Tag: history

14th Century NIMBYism

In Juliet Barker’s book on the Great Revolt of 1381 I was struck by this comment on the spread of local grammar schools in England in the second half of the 14th century:

Where there was no dedicated room or building available, classes were held in the local church. In 1373 the Bishop of Norwich prohibited this practice in the schools of King’s Lynn, on the grounds that the cries of beaten children interrupted services and distracted worshippers.

Nowadays the bishop and the local residents would have cited the shortage of parking… Continue reading “14th Century NIMBYism”

War gilt

It has often been remarked that, whereas the English word “debt” has a long history as primarily a financial term, with only optional moralistic overtones, in German “debt” and “guilt” and “sin” are represented by the single word “Schuld”, deriving from the Indo-European root skel, meaning “crime”. This surely reflects the exceptional German inclination — conspicuous in the current tussle over Greek loans — to view indebtedness as a moral failing, and moral failings need to be chastised, lest the sinner slide back into his old ways. At least, that’s the principle for other people’s indebtedness.

Their own debts are more nuanced. Particularly war debts, as this article from Spiegel makes clear. In 1942 Greece’s national bank cancelled Germany’s debt of 476 million Reichsmarks, out of pure gratitude for Germany’s contributions toward a unified Europe, into which Greece had just been integrated. In retrospect this deal — the debt would be worth something between 8 billion and 80 billion Euros today — seemed overly generous to some, given complaints about the quality of the services provided to the Greek public by the Wehrmacht. The 1953 London Agreement on German External Debt provided for the resolution of these customer-service complaints to be postponed until after a formal WWII peace treaty which, I was surprised to learn, has never been concluded.

But obviously the Germans don’t believe that a people should be forced to suffer economic devastation because of financial obligations undertaken by an irresponsible government that the people have since repudiated.

Divorce or start a world war?

I recently read Christopher Clark’s celebrated book on the initiation of the First World War, The Sleepwalkers. There was a lot in it that was new to me. I’ve never seen an account — even a German account — that portrayed Germany as such a passive, almost innocent and peace-seeking, participant in the events of 1914. Although Clark disclaims an attention to fix blame, I felt very clearly that his account put the blame on French and Russian scheming, with Serbians playing a devious supporting role, and the Austro-Hungarians hapless bunglers.

I was struck by his portrayal of the alliance system as reasonably haphazard and fluid, kind of a square dance where nations just stayed with the partners they happened to be with when the music stopped. In particular, the alliance between Russia and the UK seemed to reflect a common pathology in personal relations:

In the light of continuing Russian pressure on Persia and other peripheral imperial territories, there had been talk of abandoning the Anglo-Russian Convention in favour of a more open-ended policy that would not necessarily exclude a rapprochement of some kind with Germany. This never became Foreign Office policy, but the news that Russian mobilization had just triggered German counter-measures at least temporarily foregrounded the Russian aspect of the growing crisis. British policy-makers had no particular interest in or sympathy for Serbia. This was a war from the east, sparked by concerns remote from the official mind of Whitehall.

We’ve all known couples like this. They’ve been together for years, comfortable but never quite committed. Then a crisis comes, and they have to decide: Do we get married or split up. And often they marry, because splitting just seems too frightening. It usually doesn’t end well.

Odium ex nihilo

The Guardian quotes actress Maureen Lipman saying that the recent attacks in Paris have her thinking of leaving London for the US, where you can be shot to death in a supermarket in an entirely nondiscriminatory and racially neutral way. (Israel was also on her list of destinations, because it is a place where Jews are famously safe from terrorist attacks.) But I was struck by this comment:

When the economy dries up, then they turn on the usual scapegoat: the usual suspect –the Jew. There is one school of thought that says it’s because of Israeli policies in the West Bank, it isn’t. There’s been antisemitism for the past 4,000 years.

It is common to link modern antisemitism to trends since the middle ages. Some say nothing has really changed since Tiberius. Some go back even to the Hellenistic period. Lipman almost doubles that history.

Some people have remarked on the weird persistence of antisemitism in places like Poland despite the absence of any significant numbers of remaining Jews. Lipman’s bracing theory is that antisemitism also pre-existed the Jews. As the prayerbook says, וְהוּא הָיָה וְהוּא הֹוֶה ,וְהוּא יִהְיֶה בְּתִפְאָרָה: It was, it is, and it ever will be.

