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Sep 17, 1991
Sep 17, 1991
This book contains many insights not so much into art as into the repressive cultures for which art is an outlet. It contains works not easily availab
This book contains many insights not so much into art as into the repressive cultures for which art is an outlet. It contains works not easily available elsewhere and is very generous with its illustrations.
The first half is a chronology which is the more convincing half. The second is thematic and I found myself questioning much of the too-easy Freudian speculation and frankly unsubtle assessments.
Having said that, this is a popular guide and not a monograph in an excellent series and, as an introduction, presumably updated as Western identity politics was rising to its peak, it is to be recommended. ...more
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This is superb history - dispassionate though not without judgment, informative with a clear narrative and capable both of changing prejudices and ass This is superb history - dispassionate though not without judgment, informative with a clear narrative and capable both of changing prejudices and assumptions and suggesting analogies with today.
Fehrenbach wrote this book forty years ago as a sympathetic historian of Texas and Mexico who was filling in the natural sovereign gap in the history of the South West - the 'savage' Comancheria.
Because it was written so long ago, it was also written before 'political correctness' obliged us to accept an entirely false view of the benignity of savagery because of our fear of what Hobbes claimed.
In fact, Fehrenbach (who does have a bias towards 'civilisation' that might be unwarranted) treats the southern plains Amerindians with more respect and less sentimentality than East Coast liberals.
He takes them for what they were and not what deeply idiotic Quaker Indian agents would like them to have been - the book presents a standing argument for keeping religion and ideology out of empire.
There are two overwhelming truths about the dreadful experience of the Comanche: the official state machines of Texas and the USA were never in control of the situation; and the Indians were vicious.
The first point is one of demography and not actually of superiority. Indeed, the white settlers were held back, even pushed back by Comanche determination, for many decades.
Driving the white population forward was the simple fact that they were breeding like rabbits and surviving, sending waves of dour Baptists and then desperate migrants eastwards.
Ironically, the West is now besieged by the opposite - excitable pentecostalists and islamists and desperate migrants moving northwards with the same sort of sentimentalist evading the consequences.
The native Amerindians were numbered in tens of thousands, not millions, and were defeated ultimately first by disease and second by a market-driven, not calculated, destruction of the bison herds.
The United States in particular, but also the Republic of Texas, were not sophisticated hierarchical empires with the ability to enforce assimilation or treaties but polities trying to keep a lid on things.
The British in Canada preserved Indian culture by enforcing deals against settlers but the sheer scale of European migration and the weakness of the state meant that this was not possible in the US.
Hence the much written about tragedy of long and violent border wars and brutal and intermittent guerrilla actions leading to the utterly self-destructive tactics of the tribes and their final destruction.
Fehrenbach plausibly argues, using the Navajo example and alluding to Canada, that the best strategy for the Indians would have been a decisive military defeat and enforceable treaty-making.
It is at this point that he may be too kind to the populist federal republics that emerged in Texas and which made up the rather nasty Jacksonian democracy that drove agrarian indians ever westward.
The plains indians were not fools but simply ignorant and Jacksonian democracy as a political model had lies and faithlessness built into it - Texas was a mere extension of Christian Southern arrogance.
The point was that the Indians could never possibly resist the surge from the East because it was many and they were few but their culture and experience failed them in organising adequately to deal with this.
A diferent sort of Indian culture might have followed the classic barbarian model of creating a single Comanche proto-state that could create its own settler patterns but this was not to be.
Had it had the intellectual and organisational resources to do this, it would have followed the Slav pattern, created a sovereign war chief ('king'), adopted Protestant Christianity and become the Comanche Republic as a state within the Union or independent.
This could either have happened naturally (which no plains indian seemed able to achieve) or as a result of a defeat in effective collaboration with a sympathetic federal enemy (as in Canada).
This latter is not as absurd as it sounds since the military were professional not racist and there was a strong body of Eastern opinion sympathetic, overly so, to the Amerindians.
Unfortunately, the classic problem of American democracy - populist hysteria and inter-agency conflict constantly evaded a decisive handling of the problem.
When the military were finally permitted a free hand, the war of attrition between millions of whites and thousands of Comanche was a brutal walk over that destroyed a culture that had no room to adapt.
The Comanche, by their blunders and brutality, also sped up the end for their northern plains counterparts but that is another story.
So far, my account of the book sounds rather one-sided but that is because I have missed out the essential truth of the conflict - that the Comanches and other southern plains tribes really were savage.
The small-minded Baptists and racists were no less unappealing to modern tastes and many whites were thugs of the first order but the plains indian culture was inherently violent.
What we are dealing with here are not the romantic noble figures with waving feather headdresses who speak of great spirits and environmental responsibility but torturing half-beasts.
These were stone age people engaged in permanent internecine warfare of consummate brutality, engaging in the vilest form of torture and destruction for a form of 'honour'.
Horses and then iron simply upgraded the methodology of terror to include the plains and competition with other tribes. This moved on to brutal raids against vulnerable Mexican villagers for loot.
Given the culture, its misogynistic kin-orientated brutalities would naturally be applied to the very different tejanos even if they were initially restrained with the americanos.
Be in no doubt, the horrors perpetrated by the Amerindians on their own kind and the settlers - systematic rape, mutilation, kidnapping, enslavement, murder and wanton destruction - were 'normal'.
Any excuse that they were responding to the invasion of their territory does not hold water. They were raiding because it was profitable and that is what their young men did to get 'honour'.
Fehrenbach's book is good not only in clarifying this but in giving important context for each stage of the Comanche's evolution so that we learn a lot about the history of the whole American South West.
As he points out, what was 'normal' to Amerindians became normalised as barbarities amongst the besieged 'tejanos' although the Texans and Americans certainly did not rape, mutilate and torture as a 'norm'.
These were two incommensurate borderlands cultures and, as we know from European history, borderlands are the liminal areas where any cultural restraints will collapse under pressure.
Fehrenbach points out the differential in 'organisation' (not intelligence or technology) and the effects of demography and market capitalism as decisive in the final American victory.
But, as we note above, this victory took an inordinately long time a-coming and only emerged when the American Civil War had permitted the federal state the ability to organise itself for modernity.
The story is a tragedy. There are many capable people in it and some heroes - the disastrous rule of the Quaker Indian agents must not be included here. Most people here are muddling through on tram-lines.
Perhaps that is the lesson for today - populist democracies can never seem to get a grip on what needs to be done and there is, as a result, far more suffering than is necessary.
For all their brutalities and short lives, the plains indians deserve the respect that Fehrenbach and the best of the soldiery gave to them.
They deserved an early defeat in battle with honour and a treaty imposed by a superior force that enforced its provisions with the same sense of honour and professionalism as was found in Canada.
(Although we should be careful of claiming too much British Imperial decency. Once those missionaries got their teeth into the tribes, the decency started to disappear pretty quickly)
Instead, the Comanche faced a weak state whose lies and incompetencies derived from sentimentalism and religion. These did far more harm to them than any number of honest military defeats could have done.
The soft sentimental liberal and faith-based mind simply cannot understand this - that progress comes from direct brutal struggle between strong forces succeeded by magnanimity and the rule of law.
The final form of the American Federal State, before it degenerated again into ideology and religiosity, got this perfectly right in 1945 after another existential struggle.
It is probable that the USA will never be great again until it learns the lessons of the Indian wars - use power effectively, decisively and sparingly and be generous to the defeated.
