reliance on rules is a decreased reliance on moral suasion – and as the need for moral suasion declines, so does our ability to engage in moral argument. That is why, for example, critics of the Bush Administration’s adventure in Iraq, or the Obama Administration’s drone war, have found themselves forced to rely on shaky arguments about legality. In both cases, they should have been making arguments about morality. Alas, we no longer do public moral argument particularly well. If we don’t recover the skill, we will cease to be in any recognizable sense a moral people.”

REFLECTIONS: In Civility, you said it was your prayerful hope for America that “we build a society in which we act with, rather than talk about genuine respect for others.” Has civility lost ground since 1999? What conditions are needed for it to flourish?

CARTER:  “In the book you mention, I define “civility” as the sum of the many sacrifices that we make for the sake of living our common life. Thus civility isn’t only good manners (although it is that) and it isn’t only how we think about and talk about others (although it is that, too). Civility resides, for example, in acts of charity, particularly when they are truly costly to us.  Are we being more sacrificial? It is difficult to say. Acting through government isn’t sacrifice – it’s the use of coercion to require sacrifices from others. Coercion isn’t always bad, and there are things government must coerce – but we should be careful to separate acts of state from acts of charity.”

“The distinction matters. Consider for example the substantial literature suggesting that when individual income tax rates rise, so do charitable donations, because the benefit to the giver (the charitable deduction) is worth more at a higher marginal rate. If this is so, however, we must recognize the implicit failure of civility: People are giving money to charity because they are being paid to do it! (The older view, that only the giving of the rich and not the giving of the middle class is influenced by tax rates, seems not to have stood empirical testing.)”

REFLECTIONS: What sort of wisdom can faith traditions inject into turbulent times?

CARTER:  “Our modern word wisdom comes from an Old High German word meaning, roughly, judicial precedent. The idea was that wisdom was the guidance that the experience of the past could offer to the present – and that the guidance of wisdom, absent exceptional circumstance, should be binding.  I have never thought that we should somehow be ruled by the wisdom of the ancients. That doesn’t mean, however, that we shouldn’t consult it and, at times, defer to it. The ancients can be wrong, but so can we. Here it is useful to follow the example of Socrates in Plato’s Apology, and be as acutely sensitive to what we don’t know as to what we do. A lot of traditional teachings are, by our present lights, morally reprehensible, and have quite properly been rejected.  But we shouldn’t turn this around and suppose that they must be morally reprehensible because they’re ancient. When a moral teaching has been held for generations, that at least suggests that a lot of people over the centuries have thought it might actually be true. That fact does not make a traditional answer true, but it does suggest that we should embrace a certain humility when deciding whether to reject what tradition teaches. On the other hand, many religionists are nowadays in retreat from their own traditions – or else cowering in bunkers, trying to protect what tatters of tradition they can from the strengthening cultural and legal assault”

REFLECTIONS: If American history can be characterized as a long debate between individualism and community, who’s winning?

CARTER: “If the question is about sex, individualism is winning. If the question is about just about anything else, community is winning. If you doubt this proposition, just consider where we feel comfortable regulating, and where we don’t.  As more and more corners of life are regulated for the sake of the common good, the tricky question is who’s in charge. Come to think of it, the same question applies to sex. Odd how our culture seems most individualistic in the one sphere where the intellect is least involved in the taking of decisions.”

REFLECTIONS: There’s talk of a “narrative of decline” taking hold in this country. Is that overstated?

CARTER:  “Oh, we’re in a decline. No question. Not because the economy is retrenching – that’ll work itself out eventually, and people will fight viciously over credit the way they now fight about blame – and not because American influence abroad is receding, either – although that, too, presents problems. No, the reason we’re in a decline is that we no longer are capable of being serious about public argument. Election campaigns have become opportunities for entertainment, each side declaring a jeremiad against the other, but mainly pointing to silly gaffes, and lying happily about what the opponent is up to.  Supporters of this or that candidate, when pressed about why the campaigns are so vicious, will routinely answer that their side is just matching the other, doing what’s necessary to win. As a Christian, I find this response terrifying. Christianity seeks to build a morality of means that is every bit as important as the morality of ends, and often more so. And not just Christianity. The late Gore Vidal used to argue that the American idea rests on the proposition that the end doesn’t justify the means, and I think he was right. Our goals obviously matter, but so do our chosen strategies for attaining them. There is nothing admirable in doing whatever is necessary to win, because victory is not a virtue. (John Courtney Murray’s clever mot – “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?” – is often quoted in response, but usually out of context.)”

