More things Horatio …
Investigations Concerning the Shroud of Turin.

The Shroud of Turin is a 4.4 x 1.1 meter linen cloth in Turin, Italy, that bears the faint image of a crucified man. Believers hold it to be the burial cloth of Jesus and the cloth has been a subject of scientific and religious debate over many centuries.

Concerning the context of the Shroud and the historic events taking place soon after the death by crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, below is a New Testament description of these events from the Gospel of John, written some sixty years after they occurred. The earliest account of these events, in the Gospel of Matthew, was written around forty years after the crucifixion, not an eyewitness account but written within living memory of the event. The Gospels of Mark and Luke followed soon after.

The four accounts do not align perfectly in specific detail, which is only to be expected regarding any human eye-witness accounts of a newsworthy event. Also, in the Gospel accounts you have descriptions by hearsay, years after the event. In which case, perfectly aligned accounts would likely imply collusion rather than the actuality of flawed human perception. However none of the four Gospels vary in essentials, the message of the empty tomb and account of the resurrection of the crucified Christ.

Herewith the New Testament Account of The Discovery of the Empty Tomb According to John:

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. John 20- 1.

Few relics following Jesus’ crucifixion have generated as much discussion as the Shroud of Turin after its transfer in 1453 from Lirey in France, to the House of Savoy in Italy and later, in the 1500s’, to the Royal Chapel of the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista in Turin. Regarding the above gospel accounts and the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin as Jesus’ burial cloth, two main theories present…

Theories One and Two…

The first theory is that the Shroud is the genuine burial cloth, or ‘sindon,’ of a crucified man whose Christ-like image is mysteriously imprinted on the sindon. The second theory is that the Shroud of Turin is a cleverly constructed false relic that has been radio carbon dated to around 1300 A.D. and cannot therefore be Jesus’ burial cloth.

The strongest evidence for the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin as an image of a crucified man is twofold. First, it involves details of the image as some kind of imprint, no paint or brush marks have been found on the shroud. The ‘lines’ making up the image are approximately 1/100 the width of a human hair, making it virtually impossible for the Shroud to be a painting or a rubbing. Secondly, beginning around 1900, evidence of authenticity includes medical and pathological data that modern forensic analysis of the Shroud of Turin has revealed.

Positive evidence that the shroud image was an imprint occurred in 1898, with the advent of photography. Its inventor, Secondo Pia, while photographing the Shroud of Turin, was surprised to discover that the sepia image he had photographed was actually a negative image which he had unexpectedly converted into a positive image to show the face and body of a crucified man in much more detail than it had previously revealed.

Secondo Pia’s photograph revealed the image of a body slightly bent in rigor mortis and exhibiting foreshortening, a concept not portrayed by pre-Renaissance painters, another reason to rule out the possibility that the image was a painted forgery. To argue, therefore, that the relic must be a photographic fraud, would entail its forger be some kind of time-traveller, who acquired all the necessary advanced optical and chemical knowledge and ability to carry out the many processes needed to create such an image, which appears impossible. Consider also, there’s the problem of accessing the number of crucified victims he would have needed to create his forgery. Crucifixion had been abolished as a punishment in Rome in the fourth century A.D.

Added to the above, perhaps the strongest evidence that the Shroud of Turin is authentic is the medical and pathological data that has been revealed by modern scientific examination. Beginning around 1900 at the Sorbonne, a study was undertaken under the direction of Professor of Comparative Anatomy, Yves Delage, to investigate the physiology and pathology of the body imprint of the Shroud of Turin. The image was found to be anatomically convincing down to its most minor details.

A Paper by archaeologist William Meacham, provides a comprehensive account of medical studies on the Shroud of Turin since 1900 that agree with Delage. Hynek, 1936, Moedder, 1049, Barbet, 1963, Willis, in Wilson, 1978, Bucklin, 1970, to name a few, consider that features of rigor mortis, details of wounds and blood flow, indicate that the image on the shroud was formed by direct or indirect contact with a young male who died while in a position of suspension that suggested death by crucifixion.

Each type of wound on the cloth is viewed as characteristic and not easily faked. There are pre-crucifixion wounds all over the body with, approximately 60-120 lash marks, each about 3.7 cm long. There are also contusions on both knees, as from repeated falls. Superimposed on the shoulder are excoriated areas generally considered to be caused by friction from carrying the crossbar or from writhing on the cross.

The Crucifixion wounds are also convincing. A feature of the Shroud image is that nail wounds appear on the wrists and not the palm of the hand as traditionally portrayed in art. Barbet by experiments on cadavers showed that if nailed to the cross by the hands, the palm would fail to support the body weight and be torn from the cross. Barbet also noted that damage to the median nerve of the wrist would cause the thumb to retract into the palm so that only the four fingers would be visible, as can be seen on the Shroud image.

Blood flows from the wounds on wrists and feet correspond to the nature of the injury, ‘blood flow followed gravity in every instance.’ (Bucklin.) The blood flow from the wrists trails down the forearms at two angles, roughly 55 and 65 degrees from the axis of the arm. The blood stains accurately depict blood clots, showing a concentration of red corpuscles around the edge of the clot and tiny areas of serum inside.

Injuries thus far described are typical of any crucified victim but lacerations observed on the upper head and on the right side of the body are unusual. Around the upper scalp are at least thirty blood flows from spike punctures which exhibit the same realism as those of the wrists and feet. Between the fifth and sixth ribs on the right side of the ribcage is an oval puncture about 4.4 x 1.1 cm in area. Blood flowing from this wound and on to the lower back indicates a late flow when the body was moved to a horizontal position after death.

So convincing were these wounds and their association with the biblical accounts of the crucifixion that following the Sorbonne study, Yves Delage, an agnostic, declared them ‘a bundle of imposing probabilities,’ and concluded that the Shroud figure was indeed Christ.

In addition to the medical forensics suggesting the Shroud of Turin’s authenticity, details of its history outline its travels. Pollen samples on the shroud imply that it has been in Jerusalem, Turkey and France. The provenance of the Shroud of Turin, however, is less certain the further back in time we look. Its presence in Europe as one of the spoils of the Crusades, appears well documented. The Shroud was in the possession of knight templar Geoffrey de Charny who housed it in the Church de Liry where it remained until Margaret de Charny bequeathed it to the Italian Savoy family. In 1464 Lous1 of Savoy agreed to pay the Lirey canons an annual rent as compensation for their loss of Shroud revenues.

Prior to these recorded events the Shroud’s presence in Constantinople in the early 13th century is supported by the claim of a French soldier named Robert de Clari in 1203, that every Friday there was exhibited in the Church of St Mary de Blachernae, the cloth in which Christ was buried, and ‘his figure could be plainly seen there’. It is likely that this cloth and the Turin Shroud are the same, especially in view of the fact that these are the only known “Shrouds of Christ” with a body imprint.

Supporting Robert de Clari’s claim of a burial cloth depicting Christ’s image in Constantinople, is the appearance of The Hungarian Pray Codex, an illuminated manuscript of liturgical texts, prayers and illustrations named after Georgy Pray who catalogued it in the 18th century. Written in the Hungarian language and dated between 1192-1195, the Pray Codex includes one illustration that appears to reflect direct knowledge of the Shroud of Turin… there’s the nude body with crossed hands and thumbs missing on the hands, also the herring bone weave of the burial cloth and L- shaped burn holes on the cloth that appear on the Turin shroud.

So supporting Theory 1 that the Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial cloth of a crucified man, possibly Jesus of Nazareth, we are presented with a wide range of forensic data across disciplines.

Theory 2, however, is yet to be considered before we can (maybe) decide whether the Shroud of Turin is a genuine Christian relic or a remarkably clever fake…

For sceptics of the shroud’s authenticity there’s the problem of its early absence in the historical record. For more than a thousand years there was no documentation of the burial cloth with image which appeared in 1353 in France, under mysterious circumstances. Its exhibition in the Church of Liry was condemned by the resident bishop, Henri de Poitiers. In 1389, de Poitiers’ successor, Pierre d’Arcis, wrote to the Pope urging him to prohibit further exhibitions of the relic. He wrote that the shroud’s fraudulent nature had been discovered by de Poitiers who had said that an unnamed artist had confessed to painting the image. D’Arcis also considered the absence of historical reference suspicious, that it was ‘quite unlikely that the Holy Evangelists would have omitted to record an imprint on Christ’s burial linens, or that the fact should have remained hidden until the present time.’ (Quoted in Thurston 1903).

While this complaint by D’Arsis may have been motivated by local rivalry, there was some justification for suspicion of the display, the sale of fake Christian relics was a common corrupt practice during medieval times. Described in medieval literature, Chaucer’s Pardonner in ‘The Canterbury Tales’ boasts of how he enriches himself by selling religious relics to his credulous congregation.

Scepticism of the Shroud of Turin’s authenticity continued into the 20th century. A member of the Shroud of Turin Research Team (STURP) scientists, who examined the shroud in 1978, chemical microscopist Walter McCrone, a leading expert in forensic documents and works of art, contrary to the rest of the STURP team, asserted that the image was a painting, judging by microscopic identification of traces of iron oxide and a protein (i.e., possible pigment and binder) appearing in image areas of the shroud… What to make, then, of Secondo Pia’s photo image? Could a medieval artist visualise and accurately paint a negative image, 500 years before such a thing could possibly have been observed?

The strongest evidence for the forgery theory is the radio carbon dating that took place in 1988. Here’s the reference -‘Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin’ by P.E. Damon , D.J  Donahue et al, Reprinted from Nature, Vol.337, No 6208, 16/Feb. 1989.

A number of university laboratories and departments were involved in the Shroud  of Turn radio carbon dating, – The Department of Physics, University of Arizona, USA,- The Research Laboratory for Archaeology and History of Art, University of Oxford, UK.- Institut für Mittelenergiephysik, ETH-Hönggerberg, Zürich, Switzerland – Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, New York, USA. Also involved, The Research Laboratory, British Museum, London, UK.

Their Report includes the following:
‘A meeting was held in Turin in September-October 1986 at which seven radiocarbon laboratories (five AMS and two small gas-counter) recommended a protocol for dating the shroud. In October 1987, the offers from three AMS laboratories (Arizona, Oxford and Zurich) were selected by the Archbishop of Turin, Pontifical Custodian of the shroud, acting on instructions from the Holy See, owner of the shroud. At the same time, the British Museum was invited to help in the certification of the samples provided and in the statistical analysis of the results. The procedures for taking the samples and treating the results were discussed by representatives of the three chosen laboratories at a meeting at the British Museum in January 1988 and their recommendations were subsequently approved by the Archbishop of Turin.’

Working from small samples cut from the edge of the Shroud, and using different cleaning methods, the three laboratories subjected the cloth samples to carbon dating at their three separate locations. Below are their combined conclusions:

‘Very small samples from the Shroud of Turin have been dated by accelerator mass spectrometry in laboratories at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich. As Controls, three samples whose ages had been determined independently were also dated…

The results of radiocarbon measurements at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich yield a calibrated calendar age range with at least 95% confidence for the linen of the Shroud of Turin of AD 1260 – 1390 (rounded down/up to nearest 10 yr). These results therefore provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is mediaeval.’

http://theshroudofturin.blogspot.com/2014/12/it-is-totally-impossible-that-turin.html

That was not the end of the matter. One expert finding vying with another. The sample used in dating the shroud was taken from the bottom corner of the shroud, which was where it was held up for display, subject to damage and contamination. And as unlikely as it seems, says Raymond Rodgers, former member of the STURP team of scientists that examined the Shroud of Turin in 1978, the sample was taken from a rewoven patch of the shroud.

Rogers is one among a number of scientists that argue the sample is not typical of the main shroud. The presence of patching on the shroud doesn’t come as a surprise. It is known that the Shroud of Turin survived several damaging events, including a church fire in Chambery, France in 1532. It was then restored by nuns who patched burn holes and stitched the shroud to a reinforcing cloth now referred to as the Holland Cloth.

Most challenging of the expert claims for or against The Shroud of Turin’s authenticity is a claim presented by nuclear engineer, Robert Rucker, past member of the STURP project. In 2017 the STURP team found that the samples of the Dating Test were not homogenous, therefore not representative of the Shroud, so its dating should be rejected. The STURP team also discovered that the thin line- image encoded 3D information which you would not get in a photograph or in a painting. Rucker raises the third problem of blood in the image that dried on the skin after death Since dried blood does not absorb into cloth, how is the blood that would have dried on the body now on the cloth?

Says Rucker, the hypothesis of an extremely brief intense burst of radiation emitted in the body offers a possible explanation ‘because it is the only concept that is consistent with the evidence and can explain the three main mysteries of the Shroud—namely, image formation, carbon dating, and features of the blood.’ (Rucker 2020).

Rucker describes radiation pressure as a process by which radiation transfers momentum to an object and causes it to move. ‘If the radiation burst was sufficiently brief and sufficiently intense, it would thrust wet or dried blood off the body onto the cloth by a natural process called particle radiation.’ If the radiation emitted from the body that caused the images ‘also included neutrons, then a small fraction of these neutrons would be absorbed in the trace amount of nitrogen in the cloth to produce new C-14 in the fibers (Lind et al. 2010).This production of new C-14 would cause the carbon dating process to produce a more recent carbon date than the true date.’

https://www.asnt.org/standards-publications/blog/the-mysteries-of-the-shroud-of-turin

Two opposing theories, each supported by expert evidence, each requiring leaps of faith. The question of authenticity is unresolved, the mystery of the Shroud of Turin requires ongoing investigation… As Hamlet famously said to his friend: ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.’

Modre wol out!

Modre wol out, that se we day by day.
Modre is so wlatsom and abhomynable
To God that is so just and resonable,
That he ne wol nat suffre it heled be,
Though it abyde a yeer, or two, or thre.
Modre wol out, this is my conclusioun.