The treatment of the Amerindians after their defeat, despite their brutal 'norms', is a lasting stain on American democracy, indeed on the normative claims of the West in general.
I recommend this highly readable book to anyone who wants to understand our own species better, what differential power really means and why sentiment and faith are appalling guides to policy.
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Mar 18, 1999
The 1970 (revised 1983) Oxford World Classics Editions of Beckford's 'Vathek' of 1782 is almost exhaustingly as well as exhaustively scholarly with no The 1970 (revised 1983) Oxford World Classics Editions of Beckford's 'Vathek' of 1782 is almost exhaustingly as well as exhaustively scholarly with not only the final 1816 text as the basis of the book but a full range of notes from the original.
The work is quite slight in many ways but it has to be granted its originality as a quasi-Gothic piece of orientalism and as a major influence on subsequent fantastic literature.
Beckford himself had the potential to be great but he was not only born far too rich (the equivalent of a billionaire from the cradle) but tormented, an ephebophiliac, possibly paedophiliac, pursued by scandal.
But, though the man is interesting, his life and work would only be interesting to specialists in late eighteenth century letters if it was not for this book which bears its frequent reprinting and sits in every history of the Gothic alongside Walpole's 'Castle of Otranto'.
Written originally in French (first published in English and French in 1786), the book might as equally be considered part of the French literary tradition. It expresses the sensibility of a European culture, both cynical and fascinated by strangeness, that would collapse into nationalism quite soon.
So, rather than be seen as the harbinger of a new literature, 'Vathek' might equally be seen as one of the last gasps of an international European aristocratic culture. This is the world of 'liaisons dangereuses', Casanova and (on the cusp of the new) Byron.
In fact, the central part of the story is quite dull - a conventional 'Persian' love story presented, however, precisely with that aristocratic cynicism that we know so well to be the stance of French literature in the years leading up to the Revolution.
What makes the book worth reading is the beginning and the end, both of which show an ability to write about voluptuousness and the nature of hell in terms that strike an imaginative and fantastic chord even today.
The whole is held together with a surprisingly detailed if often false knowledge of Arab and Persian culture, that gives a strange fantastic verisimilitude to the adventures. It represents the high point of eightenth century orientalism.
We should recognise that Beckford owed a great deal to his sources and, it would seem, to a collaborator, Samuel Henley, who 'translated' the first edition for Beckford from the French to the English - hence the necessity of a scholarly comitment to entangling the book's story.
But the modern reader need not worry about all this. The account of the lust for power and wealth (with an evident sexual undercurrent throughout) of a man prepared to murder fifty children to achieve his ends is of the essence of the fantastic expressed as horror.
The monstrous witch-mother Carathis introduces us to a world of black magic and ghouls and graveyards and the characterisation of not only this character but of others is not at all bad. Beckford could write well.
There might be much to write about the psychology of the piece which wears Beckford's neuroses on its sleeve if we were to care to look. His view of women is unforgiving and the men are all weak creatures of their passions or long serving servants doing their best under conditions of evil.
But all this is as nothing to the account of his final appearance in the Halls of Eblis (a sort of Islamic Hell) which is written with such verve and imagination that it still seems new and fresh today. What actually happens is for you to discover.
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Feb 18, 1988
Feb 18, 1988
This quarter century old basic introduction to the history of continental philosophy still stands up to scrutiny. Robert Solomon has a mildly polemica This quarter century old basic introduction to the history of continental philosophy still stands up to scrutiny. Robert Solomon has a mildly polemical intent in that (in my opinon quite correctly) he clearly wants us to be unpersuaded by the transcendental claims of the great essentialists - Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and their followers.
The book's narrative perhaps hinges on the great anti-philosopher and so the greatest philosopher of the continental tradition, Nietzsche. It is as if progress was not possible until he had spoken though we can offer some thanks to the intellect of Kierkegaard.
Looking back, everything before Nietzsche looks increasingly like ideology and everything after him an attempt at science, the striving towards a philosophy that had the measure of man as he is in relation to the world or a somewhat futile attempt to salvage what he wrecked.
Of course, ideology returns in the synthesis between it and existentialism of the flawed genius Sartre, the squabbles with Camus (untreated here) and the important explorations of identity of De Beauvoir but it has to take account of the existential impulse in order to salvage a somewhat intense and over-wrought version of meaning.
By the time we get to the last chapter, we are too close to the period in which Solomon is writing. He is wisely cautious about what will and will not matter to future generations. In the mid-1980s he can reasonably judge that Althusser and Lacan were effectively damp squibs and have the jury out on Derrida and Foucault (though the last is clearly joining the greats as time passes).
In fact, what does strike us is just how good Solomon's judgment is in nearly every case. Even today, we would give Marx the due given by Solomon and we have since thrown Freud over board as influence on philosophy perhaps too easily.
But (given the closing of the story in effect in the middle of the twentieth century) what remains striking is that the long tail of Kantian and Hegelian nonsense is still so culturally dominant today outside philosophy itself.
We can push to one side the clowning of Zizek but philosophy today is either soundly analytical but increasingly sceptical of itself, striving to give up bits of itself to the cognitive sciences, or it is attempting to find out what it is to be human (the followers of Heidegger) or how power, text, language and the social actually operate (Foucault) rather than piddle around with non-existent universals.
Philosophy remains dynamic and questioning and yet our political and artistic culture, having disposed of both Freud and Marx, seems stuck in the world created by the absolutist transcendentalists.
My own theory on this relates to psychology. The class that sits in a manipulative position over the masses has no tools left but an invented idealism in order to guide and control them.
It is not that Kantian rights theory or Hegelian dialectic (shorn of its Marxist overlay now) are true but that, as tools, they are useful, whereas the insights on what it is to be human of Heidegger (after Nietzsche) or Foucault may be true but they are not useful except to individuals and (were they but to know it) the masses themselves.
The search for meaning thus intersects with a struggle over power and the Absolute has become a pragmatically useful replacement for God. It can both give a spurious meaning to people desperate for meaning (even if it not be true) and be a tool for power while posturing as progressive or advanced thought.
No wonder the liberal intelligentsia and administrative classes find it difficult to give these essentialisms up - it would be like the cynical Constantine giving up Christianity even after someone had pointed out that it was based on invented nonsense.
The invented nonsenses of Christianity were too obvious by the Enlightenment so the arrival of Rousseau and his ilk was like (excuse the joke) a 'deus ex machina', ready and waiting for the new 'democratic' ideologies of conscription and manipulation.
Heidegger and Sartre drifted into the same trap in different ways (and were unlike Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, even if a perverted form of the last was utilised by evil forces later).
Heidegger, whose early and core philosophy stands as the most profoundly 'realistic' account of how we humans exist in the world, drifted into a mystical stance later that might easily have become transcendental in its own right if taken further.
Sartre, a true manipulative genius, merged existentialism with Cartesianism to turn philosophy into a weapon once again but (as Marx did) one for the damned and discontented of the earth to use if they were so minded. That Sartre turned to Marx as tool to hand should occasion no surprise.
Neither 'turn' was persuasive because both wanted to reinvent meaning where there was no necessity for it, either for the individual in the world or as a tool for action in the world. Neither seemed to be able to reconstruct sufficient 'pagan virtue' but had to invent alienations where none need have existed. The theory of alienation, of course, actually being at its worse in the hysterically ridiculous value judgments emerging in the 'horreur' of commodification and objectification from the dimmer type of late Marxist.