“It’s not that politics wasn’t nasty before. In America, politics has always been nasty. But we used to spend a good deal less time on it than we do now. People paid attention for a few weeks and then went on with their actual lives. Democracy cannot flourish when electoral politics is exalted above all things. The entire point of the concern for civil society is that a successful nation needs its people to be focused on matters more important than transitory partisan advantage. A nation where friends can no longer hold political discussions, for no other reason than that they disagree, is a nation not only in decline but, in the Weberian sense of nationhood-as-common-interest, on the verge of collapse.”

“And our decline matters. I am naive enough, in the innocence of late middle age, to believe that America should still be a beacon to the world, a nation worth imitating. Plenty of countries around the globe have learned to imitate our self-seeking, our obsessions with wealth and celebrity, and our growing incivility. Before selecting our public behaviours, we should perhaps think a bit harder about what it is that we want to export.”

Thirteen years later an interestingly hopeful final line, given the state of the US today!

DD74 – The West and the Rest

He died in 2020, but Roger Scruton still comes across as a contemporary critic.  Idiosyncratic?  Certainly.  Alarmingly extreme?  Often.  Determined to shock?  Undoubtedly.  He was a curious mixture of fiery arguments over those topics that concerned him, while also being willing to provoke, to push to extremes to challenge thinking.  Robert George’s Opinion piece at the time captured much of what was engaging and infuriating about the man (in The uncomfortable Truths about Roger Scruton’s Conservatism, Opinion, The New York Times, The Stone, Jan. 29, 2020).  Five years after his death, he still poses a real problem, when the answer to the question as to what he stood for requires us to stop lapsing into stereotypical thinking.  He was a complex, irritating, deeply thoughtful and often aggravating man.  I disagree with much he said, but I find it hard to ignore him.

Robert George suggests he was widely known as a ‘conservative philosopher’,  possibly the most important Anglo-American conservative thinker of his generation. “It’s true that he was a conservative; it’s also true that he was a philosopher. Many of his philosophical views can truthfully be labelled “conservative.” But to honour the truth in full, it is necessary to explain, with respect to any particular view Roger held, the sense in which it was conservative. To do so will show the important ways in which Roger defied stereotypes.”  For example “Like conservatives of all descriptions, Roger loathed and opposed Communism, which he regarded as a soul-destroying abomination (and not just as a failed promise of economic prosperity), and all forms of socialism. So he found little to like in the Labour Party of his native Britain, even in the Tony Blair era, or in the Democratic Party in the United States, even before its leftward lurch in the 21st century.  Yet Roger was far from fully on board with the economic philosophy of the British Tories or the American Republicans.”

It is easy to concentrate on Roger Scruton the conservative, and ignore that he was a philosopher, writer, and social critic with a particular interest in aesthetics and political philosophy.  Certainly his wide-ranging writing did often serve to ensure the promotion of conservative views.  In  1982 he became founding editor The Salisbury Review, a journal championing conservatism.  He claimed editing The Salisbury Review effectively ended his academic career in the United Kingdom, especially as it was critical of many key issues of the period – the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, egalitarianism, feminism, foreign aid, multiculturalism and modernism.  He wasn’t shy, writing “It is necessary to establish a conservative dominance in intellectual life, not because this is the quickest or most certain way to political influence, but because in the long run, it is the only way to create a climate of opinion favourable to the conservative cause” (Martin Walker in The Guardian, 1/3/83).

Scruton wrote over 50 books on a wide range of topics, including  architecture, art, philosophy, politics, religion, and several others, and was a regular contributor to the popular media.  He explained that he had embraced conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France (this was in a New Criterion article in 2003).  He argued society is held together by authority and the rule of law, not by some kind of ideology such as the imagined rights of citizens. Obedience, he wrote, is “the prime virtue of political beings, the disposition that makes it possible to govern them, and without which societies crumble into ‘the dust and powder of individuality” (in Gentle Regrets, pages 40-41).  As he saw it, real freedom does not stand in conflict with obedience but is its other side.

He opposed elevating the ‘nation’ above its people, which would threaten rather than facilitate citizenship and peace. ‘Conservatism and conservation’ are two aspects of a single policy, that of husbanding resources, including the social capital embodied in laws, customs and institutions, and the material capital contained in the environment. He argued further that the law should not be used as a weapon to advance special interests.  People impatient for reform – for example in the areas of euthanasia or abortion – are reluctant to accept what may be “glaringly obvious to others – that the law exists precisely to impede their ambitions”, (see Arguments for Conservatism, pages 15, 34, 69).