          So writes Geoffrey Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales’ Nun’s Priest’s Tale.

I think of these words by Chaucer in relation to the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah University in The United States.

Modre is so wlatsom and abhomynable…

This observation by Chaucer is the reverse of the inhuman attitude demonstrated by Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, twenty-two year old Tyler Robinson. Robinson’s family rifle was found near the crime scene. Messages ascribed on artillery shells and also written messages to Tyler Robinson’s trans lover, expressed his political motive, a personal objection to ‘hate’ speech in Charlie Kirk’s friendly university debates. Tyler Robinson was averse to views that were contrary to left-wing views expressed by himself and his cohort. He was not a believer in free speech, friendly or otherwise.

Like Mao and other twentieth century dictators, Robinson believed everyone should sing from the same hymn book or suffer the consequences. Taking another person’s life is justified if his sentiments don’t conform to yours’, even if that person’s aim was amicable debate and even if that person is against violence, is a loving husband and father – So what?

And so what if the law of the land has a democratic Constitution incorporating the Bible’s Fifth Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill? ‘ … So what, the law of the land proclaiming, as 1st Amendment, all citizen’s right to free speech? What callous insolence to think you have a god-like right to gainsay protection of the rights of others’, that you have life and death control over your fellow human beings!

For Christians, there’s a belief in the human soul, implied in the comic aphorism: ‘Only God has the right to kill his fellow man. ‘ For non-Christians, and anyone with an ounce of imagination, there is tragedy in the knowledge of someone’s life being cut short, those early childhood deaths, people struck down before three score years and ten, denied the chance to fully experience life, the good and the bad… Think of a long black screen image, and down the middle of the screen, like a door ajar, a thin thread of light. That-is-your-life! For millions of years before, on the left side of screen and, to the right of the thread of light, post your life, all is dark…Who has the right to deny someone else that brief thread of light?

Who has the right? Well, historically leaders of Church and State, while loudly proclaiming the loathsomeness of murder in the cathedral or mayhem in the city square, themselves have claimed the right to impose the death penalty on those they deemed heretics or dissenters. Church and State institutions evolved official forms of punishment, sentences combining death with extreme deterrence, such as burning at the stake, disembowelling or crucifixion, for acts they considered hostile to the peace of the realm.

Who has the right? Hominids from way back didn’t doubt they had the right to kill the stranger from another clan or maybe a rival from their own. Biologist Matt Ridley, in his book ‘The Rational Optimist’, observes that violence in prehistory was a fact of life. In a 14,000 year old cemetery discovered at Jebel Sahaba in Egypt, 24 of the 59 bodies unearthed had died as a result of unhealed spear, dart or arrow wounds. (M.R. p44.)

There is evidence of violent death also in the preserved remains of Otzi the Iceman discovered in an Austrian glacier and in Tollund Man found in a Danish peat bog.  Rousseau’s noble savage is a myth. Matt Ridley says that even today, two thirds of modern hunter gatherers, from the !Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic, have proved to be in a state of almost constant warfare.

Curious then, you may observe, when it is such a common event in human history, how we strongly disapprove of homicide, and as Chaucer claims, wol nat suffre it heled be.(heled means  hidden)… note how eagerly on media outlets we listen to or read that current murder case report before visiting the sports’ page or front page political news. A media discovery: If it bleeds it leads!

We’ve somewhat evolved from those predatory pack animals that preceded us, that solely relate to their own immediate group. While some animal hostility to outsiders still lurks in us, we have grown more tolerant of other tribes. We approve Immanuel Kant’s Moral Imperative, ‘Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.’ and we hope, like Chaucer, that acts of homicides will not go unpunished.

Though it abyde a yeer, or two, or thre,
Modre wol out…

And often it does. If not immediately or in a year or three, eventually, murder will out. Think of those cold cases that are solved much later, even fifty years later when the perpetrator is deceased or maybe 92 years old!. Such has been the case. Here are two Cold Cases of particularly savage serial homicides that were solved many years later.

First Cold Case: Joseph D’ Angelo,, known as the Golden State Killer terrorised California in the 1970’s 1980’s with a series of 50 rapes  escalating to 13 murders of his victims. Victims who survived reported how he brutally terrorised them over a period of hours and left them gagged and bound while he raided their kitchens for food or even cooked himself meals.

He began his public career as a policeman but was soon dismissed for burglary but on the surface lived a conventional life, marrying and raising a family. His daughter said that he was a good father. He was arrested 42 years after his criminal career by a Cold Case investigator that had worked on the case from its outset.

The investigators, with the rape kit of the Golden State killings turned to a genealogy website  called GEDmatch that allows people to submit their DNA samples to explore their family tree.  Unbeknown to D’Angelo, about 20 of his distant relatives had used the website. As they went through the D’Angelo family tree, investigators came across a man who perfectly matched the psychological profile of the Golden State Killer, a former policeman who had lived in every city where the rapes and murders had occurred.  Joseph D’Angelo was convicted with the ruling that he was never to be released.

Second Cold Case : The Cromwell Street murders in Gloucestershire, England, from1967 to 1987,were another Cold Case solved almost a decade after the murders. Fred West confessed to killing at least 12 women and girls, including his first wife and one of his daughters. DNA evidence played a crucial role in identifying the victims.  Other evidence revealed the almost unbelievable depravity and violence of the West household. Tests showed that Fred’s daughter, Heather West had been dismembered after suffering a fractured jaw and skull, indicating a violent assault.

The police used mitochondrial DNA analysis to compare the bones found at Cromwell Street with blood samples of the victims’ relatives. This method helped to confirm the identities of nine victims, including Heather West, Fred West’s daughter, and Charmaine West, murdered by her stepmother while Fred West was in prison on  a charge of unpaid debts. Rose West was convicted of 10 murders in November 1995 and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Fred West hanged himself in prison in January 1995, before his trial could begin.

Wolde that modre never heled be…

Despite our wish that modre wol out, on all of the seven continents of the globe, many Cold Case homicides remain unsolved. Six of these continents have substantial files packed with unresolved murders, and even the seventh continent, Antarctica, has a case from the year 2000, an unsolved poisoning at the Asmundsen Scott Pole Station.

Included in these unresolved Cold Case crimes, one of the oldest that of notorious serial killer, Jack the Ripper, who murdered and mutilated a number of prostitutes in the gloomy White Chapel district of London in 1888. Numerous suspects were considered to be Jack the Ripper, but even today when claims are made that he has been identified, no strong evidence supports these claims.

In the USA, the Zodiak killer, believed to have killed at least five people in California  between the years 1969 to 1970, remains at large. His murders were the subject of intense investigation and media coverage, particularly because of the killer’s taunting letters to newspapers and phone calls to police. His letters, typically began with the phrase, “this is the Zodiac speaking.” Included among the letters were four ciphers or cryptograms, the first of which was sent in three parts to three Bay Area newspapers in July 1969. Its message stated in part that, “I like killing people because it is so much fun.”

If so wlatsom, why so common?

Why do a significant number of human beings take the lives of their fellow men and women? Well we know what ethologist Konrad Lorenz has to say regarding our genetic past, in his book, ‘On Aggression.’ (1963. ) As with other animals we are opportunistic, and like many other pack animals we initially distrusted the stranger from another tribe.

We evolved cultural means of interacting with the stranger, however uneasily, whereas animals maintain strict boundaries. Think of animal signalling, the whistling, whooping, roaring territory claims of animals warning rival flocks or packs to stay away. Human cultures, those man – made webs of social life in which we live, composed of knowledge. beliefs, rituals, art, the myriads of human  responses to the natural world we inhabit, may have a civilizing effect on how we act.  But not always… think of the warlike culture of the Ute Indians on the North American plains,  described by Konrad Lorenz  (K.L. P 210.) Consider the Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela described by anthropologist Napoloeon Chagnon in his book: ‘Yanomamo: The Fierce People.’ (1968.)

Generally, over time culture  can be said to have had a civilizing effect on societies, as Matt Ridley argues in ‘The Rational Optimist.’ (2011. ) And this was brought about by our development of trade,… humans the only species to learn to cohabitate with the stranger by beginning to trade with other tribes.

David Hume the Scottish philosopher said this of trade:’ Nothing is more favourable to the rise of politeness and learning than a number of neighbouring and independent states, connected by commerce and policy.’ (M.R. p 103. ) And consider, regarding trade, there’s our human propensity to make something to trade, shell necklaces, baskets, fish hooks,  trade fostering our human ability to create.

After that no stopping us –  mud huts, aqueducts, cathedrals, sculptures.. steam engines, we prefer building icons rather than vandalising or engaging in homicide. How  many of your family members and friends prefer to tend their garden or busy themselves with a project, even play golf, rather than commit mayhem on the streets?

About those civilising influences, I can’t leave it here without mentioning the civilizing effect of the great tragedians in literature. A final quote from William Shakespeare  – how  much, I wonder, have his tragic dramas helped reveal us to ourselves, presented us with insights into the nature of criminal acts like the hubris and opportunism of Macbeth finally revealed to him as sees he can’t escape his crimes?

…I have lived long enough. My way of life
Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have — ( Act 5 Sc.)

In conclusioun…

For goodness sake, let us latch on to the affirmative,- trade, create, relate.
Embrace free speech, accept nothing less, …the musings of philosophy, Kant’s categorical imperative, the insights of the arts, – tragedy and comedy.

Know thyself, thy capacity to go either way, dark side or bright side.

William Kempff plays The Tempest.

Considering the Causes of War.

In his book, ‘The Causes of War,’ published in 1973, historian Geoffrey Blainey examines the often subjective assumptions that have been offered as reasons nations chose to go to war as an option to preferring peace. Professor Blainey surveys all the international wars fought since 1700 to identify many assumptions that have not been supported by events on the ground.

There’s the common assumption that war needs explaining whereas peace needs no explanation, peace is the normal state of affairs.

The Peace that Passeth Understanding.

Peace is the normal state of affairs? How then the fact that history shows nations spend as much time fighting as experiencing periods of peace? Sociologist Pitirim Sorokins, in the nineteen thirties, surveyed wars in European countries and discovered that Russia, for example, experienced only one peaceful quarter of a century in the previous thousand years. Other nations, like England and Spain, were scarcely more peaceful. England, since the time of William the Conqueror, was engaged in war fifty six years in every century and Spain experienced even more years of warfare.

Louis F. Richardson, a Quaker and crusader for peace and also a mathematician, was optimistic that a systematic study of war might uncover valuable clues as to the causes of war. Louis Richardson sorted and counted many wars and their likely causes in his book ‘The Mathematical Psychology of War,’ published in 1919. Some of his most useful observations were negative conclusions challenging popular ideas. For example, contrary to the enthusiasts who preached that a universal language or sharing the same religion, except perhaps Confucianism, would reduce misunderstandings between nations, he found no statistical evidence to support these assumptions.

One of Louis Richardson’s positive conclusions was the theory that after a severe bout of fighting a nation experienced war-weariness and a long period of peace was likely to follow, after which the immunity faded and the next generation was likely to enter war with enthusiasm. War-weariness was one of the most popular theories for explaining the long peace after Waterloo. Professor Arnold Toynbee saw the theory as a predominate pattern in the history of nations, century after century, though, as Professor Blainey observes, it is difficult to trace those cycles before 1800 and the onset of WW2 came at a time when, according to Toynbee’s theory, nations should have been enthusiastic for peace. As a force for peace, war-weariness has some currency but not if it is over exploited. Sometimes, when a nation is against armament production it may even encourage a rival nation to take advantage of the military- weaker nation.

Blainey also describes the theory of war-weariness as usually viewing a nation as ‘the personification of the individual: Germany was weary or France was exhausted, but the way in which men and women reacted to a long war varied from individual to individual and from war to war.’ (p8) Some spectators separate from the inconveniences of the fighting may enjoy the exploits on the battlefield they read about in newspapers, while farmers or manufacturers earning high profits from war may be less wearied by the war than by the peace that followed.

Another assumption that does not match the evidence is the Delinquent Theory of history, a theory implying that nations are like groups of youths who fight in the street when they are not kept too occupied for mischief. Inherent in the theory that nations involved in industrial growth and expansion are too busy to go to war is the assumption that nations have a fixed stock of energy which is alternately channeled into peaceful or war-like pursuits. Not so, says Blainey, ‘ the United States in the late 1960s could simultaneously land men on the Sea of Tranquility and the coast of Vietnam and have energy to spare for racial riots, industrial expansion and the ubiquitous sit-in and love-in. ‘ ( p11.)

In the collection of reasons given for what makes nations fight or choose peace, is the assumption that war ending with a moderate treaty is more likely to create a lasting peace than a harsh treaty. The harshness of the Treaty of Versailles which ended the first World War was said to have been a major cause for the outbreak of the Second World War. If that theory is valid then the same results should apply after World War 2 when equally harsh terms were imposed on Germany in 1945, but that did not happen.

Conversely, the eighteenth century experienced a series of mild peace treaties that did not lead to long periods of peace. For example the moderate peace treaty to end nine years of fighting in 1748, was followed six years later by the Seven Years War which involved almost half of Europe. Concerning the record of peace treaties Professor Blainey concludes that:

‘When a war ended with lenient terms it was usually because the victor was not strong enough to impose severe terms. Nevertheless the weight of evidence suggests that a severe treaty of peace prolongs peace: and there is a powerful reason why that should be so. A harsh treaty was mostly the outcome of a war which ended in a decisive victory … a decisive victory tends to promote a more enduring peace.’ (p17.)

All aboard the Spirit of Progress!

In the 1850’s there was a popular theory, the Manchester Theory, that claimed that people were becoming more civilized. Historian Henry Thomas Buckle, political leader William Gladstone and British monarch Prince Albert the Good, were enthusiastic prophets of the theory’s central belief that the international flow of trade and ideas fostered peace among nations.