Perhaps, just as some say that antisemitism maintained the Jews as a distinct people through the Middle Ages, pre-existing antisemitism actually called the Jewish people into existence. As Sartre famously said,

Loin que l’expérience engendre la notion de Juif, c’est celle-ci qui éclaire l’expérience au contraire ; si le Juif n’existait pas, l’antisémite l’inventerait.

The concept of the Jew does not arise from experience, but rather the Jew serves as a pretext to explain [the anti-Semite’s] experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.

Old-time Darwinism

I’ve just been reading Adam Tooze’s book on WWI and its aftermath. I see Tooze as the great Marxist historian that never was — I don’t know anything about him other than his two books, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t like the comparison — since the grandest human affairs, in his accounts, end up in orbit around the black hole of capital. Anyway, I came upon an interesting quote there that reminded me of why some people of good will found themselves repulsed by Darwinism, particularly by Darwinian hangers-on who try to cite the “lessons” of Darwinism for human affairs.

The Japanese delegation to the founding conference of the League of Nations sought to have a ban on racial discrimination written in to the League covenant. (Not that they opposed racial discrimination in general, but they often enough found themselves on the unpleasant end of it.) Colonel House, a senior American diplomat and advisor to President Wilson, suggested to British foreign minister Arthur Balfour splicing the line from the US Declaration of Independence “All men are created equal” into the Covenant preamble. Balfour rejected this out of hand.

The claim that all men were created equal, Balfour objected, “was an eighteenth-century proposition which he did not believe was true.” The Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth century had taught other lessons. It might be asserted that “in a certain sense… all men of a particular nation were created equal”. Bot to assert that “a man in Central Africa was created equal to a European” was, to Balfour, patent nonsense.

Of course, one needn’t look far to find scientifically-interested chatterers — and occasionally scientists themselves — citing Darwin-themed research to prove that all the prejudices they ever had (these days they tend to emphasise difference between sexes rather than between races) are not only true, but indisputable because they have been proved by science.

I suppose it’s also worth reminding oneself what kind of racist colonialist swamp early Zionism got its start in.

Same as it ever was

The battle over climate science in US environmental policy has come to an odd watershed:

The Senate overwhelmingly voted, 98-1, in favor of an amendment stating that “climate change is real and not a hoax.” In an amusing twist, the chamber’s most notorious climate denier, Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, signed on to the amendment at the last minute, mostly because it didn’t attribute a cause to global warming. “The climate is changing. The climate has always changed,” Inhofe said. He then criticized supporters of man-caused climate change by saying that the real “hoax” was “that there are some people that are so arrogant to think” they can change the climate.

This reminds me of an obscure event in modern German history. Searching for an appropriate new president to succeed the highly esteemed Richard von Weizsäcker in 1993, the first new Bundespräsident since reunification, Helmut Kohl looked east, and selected the little-known former theologian and then justice minister of Saxony, Steffen Heitmann. Unfortunately, Heitmann scuttled his own candidacy by proving himself to be even more prone to embarrassing press comments than Kohl himself.

For the first time in nearly 50 years Germany was not occupied, but rather was preoccupied, with the “Schlussstrich” debate. It’s an untranslatable German word for the line drawn under a column of numbers before totting them up. The question was whether Germany should stop examining its conscience about the Nazi period and Cold War, and draw a balance, the better to march forward to a bright new dawn, as the right wing (!) wanted. (I’m presuming they assumed the balance would come out negative, though what the sum would be was never really a part of the discussion.) Exactly the opposite of Faulkner’s famous dictum about the past, and this was the position that Heitmann allied himself with, which was controversial enough. But his choice of words really grabbed people’s attention:

Ich glaube, daß der organisierte Tod von Millionen Juden in Gaskammern tatsächlich einmalig ist – so wie es viele historisch einmalige Vorgänge gibt. Wiederholungen gibt es in der Geschichte ohnehin nicht.

I do believe that the organised death of millions of Jews in gas chambers was unique — just as there are so many unique events in history. In any case, history never repeats itself.

As one commentator satirised it, “Of course you are my one true love, darling. As are all my girlfriends.”

I was also intrigued by the following comment, cited by Jonathan Chait,

“I do think there are those [who] think there is some kind of climate change happening and are tired of fighting the science or just don’t want the fight and who would rather focus on the economics — I don’t think that means they are ceding the argument that manmade climate change exists, though,” said one Republican Senate aide in a comment echoed by several others.