Today, we seem to live in a world where philosophy exists in three layers: a top layer of serious investigation that informs how science is being done and how people may live in the world; an intermediate layer of celebrity performance whose sole purpose appears to be pander to the prejudices of a certain type of graduate terrified of becoming declasse; and the level below this where liberal rights activism and administrative conservatism rely on philosophical systems that are outdated and, bluntly, plain wrong.
Below these three layers are the population at large, controlled by the layer immediately above (and half persuaded where they are not holding to traditional world views of their rightness), confused by and disconnected from the layer above that and not realising that the things that will decide their future and their world live in that fertile top layer.
What we have as the world trundles towards a revolutionary situation based on technological change is a cultural milieu in which rights and the dialectic have simply replaced traditional religion. It is no surprise to see, equally threatened by the new world, faith-based groups and many intellectual 'Leftists' converging in conservative opposition to the technological and freedom agenda emerging (albeit mostly accidentally) out of much current philosophy.
We are entering a time of struggle. The reactionary forces in this struggle include Enlightenment absolutism as much as people who believe in supernatural forces - both the Absolute and God are really simply variations on the same theme. However, that is looking at things a quarter of a century on from this book.
In the meantime, Solomon's narrative should be taken as one of the best short and very readable guides to the continental tradition, from Rousseau to the existentialists and phenomenologists, and is recommended.
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Oct 27, 2013
Jan 01, 2000
Published just after the Millennium as a sort of popular pot boiler, no doubt making excellent use of material derived from editing various Times' his Published just after the Millennium as a sort of popular pot boiler, no doubt making excellent use of material derived from editing various Times' historical atlases and his research on his own 'Millennium', the idea behind Fernandez-Armesto's book has some experimental merit.
What the Argentian-born academic tries to do is to limit the chronological bias of history by exploring what civilisation means in terms of human mastery of the environment.
There is a dull introduction for fellow-professionals which the author implies we can freely skip and a speculative final chapter that seems already overtaken by events but the remaining 450 pages of this blockbuster contain a great deal of material that will probably be as new to you as it was to me.
The book has to become much more conventional as he moves towards the story of Greece and Rome and then on to the creation and dominance of what he calls Atlantic civilisation but, even here, there are important insights.
His critique of slavery abolitionism is devastating and depressingly true and he reports back on the 1997 500th anniversary academic investigation into Vasco da Gama in a way that suggests that its findings have partially helped to underpin his book.
What we can learn from history is not so much how to predict the future - this is impossible - but how our modern decisions are often wrong because we have not understood what happened in the past (or, equally likely, are in denial of that past).
Even now, in the slavery case, we have eager beaver idealists in the NGOs and amongst the Christian evangelicals causing similar harms on the 'victims' because of their idealistic commitment to issues of 'principle'.
Overall, I like his conservative but humane approach to history as a complex system where good and bad things arise from each other, mostly beyond the control of anyone, rather than a story of inevitable or automatic progress and individual heroism.
What progress there is is incremental and derived from blind luck and necessity as much as any other factors. The mythologies of inevitability and superiority arising from a 'win' in 'life's race' are suggested throughout to be false.
The judgments of the early modern and modern era are mostly sound if necessarily selective in scope. But a book on civilisations that appears to entirely neglect the globalising inter-ocean power of the British Empire in the nineteenth century and over-emphasises the power of the United States since then has to be considered slightly flawed.
As a result, the British Raj is scarcely alluded to (nor the parallel trek across the world of the French) and Australia arises very late and in passing as part of the putative Pacific World where (I think) the author's predictions are too much of the time of his writing.
But the meat of the book - easily two thirds of the whole - is filled with insights on cultures and civilisation that are usually neglected in Western school rooms, covering almost every conceivable human environment excluding space and deep sea exploration (which have not constructed true civilisations as yet).
Here are just some of the peoples that Fernandez-Arnesto introduced to me and which had me searching for more information on Wikipedia - the biarmians, the orang laut, the kutchi, the garamantes, the dawada and the mapuche as well as, more anciently, the hagarites.
Alternatively, you might try looking up some very obscure but interesting kingdoms - Funan, Shatrunjaya, Srivijaya, Rozwi, Mwene Mutapa or the Maroon Kingdoms such as Palmares.
Overall, not a bad entertainment and an excellent guide to how sensible history should be written - conversationally, contingently and evidence-based with a critical attitude to the stories we tell ourselves in the dark. ...more
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Jul 13, 2013
Oct 17, 2011
Oct 17, 2011
A blockbuster of a book that, on and off, took me about eighteen months to get through. It comprises nearly 1,000 pages of art works, with useful refe A blockbuster of a book that, on and off, took me about eighteen months to get through. It comprises nearly 1,000 pages of art works, with useful references at the back, on a large pictorial scale. This means that you get a better sense of the scale of a work than you would from most art books.
My edition lost a star because of a gripe. Perhaps the publishers were keen to get the book out for Christmas 2011 but there are persistent problems with inaccurate cross references in some sections. However, it is an achievement of great educational value, covering all periods and regions from the stone age to contemporary work.
I tend to have a jaundiced view of much recent art which strikes me as simply reflecting the same bubble that burst with the crash of the financial engineers in 2008 - cynics servicing fools.
Despite that, there are signs of recovery. Relational art takes conceptual art out of the hands of the alleged creative genius and makes the artist a potential educator and facilitator of liberation.
In addition, there are individual geniuses for our age - the late Cy Twombly speaks to the great tradition and Eliasson tries to make us think again while installations are there to create wonder.
Even the neo-pop of Murakami and Koons is, at the least, fun and sculptural techniques continue to subvert materials. Perhaps we can now move on from the constant hommages to Duchamp.
This book is a great table top item - albeit very heavy to carry around. It is highly recommended although I hope a second edition corrects the referencing. Such sloppy editing, for whatever reason, is not good enough from the House of Phaidon - and certainly not at the relatively high price. ...more
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Jun 28, 2013
Jul 16, 1998
This Oxford World's Classics Edition of the 1764 Gothick classic (indeed the founder of the form) has been edited to the very high standards of the re This Oxford World's Classics Edition of the 1764 Gothick classic (indeed the founder of the form) has been edited to the very high standards of the rest of the series.
There is not a lot to be said about it that has not been said by other commentators on Walpole and the Gothick.
The story is hysterical and somewhat dull, certainly unbelievable beyond any reasonable suspension of disbelief, even comical in the way that we find the comedy in the melodramas that owe so much to its sensibility.
But, having said all that, it was highly innovative in its day and no sensible person can expect to understand anything subsequently written in the gothic genre without coming to terms with it.
It is deservedly a classic, not because it is readable (it is not) but because it represents a creative turning point in culture, a point when formal rules could be thrown into the air and a new form be created. ...more
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May 03, 2013
Aug 01, 1997
This is an overrated picaresque 'classic' from very early in the nineteenth century. It has its moments of genuine surprise and horror - indeed erotic This is an overrated picaresque 'classic' from very early in the nineteenth century. It has its moments of genuine surprise and horror - indeed eroticism - but it is also overwrought, messy and confused.
Brian Stableford has produced a solid piece of academic background for this edition. We are really not very sure of the book's origin. Is it Polish or French and, if Polish, which Potocki wrote it?