Prince Albert was a sponsor of the Crystal Palace Great Exhibition that celebrated peace through commercial enterprise. The laying of the telegraph cable across the English Channel in the same period was viewed as a bringer of peace, the long peace that followed the Battle of Waterloo was considered by many to be the result of commercial exchange. Building international railways and canals were also supposed to bring nations closer together.

The theory became dogma in the peaceful decades following Waterloo despite abundant warnings that the Manchester Theory was not infallible. The very instruments of peace, railways, steamships, the Suez Canal, were subject to rivalries for their control. Without the Trans-Siberian Railway, it is doubtful that there would have been a Russo-Japanese War in 1904. But the faith in human progress was not easily shaken. In 1911 Sir Thomas Barkley, in a widely read publication confidently declared that the free flow of communications were the clarions of peace! Three years later World War 1 broke out.

Despite the shock of World War 1 the Manchester creed survived two twentieth century World Wars. It pervaded much of the criticism of the Vietnam War. It is visible in the school of thought that expected quite different results from fostering friendly contacts with Russia and China. It pervades a host of ventures ranging from the Olympic Games to international tourism and peace ventures.

It is difficult to find evidence that close contacts between nations promoted peace. Blainey observes that many of the changes that were heralded as causes of peace in the 19th century were probably more the effects of peace. Most wars during the last three centuries were between neighbouring countries, not countries which are far apart.

Even the strain of idealism that sees human nature as fundamentally good and actions
of deterrence as increasingly unnecessary between nations, is not a cause of peace in our time. It fails to recognize the long history of national strength as a more reliable deterrent to war than decisions to forgo measures of self protection. Regarding all the above theories Blainey suggests, only the war-weariness theory, to some extent, can be shown to have merit as an explanation of some periods of peace in a history of national rivalry.

To Fight or Not to Fight? That is the Question.

Persistent patterns of why countries go to war or choose not to fight remain elusive. One concealed clue to an understanding of war is the optimism of most decision makers on the eve of the outbreak of hostilities. Before the outbreak of the First World War the German leader, Colonel-General Moltke privately considered France would be defeated in less than six weeks, while French generals were predicting that their soldiers would be across the Rhine in the same amount of time. In London Winston Churchill, first lord of the admiralty, thought the weight of evidence pointed to a short but terrible war. German, French and English leaders each considered the advantages in battle lay with their own side. The war would be short because they had decisive superiority. In 1962 Barbara Tuckman wrote a history of the First World War, The Guns of August, which documented the false optimism and aggressive day-dreaming expressed in Europe in the summer of 1914.

The optimism on the eve of the First World War belonged to a long and unnoticed tradition. Blainey cites wars from the 18th century, like the European war against Sweden in 1700, or the rebellion of the English colonies in 1775, where similar optimism and expectation for a quick victory were revealed. The longest War fought in Europe during the last three centuries, the Franco-Austrian War, was begun in 1792 with supreme confidence on both sides that it would be a short war. The Crimean War and Boer War in the 19th century were also expected to be short. ‘This recurring optimism,’ Blainey concludes, ‘is a vital prelude to war. Anything which increases that optimism is a cause of war. Anything which dampens that optimism is a cause of peace.’ (p 53)

Every decision to wage war is also influenced by predictions of how outside nations will react to the decision. Will another nation support or jeopardise a nation’s prospect of victory or take advantage of two nations’ fighting? Blainey uses an analogy of two waterbirds fighting while an opportunist third waterbird snatches the fish away.

He cites many examples of wars in which the beginnings (and endings) of wars were influenced by hopes or fears that outsiders would intervene. When Poland went to war with Germany in 1939, Poland believed that it would receive crucial aid from Britain and France. Hitler, on the contrary, thought Poland would not receive such aid. In the Suez War and Hungarian uprising in 1956, expectations of how other nations would react, were crucial considerations, both at the beginning and the end of hostilities.

Opportunism is usually detected in the intentions of national leaders but is often overlooked in the outbreak of peace. The oversight is likely due to a popular vision that nations respect each others’ rights and territories. Professor Blainey concludes that:

‘The brotherhood of nations tends to be hierarchical and opportunistic. Peace depends
directly or indirectly on military power. While we observe military power when it dramatically breaks the peace, we tend to ignore it when it ends a war or preserves the peace. We thus conceal from ourselves the close relation between the causes of peace and the causes of war.’ (p67)

Here’s opportunism – in what Blainey calls the ‘Death Watch‘ wars, wars that were common in the 18th century. These were wars where the death of a king and succession of a new, inexperienced ruler, judged to be too weak to resist plundering, heralded an opportunity for other nations to take advantage of their perceived weakness. Four such wars were the War of Spanish Succession and other wars so named, the War of Polish Succession and Wars of Austrian and Bulgarian Succession.

Another theory of opportunism, the Scapegoat Theory of war was less convincing as a reasoned account of how decision makers act. The Scapegoat Theory describes war in a nation experiencing social unrest as a crusade to rally the divided nation. Comments by decision makers of nations considering war shows the opposite reasoning. Regarding social unrest in France under his regime, Napoleon told the Foreign Minister that war and its accompanying taxes would endanger, rather than strengthen a dynasty. Similarly, on the eve of the First World War, Germany’s leading General, General von Moltke and Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, expressed the view that going to war requires the full cooperation of the people.

The question of choosing war over peace requires multiple considerations but the Scapegoat Theory fails as a cause of war. So does the Theory of Economic Need as a reason to fight. Professor Blainey argues that it was almost an axiom in the letters of kings, ministers and diplomats in the centuries between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War that lack of finance was a strong deterrent for war. The reason for the high indemnities frequently imposed on defeated nations were also a way to keep those nations weak in the decades following a war.

Contrary to the Theory of Economic Need as a reason to wage war, economist Alex Macfie, writing in 1937, observed the opposite pattern in twelve international wars from 1850 on. Macfie observed that those wars tended to break out during an upswing in the trade cycle when the economic mood was bumptious. In that same year that Hitler took over the German Ministry of War, Macfie predicted that 1940 could be such a year of significant confidence, a prediction that scarcely anyone seemed to notice. Macfie’s forgotten observation, Blainey observes, may help to explain the optimism with which wars were begun.

Optimism appears to be an impetus to the decision whether to fight or not to fight, and then, there’s that important impetus, a desire for power, as a crucial explanation of causes of war and peace.

The Balance of Power in War and Peace.

The Prussian soldier and analyst Carl von Clauswitz in the early 19th century believed that a clear ladder of international power tended to promote peace, that a dominant power can preserve the peace simply by its ability to keep weaker nations in order. His view was more accepted by the military than by the larger community. Most observers believed otherwise, that a nation that is too powerful endangers the peace.

Geoffrey Blainey is unable to find any historian or social scientist that produced evidence supporting the claim that a dominant power may be counter-balanced by opposing powers. Of the general wars fought in Europe in the last three centuries, the Napoleonic War, the Franco Prussian War and two World Wars, the latter days of the wars and early years of the following outbreak of peace marked the height of the unbalance of power in Europe. As Blainey concludes: The end of a war produces a neat ledger of power which has been duly audited and signed.’ (p113)

In essence it is not the actual distribution of power that makes nations wage war but the conflicting ways nations think that power is distributed. War is a dispute about the measurement of power that is no longer disputed at the end of a war.

Some Myths of War.

The high hopes that are apparent on the eve of war only occur when rivals believe that they are able to achieve more through war than peace. In the mists of war herewith some myths of war conflicting with the above opportunism.

There’s the mythic view expressed by many historians that some wars are unintentional.

One of the tenets of accidental war is the belief that an armaments race is likely to culminate in yet another round of hostility. But Blainey argues that in fact many of the warships and rifles produced between 1870 and 1914 were never used in wars but acted as a deterrence to war. He concludes that: international relations have been marked by threats for centuries; effective threats were a vital characteristic of long periods of peace.

In the 1960s a group of political scientists at Stanford University thought that some wars, such as World War 1, were accidental. The Stanford researchers claimed to have discovered, perusing the letters of European leaders in the mid – summer of 2014, that leaders all felt that they were facing hostile rivals while they themselves were friendly and not militarily prepared for war. Nations drifted into a war as a result of the misconceptions of the rival parties.

The researchers’ belief that the great War was an unintentional war is contradicted by Fritz Fischer’s massive book, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1961), which documents the evidence that most German leaders were confident of their ability not only to win a war but to win quickly. Then there’s the optimism recorded in Europe on the eve of World War 1 by Barbara Tuckman in The Guns of August.

While the assumption of accidental war has become widely accepted by political scientists, it is rarely illustrated by convincing example in the historical record of war and peace.

Another mythic perception is the conviction that the ambitions of particular culprits are the main cause of war. In the 18th century the ambition of monarchs was the principal cause. Later mercantilism or manufacturers of armaments, all these theories identified a particular culprit for beginning hostilities. By controlling the villains in a situation, whether dictators, capitalists, militarists or manufacturers, peace could be preserved.

The assumption that ambitions and motives are the dominant cause of war depends less on evidence than on preconceptions in the framework of which they are formed. Century after century the aims of decision makers can’t be ‘packaged into a simple religious, economic or political formula,’ argues Blainey, those who decided to wage war pursue a variety of aims which are likely to fluctuate and alter over the course of a war. These aims are essentially varieties of power. Whether to resolve an issue by peaceful or warlike methods is largely determined by assessments of relative power.

Aims require means of pursuing those aims, you can’t have one without the other, a cart without a horse. It is unrealistic to accept any explanation of war which concentrates on ambitions but ignores the means of carrying out those ambitions, the question of the power to do so. For example, in his book The Origins of the 2nd World War, A.J.P. Taylor reveals Hitler as an alert opportunist who tempered his political objectives to his available means of achieving them.’ (p151) Hitler would not have rearmed Germany if he believed that France and Russia would try to prevent him from doing so. ‘His bargaining position marched neatly in step with his oscillating sense of Germany’s strength.’ (p157)

Similarly in World War 1, in Lenin’s writings he assesses Russia’s means to proceed with a revolutionary war when the prospect of victory was frail, when Russian soldiers were exhausted and military horses unfit to drag the artillery. Lenin’s realist assessment of the means of carrying out his aims is scarcely remarked on today, whereas his celebrated interpretation of the causes of the First World War as motivated by economic appetite and the quest for scapegoats, are remembered and widely endorsed.

Beside the myths of unintentional war or conversely specific ambition as causing war is the belief that nations declare war before fighting, a facade of playing by rules of the game.

When Japan attacked America’s fleet at Pearl Harbour this was regarded as an act of unprecedented aggression but it was not the case. Behind the facade of fair play all wars in many ways involve seeking advantage and many undeclared wars were also responses to earlier hostile acts by a rival nation. When Japan attacked Russia in 1904 it was partly a response to Russian ships and troops being despatched to eastern Asia. When the US attacked Britain in 1812 it was in response to British attacks on US merchant ships. In the 19th century, when John Frederick Maurice of the British War Office made a study of past wars in the confident belief that he would find few wars that began without declaration of war, he found forty seven wars that were undeclared in the 18th century and less than ten wars since 1700 that had been preceded by declarations of war.

Professor Blainey observes that opportunism pervades every phase of the sequence of war and peace. Surprise attacks giving an advantage to the attacker will be a common tactic in warfare, despite observers of war clinging to the myth that Pearl Harbor was a breach of the Queensberry Rules of War.

……………………..

A couple of conclusions a serf draws from Professor Blainey’s book, The Causes of War.

The first conclusion is that a study of history, as patterns of the behaviour of competing human groups throughout time, shows how ready we are to go to war. In our human history periods of war prevail over periods of peace. It is not varieties of war that need to be explained so much as the need to explain those intermittent long periods of peace, like the Congress of Vienna, that sometimes take place.

The basic impulse of war itself, according to Blainey’s studies of the outbreak of hostilities, comes not just from the opportunism displayed by all living things, but is heightened by a mood of optimism and the innate aggression and tribalism that makes humanity a war like species … think of that fight scene at the waterhole in the beginning of Kubrick’s film 2001 A Space Odyssey. A sobering thought – is the urge to fight inherent in our genes? If so, how do we explain long periods of peace like the period following the Congress of Vienna? These could be the periods of history that we most benefit from studying.

The second conclusion a serf draws from reading The Causes of War is how incorrect are so many theories of war, for example The Manchester and Delinquent Theories, that are confidently held by theorists and seldom critically scrutinized by them.

What is going on? We know our false confidence is not because we are incapable of rational behaviour. Humans created the scientific methodology of conjecture and refutation, guess and test, and humans have been applying trial and error in engineering tasks from way-back. Long before the Scientific Revolution, tool makers, the inventors of the plough, employed trial and error in discovery as did engineers, bridge builders, cathedral constructors and chemists also, acting in situations where feedback was clear and often immediate.

In the social sciences, however, cause and effect are less immediate and open to a variety of explanations which seem not to require stringent testing. Perhaps this may be because we allow what Karl Popper calls our ‘horizon of expectations’ to constrain our enquiry.

Philosopher of Science, Karl Popper in ‘Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach’ recognised that there is no such thing as the innocent eye. ‘At every instant of our pre-scientific or scientific development we are living in the centre of ‘a horizon of expectations,’ whether subconscious or conscious, or perhaps even explicitly stated in some language. Our conjectures can’t be objective but our tests or refutation can be.

Popper argues, the horizon of expectations plays the part of a frame of reference conferring meaning or significance on our experiences our actions and our observations. The observations we make have a peculiar function within this frame. If they clash with our expectations, they may, under certain circumstances, destroy the frame itself and force us to rebuild a whole horizon of expectation.