Naturally, he wasn’t happy with the dictates of post-modernism, which he regarded as the claim that there are no grounds for truth, objectivity, and meaning, and that conflicts between views are therefore nothing more than contests of power. Scruton argued that, while the West is required to judge other cultures in their own terms, Western culture is adversely judged as ethnocentric and racist. He wrote: “The very reasoning which sets out to destroy the ideas of objective truth and absolute value imposes political correctness as absolutely binding, and cultural relativism as objectively true” (Ibid 105, 116).

All this takes us to Roger Scruton’s 2002 book, The West and the Rest.  In a Carnegie Council review, (1/10/03), John Becker began by citing the final four sentences of the book:  “The enemy is of two kinds: the tyrant dictator, and the religious fanatic whom the tyrant protects. To act against the first is feasible, if we are prepared to play by the tyrant’s rules. But to act against the second requires a credible alternative to the absolutes with which he conjures. It requires us not merely to believe in something, but to study how to put our beliefs into practice.   Scruton contrasts the basic structure of Western political life with the Holy Law of Islam. Islam then becomes his paradigm for ‘the rest.’ It is a nicely written book, seductive in its clarity, suspect in some of its conclusions.” (p. 161).

The development of early Christianity within the context of Roman Law, says Scruton, lays down a pattern of church-state separation for the West: Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. “Religion, in the West, is not completely separate from the state; it may teach that there are moral limits to what a state can do, but religion does not dominate all. The business of religion and the business of the state remain essentially distinct. The fruit of this separation is that strangers to one another live together peacefully under the secular rule of law. Though family, tribal custom, and religion persist on the deepest levels, it is possible for a secular state to create its own deep and powerful appeal. That is an appeal to loyalty, loyalty to a place, a territory, a common home. … The government is a government of laws, not a government of men, nor of a totalizing religion. Citizens are first and foremost members of a society of strangers, committed to the defense of their common territory and to the maintenance of the law that applies there. Citizenship therefore depends on pre-political loyalties of a territorial kind–loyalties rooted in a sense of the common home and of the transgenerational society that resides there”. (p. 60).

But we live in a globalizing world and one wonders if we aren’t on the way to some kind of world citizenship, a sense of the entire globe as our home, a larger home, but still a home within an “all-embracing legal order.” Scruton thinks not. The alternatives to the nation-state, he argues, are bad: “tribes, creed communities, or customary communities united by an imperial power.” Such political structures are “hostile, on the whole, to democratic politics. Nationhood is the best that we can offer by way of a pre-political loyalty that delivers territorial jurisdiction and individual citizenship as its natural political expressions.”(p. 61)

Becker sees some plausibility in this argument. Western Europe has welcomed many asylum seekers who, enjoying the rights and privileges of citizens, respond to the incitement of their religious leaders with violence against the very countries that have taken them in. Religion is apparently the problem: “People who see all law, all social identity, and all loyalty as issuing from a religious source cannot really form part of this [Western] political culture, and they will not recognize either the obligation to the state or the love of country on which it is founded.” (p. 63) But is this true? Isn’t it rather true that the number of immigrants and asylum seekers who respond to these calls for violence is small. A vast majority of Muslims seem to have made their peace with the secular states in which they live. Unfortunately, we hear little from that majority. Scruton’s understanding of Islam is the understanding we are all acquiring of radical Islam. Those Muslims who have made their peace with the modern secular state seem stricken with silence. How good it would be to hear from them.

Becker continues “What makes me suspicious of Scruton is his use of the word natural. Is it in the nature of human beings that the largest unit to which they may pledge their loyalty is the nation? My suspicions were verified as Scruton went on to express his reservations about immigration, the multicultural society, the loss of the traditional division of labour between men and women. These, he says, tend to break down the pre-political loyalty on which every social contract is founded. He may be right, but is it necessarily so? Is it natural? And does that end the discussion.   The global outreach of Western political culture has forced a confrontation, between two visions of society that are profoundly contradictory. What to one is good, freedom, to the other is vacuous, corrupt. And those who love freedom find the cultural dominance of religion intolerable, even infuriating. The question that comes to mind is this: Just how deep and how broad is this contradiction in the lives we all live? How many of us manage to shape our lives around convictions so irreducible? It’s a real question and a practical one. Perhaps even an urgent one. Scruton doesn’t really address it, it seems to me.”