There have been great cultural claims for this book - including claims of it holding secret qabbalistic meaning - but it strikes me as the plaything of a bored aristocrat trying to work out his demons on paper.
The most striking aspect of this quasi-Gothic tale is the underlying eroticism of what amount to mysterious and dream-like 'threesomes' that only get dignified with their qabbalistic coating towards the end.
And, of course, we have our old nineteenth century neurotic friend - the linkage of sex and death. We find ourselves in the picaresque tale-telling world of one era and the decadent necro-sexuality of another.
I am not sure about these claims at all. It seems to me that our mysterious nobleman was trying to cope with his sexual fantasies and then finding a way to give them erotic meaning through the esoteric.
That may sound cynical until you consider how much libertine, homo-erotic and ephebophiliac sentiment was usefully hidden under neo-pagan cover right up until very recent times.
In a Christian culture of aristocratic licence and religious reaction, the worlds of myth and the esoteric have both been tailor made for turning 'base' desires and urges into something 'magical' and 'other'.
But the artistic output of sexual desire can be done well or badly. This book is so inconclusive that there is a danger of thinking its incompleteness hides some intended subtlety. I do not think it does.
What might be said, though, is that 'Potocki' straddles the world of eighteenth century aristocratic licentiousness and what would become the bourgeois decadence of the era of Huysmans in a very peculiar way.
The peculiarity of this is taken unwarrantedly for sophistication. What we have instead is an acute magpie mind, taking a number of literary influences and throwing them into what amounts to a dream novel.
The tension between the honour codes of Alphonse Van Worden and the desire to be saved from eternal damnation is also a tension between fleshly pleasures and the desire for meaning.
It could be said that the confusion and lack of completion in the book mirrors these tensions quite well but that is not enough.
The 'manuscript' deserves its place in history (for study) but it is not a great book for all that. ...more
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Apr 10, 2013
Jan 01, 1981
An entertaining enough anthology of erotic prose, produced in the early 1980s, that might still make a few people uncomfortable.
Certainly, some conte An entertaining enough anthology of erotic prose, produced in the early 1980s, that might still make a few people uncomfortable.
Certainly, some contemporary moralists, who might still put up with anything between two consenting adults, might baulk at the occasional pleasures involving younger persons.
The past is definitely another country. Paedo has now replaced terrorist as the central unthinking insult 'de nos jours' but, otherwise, nearly all forms of adult transgression and stance are here and they will amuse, disgust, 'turn on' or bore to taste.
Derek Parker is quite acute in his choice of passage, emphasising literary insights rather than arousal, but the net effect is probably to confirm that sex is something that you do rather than read or write about. In short, it hangs together well but it cannot inspire.
One test of an anthology is whether it is likely to drive you to read on. Unfortunately, most passages rather do the opposite (at least to this reviewer).
A lack of desire to discover more about desire through literature may show how much we have moved into a more explicit and visual culture - although the arrival of Fifty Shades of Unsafe Sex shows that many still prefer wordy fantasy to grubby reality.
I know and admire the work of Pauline Reage and there is a very amusing, probably unintended, satire on seventeenth century Chinese examination culture from Li Yiu but much of the material is crude or overwrought and the rest is merely 'interesting'.
As you might expect, Oscar Wilde cannot write badly and there is much of quality but probably only Casanova looks as if he would be worth reading for any sense of something that is not purely sexual fantasy.
I have probably rated this book a little unfairly because anthologies are never easy to review. Parker himself seems mature and civilised in his own assessment of this problem and of his subject matter.
I am also somewhat personally prejudiced against literature as substitute for life. Fantasy about strange worlds and other planets is one thing. Fantasy about what can actually be touched and felt strikes me as often absurd displacement activity.
So, this is one for reference and guidance really, available to remind oneself of the style and approach of a particular author. But I do have a footnote to add, a discovery, and it is not really to do with the erotic but only with fine and lucid writing.
Experimental writing is often the worst of all - I had forgotten what hard work William Burroughs was - so the clarity of Denton Welch, virtually unknown today, who died in his early 30s, was a revelation.
A superb diary passage of homo-erotic longing, English middle class diffidence and inability to act on a desire (how very English!) shows a fine writer who was never given a chance to shine.
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Dec 14, 2012
Sep 05, 2002
Sep 05, 2002
Wordsworth Classics are generally very good value. This is no exception - a collection of twenty gothic short stories from the second half of the eigh Wordsworth Classics are generally very good value. This is no exception - a collection of twenty gothic short stories from the second half of the eighteenth century through to the Edwardian era.
What is interesting about the collection is that David Blair has usefully compared and contrasted the English and American approaches with an eye to illustrating his fine introduction.
He also introduces us to American by-ways that I had not known before - alongside Poe, Gilman and Bierce are three tales by 'minor' writers from the turn of the last century that are of considerable interest .
However, it is important not to read the Introduction first (there is a warning to that effect at the beginning). Blair's analysis, including the sexual and gender themes, comes alive from its reference back to the readings.
Blair has not always chosen the obvious Gothic master tales. Although there are some familiar stories in here, each has been carefully chosen to illustrate his introductory themes, a process that only becomes clear when he has tied them together analytically.
Normally, one avoids spoilers on stories but here I think one should avoid spoilers on the analysis and insights. So I shall say no more ... ...more
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Nov 17, 2012
Nov 19, 2007
This is a fairly substantial and worthy account of the history of anarchism, largely built around review chapters of prominent figures and historical This is a fairly substantial and worthy account of the history of anarchism, largely built around review chapters of prominent figures and historical reviews of anarchism in action. It takes a broad view by including writers and thinkers who might better or equally be considered liberal or libertarian, although Marshall is always at pains to show their differences from classical anarchist thought.
It has to be said that it can be a little dull at times and there is a lack of a sustained overview, something that would give us a better idea of what it all may mean. It was also written in or around 1991/2 so the 'action' (such as it is) takes place at one of the low points in anarchist history - a quarter of a century after the collapse of the student hopes of the 1960s.
Similarly, Marshall is writing at least a decade and probably more before the internet permits the creation of a new politically-directed hacker activism and the emergence of the post-2008 insurrectionism that, one suspects, would have thoroughly confused the somewhat earnest intellectuals who dominate his book.
Indeed, that is the problem with the tale told here. This is mostly a story of intellectuals pontificating from on high about 'shoulds' and 'oughts' and about the nature of humanity and the world in a way that bears little relationship to the actual lived-in world of the people they claim that they want to liberate.
And it gets worse over time. The culmination of the book is a deathly dull (I skimmed in the end) account of the thoughts of that dodgy old Hegelian Murray Bookchin, a throw-back to the nineteenth century if ever there was one.
Marshall is old-school. The succession of (mostly) dead and nearly-dead white males leaves one, ultimately, less minded to anarchism at the end than one was at the beginning, partly because of the brutal realization that, if most of these gentlemen could have achieved their utopian dreams, the rest of us would have been oppressed and miserable before very long, certainly from utter boredom in their craftsman/peasant, neighbourly, crushingly dull, little communities.
At the end of the day, most of these thinkers (as opposed to the far more interesting practical seizures of power by anarchists in the Latin street) have no real language for accepting humanity as it is and so they rapidly go scuttling into a world of claimed reason where you can read petit-bourgeois tyranny on every page, at least when the people do not match up to the dreams of their saviours.