And there is a problem regarding testing that Daniel Kahneman identifies in his book about human cognitive illusions, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow.’ Daniel Kahneman is a psychologist who turned psychology into a quantitative investigation. He argues the existence in our brains of two independent systems for organizing knowledge, one he labels System One, a quick thinking, fight or flight survival mechanism which probably evolved with our mammalian ancestors. System Two is the slow process of forming judgements based on conscious thinking that checks the actions of System One and allows us to correct our mistakes. Human arts and science have been created by System Two.

Bottom line is that Kahneman concludes we are machines for jumping to conclusions. For System One, the measure of success is coherence of a story, it’s consistency that matters most, not completeness of evidence… ‘what you see is all that there is.’ And the bad news is, as Kahneman first discovered, working with Israeli Defence Forces in the 1950’s, that your System Two thinkers are also prone to similar thinking errors and heuristics, more rationalising than rational, justifying rather than testing assumptions.

So … considering the above seemingly intractable problems of human behaviour, can nothing be done to change the imbalance between periods of war and peace? Well probably not much, but say, isn’t knowledge preferable to ignorance? And as an ancient sage once told us, it’s well to know thyself.

What (who) are we? Do we have a measure of freewill or is all determined? Our genetic inheritance is our hardware that may be modified, sometimes, by our cultural experience or software. Human history has shown that in some circumstances, we do excel at solving problems … Regarding those problems of war and peace, just let us not be too optimistic.

Consider the Lobster…

When considering the lobster, as one is want to do, an investigator is immediately presented with two choices of observation, a narrow or confined choice or a generalized, more discursive choice, – you may be surprised to learn that I shall take the more discursive option. So herewith, discursively, I begin with the voyage into the South Pacific of Captain Cook and the naturalist, Sir Joseph Banks, in 1769.

The Great Chain of Being.

When James Cook and Joseph Banks sailed out of Plymouth Harbour on the 26th of August, 1769, their instruction from the promoter of the enterprise, the Royal Society, was to observe an astronomical event, the transit of Venus across the face of the sun, and afterwards to seek and explore the southern continent that lay in those latitudes. Arriving at this southern continent, Cook was instructed, among other things, ‘carefully to observe the Nature of the soil and the products thereof, the Beasts and the Fowls that inhabit or frequent it.’

In addition to Cook’s orders, it was widely assumed that the expedition would help complete the picture of the universe as a vast, ordered chain of Being, a theory derived from Plato and Aristotle and still in vogue in the 18th century. This chain of Being was believed to be composed of a great number of hierarchical links from basic elements to plants, animal life and humans, all depending upon a platonic sense of permanence and inviolability of species, here expressed by Carl Linnaeus, the most influential naturalist of the 18th century:

‘If we consider the generation of Animals, we find that each produces an off-spring after its own kind… and that from each proceeds a germ of the same nature with its own parent; so that all living things, plants, animals, and even mankind themselves form one ‘ chain of universal Being,’ from the beginning to the end of the world; in this sense truly may we say that there is nothing new under the sun.’
(Cited in Bernard Smith. European Vision and The South Pacific. p167.)

Of course, assumptions, as is so often the case, went astray. Surprising, really, that Aristotle’s theory of the universe as a structured system with a fixed place for everything, where each level is dependent on the level above it, had remained popular for so long. From Aristotle to the West’s embrace of Christianity, the immutability of species remained the accepted cosmic theory for more than two thousand years.

Observe this 16th century drawing of the chain of Being…

The drawing depicts a hierarchical model of a progressive system. Does this not denote a dynamic process taking place? Animals viewed as on a higher level than others don’t get there without some development and development entails change. Consider the lobster, how did it develop those giant claws – nothing on the level below it had such hand-like appendages – one adapted for pinching, one for crushing its food? But according to the chain of Being theory, all of these levels of life came into being instantaneously and in a ready-made state of perfection. Even Linnaeus’ taxonomy system that classified living things by kingdom, phylum, down to genus and species, emphasised the separateness of species.

Not until the 18th century was this theory of immutable species questioned, famously by Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin. Erasmus Darwin was influenced by the thoughts of French naturalist Jean-Baptist Lamarck and by the Scottish jurist Lord Monboddo, (apparently as eccentric as his name implies,) who seem to have been the earliest people to think about species’ change.

And only after naturalist Joseph Banks had seen those animals of the Antipodes, the marsupial kangaroo and koala, and come across that egg-laying monotreme, the platypus, and after Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands and then journeyed to the southern continent on his momentous voyage a few decades later, were changes underway to a the theory of the cosmos that had held sway for so long.

So why had this questioning not taken place earlier? Maybe consider the nature of the theory of the chain of Being and also the nature of human beings reacting to that theory.

Regarding the theory itself, the theory involved a divine Creator and you don’t challenge a divine Creator in a hurry. Recall Copernicus and Galileo proposing the Heliocentric theory with Earth now removed from its place at the centre of the universe. That didn’t make them popular with religious thinkers at the time. Next consider that the theory emphasised stability and order. We humans like certainty, it makes us feel that we have some control over events, are able to predict that the sun will rise tomorrow. Who doesn’t like a theory that gives us stability?

Then there’s the matter of our human reaction to the theory. Consider that by nature human beings are tribal, and being tribal we don’t like to go against the tribal point of view, inconformity can be an uncomfortable experience for a human being.

All or any of the above considerations could make conformity the preferred option, but not necessarily so, they being in the way of untested generalisations.

All that earlier exploration in the Northern Hemisphere, coming across your first Indian Elephant, or off the coast of America seeing that leviathan, the Blue Whale, seems not to have invited much questioning, though Hamlet telling Horatio that more things exist than are found in his philosophy, may have been thinking of the lobster.

Consider some features of this bizarre creature.

Lobster Oddity.

Look at the eyes of the lobster, compound eyes not set in its head as any self- respecting mammal knows is the most sensible arrangement, but set on stalks, eyes that revolve like planets in space. And the teeth, where teeth but in the mouth? Not in your lobster, forsooth, the lobster’s teeth are in its stomach, the first of its three stomachs, a most strange method of mastication.

The oddities continue, – the lobster’s skeleton, worn on the outside, is shed many times through its life as it outgrows one skeleton and grows another. Similarly with its ten legs, lose a leg along the way, it will regenerate., your lobster is something of a Lazurus. The lobster does not age, it simply grows bigger. If it wasn’t exhausted by its skeleton shedding process which becomes an endurance test as the lobster gets larger and fails to shed its latest skeleton, or if it was not eaten by its predators, the lobster could live on and on.

Then there’s lobster behaviour. Studies show that when introduced into a community, they behave as a social hierarchy (there’s that word again,) and in the mating season the higher status male gets to mate with the most females, just like the chimpanzees do in chimp hierarchies. How the lobsters decide which lobster has the highest status is still a matter of conjecture, but it looks like lobsters recognise each other. How they communicate is uncertain, they being silent animals and mostly solitary. Much to think on, Horatio.

So what lesson may be learned from studying the lobster? Maybe that what is strange in one part of the world, in northern or southern hemisphere, may be dulled by abundance. – Here’s a cautionary tale.

A Lobster Tale.

In New England when a North American tribe shared a meal with the Pilgrims in 1621, that first thanksgiving meal was lobster. Lobsters were remarkably plentiful on the shores of New England, observed Captain John Smith. ‘You can scarcely find any bay or shallow …where you might not take many clams or lobsters at your pleasure and in many places load your boat if you please.’

But many colonists preferred to dine on cod or eels and not lobster. An English colonist in the 1630’s commented that ‘plenty makes them little esteemed and seldom eaten.’

Lobster was eaten mainly by servants and prisoners in goals who sometimes protested for being given so many meals of lobster. Lobster was also fed to pets. Change of the view that lobster was only fit for the poor to eat did not happen until lobsters became scarce and then it became an expensive delicacy. The more common, the less valued.

Despite the above, I’m pleased to say that literature and music still celebrate the lobster’s oddity by appropriately strange renderings of the theme. Lewis Carroll in his Wonderland universe inviting us to join in that strange dance The Lobster Quadrille, ‘will you or will you not?’

The Lobster Quadrille.

‘Will you walk a little faster?’ said a whiting to the snail, /’There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s trading on my tail. /See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance! / They are waiting on the shingle, – will you come and join the dance? /Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance? /Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?’

‘You can really have no notion how delightful it will be/ When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters out to sea.’/ But the snail replied, ‘Too far, too far!’ and gave a look askance – / Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance, / Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.? / Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join the dance.

‘What matters it how far we go? his scaly friend replied./ There is another shore, you know, upon the other side, / The further off from England the nearer is to France- / Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance./ Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance? / Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?

Strange creatures invite a strange performance. Here in the late 1970’s a performance of their song ‘Rock Lobster,’ by the Band, B52, the lead singer dressed for the hunt in pith helmet and jodphurs, more Lawrence of Arabia costume than attire for hunting the lobster.

Rock Lobster.

And listen to that fast tempo, da da da da dadada da, doesn’t at all reflect the lobster’s somewhat static existence, hiding in crevices, but at least, like the lobster, it has a bizarre quality. Compare it to this music in Saint-Saens Carnival of Animals where rhythm and silvery sound just make you think of fish swimming in rippling water.

And how might we conclude a discursive account of the lobster without a celebration of its culinary delights? So here a famous lobster recipe…

Lobster Thermidor.

On January 1891, Victorien Sardou’s controversial play “Thermidor,” about the French Revolution, had its debut in Paris. In celebration of the inaugural performance, chef Léopold Étienne Mourier created a lobster dish, naming it after the play and presenting it to the actors and stage workers at his restaurant, Chez Marie.

The play only lasted for three nights because it criticized the French Revolutionary figure, Robespierre, but Lobster Thermidor had already made its mark, with other chefs like Auguste Escoffier taking note; he included a recipe for the dish in one of his own cookbooks, published in 1903.

By the turn of the 20th century, Lobster Thermidor had been introduced to America, particularly to New York high life. The Hotel Knickerbocker featured the dish on their menu in 1907 and soon the Waldorf Astoria and Delmonico’s were serving Lobster Thermidor as well. Interestingly enough, the latter created a similar entrée called Lobster Newberg in 1876, which is still served at the restaurant today.

………….

And so endeth this tale of the lobster but I will leave you with this thought –
‘Still so much to ponder
regarding the lobster.’

Who’s your favourite hero?

Asking you a couple of questions. Here’s the first question: ‘Who’s your favourite hero? ‘ Second question as a follow up: ‘ Should we expect some consensus among us agreeing on a top – ten pantheon of heroes?

Regarding a pantheon of heroes, well, given human cussedness on other issues of worldly concern, things religious or political for example, it appears unlikely. But prior to all that, let us set out on a quest to discover whether we can agree on what we mean when we call someone ‘a hero.’

There’s the Oxford Dictionary definition of the word ‘hero’. It’s the Oxford dictionary so that carries a lot of weight. The Oxford Dictionary describes a hero as ‘a person who is admired for their courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities.’ (My italics.)

Ask around, making sure you don’t confine your questioning to one specific tribal group. Think you’ll find general agreement on the first two attributes, ‘courage and distinguished action.’ The timid and hesitant hero is a Walter Mitty / Danny Kaye kind of parody of heroism.

But what about that final attribute, ‘or noble qualities?’ I have issues with that. First I’ll take up arms regarding the ‘or’ word, suggesting that a choice may be made between one or both of the first two attributes and a third attribute. A resolute no to that. No matter how noble the quality, it cannot transform a man into a hero if he is a shrinking violet and incapable of a daring action such as rescuing an imprisoned damsel or attempting to bring home the golden fleece. There is always a quest involved.

And regarding heroes’ noble qualities, hmm, between you and me, some of those heroes in life and literature were not always what you’d call upright role models for the next generation, they had their flaws… let’s just leave it at that.

Nevertheless I’ll hazard a guess that we’d agree on two out of three of the Oxford Dictionary definitions, which is not bad!

And now let ‘s see what Joseph Campbell, famous author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a study of the archetypal hero, has to say about the hero’s journey in mythology.

The hero’s journey…

Joseph Campbell identifies three stages in the hero’s journey, the setting out, encountering the unfamiliar and undergoing tests, then finally a return to the familiar bringing some boon that restores harmony to that world:

A hero journeys forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men. (P 23)

Joseph Campbell regards this as a mono-myth present in all the cultures he has studied. The details may vary, for example, the hero may set out from a castle or from a shepherd’s hut, his going may be voluntary or connived by someone hostile to the hero, the journey may involve many different places and tests and be assisted or hampered by powerful entities. The hero’s return, similarly, may be blessed by approving forces or he may be pursued by vengeful ones. Then there’s that boon he brings, possibly a tangible one, possibly some enlightenment to the world. Despite the variations on a theme, Joseph Campbell tells us that east and west, we essentially share the same mythic cycle.

But when it comes to choosing who is your favourite hero, expect no consensus. First there is the East/West divide where, on cultural grounds, never the twain shall meet. Even in the rating of literary endeavour, Harold Bloom limited his pantheon of greats to a Western Canon in which we can agree on just a few stand – outs, maybe three or so, like Homer, Shakespeare and Dante. The other seven in a top ten, we find we can’t unanimously agree on.

Likewise in choosing a pantheon of heroes, whether in fiction or real life. Fictionally some will make their choice from the Greek heroes, Perseus, say, or Theseus, others from Norse heroes, yet others will go for Hollywood heroes like Robin Hood or Clint Eastwood. The field of choice is so wide. In real life too, many categories, not just heroes on the battlefield, there are a plethora of categories …

On Being a Contender.

When it comes to who could be a contender in a pantheon of heroes, we’re presented with choices galore. Your hero may be drawn not only from the battlefield, whether land, sea or air action, but from other fields of endeavour as well…

There’s the field of geographic exploration, again either by land, sea or air. There are the fields of scientific or medical endeavour, think about those! Additionally, there are those heroes in the field of engineering and heroes in the field of social reform. Additionally, heroes may be selected regarding artistic endeavour or sporting achievement. Say, consider the variety of activities in the sporting field, our tribal attachment to an achiever in any one of the following – track and field, leaping and swimming, a large number of ball games comprising individual or team effort, cycling, where to start!