I’ve never seen such an explicit statement from inside the Republican party that science is seen as an enemy to be “fought”, rather than a discipline that should inform all sensible policy.

Birmingham

A “terrorism expert” on Fox News in the US has raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic by informing his viewers that

in Britain, it’s not just no-go zones, there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in. And parts of London, there are actually Muslim religious police that actually beat and actually wound seriously anyone who doesn’t dress according to Muslim, religious Muslim attire.

This is, of course, well known, and was first brought fleetingly to public attention by the Rev. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail. As some people have forgotten, in his role as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (based in Brighton, I believe) Dr King attempted to open the totally Muslim city of Birmingham to Christians, by staging a nonviolent march. After his arrest by the Muslim religious police (who actually beat and actually wounded him seriously) he penned these stirring words:

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.”[…] I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. […] I cannot sit idly by […] and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

I am offering my services to Fox News, to appear as a history expert and discuss this neglected background to the current crisis in Birmingham.

It is perhaps to the credit of “expert” Steve Emerson that his organisation has posted the transcript of this interview, together with a sort-of-apology:

I have clearly made a terrible error for which I am deeply sorry. My comments about Birmingham were totally in error[. …] I do not intend to justify or mitigate my mistake by stating that I had relied on other sources because I should have been much more careful.

There are several more sentences in the same vein, followed by a non sequitur offer of a donation to Birmingham Children’s Hospital. While I appreciate his refusal to “justify or mitigate”, I think in this case an exposition of his sources would be informative, or at least entertaining. But these think tanks are not so much scholarly organisations as conspiratorial cells, and unless we take him to Guantanamo we’ll never get the names of his contacts.

I guess he’s standing by the London comments. I think this is a real opening for Labour, if the government is cutting housing assistance but still funding the Muslim religious police. And he hasn’t yet apologised for neglecting Dr King’s contributions to intercommunal understanding in Birmingham.

Aren’t all famous people friends?

By way of Andrew Sullivan, I found this book review by Diane Johnson, referring to

Freud’s friend Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Novel, the inspiration for the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut…

Poor Schnitzler. He’s one of my favourite authors, and Traumnovelle is one of his masterpieces, but he needs to be put into context for English readers by his connection to two people who are much better known.

I find the Freud hook particularly poignant because Freud was famously not a friend of Schnitzler. They were contemporaries, yes, and neighbours in Vienna. They read each other’s work. But they were not friends. There is one famous letter from Freud to Schnitzler (out of about 10 in total), on the occasion of the latter’s 60th birthday, in which Freud expresses his admiration, and explains why he had never made an effort to meet him. He says it was “Doppelgängerscheu”, fear of meeting his double. Schnitzler used a similar expression some years later in an interview with an American journalist, and he had long been fascinated by Freud’s theories, though also critical.

Freud did invite Schnitzler to his home after that letter, but there seem to have been only a few encounters after that. It would have been more accurate to call Schnitzler’s work “the inspiration for the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut, and the inspiration for many of Freud’s theories of dream analysis”.

The origin of “tool” use

I always thought that the word “tool”, used to mean a fool easily manipulated, particularly by advertising or consumer marketing (though more recent usages have veered closer to “unfashionable” for those who don’t believe they follow fashions) was a recent neologism, derived from the 1960s phrase “capitalist tool”. The capitalist tool was the pendant to the “commie symp”, and there’s a nice parallelism in the way “tool” rhymes with “fool” (which rhymes with “pool”) and “symp” is like “simp”.

I just happened across a piece of 1760s political doggerel in Robert Middlekauf’s history of the American Revolution, an attack on Massachusetts state representative James Otis, Jr., called Jemmibullero:

And Jemmy is a silly dog, and Jemmy is a tool,

And Jemmy is a stupid curr, and Jemmy is a fool.

And Jemmy is a madman, and Jemmy is an ass,

And Jemmy has a leaden head and forehead spread with brass.

Bayesian theology

I was reading (finally, after seven years in Oxford) Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and found the following quote from John Henry Newman:

My argument was … that absolute certitude as to the truths of natural theology was the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging probabilities … that probabilities which did not reach to logical certainty might create a mental certitude.