Becker ends by admitting he likes Scruton’s seductive clarity. “Reading him reminds me of reading Plato. One of my undergraduate philosophy professors used to say that the way you make a philosopher is to fill him full of Plato and then beat it out of him. Scruton makes you think, even though there’s a lot that needs sorting once you’ve done it.”

In another contemporary review, Bill Muehlenberg (Culture Watch, 21 September 2005) addresses the book’s subtitle, ‘Globalization and the Terrorist Threat’, and he observes how Scruton explores a number of related themes. His major thesis is how modern Western democracies differ from other types of societies in general, and the Islamic world in particular. His historical and philosophical investigations provide a framework in which to judge both the September 11 attacks, and the ongoing threat of Islamic terrorism.

He begins by noting that social bonding can take place by means of either religion or politics. In the pluralistic West, social cohesion is mainly found in the form of the social contract, whereas in the Islamic world, religion alone provides that basis. Roman law and the Christian religion helped provide the basis for the social contract, as well as bring about the Western conception of the demarcation of the religious and political spheres.  He argues Islamic societies on the other hand know of no separation of religious and secular authorities, with religion the sole basis of the state. Just as the Communist party was a law onto itself, so “Islam aims to control the state without being a subject of the state”. As a result, there are no political or social mediating structures between Allah and His will (Islam) and the submissive Muslim (Islamic citizen).  The freedoms of a democracy, including the freedom to oppose the state, to vote for alternative parties, and to freely express dissenting opinions are thus not to be found in Islamic states. In theocracies, such dissent is just not possible. And given that Islam means submission, the good Muslim is an obedient Muslim.

Both secular Western societies and Muslim societies have notions of membership. Membership in the West is made up of the voluntary, the tribal, the linguistic and the political. Muslim membership is credal, based only on the religious. The political process of the West allows for the separation of society from the state, while there is no such distinction in Islamic jurisdictions. Thus the political is the religious, whereas the genius of Western democracies is to separate the political from the rest of social and personal life.

Democratic citizenship helps to limit state power and deter totalitarian temptations. However as the onslaught of radical individualism and secularism sweep the West, former loyalties and the sense of social membership are quickly giving way. As the concept of citizenship disappears, social membership is strained and the basis of democracies is undermined. In the light of such social and political fragmentation, the religious membership of Islamic societies stands in sharp contrast.  However Islamic unity is based on force and power, not consent. Religious toleration, taken for granted in the West, is a foreign concept in Islamic societies. Islamic law applies to every aspect of life and leads to the denial of the political. All is religious, and mediating structures are unheard of.

While Christianity teaches us to give to Caesar what is his, in Islamic thinking nothing is Caesar’s, everything is Allah’s. All is religious because all is Allah’s. Thus Islamic membership is all-embracing and all-demanding.  But Western membership, or citizenship is unravelling, making Western democracies vulnerable and lacking in direction. Thus the inability of Western nations to unite against the real dangers of terrorism. Thus the mistaken notions of moral equivalence, where ruthless Muslim dictatorships are seen as no better or no worse than Western leadership. Thus the real possibility of the continued demise of the West coupled with a resurgent rise of Islam.

Thus Scruton’s book is not only a warning about the anti-democratic makeup of Islamic societies, but a wake-up call to the West to re-explore its roots and re-establish its moral and cultural foundations. Without a revived West the prospects for the war against Islamic terrorism look bleak. But this volume helps to remind us that the stakes are high and some things are worth fighting for. Hopefully this book will serve as a much-needed call to action by the West. If not, we have much to fear from the future.

Robert George argues conservative can support moderate reforms but their fundamental goal is to conserve. Roger Scruton was an ardent, but old-fashioned and therefore moderate, conservationist   Left-wing philosophers, heirs to 1789, believe that philosophy’s point is to chart how the world should be remade. Some conservative philosophers have sought to explain that the social world is as it is because it had to be that way and cannot be changed.  Roger saw things more flexibly.  He believed that philosophy can help us see the value of good, if imperfect, things, our communities and  institutions, that have grown up organically, and that it can show us why we should fight to preserve them and how we can make our own contribution to their development, even by way of moderate reforms.

Let’s face it, The West and the Rest makes me uncomfortable.  At one level I can ignore Scruton’s analysis by reflecting on conversations I have had with a variety of Muslims over the years.  They come across as people not unlike me:  often rational, sometimes passionate, and willing to listen and argue.  However, Roger Scruton would argue I am missing the point:  this isn’t about that famous ‘man in the street’, but the holders of power, the decision makers.  They often lay claim to the views Scruton depicts.  Yes, perhaps, they are different.