Choices, choices…

Taking a cursory look at the heroes jostling for pre-eminence on the battle field, solely from a British point of view (consider who this excludes,) there’s Sir Francis Drake vanquishing the mighty Spanish Armada that set out to conquer the Tudor England of good Queen Bess. There is Admiral Horatio Nelson a couple of centuries later, ‘going straight at ’em’ in the Napoleonic Wars, or The Duke of Wellington conquering Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo, hence the popular phrase ‘to meet your Waterloo.’

In the category of geographic explorers, a long trail going back to explorers like Marco Pole visiting the inscrutable East, well inscrutable to us but not to them, or we can make a selection from figures like Magellan or Scott of the Antarctic or maybe a modern day astronaut, the choices seem almost endless.

In the research category, aside from those unknown heroes like the developer of the plough, you might opt for Isaac Newton, discoverer of gravity, or Darwin proposing the evolution of species, or Louis Pasteur, first discoverer of germ theory. You could opt for one of my favourite heroes, Norman Borlaug, son of a poor farmer in America’s dust bowl territory, Borlaug developed a prolific rust-proof species of wheat that potentially saved millions of people in India from dying of starvation.

More heroes! In the field of engineering, consider those famous bridge builders Thomas Telford and Isimbard Kingdom Brunel – lovely name for a hero. Isimbard Kingdom Brunel not only built bridges but railways and steam ships as well, he was a prodigious creator!

And among those social reformers numerous fields to focus on, slavery for example, or children employed as chimney sweeps, or factory conditions in the 19th century. A reformer of note was David Livingstone. His history exemplifies the hero’s journey though he didn’t quite make the return. Dr David Livingstone earned his qualifications while working in a Woollen Factory. He learned Latin from a test book propped up at his loom, studying as he worked. His motivation was not so much to spread Christianity in Africa as to rescue Africans from the scourge of slavery, an interesting hero.

On to heroic endeavour in the artistic field, hard to go past Michelangelo, creator of that famous statue of David, and also painter of the visionary ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Not easy painting your grand masterpiece lying on a piece of scaffolding more than sixty feet above the ground, a challenging task that took four years.

And in that sporting hall of achievement, just sample the variety that that offers! Some choices here – maybe from the hundred metres sprint choose Eric Liddel of Chariots of Fire fame, or Australian female sprinter Marjorie Jackson, the Lithgow Flash. And what about great marathon runner Haile Gebrselassie, or swimming hero Michael Phelps? Then in cricket there is Don Bradman… or Babe Ruth in baseball… or Eddy Merckz in cycling, go le tour!

Perhaps choose from male and female tennis greats like Djokovic Novak and Serena Williams. But when you come to the team games of soccer, rugby or football, here are too many teams and one-eyed supporters to know where to begin…

And there’s another category as well as team games that might give trouble, let’s call it the category of unconventional heroes.

An Heroic Oddity.

There are a couple of characters in literature that might not immediately appear to be heroes. Take Cervantes’ gentle knight for example. Don Quixote’s setting out on the hero’s journey could not have been less propitious. The Don’s hold on the world is not overly realistic. His head turned from reading too many romance novels, he decides to become a knightly hero, choosing his steed, a very aged horse. His choice of enemy combatant, as you know, was also noticeably at fault.

But look what took place in Cervantes complex novel… The Don performed his knightly deeds with courage and grace and suffered the bullying of the vulgar populace with fortitude. In the end, strangely, this unlikely hero became the very model of a chivalrous errant knight.

Then for another unlikely hero, consider Mark Twain’s homeless waif, Huckleberry Finn. Huck Finn lives off the land to avoid beatings from his violent father. Uneducated and too ignorant to understand what’s wrong with his world, Huck Finn believes that his own defiance of that society’s mores will earn him damnation, he struggles with his conscience when he reads a handbill advertising the runaway slave, Jim, who is Huck’s companion on his journey down the Mississippi River. The remorseful Huck initially decides to renounce Jim…

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing… and then I happened to look around and see that paper, it was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was just a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then I says to myself:

‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’ – and tore up the paper. (CH 31)

This was an age that believed in Hell. Huckleberry Finn, however much he appeared unlikely to fit the definition, was clearly a hero when he risked his mortal soul to protect a friend.

And there’s a real life hero, the philosopher Socrates, who doesn’t immediately present as such, though the Oracle of Delphi declared him the wisest of men.

Socrates, a favourite hero of mine, was not, as you’d expect in a pantheon of heroes, a physically attractive hero. He was coarse featured, had bulbous eyes, and was noticeably corpulent. He was also untidy and usually unwashed, so no god-like Thesius or Perseus comparison can be made by Socrates’ admirers. Socially, too, he was unconventional. At some inconvenient time or place, Socrates would fall into a trance-like stillness, often for hours at a time. This was not an actual trance, he was probably deep in thought, deeper thought than the Athenian plebs were likely to experience, but still, somewhat awkward when you are en route somewhere…

But despite the above, Socrates was a hero, teaching and encouraging critical thought, even to slaves, and acting as a gad-fly to the Athenian democracy. Socrates even chose to die for the Demos when, charged with impiety and ordered to drink hemlock, he complied after making his defence, refusing to escape as he could have done, and instead, giving up his life to uphold his principles…

………………………………

And so, ultimately, what should our reaction be to Socrates and those other heroes mentioned above? There’s the Karl Popper warning in his Open Society and its Enemies not to put all our faith in following the great man in history, for great men have been known to make a great many mistakes… and there’s Ayn Rand demonstrating in Atlas Shrugged that we need to value the boons that heroes provide and respect the heroic journey – or heroes may withdraw their services.

How to respond to the hero? Socrates himself would probably advise a non-dogmatic approach, Neither a worshipper nor a detractor be – and in the spirit of Socrates I will just suggest, be thankful for what you receive but don’t go overboard.

Ending the hero’s journey with a selection of hero music…

Richard Wagner. The Ride of the Valkyries.

Verdi. Grand March from Aida.

David Bowie. Space Oddity.

David Bowie. We can be heroes, just for one day.

Pied a Terre to Everywhere.

Laetoli fossil footprint.

A little pre-history of the making of mankind … from hominoid to hominid.

Across Africa and then out of Africa, those feet were made for walking…trek, trek, trek.

By a fortunate combination of circumstances a few moments in the lives of a small group of our ancestors, a casual walk over three and a half million years ago, became preserved in the fossil record, leading to a dramatic archaeological event, their fortunate discovery in 1976 by Mary Leakey, member of the famous Leakey family, pioneers of fossil discoveries in the Rift Valley in Africa.

The Rift Valley is a weak area in the earth’s crust punctuated by active volcanoes. The volcanic ash that covered the fossil footprints and also other fossil prints in the valley made them relatively easy to date (given a few thousand years).

As luck would have it, on that auspicious day in prehistory, a scattering of showers, a carpet of ash from a nearby volcano created the perfect conditions for taking a print and preserving the footprints of any living creature that happened to pass by, and a small group of hominids did just that. Preserved by ash, for long ages the footprints survived until another family group came by at a time when the prints were once again exposed, and so made the momentous discovery.

The footprints were those of a hominid, a break away from the hominoid which form the genus primate. The prints were considered by the Leakeys’ as being made by a family of Homo Australopithecus, the same species they had come across in a 1969 expedition to Lake Turkana, where they found a skull and jawbone of Australopithecus in a dry river bed. (The Making of Mankind, R Leakey. Ch 3.)

In the news press, the skull was jokingly referred to as Nutcracker Man because of its large teeth, likely adapted to the tough diet that the savannah environment necessarily had to offer.

Out of the trees.

These breakaway hominids were characterized by their upright walking. For apes to develop those feet for walking, they had leave the security of life in the trees and a diet of soft fruits for the more dangerous experience of life in the open savannah. The switch from being four-handed climbing creatures to being bipedal is dramatic, requiring enormous anatomical changes, changes in hip and thigh bone, changes of two of their grasping feet used for climbing that became forward-aligned for a different action.

Coming down out of the trees also stimulated cultural development, as in territory-exploring and potentially, responding to the challenges of a new food environment, new ways of food gathering, developments in tool-making.

The search for our Homo sapien forebears.

Some ten million years ago the upright apes we call hominids split off from the ape family, but for the next few million years, while undergoing skeletal changes, did not show any striking growth in brain size. The fossilized casts of craniums of African hominids three and a half million years ago, discovered by the Leakey group, indicate that they remained ape-like in size.

Richard Leakey observes that while brain size is not necessarily evidence of intelligence, some highly intelligent people, like Jonathan Swift, have not had large brains, prior to Homo habilis, smaller brained hominids like Australopithecus wandering across the rift valley for two million years, left no evidence of tool-making in the fossil record.

Two years after the discovery of Nutcracker Man, a second type of hominid was discovered at Olduvai Gorge by Richard Leakey’s brother, its larger brain and more delicate body structure indicating a different species from Australopithecus. Louis Leakey called it Homo habilis, ‘habilis’ meaning ‘skilled.’ with reference to tool-making. He considered that the early tool maker had been found. And as Homo habilis began to prevail in the record, so did the archaeological evidence of tool use.

What we call the Stone Age, characterised by the use of stone tools, is also referred to in prehistory as the Paleolithic Period, believed to have begun over two million years and ending approximately twelve thousand years ago. The Paleolithic Period is divided into Early, Middle and Late Paleolithic stages.

Homo habilis nomads, confining their wanderings to Africa, were the tool makers of the early stage, creating early flake stone tools and axes, though without much variation over a period of some million years.

While Homo habilis were developing tool use, two species of the smaller brained Australopithecines were also coexisting in Africa, probably utilizing different food sources. The Austalopithenes eventually died out, leaving only Homo habilis as a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens, that’s us!.

Another momentous discovery, in September 1978, Richard Leakey and fellow fossil-prospector Kamoya Kimeu discovered the intact cranium and some skeletal remains of a hominid that lived and died close to a lakeshore at Koobi Fora in the African Rift Valley some one and a half million years ago. The skeleton was almost modern and although the head still showed ape-like features, it had a larger brain cavity than that of Homo habilis. Richard Leakey observed that the fossil was a fine example of a hominid species he called Homo erectus, ‘ the hominid that immediately preceded Home sapiens. ‘

Homo Erectus were present in the fossil record up to about 300 000 years ago, the Stone Age Middle Paleolithic Period. Homo erectus tool making was more sophisticated than that of Homo habilis and studies of tooth enamel show that they were eating tubers and roots and other sorts of food, even meat.

Like the three wise men they travelled far, treking across Africa and on to the uninhabited lands which we now call Europe and Asia. Fossil remains if erectus have been found in Spain, France, China and one site faraway in Java.

One important camp site in Tera Amata tells the story of life beside the Mediterranean some 400 000 years ago when the climate was chillier than it is today. The excavation of the site revealed a series of eleven dwellings supported by sturdy central posts. A stone hearth, complete with a thick layer of fossil ash, was found in the centre of each hut, showing that Homo erectus hominids used fire to warm and protect themselves. A scatter of stone flakes around the hearths and remains of wild boor, reindeer and other large animals, indicate their taste for meat and that hunting was part of their culture.

More hominids…

In the middle Paleolithic Period, more hominids appear on the scene and some earlier identifications become subject to reappraisal. Trouble is hominids won’t stay still or refrain from interbreeding. Trouble is no unambiguous linear line of inheritance appears in the fossil record.

That camp site at Tera Amata, as well as some other finds like Java, are now being re-identified as examples of another evolutionary development in the Homo habilis and erectus line, examples of Homo heidelbergensis, a hominid with a larger brain and smaller teeth than erectus, first found in a gravel quarry near Heidelberg, Germany in 1907 and which, at the end of the twentieth century, became accepted as a new species. Many fossil remains found across Africa and Europe, previously known as Homo erectus are now considered to be Homo heidelbergensis.

To add to the complexity, another evolutionary species, the large-brained Homo
Neanderthal, seemingly evolving in Europe, appears in the Middle Paleolithic Period some 120 000 years ago. Not the shambling slow-witted hominid he was first purported to be, cave artifacts and burial sites indicate that Homo neanderthal sapien experienced an advanced social life.

No clear line of evolution appears, Homo erectus, heidelbergensis, neanderthal then Homo sapien sapien. Fossilization is a rare event. The vast majority of hominid remains were scattered and dispersed to the winds and to wild beast scavenging before they had the chance to be interred in the kind of deposits that enabled fossilization. Of the many experiments in hominid development that took place in different geographic locations and times, how many disappeared without leaving a trace in the human genome?

Oh sweet mystery of life. In the making of mankind we don’t even know when and why we developed human language. We only know that in later hominids like Homo habilis, imprint of Broca’s organ is present in the fossil brain cavity, a necessary prerequisite for human speech.

The “Out of Africa” theory is now interpreted as multiple migrations over many millennia. Homo erectus was well established in eastern and south-eastern Asia by one million years ago. The human ancestor named Homo heidelbergensis is found in sites from Africa, Europe, and possibly Asia. These fossils date to between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago.

A controversial subject in this field is the identity and fate of the next major group of hominid, the neanderthals (H. neanderthalensis), who lived between 200,000 and 30,000 years ago in Europe and western Asia. Recent studies suggest that Neanderthals were not the direct ancestors of modern humans. (ref Brittanica.) Our human genome, however, shows that we have inherited 1- 4 % neanderthal genes, we do not know when or where. Nor do we know why neanderthals disappeared from Europe some 40 000 years ago. We do know that H. neanderthals and H. sapiens, like H. erectus and H. Hardenbergensis, inhabited the same territories for long periods and interbred.