The Green Anarchism of Murray Bookchin is typical. His is a turgid and unrealistic Hegelianism that has very little to do with real freedom, calling us back to what amounts to the faith-based politics of dreamers like Kropotkin and Tolstoy via that German theoretician.
Anything that is ultimately faith-based or essentialist is definitely a bit creepy to anyone with their two feet placed firmly on the earth and many anarchists can be lumped with the Marxists and New Age loons in that respect.
In the end, one is thrown back to a place somewhere between the minimal state libertarianism and a humane left-libertarianism that permits some state action to enable all to be autonomous on equal terms. Grand theory has little to say to us here, praxis everything.
But even the praxis leaves us with a romantic bad taste in the mouth because every decent anarchist experiment – the Paris Commune, the Kronstadt rebellion, Makhno in the Ukraine, the POUM in Catalonia, the Evenements of '68 and many others – is quite simply crushed by superior reality.
Not just by superior force but by the fact that the force represents something – the reality of the situation. As a romantic, I am definitely with all these rebellions but, let's face it, participation is heroic but futile, an act of suicide. It would be like Mishima's hari-kiri only for the goodies.
It is not enough to say that these experiments 'should have won' because they were 'right'. The truth is they did not win for very good reasons related to what we are as human beings. The only successful anarchist rebellion would be one that could change humanity – and that is very dangerous territory indeed, a repetition by force of what the Bolsheviks tried and failed to do.
All in all, this book, which is highly sympathetic to the movement, tells us that anarchic thinking is like a chair that is very appealing to the eye but falls apart when someone tries to sit on it. If it did not exist, it would have to be invented but only as a constraint or restraint on power, by promising rebellion if lines were crossed but not as an option for any social organization that is actually viable.
This has implications for the four main current strands of quasi-anarchic thinking in the world today – hacker activism, greenery (which has already compromised with reality to gain a power that it probably does not deserve), the Occupy Movement and anarcho-capitalist libertarianism.
All of these are troublesome for the prevailing order but none of them represent a terminal threat – indeed, the Occupy Movement's achievement may have been little more than mobilizing the vote for Tweedledum Obama over Tweedledee Romney and giving the State some populist welly when it is minded to bring the capitalists to heel for its own tax-raising purposes. It is interesting that the State did not even bother to do that.
Occupy is particularly daft from a classical anarchist perspective. It is led by naïve middle class students and activists whose sole purpose seems to be to get more cash into the hands of the State from the private sector or give the NGOs a bit more oomph in the street so that money can then be diverted to their latest pet project. The general public, of course, has seen through this.
The most threatening to the State may be hacker activism and then only because its more louche side is quite prepared to act as intellectual muscle for organized crime. But it can just as easily be co-opted into the State Department's manipulative cyberwars against states it does not approve of and it is most effective as trail-blazer for anarcho-capitalism's darker side. Kim Dotcom is an anarchist of sorts but not quite what Prince Pyotr Kropotkin had in mind.
Even in Greece today, where one would most expect insurrection, the struggle for mastery over a corrupt and failed bourgeois elite, backed by the European Union, is in the hands either of sensible Leftists who have no intention of unraveling the State and a bunch of gangster fascists. In Catalonia, the drive for independence is also no longer associated with anarchist ideology but with a revived Leftism.
Worse, this Euro-Leftism is not only not anarchist in the traditional sense but is imbued with an ideology of identity politics that wholly relies on the State to impose its cultural agenda on an increasingly resentful mass (at least that proportion of the mass not on the State pay roll, admittedly a decreasing proportion).
Having said all that, if we winnow out perhaps seven out of ten of the anarcho-intellectuals as either faith-based essentialists (and we include the Hegelians) or narcissistic imposers of their values and personality on the world, we are left with some good people and good thinking. The American Paul Goodman stood out in this respect. And it was good to see Foucault briefly included as gad fly.
There is real value in anarchism but not as praxis or ideology. Its value lies in it being a reminder of the core value to humanity of personal autonomy and of individuation. People of anarchist bent would do much better to hold their noses and engage with the political process and the State through improved organization, if only to halt the growing power of authoritarian Leftists, fascists and religious believers. Camus' concept of rebellion as preferable to revolution holds water here - we can all constantly rebel against the unwarranted demands and claims of others.
The final pages of the book raise issues with anarchism as practical politics but by this time we have all made our mind up – either we are anarchists or we are not. I am not – more so after reading the book than before. My initial sympathies dissipated chapter by chapter as I realized that I would be filled with a terminal boredom by these men and their utopias.
Anarchists are too often people who have lost their sense of reality, equally as much as the religious types they claim to despise. In some cases (horror of horrors!), they will even claim to have found a better God or reality as did Tolstoy. Any politics that has a place for invented beings and universal consciousnesses must be considered dangerous and yet a small minority of anarchists persist in this sort of flummery.
Like Marxism, anarchism can be religion by other means and so deeply dangerous to non-believers in the long run. Nevertheless, this book is strongly recommended as a sound guide to what anarchists have thought in the past and what they did in history.
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A very sound academic introduction to the Gothic literary phenomenon, although Botting loses momentum and perhaps judgment once he reaches the twentie A very sound academic introduction to the Gothic literary phenomenon, although Botting loses momentum and perhaps judgment once he reaches the twentieth century which he deals with in a rather cursory and slightly negative manner.
Nevertheless, 90% of the book is devoted to analysing both the core literary phenomenon and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries so he can certainly be forgiven. The book should also stimulate the reader to try the original texts and make their own judgments - that has to be a good thing. ...more
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This book is now forty years old but it still stands as excellent basic background to the history of secret societies and political conspiracy in the
This book is now forty years old but it still stands as excellent basic background to the history of secret societies and political conspiracy in the eighteenth and first quarter of the nineteenth centuries.
Of course, much of the detail will have been overtaken by the work of two generations of scholar. Roberts is also contesting his case during a period when the grand narrative of Marxism was treated with more respect than it is today.
He is writing as part of the very serious business of countering the persistence of conspiracy in political discourse, especially on the radical right and amongst anti-semites. He writes only thirty years after a holocaust whose raison d'etre was based on a conspiracy theory.
A mildly conservative pessimism – as in the best of the British school of historiography – questions delicately whether conspiracy theory will ever be removed from political discourse by rational men. History, in the age of 9/11 and the New World Order, has shown that his concerns were valid.
The book is measured and serious and there is so much meat in it – essential to understanding why, even today, Europe is 'different' in political culture from Britain – that we can only pinpoint three themes here.
The first is to argue cogently that, with the exception of the radicalism of the Illuminati, most esoteric activity in the eighteenth century was political only insofar as it shared the mood of the time. Claims by Barruel and others of a deliberate Enlightenment conspiracy against Kings and Church are untenable.
The second is that the creation of the myth of conspiracy resulted in the creation of political conspiracy after the French Revolution and not the other way around.
Political conspiracies, almost entirely ineffective, were no serious threat to the State during this later period but developed in a sort of call-and-response to the paranoia of States about their very existence. Roberts is illuminating (excuse the pun) on the lack of success of the Carbonari.
The third theme comes late in the book and is only touched upon because its denouement comes after the collapse of utopian socialism and the rise of Marxism.
This is the myth of Buonarroti and, through him, Babeuf spinning a tale of professional revolutionary fervour that was later redrafted to serve history.