Not the Garden of Eden…

Man was born in adversity. When those early hominoids were forced to climb down from the trees, Africa was experiencing catastrophic climate change as the Mediterranean Sea became a vast evaporating salt pan and the African rain forest was reduced to a few small pockets. The Great Rift Valley became savannnah with alternating wet and dry seasons. The hominoids of the forest had little choice but to adapt or perish.

Coming down out of the trees to face the predators of the African plains, the giant hyenas, sabre tooth tigers and other big cats that hunted their prey at night, must have been a terrifying experience for those early hominids, so lacking in powerful defences and having poor night vision

One hominid stress response was to evolve into an upright walker, the discovery of the first Australopithecus fossil, Lucy, is now believed to have been walking upright around six million years ago. Another evolutionary response was to develop more muscle.

Reading Bruce Chatwin’s book on Australian nomads, ‘The Songlines,’ includes an interview with a famous palaeontologist, Dr Elizabeth Vrba, who describes how three different forms of Australopithecus skeletons became bigger and more muscular in answer to an increasingly drier and more open climate.

Elizabeth Vrba has written extensively about rates of evolutionary change in the fossil record, the orthodox Darwinian view that evolution proceeds in a steady continuum and the jump belief known as ‘allopatric speciation,’ allopatric meaning ‘in another country,’ each species an entity with an abrupt beginning and a sudden end.

According to Elizabeth Vrba, two separate climate catastrophes stimulated the making of mankind. The second occurred between 3.2 and 2.6 million years ago when
a sharp plunge in world temperature, known as The First Northern Glaciation, transformed the Great Rift Valley into open steppe country of sand, patchy grass and thorn bush. There was a noticeable turning over of animal species at this time. Of her particular field of study of animal paleontolgy, ‘ Elizabeth Vrba says that ‘all hell broke loose among the antelopes.’ … And this was the period when the brain of Homo habilis increased in size by almost half and took on a human shape.

So – in the making of mankind, we cannot be certain whether we evolved by way of alllopatric speciation or a Darwinian stately continuum, we remain uncertain of our actual hominid lineage, just who were our immediate forefathers and no clear record depicts our wanderings out of Africa or sometimes our returns.

What we can be certain of is that modern humans appeared in Europe between 40 000 and 30 000 years ago, replacing the neanderthals who had lived there for as long as 90 000 years. In the late Paleolithic Period, fossil remains of early Homo sapien sapiens appear in the fossil record. In 1868, in a shallow cave at Cro-Magnon in the Dordogne region of south western France a number of ancient human skeletons were found.

And now what a wealth of evidence appears in the fossil record of Homo sapien sapien creative energy … Like this painting of a bison on the cave walls of Altimira… We are here!

Altimira cave art.

By The Vision Divided.

Political and social history has been a history of division and frequent warfare… American economist Thomas Sowell, in his book A Conflict of Visions, identifies what he sees as an age old dichotomy of conflicting world views prevalent in history, which he calls ‘the constrained’ and ‘the unconstrained’ visions, two contrasting lenses through which people perceive human nature, the social order, and potentials for societal improvement.

These conflicts of vision differ from human conflicts of contending interests by being largely unconscious. They are underlying assumptions that line up in the people taking opposite sides on social issues.

The constrained vision of human nature, a view that human nature is fundamentally flawed, is depicted in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in which he argued, that as a consequence of this flawed nature, moral and socially beneficial behaviour can only be evoked by incentives and not by relying on man’s natural disposition.

Adam Smith’s contemporary, Edmund Burke, summarized the constrained vision from a political perspective when he spoke of an infirmity in the nature of things, ‘ a radical infirmity in all human contrivances.’ (Cited in Thomas Sowell. Chapter 2.)  A similar view was expressed by Alexander Hamilton, one of the creators of the American Constitution that was designed with checks and balances to limit abuse of power in America’s three tiers of government. Alexander Hamilton observed that:

‘It is the lot of all human institutions, even those of the most perfect kind, to have defects as well as excellences – ill as well as good propensities. This results from the imperfection of the Institutor, Man. ‘ (Sowell. Ibid.)

Contrary to the above views, checks and balances was considered a needless complication and impediment to reform by those with the unconstrained vision of human nature, a view that man is perfectible or even fundamentally noble by nature, as Jean Jacques Rousseau claimed with his description of the ‘noble savage.’

Other than Rousseau, no other proponent of the unconstrained vision presents such a contrast to the vision of man described in Adam Smith’s writing as William Godwin, whose treatise, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, published in 1793,  clearly  elaborated  the unconstrained vision. According to Godwin, man was perfectible, capable of directly feeling other people’s needs as more important than his own and therefore of consistently acting impartially, even when his own interests or those of his family were involved.  (Sowell Ch.2.)

Also writing in the period of the French Revolution the Marquis de Condorcet, in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit (1795) made the idea of progress a central concern of Enlightenment thought. Condorcet argued that the belief that man was a flawed being was mistaken and people like Adam Smith and Alexander Hamilton were confusing ‘natural’ man with ‘existing’ man, the latter artificially corrupted but capable of great progress without incentives or checks and balances being necessary.

Who shall decide? – Market Place meet Philosopher King.

People of the constrained vision, a tragic vision of humanity, are more trusting of the market place than of the philosopher king. People of the unconstrained vision, a utopian vision, have faith in the philosopher king.

For the former, no one person or group is up to making society work effectively but there’s a process that keeps anarchy at bay and that’s the experiential wisdom of the market place that evolved over time, realised in human institutions, due more to systemic incentives than to conscious planning by elites.

Conscious planning by elites is the rational way to go, say the unconstrained visionaries. Human nature is perfectible and some of us are already advanced along this path, utopia is a possibility. The marketplace is too messy.

Depending on your particular focus, the opposing vision is easily misunderstood. Groups talk past each other. Concepts like Power, Freedom, Justice and Equality differ, shape shifting according to different presuppositions. Think of that ambiguous image of the rabbit or duck, changing according to how you focus.

Power is one of those words that change shape. Whether it is a question of how governments exercise power internationally, or exercise it at home, or whether it is a question of how we, as citizens, experience power wielded over us, varies considerably depending on the way we view human nature.

Regarding the conundrum of War, one view is that war needs no explaining, it is peace that is the more in need of explanation, the other view, of course, is the reverse. One view urges the need to be prepared, the stick of deterrence is a necessary adjunct to diplomacy. The other view, being more sanguine about human rationality, is more comfortable proposing diplomacy and sometimes disarmament. Much faith is put in global talk fests.

At the national level the attitude to Crime and Punishment is what you might expect. Believers in the constrained vision emphasise social contrivances to deter criminal behaviour. They think people commit crime because they are people, they put their own ego first. But to believers in the unconstrained vision there are a myriad social reasons why people act as criminals. Punishment is barbaric and those who act criminally should be rehabilitated.

When it comes to the exercise of power over the citizenry, believers in the vision that human nature is flawed have no trouble in accepting that power corrupts even the best of us and believe, along with Adam Smith, that the decision making loci should be as broad as possible. Andrew Hamilton’s checks and balances of government power are necessary to limit decision making by an authority that can’t help acting in its own interest and from its members’ prescribed perspective. And whatever a government’s motivation, its members don’t have the wide knowledge and experience that their hubris might lead them to think that they possess. Nobody’s perfect.

‘Oh but wait a minute,’ exclaim idealists of the unconstrained vision such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, ‘they could be perfectible! They are only flawed because they have been corrupted by institutions, just throw off their chains!’

To these elites who are advanced along the way of perfectibility and who know how to turn the rest of us into a model society, checks and balances on government power are a hindrance. Progressivists must have the power to construct this model society. They are therefore more sanguine about authority, i.e. authority of the right stuff. They are social justice missionaries, each regulation in service of social progress is to be welcomed.

Serfs think that those of constrained view hold to the definition of Freedom as the ‘absence of constraint,’ so that freedom from … is your guiding principle. Any constraint on someone’s freedom in order to facilitate freedom elsewhere must still be regarded as a constraint. The only constraint you should accept consistently in the name of freedom is that your freedom does not detract from someone else’s freedom. The more you tamper with this by way of more regulation, the more you pave the way for the overreach of bureaucrats and dictators and results that you could not foresee.

Those observing the opposite definition, freedom to …are less concerned about power corrupting their ruling elites. Elites have been schooled in noblesse oblige and to rule nobly, an abundance of social regulation is required, regulation combined with persuasion to ensure the proletariat follow elite leaders towards the promised land.

Justice and Equal Rule of Law for All?

Without a working Justice System, no society will function, say those of the constrained vision. According to Adam Smith,’ Society cannot subsist unless the laws of justice are tolerably observed.’ Think cattle raids in primitive societies or confrontations at water holes in the Wild West…Oliver Wendell Holmes illustrated the way in which human limitation is central to the constrained view of legal justice:

‘The law takes no account of the infinite varieties of temperament, intellect and education which make the internal character of a given act so different in different men. It does not attempt to see men as God sees them …. If, for instance, a man is born hasty and awkward, is always having accidents and hurting himself and his neighbors, no doubt his congenital defects will be allowed for in the courts of heaven but his slips are no less troublesome to his neighbors than if they sprang from guilty neglect. His neighbors accordingly require him, at his proper peril, to come up to their standard, and the courts which they establish, decline to take his personal equation into account. ‘ (In Sowell. Ch 8.)

Wendell Holmes rejected the higher Godly standard of justice, which is beyond human capability, for the instrumental view that law exists to preserve society. Criminal justice is primarily concerned with deterring crime, not with finely adjusting punishments to the individual.

Differences between the moral-intellectual elite and the masses are crucial in determining who has the knowledge to dispense justice. One is a prudent view of law as a process. Hasten slowly, avoid unexpected consequences, prefer the widely scattered loci of knowledge that is embodied in a constitution to the perceived inadequacy of experience in a smaller population of leaders.

The other view is more idealistic and iconoclastic. Only those who are further advanced towards the potential of man, judges wishing to reform society along rational designs, are fit to execute surrogate judgement. Though judges are unelected by the people, they have the knowledge and right perspective to be trusted to re-interpret the constitution on issues they regard as socially just. Results should trump process. These progressivist judges are regarded as capable of making fiat decisions to meet all specific injustices… they view the moral rightness of a decision as having greater value than predictable law and order for the benefit of all.

Equality and its Converse.

Regarding issues of equality as a matter of justice, the two conflicting visions do not differ on the basis of fundamental moral principles but do they differ in their analysis of cause and effect. For example, Adam Smith and William Godwin were both offended by inequality and the sense of privilege and arrogance displayed by the powerful in the 18th century, as were Milton Friedman and Ronald Dworkin in the 20th century. They differed, however, regarding causation, regarding what can be done about it.

Those with the constrained vision argued that the processes to create equalisation generate other inequalities caused by expanding the role of government. Quoting Adam Smith again:

‘A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will
destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.’ (In Sowell Ch 6.)

Regarding opportunity, Friedman argues that ‘Wherever the free market has been permitted to operate, wherever anything approaching equality of opportunity has existed, the ordinary man has been able to attain levels of living never dreamed of before.’

But for the unconstrained visionary, equality of opportunity will not do. Applying the same criteria to those of radically less wealth, and poor educational background is to negate the meaning of equality. There must exist equal probabilities of achieving given results. Results matter! What is required is equality of outcome. As far back as the 18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet stated that ‘a real equality’ requires that ‘even the natural differences between men will be mitigated by social policy.’ (In Sowell Ch 6). To the unconstrained, danger of unexpected consequences is not an issue, the main imperative is that the masses enjoy optimum material conditions even if the means of achieving this requires top down decisions by a moral elite authority restricting the discretion of others in the market place.

Once again, within the two colliding visions, one goes for the philosopher king deciding, the other goes for the market place,

A Serf’s P.O.V.

I think this is the place for a * Disclosure of Interest Concerning Impartiality.*

Relating to the above conflict of visions, a serf must confess partiality. How can it be otherwise? Herewith, Alain’s witty cartoon of an Egyptian Art Class, juxtaposing the physical act of seeing and the cultural act of knowing, giving a visual illustration of the human dilemma of impartiality.

As if you didn’t know, my view is that we humans are flawed. I do not believe in the blank slate theory, see my serf essay here,

I consider that we come into the world with certain genetic propensities and in apocalyptic times, times of war, plague and other disasters, even, in some less direful times too, what might we not do, acting in our own self interest, that we might later wish to forget?

Much as serfs admire our creative human talents, much as serfs admire the behaviour of family and friends, can any of us say that we have not succumbed to at least one of the Seven deadly sins? Anger, Pride … Sloth maybe? And if we read just a tiny amount of political history, does that not reveal us to ourselves with all our varied human motivations, some good deeds, yes, but many, many deeds relating to those seven deadly sins?

Accordingly, serfs are also sceptical of too much elite government rule. Power corrupts. Therefore I say, ‘do not put much faith in the philosopher king.’ See serf essay

Regarding philosopher kings, Karl Poppers’ observation in his preface to ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies is worth consideration:

’If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them…’

Anyone reading this will have their own particular view, who am I to gainsay someone else’s considered opinion? Reminded by Socrates, I try not to be too dogmatic. And a serf thinks that just maybe, if we have a genuine curiosity to know the truth of something, if we defend freedom of speech and value trial and error, we might, possibly, gain some insight into the world of nature, the natural world which includes ourselves.

And so to one and all of my readers, best wishes and thanks for following a serf’s under_ground journal.

Revisiting History’s Chequered History.

For history to be viewed as a study of human interaction with our world, as a serf has reflected on before, certain misconceptions involving history’s facts and purpose, problems of historical explanation and the tools we apply to it, had to be overcome.

‘The proper study of mankind is man,’ said Alexander Pope. Can’t disagree with Alexander Pope or disagree with Greek historian Thucydides, regarding doing history as an attempt to discover ‘what really happened.’

Finding what really happened … of course that’s easier said than done. Significant events of past societies are not lying there in plain sight for the historian to pick up and interpret. Picture the past as a series of mountain ranges, some near to us, some far away, scarcely visible through the mists of time. In a mountain that is close to us we may catch sight of almost all of the north face, excluding what is hidden in a few deep valleys. In the most distant mountains our binoculars may barely pick up one or two features of a particular escarpment. That is all we have to go on, to make of it what we will.

A couple of problems with those phenomena we glimpse from the past. To illustrate, there’s the information recorded on the Palermo Stone, recording the names and date of rule of the earliest Egyptian Pharaohs of the 1st – 5th dynasties together with annual records of the water levels of the Nile River. We do not know when this data was recorded or by whom. Was it recorded at the close of the 5th dynasty or much later? We do observe the element of propaganda in the data, the record is being employed to enhance the status of the Pharaohs, link nature, the harvest, to the power of a god-like dynastic ruler. The Hebrew Book of Chronicles, establishing distant relationships of the Patriarchs, is a similar ploy. These records of the past need to be handled with care. And we need to ask is there enough evidence to go on to establish much at all regarding a certain epoch of time?

For example there’s the Iron Age Tollund Man discovered in a peat bog in Jutland in 1950. We can visit him in the Silkeborg Museum in Central Jutland. The Tollund Man is so well preserved that we can observe, on his face, his dying expression and also some tussocks of hair, we can see the thong fastened around his neck that reveals his violent death. We even know what he ate for his last meal as the contents of his stomach are revealed to us. People have prepared and eaten a similar meal and said how unappetising it was.

But still we do not know much about Tollund Man or the society he lived in. There’s a book called ‘The Bog People’ written by Professor P.V. Glob, yes really, in which Professor Glob describes his involvement with Tollund Man’s excavation and also gives his own interpretation of the circumstances of his death and burial. Professor Glob has been criticized for drawing conclusions that were not supported by the evidence.

Asking ‘what really happened and why,’ the problem of investigating and explaining past phenomena, also involves what point of view the historian brings to the task.

The role of deux ex machina in history’s chequered history.

The historian, before he (or she) begins to write history, is himself a product of history. No such thing as the innocent eye, purpose plays a role. The earliest documented Greek historian, Herodotus, writing a history of the Persian Wars, altered facts to show a moral or teach a lesson. More important than what really happened was the religious or political purpose that history served. For much of the historiography up to the 17th century, events are attributed to divine purpose and the actions of humans viewed largely as instruments of that divine purpose.

There were advances and retreats in the development of the historical process during the 18th and 19th centuries. An apocalyptic attitude to an irrational past was a setback during the Enlightenment. An advance was made by Hegel in recognising that history is man’s thought expressed outwardly in action but Hegel succumbed to ‘historicism’ or ‘scientism,’ another deux ex machina, the belief in laws of human and political destiny, laws conceived as a property of nature and giving history a predictive function.

Another historicist, Karl Marx, later introduced a more rational historicism than Hegel’s relentless world spirit. Marx, instead, introduced relentless economic necessity as the driver of human affairs. History is explained as a series of economic stages in which actors are destined to behave as mere puppets, irresistibly pulled by economic wires over which they have no control.

And however valuable Marx’s historicists view of economics and class interest might be as a generalisation for historians studying the problem situation of events, none of his predictions by way of inexorable laws of development and stages of history which cannot be leapt over, have been successful. Nor can our complex human history be reduced to a single cause. Contrary to Marx’s focus on economic historicism, enthusiasm for an idea, such as Robespierre’s enthusiasm for Rousseau’s ideas, has also been a driving force in history, for example in the French and the Russian Revolutions and in other major social movements like the Italian Renaissance and the Scottish Enlightenment.

As above, there are problems in locating the facts of an enigmatic past and problems with historians needing to deal with their own subjectivity. And then there’s a problem raised by modern critics regarding the nature of language itself…

Words, words, words …

The written record has long been considered a most important source of historical illumination by historians. Consider how much has been gleaned from the words inscribed in cuneiform script on clay tablets unearthed at the Babylonian city of Uruk, and how little from the discovery of the Tolland Man’s preserved body in Jutland…

We know nothing of the thoughts of the Tollund Man or any of those around him, thoughts being revealed, however precariously, by words. Whereas, in what is now Iran, the discovery of inscribed clay tablets, translated in the 1870’s by George Smith and also by later Assyriologiists, enable us to read records of the daily business of the city of Uruk as well as read history’s earliest discovered written story, The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Epic of Gilgamesh describes a human world acting in opposition to the Gods but also includes writers’ thoughts regarding tyranny and reflective passages on wise living.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would not agree with historians who believe that the written record can help us to know what really happened. For Nietzsche and his follower Michael Foucault, language is an inadequate tool for capturing a complex reality. Not up to the job for those interpreting history, and presumably for scientists exploring physical reality either.

Underlying Nietzsche’s criticism of historical practice, in his essay, ‘The Uses and Abuses of History,’ Thoughts Out of Season, (1874) are radical assumptions about language. For Nietzsche, language was originally expressive and conceptual language is an aberration, supplanting the true function of language without, itself, being able to represent the truth. He thinks that if we rely on conceptual language, which is reductive, as in the monumental and antiquarian studies of the past, we create inhibiting illusions, or by relying on critical language, strip ourselves of illusions altogether. Note that Nietzsche finds no problem using conceptual language to argue his case.

Nor does Foucault have a problem using verbal argument to claim that words have been perverted from their original function of signification and given the impossible task of realistically representing, and neutrally referring to their objects… But ‘if words are mere things alongside other things this task is exposed for what it is, the construction of objects by word things.’ (Ref Hayden White ‘Foucault Decoded, Notes From The Underground’ History & Theory X11 1972 p32).

Foucault also views language as opaque and argues that different epochs are the unwitting captives of a specific linguistic protocol while the meaning of words like ‘life,’ ‘labour’ and ‘language,’ are purported, across time, to represent the same unchanging reality. (HW pp 34-36)

While language also constitutes a problem for historian of ideas, John Dunn, it is not insurmountable. The problem of historical perspective may be overcome by understanding the biographical or social experience a past argument was designed to meet.

Context’s the thing…

John Dunn considers that documentary evidence does not provide an open sesame to explaining the past. (J.Dunn, ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas.’ in Philosophy 43 1968.) He argues that in studying a past intellectual enterprise it must be studied in context. To abstract an argument from the criteria it was designed to meet is to convert it into a different argument.

If we wish to understand the argument of a past thinker we need to understand the biographical or social experience it was designed to meet, we need ‘to substitute the closure of the context provided by the biography of the speaker for that provided by the biography of the historian.’ (JDp98)

Two other contextualists, philosopher Karl Popper, essays in ‘Objective Knowledge,’ (1976) and historian, R.G Collingwood, ‘The Idea of History,'(1946) share this view that to understand a past event the historian must understand the problem situation of the proponent.

R.G. Collingwood adopts a subjective approach, however, arguing that the historian must try to identify with a past actor, re-enacting the actor’s past experience in his own mind. Karl Popper relies on a more reasoned reconstruction of a past problem situation as a way to understand the past. By the critical approach of studying the logic of the situation involving context, and marshalling objective arguments for and against the conjectural situational analysis, an historian has a good chance of understanding and explaining a past event.

Karl Popper, like John Dunn, recognizes that our responses to events of the past are necessarily theory impregnated. For Popper, this is no cause for alarm since this is the way humans learn, every observation we make is the result of a tentative hypothesis we ask nature, that is, a deductive, ‘search light theory’ of learning, not an inductive, ‘bucket theory’ of passively absorbing ‘facts.’

Popper goes in to bat for human language arguing that it is the development of language beyond the self-expressive and signalling functions it shares with animal language that allows us objective knowledge of our world, including historical events. Only with the descriptive function of human language can the regulative idea of truth emerge, that is, of a description that fits the facts.

Inga Glendinnen, in her essay ‘Agamemnon’s Kiss,’ (1998) gives a personal example of an historian involved in situational analysis. Researching Aztec rituals, Glendinnen came across a list of the small creatures young boys were required to catch and present to the Old Fire God in an annual ceremony. She describes her response:

‘It was an odd collection and I puzzled over it for days. What taken-for-granted Aztec category made these creatures and only these creatures acceptable offerings?…. The listed creatures inhabited air, earth and water. None had fur, none could run… And then I saw it. Their shared habitat was, broadly speaking, amphibian. These were the despised creatures which had sustained the Aztecs and the Old God of Fire and the Hearth they had carried on their backs in their own historic youth, when they were no more than despised refugees eking out a miserable existence in a marshy desolation. In time they would raise their glorious lake-borne city of Tenochtitlan out of these marshes but in the days of their humiliation, they dared not compete with the flesh-fish-and fowl hunters of the dominant resident tribes. Therefore this poor fare, lovingly collected by boy-hunters in yearly tributes to their oldest god, was a ‘re-collection’ in a double sense.’ (Agamemnon’s Kiss, p 215.)

Inga Glendinnen finds rare delights in the doing of history. She says:

‘There is luxury in attending to the papery whispers from the past rather than the boom and the babble of the present. I can listen to these dead people and think about them steadily because I don’t have to do anything about them. I don’t have to rebuke them, reason with them, encourage them or fight them. I don’t have to deal with them. All I have to do is listen. I therefore listen with an intentness, an openness I give to almost nothing else.’ (p213)

Which brings me to the conclusion … (of my plethora of words.)

On the power of words as revelation…

Contrary to Nietzsche and Foucault’s preference for the language of emotion, there’s something to be said for the evolution of language to more rational modes.

We recognise that descriptive and critical language, conjecture and refutation, used by scientists investigating physical phenomena, has enabled humans to do tangible things such as fly to the moon and back, and also put a space station in orbit. We have read, vividly described by George Orwell in his novel 1984, how a State-created language, Ingsoc, reduces the ability of it’s speakers to think critically…’That which may not be said cannot be thought.’

During history’s chequered history, there have been an abundance of words rescued from the past and words written in description of that past, some used to baffle or bewitch, some to persuade or to teach a lesson. Some may even reveal the significance of a past event, as contextualists like Dunn and Glendinnen think not-impossible for a curious time-traveller.

So is it worthwhile to study the past? Well, is knowledge preferable to ignorance? Socrates words, ‘Know thyself,’ apply… seeing ourselves in all our variety. Know ourselves.”

Quoting from my earlier essay:

Context’s the thing whereby
we may unearth the problem
situation of the king (and troops.)
Situation analysis is able to
transcend the myopia
of point of view and the
opacity of time and space.

In seeking knowledge of what ‘really’ happened, can we be sure that we have reached this secure place? Here Socrates again, eschewing dogmatic certainty; ‘I only ‘know’
that I do not ‘know.’

That’s all folks.

ON THE EVE …

‘On the Eve,’ is the evocative title of a novel by Ivan Turgenev, primarily a love story but set against a historic backdrop, Russia on the eve of the Crimean War between Russia and Turkey. Turgenev’s characters are fictional. In the real world of wars and revolution, interesting to ask, on the eve of these large historical events, how prescient were actual participants and onlookers to their unfolding?

Sometimes in retrospect events seem predictable, whereas, looking forward, they may seem deceptively uncomplicated or, conversely, more like entering into a dark wood … In either case, black swans may be lurking. The French Revolution is a case of the former.

Viva la, viva la France!

On what was later considered to be the eve of the French Revolution, no one set out to overthrow the existing order in France. No threat existed to the King’s person. King Louis XV1 himself convened a meeting of the Estates General, because he wanted new taxes to stave off bankruptcy. The financial crisis in France was partly due to French loans given to America during the American Revolution, but also due to the extravagant lifestyle of the King and Queen.

The Estates General that the King convened to approve his right to new taxes, was made up of three hereditary social groups in France. The First Estate comprised the clergy, the Second Estate were people of noble birth, and the Third Estate all the rest, commoners, peasants, city workers, bourgeoisie and professionals, the largest of the three groups.

On May 4th, 1789, the procession of the Estates General, the last grand ceremony of the Ancien Regime, was held at Versailles. From all over France, 1,200 deputies in ceremonial garb, the deputies of the Third Estate dressed in black with gold and black overcoats, the King in a coat of gold cloth and surrounded by the most important Officers to the Crown.

This meeting of the Estates General was the first time it had been convened in more than 150 years. Louis XVI opened the historic session with a speech in which he reviewed the circumstances that had led to the convocation, and what he expected from the Estates General. As a peaceful king, he declared himself ‘the people’s greatest friend.’

The crowd watching his procession, even had a few cheers for the King, but there were potentials for instability in this collective of differing social groups and also in the Paris crowd, as the harvest had failed, there were riots in the streets when the price of bread became an issue of survival for many. And prior to the assembly of the three estates, King Louis had encouraged each of the three groups to express their hopes and grievance in official Cahiers des Doleances. This made the Assembly something of a focus for the dissatisfactions that each group was feeling in this late stage of the Ancien Regime.

The cahiers of the Third Estate spoke out mainly against the financial privileges held by the two other Estates that were exempt from most taxes such as the church tithe and taille (the main direct tax). They also wanted to have a fair voting system in the Estates-General. At the moment, they would be outvoted by the other two orders, who would combine their votes on any issue that suited them. The Third Estate had double representation (600, rather than 300 members representing them), but each estate had a single vote, and thus having double the representative would only be effective if they were voting by head, and not by order.

So members of the Third Estate refused to conduct any business of the Estates General until their demand was met that votes be counted by head and not by group. When the King was distracted by the death of the Dauphin and the nobles refused to compromise, the third Estate went ahead and organized their own National Assembly, planning to conduct business on their own. Meeting in the Royal Tennis Court each member took an oath that they would not disband until a new constitution was created for France. They were soon joined by a number of parish priests and that night crowds broke into the palace and began heckling those who opposed the Assembly.