Bounarroti, an Italian aristocrat turned radical, was a singular failure during his life time, like (in political terms) Cagliostro and Weisshaupt before him.
However, his obsessive plotting and tradecraft fuelled an anarchist and, subsequently, Leninist reality of secret cadres planning the overthrow of States.
When Lenin spoke of the necessity of a revolutionary cadre to effect a revolution (when economic crisis and a collapse in the ruling order had enabled a seizure of power), he was re-inventing the French Revolution along conspiratorial lines - no less than Nesta Webster and Barruel.
Anarchist revolutionaries, especially the Nihilists, continued to demonstrate the utter ineffectiveness of secrecy and plotting as more than the occasion of violence and murder (and of intensified repression such as Metternich might have approved).
Lenin, a political genius, turned the myth into reality through intellectual discipline. But that is another story ... this book ends in the late 1820s just before the Revolutions of the 1830s would switch our attention back to the great tidal waves of history that Marx and Engels were more interested in.
In that context, Lenin is a sort of synthesis between European political narratives. He 'industrialises' secret conspiracy.
Where I have my doubts about the book is where I have my doubts about nearly all formal academic writing on conspiracy – an imaginative inability to understand or explore the psychological importance of such theories in filling a vacuum of knowledge in times of fear and insecurity.
To be fair, this is a book of history and not psychology and Roberts does touch at the end on the psychological aspects, if all too briefly.
I would argue that conspiracy theory and paranoia are legitimate actors (if with tragic consequences) under conditions where Power holds all the informational cards.
The difference between Roberts' and our world is the internet - and Roberts is, of course, closer to the mental world of Lenin than that of Assange.
The establishment's fear of the internet as the basis for a revival of the worst sort of conspiracy theory may be misplaced for a curious reason.
When the internet first appears, it appears suddenly in the face of an Authority (Power) that has defined the political narratives of the population, with diminishing competition, over the whole industrialising process.
The grand narratives of the elite have succeeded one another with little contribution from below except as walk-on parts as rioters or lobby fodder. The Arab World is going through this process now.
Suddenly, Power's ability to define narrative collapses from above with the arrival of the internet and the first reaction of the population is to flood the vacuum with alternative stories based on poor critical faculties, natural distrust, limited experience of Power (except as subjects of it) and very poor reasoning ability.
Although this condition persists across much of the world (and 9/11 and the Iraq War hit the internet formation process at a critical juncture in this respect), the internet is rapidly becoming self-organising through rational hacktivism, community management and a responsiveness on the part of the more intelligent parts of Power
The information vacuum that fed paranoia is beginning to fill with real information. That information is being pumped into a market that is learning not only to be more critical but to argue a critical stance within itself against its more ignorant members.
The social networks are becoming huge political education machines rather than, as originally thought, huge machines for political mobilisation (the rioter and outraged NGO model).
The next stage is actual political organisation which we are beginning to see with the Pirate Party and, conceivably though uncertainly, Zero State. Occupy will feel very naive, the last gasp of Obama-ism, against the rise of new organisations from below that can capture electoral space.
Wikileaks is only part of this massive revolution which embraces the coming semantic web and the creation of focused 'gardens' of accessible knowledge.
The numbers of the truly ignorant and passive are still large but the informationally engaged and active population is increasingly in command of its own analysis while selected non-elite leadership groups are self-teaching themselves politics under new conditions.
There is no need for grand conspiracy theory today because we now know that Power largely consists of surprisingly incompetent people only with access to force and the passive complicity of the population between them and dissolution.
If the population becomes questioning and resists force from a sense of its own potential and a cessation of socially constructed fear of consequences, it has no need for a myth justifying its own impotence.
Yes, there are still 'conspiracies' but these are the small-scale conspiracies that are practical, rational ones of interest – of bankers, vote-grabbers and special interests.
Adam Smith referred to these and they will always be with us. Indeed, they will replicate within the new self-organising politics because no utopian idealist can escape the actuality of the human condition.
The current political machine can now be seen as ramshackle, so ramshackle that the brutal failure of the Leninist seizure of power can now be explained. Anyone who seizes the levers of power without having built a popular base of some sort can do little than use terror and rely on zombie-like habit to get anything useful done.
Bolsheviks could ignore an election because they could seize a State with a monopoly of information - today, no State can expect to hold onto that monopoly for long.
Conspiracy theory is thus the product of impotence in the face of rapid change. The question becomes today whether the internet will change the situation by transferring new potencies to the masses. If so, there may be much less need for paranoia.
If anything, it is the State that has now become paranoid, what with drones, terror alerts and mass surveillance and nudge strategies to hold back, Canute-like, the spread of questioning and community organisation. Roles are being reversed.
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Jan 01, 2001
Oct 01, 2001
Almost hypnotically repetitively at times, this might be the book that Machiavelli could have written about love if he had been a jaded modern.
Almost hypnotically repetitively at times, this might be the book that Machiavelli could have written about love if he had been a jaded modern.
Unfortunately for those determined to be 'nice' in the world, there is scarcely a line in this book that does not ring true.
For better or worse (depending on your stance), Greene is persuasive that seduction is a game between equal partners where the 'victim' is willing enough for what they will get out of the process.
It is about the flow of power between sexually alive people and no means to be compared with the 'game' genre of Neil Strauss and others.
Far more sophisticated than Strauss' manuals for adolescent losers and the sexually autistic, Greene is not interested in seduction as a mechanical application of rules for sex. He writes of art, not science.
What he is showing us is something closer to a dance or a ritual (think of the tango perhaps) which obeys rules derived from a deeper level of shared or unconscious desires and fears and where, while the sexual element is central, it is the process that matters.
The book is also pleasurable for entirely different reasons. Greene is master of the historical anecdote. Every chapter has well chosen illustrative examples from literature and history.
Although he does not preclude rational love between consenting adults by any means, there is enough evidence here of eternal truths about sexual relations which apply to male and female alike (albeit with different 'modes') and in homosexual liaisons as well.
We are talking here about a flow of power and desire between equals. There is no game if the other is not a free and equal participant. It is chess played by bodies in time and space.
One's reaction to this book will come down to aesthetics and to anxiety. It is a very unromantic book by conventional and Anglo-Saxon standards but it is not reductionist about sex.
The person who will be entranced by this book will be the natural seducer, one who takes simple pleasure in pleasure and treats life like a game. I was not entranced, just interested and appreciative.
Many of the tales derive from high-ranking courtly cultures where seduction and romance were bound by rules of conduct that were strict enough to suggest appropriate behavior but not so strict as to introduce bourgeois guilt or shame into the game of sexual conquest.
Indeed, there is no room at all for shame or guilt, only for winning and losing … or perhaps for playing elegantly and still losing, more than winning too easily or in an ignoble way.
The attitude to sex is also counter-intuitive to Anglo-Saxon moderns. It is presented as a prize and not as some 'sacred' thing alienated from the bodies that couple. It is a fact on the ground. A pleasure.
Greene occasionally applies his analysis of technique to politics and there are many 'democratic' era cases of seductive power – Marilyn Monroe, Errol Flynn, Duke Ellington are all cited at length.
If the cynicism of his political analysis reminds us that people are stupid rather than eliciting admiration for the political seducers, when it comes to sex, there is no question of stupidity.
In every tale of sexual seduction, we are not dealing with coercion but with something like a willing suspension of disbelief where the seduced often gets precisely what they want, whatever the rest of us may think.