On July 9th, the King grudgingly gave in and urged the nobles and the remaining clergy to join the assembly, which took the official title of National Constituent Assembly. At the same time, however, he began gathering troops to dissolve it, creating panic in the streets. Instead of the peaceful drafting of a Constitution, which had been the plan of the Assembly, the stage was set for a revolution, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, all of which were noticeably absent from its events…

Soon came the guillotining of aristocrats and Royal Family, and dismantling of the Catholic Church, then the Reign of Terror where factions among the Third Estate executed each other without proper trial. justified in the name of ‘keeping the revolution pure.’ Events followed each other in quick succession. Chaos was master.

Another unforeseen development, the Industrial Revolution…

Unlike the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution did not have a ceremonial beginning but started quietly with one curious man seeking to solve a problem in engineering that interested him.

James Watt, instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, became interested in a steam machine created by Derbyshire man Thomas Newcomb, which was used in mines to pump water out of the coal pits. Glasgow University had a model of the device, which Watts got working but soon saw its flaws. In Newcomb’s steam pump the piston only turned two or three strokes at a time because, although it had a large boiler, most of the steam it made escaped into the air. James Watt believed that he could fix this problem and he laboured over it for more than a year. Then one fine day in 1765 he went for a walk in the streets of Glasgow. Walking up Charlotte Street, he passed by the old washing house…

‘I was thinking upon the engine at the time,’ he wrote later, ‘when the idea came into my mind that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication were made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel, it would rush into it and thereby be condensed without cooling the cylinder … I had not walked further than the golf-house when the whole thing was strong in my mind.’ Scottish Enlightenment, Arthur Herman. Ch 12.

On this peaceful walk, did James Watt know that he had created the work engine of the Industrial Revolution? There’s no evidence of that. That he knew his improved steam pump would be an important discovery was obvious by his perseverance in making Newcomb’s steam engine more efficient. But he could not have foreseen the network of railways that later criss-crossed the British Isles and the continents of Eurasia and America. He could not have foreseen steam engines transporting people of all social groups and in vast numbers to neighbouring towns or far distant regions at speeds exceeding coach and horse.

Nor could he foresee the factory system of production that steam power enabled, revolutionising societies and employing vast numbers of workers. Bright side, dark side…. unforeseen by Watts those problems to come, trains transporting armies to battle fields, a factory system that, initially, involved long hours of drudgery for its workers and caused environmental damage, soot begrimed buildings and an atmosphere befogged by a pall of smog. The Industrial Revolution in all its un-foreseeable complexity…

There’s a poem by W.B. Yeats that describes a young Helen of Troy practising, unaware of future significance, the seductive skills that would make her an inspiration for a future Homer composing his great epic poems. I find the tinker shuffle she was practising in Yeats’ poem something of an analogy to Watt’s problem – solving as he strolled up Charlotte Street Hill.

That the topless towers be burnt/And men recall that face,/ Move most gently if move you must In this lonely place./She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,/That nobody looks; her feet/Practise a tinker shuffle/ Picked up on the streets.

James Watt, insightful and creative as he was, could only visualise in part, the consequences of his thoughtful walk up Charlotte Street Hill when he saw how he could harness steam energy efficiently by a process that had not been discovered until that day.

On the Eve of the First World War, a war that would be of a brief duration…

Geoffrey Blainey writes in his book The Great Seesaw, that ‘The First World War was to be a shattering event, partly because a war of a magnitude that had been generally thought to be impossible.’ He cites an English journalist, Norman Angell, author of a famous book in1910, The Great Illusion, arguing ‘that a major war was unlikely- or would soon be ended- because under modern conditions there could be no victor.’

Blainey notes that in agreement with Angell, many economists at the time thought that if a war was fought, it would be a short war, dislocations in global trade and shortage of food would quickly end this war. Others thought a burst in inflation would stop it. Socialists anticipated a general strike, or working men refusing to fight, would cause the war to end.

Europe’s civilian and military leaders, like Winston Churchill, First Lord of the British Admiralty, and German leader, Colonel von Moltke, thought there would be a short war. Many were influenced by the history of war over the past seventy years when wars, typically, were short. The power of modern weaponry and swift means of communication, also contributed to the view that any war that took place could not last long.

The belief that the next war would be a short war was not accepted by one man, a financier from Warsaw, Ivan Bloch, who went against the consensus by suggesting that the next major war in Europe would be a long and murderous siege. In The Causes of War. Geoffrey Blainey. Chapter 14. Blainey tells us how Bloch, although not a decision maker of the war, wrote a six volume book attacking the prevailing dogma on modern warfare. Such a war, he wrote, will be a great war of entrenchments. ‘The spade will be as indispensable to a soldier as his rifle. The first thing every man will have to do if he cares for his life at all, will be to dig a hole in the ground.’ Bloch foresaw that this modern war would end in stalemate and economic decline.

In making such predictions Ivan Bloch analysed events from the same recent wars that decision makers observed, but Bloch noted details that others did not, such as the entrenchments that broke out in the Franc-German War during the Siege of Paris in 1870, and saw that with approximately equal powerful armaments, a war of the future would be a struggle for fortified positions. Bloch deplored the reluctance of military observers to learn the lessons of the Boer War, in which the small bore rifle employed on a large scale and in Europe’s more enclosed spaces would give the advantage to defensive warfare.

Military leaders did not listen to Bloch. they did not envision a dead-locked Europe. But it was soon a fact of the First World War as temporary defences became permanent… Between October 1914 and March 1918, mammoth entrenchments shifted the front only five miles. In 1916, the German offensive at Verdun advanced five miles at a cost of more than 10,000 casualties.

            ———————————

‘The future ain’t what it used to be.’ – an ironic comment by Yogi Berra by way of conclusion. Take heed, you visionary planners, you confident devisers of your Five or Ten Year Plan. Plans go awry, what seems, on their eve, to be a large or small event of large or small purport, may turn out to be a bird of quite a different hue.

Why we should favour comedy over tragedy.

O Ozymandias, O Orestes!

There they are, that long line of tragic heroes, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and even Macbeth, how the mighty do fall, that being the essence of Aristotelian tragedy. From Greek tragic drama to Shakespearean tragic drama, the person of noble mind, or at least noble birth, makes a mistake of judgement arising from some personal flaw such as one of your seven deadly sins. No escape, each recognises the error too late to save the hero from an inevitable tragic fate.

There’s irony in tragedy since we, like some perceptive chorus, early on can see the hero’s self deception, which so often turns out to be hubris. Take Hamlet as example, it’s why Shakespeare had to create The Soliloquy, to accommodate Hamlet’s endless meditating on self. Here’s the opening lines of his first soliloquy … one of seven in the Play: O, that this too too solid flesh would melt/Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! /Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d/ His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!/ How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,/ Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Perhaps the prevailing pride of your tragic hero is brought about as the great man gets to take the crowd’s subservience for a genuine reflection of his worth, maybe a case of mistaken identity. Consider those fatal initial acts in tragic drama, often acts of intractable vanity. There’s Oedipus and his father, ill-met at the crossroads and neither would give way to the other, a petty reason for an honour killing. Lear and Hamlet, so self centred, yes I know we are overcome with pity at Lear’s tragic fate… but what about Macbeth, he’ll stop at nothing to be top man, only fits the tragic formula because he’s promoted to be thane of Cawder. There’s something somewhat specious about your Aristotelian tragedy though it does make for a grand theatrical experience.

But comedy, I suggest, is a more down to earth rendering of our human condition. Consider that ascent of man image depicting our evolution from ape to man.

The Long Ascent… …

From ape to man, you know its a longer ascent than that. Why, our lineage can be traced back further even than our fishy ancestors, back to single celled organisms, the origin of all life. Know we carry that ancestry within us – gods we are not.

Part of the herd but sometimes not. Picture this… A flock of birds in the sky, one ascends in a sudden burst from its midst and rises higher – sometimes a human does this too – an insightful dramatist, your great composer of symphonies, a far-seeing scientist or engineer, an agronomist or even a modest doctor. How many lives did Dr John Snow save when he located the source of London’s cholera outbreak in the 1850’s?

There is human behaviour from various cultural settings and epochs that has been impressive, even rational, but a study of the human record in history is not reassuring, recognise our groupi-ness, our predisposition to predatory behaviour – our genes are always with us, constantly challenging the good intentions to which we might aspire. Comedy is less pitying than Tragedy, it views us at our evolutionary worst.

The Divine Comedy concerning Non-Divine Behaviour.

It tis said that only humans laugh – so why do we laugh and what do we laugh at? Henri Bergson, in his essay, ‘Laughter – An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,’ argues that we laugh at human intransigence, ‘rigidity is the comic and laughter s the correction.’ We laugh at a certain inelasticity of mind that is closely akin to absent-mindedness.’

Human laughter is a survival mechanism we’ve evolved to remind us always to be on the alert. We should and do laugh when someone slips on a banana skin. We laugh at the frozen expression, a grimace, on the face of a cartoon character when life is demanding mobility and adaptability. We laugh at comic language, those malaprops made due to lapses of attention or as witty responses in language that are a deliberate play on careless thinking. Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll provoke us in this way:

‘The lack of money is the root of all evil,’ quips Mark Twain.

‘I say what I mean,’ says Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland’ ‘at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing you know.’
‘
‘Not the same thing a bit,’ said the Hatter, ‘You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see.’ ‘

‘You might just as well say,’ added the March Hare, ‘ that ‘ I like what I get ‘ is the same thing as ‘ I get what I like.’

Scene – change and sea – change.

Transposing the natural into another key is a mode of comedy that jolts our tendency to stereotype-thinking. Shift the solemn into the familiar, making small things large and large things small are ways that comedy reminds us of our human thoughtless -ness. Parody, satire, buffoonery are potent techniques in the armoury of comedy.

In Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,’ two animals in a farm – yard, Chanticleer and Pertelote, discuss meaningful life issues from their perch in the poultry yard, an ironical parody on our own limited perspective.

In Alexander Pope’s satirical poem, ‘ An Essay on Man,’ Pope attacks human hubris that allows us to adopt an ego-centric view of the universe:

Canto V-
Ask for what end the heav’nly bodies shine,
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, ” ‘Tis for mine:
For me kind Nature wakes her genial pow’r,
Suckles each herb, and spreads out ev’ry flow’r;
Annual for me, the grape, the rose renew,
The juice nectareous, and the balmy dew;
For me, the mine a thousand treasures brings;
For me, health gushes from a thousand springs;
Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;
My foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies.

In Jonathan Swift’s satirical travel tale, Gulliver’s Travels,’ Gulliver, as a giant in the land of Lilliput, appears gross and clumsy to the tiny inhabitants. Later, when he is marooned on the island of Brobdingnag, which is inhabited by giants, Gulliver himself is insignificant and weak.

Regarding the human condition, there’s some truth in both these points of view.
Consider we humans trampling thoughtlessly across a patch of meadow-land, partly demolishing a colony of ants as we go, only to be decimated in out turn, at some other time and place, by cosmic forces, tempest, earth-quake, flood, these beyond our puny human control.

‘What fools these humans be.’
– Robin Goodfellow.

Lots of buffoonery in Shakespeare’s ‘ Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ a romantic triangle concerning four fraught young lovers who are fittingly lost in the woods, the shifting alliances of these young lovers made more confusing by the machinations of the forest fairy folk who use their magic tricks to intervene in the lovers’ affairs. There’s a social hierarchy at work in the play involving the upper-class lovers, themselves subject to rule by Theseus, Duke of Athens; there are the lower class rustics, tradesmen about to rehearse a play, itself a burlesque, ‘The Tragedy of Pyramis and Thisbe,’ in honour of the nuptials of the Duke of Athens and his bride to be, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Then there’s the world of the fairies ruled by the fairy king Oberon and his wife Titania. In between being engaged in their own domestic disputes and infidelities, the fairies intervene in the human lovers’ drama and also the play rehearsal of Bottom the Weaver, Nick the Joiner and the other trades folk.

‘Oh what fools these humans be!’ declares Robin Goodfellow, Oberon’s main performer of trickery. And they are. No one in this world of changing alliances and power plays could be said to be a paragon of good sense. Nor paragons of virtue either.

Demetrius has discarded his first love, Helena to pursue Hermia, who loves Lysander. Helena, though a long time friend of Hermia, is quite prepared to betray her friend’s confidences if it will gain her some short-term approval from the surly Demetrius. Nor does the history of the Duke of Athens and his bride bear scrutiny, there’s been some violence there…

The buffoonery of the rustics makes us laugh. Bottom the Weaver’s instructions on the art of the play are a parody of Hamlet’s instructions to players in Shakespeare’s later tragic play. But here’s the thing. When Oberon plays a trick upon his wife, and makes her fall in love with Bottom, who, thanks to Puck’s mischief-making now wears the head of an ass, Bottom is offered anything he desires by Titania, but unlike Macbeth, Bottom’s wishes are not megalomaniac and his requests courteously framed:

Mounsieur Cobweb, good mounsieur, get you your
weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipped
humble-bee on the top of a thistle; and, good
mounsieur, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret
yourself too much in the action, mounsieur; and
good mounsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not;
I would be loath to have you overflown with
honey-bag, signior.

What fools, and knaves, these humans be, and yet there’s something unassuming and quite benign about Bottom the weaver, he’s not the stuff of tragedy, nor of satire, more the Jacques Tati kind of clown. We laugh at Jacques Tati’s naivety in ‘Mon Oncle’ and ‘Playtime,’ as we laugh at almost every one else in those films, but not too harshly. O what fools these humans be as they stumble through life, sometimes captivated but always confused by modern technology and the bureaucratic world that seeks to manage it.

Then there are Fellini’s clowns!

That’s all folks.