He refers to the festival and to the theatre often, but also to seduction as the means by which our 'dark side', which is important to us to recognise in order to be whole persons, is allowed full play.
I would add that the transgressive aspects of seduction can allow individuation to both parties – it would often seem that seducers get trapped in the game, while the seduced move on into something different.
Greene more than once tells stories that suggest that a seduction becomes an integral memory that moulds the future mind for the better, removing someone from past habits that do not reflect who they are.
Naturally 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses' pops up as a case study in more than one chapter (designed to be a sequence that draws you into the seduction process).
The Presidente de Tourvel is presented as being liberated from her boredom and obligations by the cynical seduction by Valmont. There is truth in this.
Greene is far too simplistic here about politics (one wishes he would just say 'people are stupid' and have done with it) but he is far from simplistic on sexual psychology.
He offers a sound corrective to moralists who, like repressed ideologues in politics, seem to leave more pain and suffering in their wake than do cynics and a-moralists.
Strangely and counter-intuitively, while some seducers come across as the worst sort of bully (D H Lawrence was an utter monster), others come across in quite a different way - providing a sort of liberatory service that costs them far more than it costs their alleged 'victims'.
In short, seduction emerges to be morally far more interesting than we thought. Quite often we see the ostensible predator out-classed by a skilful 'victim' so that roles are reversed ...
If morality is good order as dictated by some Iron Age text, then seduction is to be consigned to the pits of hell. But if it is the hand-maiden or servant of creative individuation, then it is conventional morality that might stand in the dock.
Of course, nothing is so simple. Just as religion brings solace as well as repression, so some seducers are simply cynical and cruel while others are exciting and challenging.
This book is recommended not as a 'how to' (since, for most people, it is would be like reading a book on how to win an Olympic Medal), but as an insight into what we are as human beings.
If we all had developed the art of seduction and of being seduced to meet our own dark desires, then perhaps there might be a lot less boredom and neurosis in the world.
If we knew how to play our own part in the game with others who knew how to play theirs (if, in fact, the aristocratic court of Japan or Louis XVI became democratised with leisure and an instinct for pleasure for all) might not life be not only more interesting but less deadly dull?
But anyone who thinks that human beings are basically 'good', that 'caring' cannot become unutterably boring and intrusive or who thinks that most relationships can last forever without some transgression and hysteria will hate this book. It is only for grown-ups.
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Dec 08, 2003
Dec 08, 2003
This is one of Gary Lachman's lighter weight excursions into the history of the esoteric but it is well worth having in the Library.
In effect, it is a This is one of Gary Lachman's lighter weight excursions into the history of the esoteric but it is well worth having in the Library.
In effect, it is a series of suggestive and rather entertaining biographies from the Enlightenment world of Swedenborg, Mesmer and Cagliostro to the modernist occultism of the much less well known Daumal, Milosz and Lowry.
There are just over 40 of these pen portraits under five occultist headings (Enlightenment, Romantic, Satanic, Fin de Siecle and Modernist), with good short introductions to each section. It is a book that can be usefully 'dipped into' whenever one of the 40 pops up somewhere else.
The last quarter or so is a smattering of original texts, perhaps somewhat hard to fathom out of their full context and in an order that may have its own occult meaning but which passed me by, but useful to have available nonetheless.
Certainly, for all its lack of depth, this is well recommended as an enjoyable reference source and the starting point for further study into a cultural phenomenon that still acts as a strong undercurrent in European life and literature. ...more
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May 05, 2012
Oct 01, 1993
Originally published in 1945, this remarkable book was possibly the clearest analysis of the nature of Power (always capitalized by De Jouvenel) since
Originally published in 1945, this remarkable book was possibly the clearest analysis of the nature of Power (always capitalized by De Jouvenel) since Machiavelli's account of the reality of politics in Renaissance Italy.
It is of its time. De Jouvenel was clearly stunned at the ability of post-dynastic state machines to mobilise national resources and populations for total war. The 'tyrannical' Louis XIV (there is a French cultural focus to the book) could not have dreamed of such power.
The thesis is a surprisingly simple one - that Power (meaning concentrated state power) strengthens itself through the revolutionary defeat of aristocratic republicanism and that its alliance with each rising class in turn strengthens its ability to command the resources of that class.
This is not quite the positive interpretation of successive revolutionary successes that the typical intellectual of the 1940s might have found easy to accept although it is perhaps easier to do so in the light of Communism. De Jouvenel has become a beacon for American libertarians.
But the message is not simply an implicitly anti-communist one. While Hitler and Stalin hover over the story, De Jouvenel's interest is really in the so-called liberal democratic States whose ability to enslave populations and thieve property has been no less than that of these tyrants.
His book is a paradigm-shifter, perhaps more so today, because what he is really saying is that every apparent rhetorical victory for the population in terms of rights, democracy and welfare has actually been a victory for ruling elites.
This is not to say that there have not been benefits - including the rule of law for everyone and welfare programmes - but that the 'deal' has been a dirty one with populations at large conscripted into death and slavery, even in Roosevelt's America, with scarcely a protest.
I part company with De Jouvenel (though I suggest that his analysis in itself is unanswerable) only on his conservative pessimism (which I might share about our species but not necessarily about all future social and political forms). When he moves from an 'is' to an 'ought' he is less convincing.
His attachment to aristocratic republicanism, whether Roman or eighteenth century British, may represent more freedom for men who do not come under the gaze of the aristocrat than that offered by the State but petty oppressions, security and welfare do provide a reason for voluntary enslavement.
He is not insensitive to the fact that welfare needs and the bad conduct of aristocrats help drive the rise of State power even if it is clear that populations will die (perhaps in a state of 'false consciousness') to preserve this Faustian bargain – an improved degree of protection and security.
Of course, we are in different times now but what De Jouvenel might have noticed is that, as States weaken under the global market system, so protection for the population weakens and that the increase in 'freedom' since the 1980s is matched by an increase in insecurity.
Security for the masses in return for blind compliance (with even intellectuals submitting to the myth of the democratic State) has been replaced across much of the West with security for the State against the masses.
This seems to be a slow reversion to eighteenth century conditions. States cannot enforce their desired theft of assets or conscript labour yet are both engaged in expensive and perpetual small wars and trying to reduce their obligations to the population, since they get few services in return.
The population at large thinks that it owns the State (this heir to dynastic accretion of power at the expense of fellow criminal warlords) but it does not and never did. The State is an interest in itself concerned solely with its own survival and is now genuinely worried about that survival.
One survival strategy is to pool power with other threatened bureaucracies in unwieldy and fundamentally flawed imperial bureaucracies like the European Union in the hope that democracy might be attenuated by scale and discontent moderated by judicial legalism and spending.
Another survival strategy is to try and scare the population into compliance with State authority through constant security scares and to encourage passivity with populist policies ('bread and circuses').
Yet another is to disengage the bulk of the population by treating political parties and NGOs as partners in Power so detaching them from the population at large. Activists, under this now dominant system, get a slice of the action in return for collaboration.
All these policies, in cultures used to personal freedom, that have access to social media that can by-pass official channels and have a decreasing sense of locality and ideology to bind them together, require funds and funds are becoming harder to find as taxation is resisted.
Moreover, people not merely died for Italy and Germany, they volunteered to die for Italy and Germany. Who will volunteer to die for the European Union? People volunteered to die for communism. Who will volunteer to die for liberal capitalism? No-one who is not an idiot is the answer.
The world of today is very different from that of De Jouvenel. States still have an immense monopoly of force which could create workable tyrannies but such methods would thrust such societies back into unsustainable economic models that would ultimately undermine States themselves.
Our problem is the very opposite. States are now faced with a revived warlordism at the margins – the very basis of aristocratic republicanism and 'freedom'. It is not stupid to consider Columbian and Mexican narco-gangsters or Al-Qaeda as the possible basis of functional states one day.
This book is highly recommended not so much for De Jouvenel's implicit prescriptions – somewhat desperate appeals to a religious (in the Roman sense) basis for society and better behavior and self restraint by elites – as for his cold and cruelly apposite analysis of the situation.
Although the analysis is of the situation of the West in the 1940s, the book makes it clear that what he is writing about is something much more 'eternal' about Power and its drive for self-advancement. There is something intrinsic to State Power that drives it to tyranny over men.
Undoubtedly, this is a conservative book and probably a pessimistic one but it can be read with profit by those who are not conservative. Authoritarian socialists and other ideologues won't give a damn and will continue to try to capture the State to enforce their ideology no matter what.
But libertarian Leftists would do well to understand that the State flips from solution to problem at a key point in the game and that the cost of socialist or Leftist policies becomes far too great at a certain cut-off point in key personal freedoms, including State enslavement of labour value.
This does not mean accepting De Jouvenel's implied approval of the feudalism of Di Lampedusa's Prince of Salina. It does suggest that a libertarian Left should distrust the people that the 'Leopard' distrusted, rising men in revolutionary situations, to which he was happy to adapt.
History is the story of the little guys being screwed over and finding it increasingly difficult to hide from the military boot, the police spy and the tax collector. The fact that some of the cash might return in benefits later is of little joy if your son returns from the front in a coffin.
Perhaps there is some way of creating an aristocratic republicanism where everyone is an aristocrat, jealous of freedoms, prepared to defend their land by force but not steal another's, charitable, concerned with public order and egalitarian – admittedly a tall order given our species!
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Mar 15, 1994
Although probably out-of-date in terms of latest scholarship (it was published in 1982), this is a sound reference work covering the world's legendary Although probably out-of-date in terms of latest scholarship (it was published in 1982), this is a sound reference work covering the world's legendary (not historical or mythological) heritage.
I read it straight through from cover to cover over a long period but there is no need to do so. This might be best treated as a useful reference work.
The Editor (Richard Cavendish) has competently drawn together over 30 contributing experts to provide quick summaries of legends from every continent. Perhaps only Africa is under-represented.
The breadth is chronological as well as geographical, ranging from the legend of Sinuhe (Ancient Egypt) and the Trojan War through to tales of Jesse James, Billy the Kid and Australian aboriginal bandits.
There is a very useful comparative survey of all the legends in an appendix, a good index and a decent list of books for further reading (at least from those published before the book).
There is also a lot of material for theory, especially about archetypal attitudes to such things as love and property but also about attitudes to sustaining and resisting power.
The woodcut illustrations by Eric Fraser are very attractive additions.
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Oct 04, 2007
Once you get into the rhythm of the narrative, this is an entertaining way of getting a broad outline of Chinese history (up to the early twentieth ce Once you get into the rhythm of the narrative, this is an entertaining way of getting a broad outline of Chinese history (up to the early twentieth century) through the story of its imperial capitals.
There are surprisingly few good general accounts of Chinese history, considering the country's new status as rising superpower, although we understand that publishers intend to change that in coming years.
In the meantime, this book will serve. Cotterell writes well enough. The heads of Chinese history are covered. There are even the seeds of analysis. Not a bad interim introduction.
To know China is also to understand much of the rest of East Asia better. Although distinct and proudly separate cultures, both Korea and Japan owe a great deal to Chinese culture.
One foot note - the account of British imperial conduct in the mid-nineteenth century is pretty damning.
The British were little better behaved towards China than the modern Mexico cartels who are now undermining the United States.
In a way, as the mafia say, 'that was then and this is now', but the Chinese are not unjustified in seeing our discovery of ethics in foreign policy to have come somewhat late in the day.
You should read a history of China, if not this one, to understand precisely what informs the Chinese sense of what needs re-balancing in the world. Chinese suspicion of Western motivations are reasonable.
Histories of Russia, India and the Muslim worlds would tell not dissimilar stories of arrogant piracy by Western 'gentlemen' and 'scholars'.
There is unfinished business here and Westerners should start reading sooner rather than later about the world they once ruled and soon will rule no longer. ...more
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Jan 01, 2011
Jan 01, 2011
This is the first in a new series of Swedenborg Society pocket books. It is beautifully produced as is everything by this remarkable little cultural c This is the first in a new series of Swedenborg Society pocket books. It is beautifully produced as is everything by this remarkable little cultural centre in Bloomsbury. Unfortunately, the first offering, though it will please London cultists, is not to my taste.
It is the edited transcript of a lecture on William Blake as a Londoner that represents all the reasons why Iain Sinclair is a problem - it is narcissistic, elliptical, occasionally uses language in a mannered way and over-mythologises where mythology is not required.
Perhaps the very mild 'crack' at Ackroyd irritated me even if Ackroyd is conventional and perhaps did get it wrong in one case because of his implied laziness of not visiting a site (psycho-geographers feel bound to 'own' a territory by actually walking it).
Why? Because Sinclair is often no more reliable. I share Sinclair's slightly curmudgeonly politics. Certainly his account of the thuggish idiocy of development through grand events such as the Olympics tallies with my own distaste for New Labour's debt-fuelled private/public populism.
However, his excellent account of Blakes's visionary engagement with his own London territory and the 'madness' of Clare, the country bumpkin poet, forced into disorder by the destruction of his own rural environment by enclosures, should not be allowed implicit comparison with current events.
The brutal clearances of the developers remove disorderly public ownership of territory, it is true, but, ultimately, much of the territory seized will be returned to the population in an orderly manner as 'amenities' that will be seen to improve the lives of many if not all.
It is just that the New Labour model is clumsy, is statist, is inefficient and fails to engage the population. The views of this latter day Cobbett, defending traditional or rather slow organic change, are not far from mine but the case for them must not be overstated.
More disturbing is his unsubstantiated claim in the questions and answers of arson attacks on those who protested against the development of the new rail link which, if true, indicates a degree of lawlessness that requires serious investigation.
There are very serious socio-economic arguments against the clumsy process of developing zones like East London through inane circuses like the Olympics instead of proper democratic planning and direct state investment.
But if New Labour's approach to social infrastructural investment is often a sick joke on the local population, a romantic love of nooks and crannies, trades for which there is no market and long walks to finance poetic books does not butter the parsnips of survival for many people.
The problem with London is that Albion lost control of it decades ago (as the recent riots have perhaps shown us). Post-imperial mass migration and globalisation has turned the whole city into something very different from the period when it appeared settled and white.
Of course, it always was a migrant maw - country bumpkins and displaced Welsh, then the Irish, then the Jews, each with a culture an edge more distant from that of the Saxons but still easy to integrate (the last as intellectual and radical fervour in a working class context).
But the process has accelerated (a visit to the revamped Museum of London will demonstrate this) incredibly since the 1960s. Whether Albion likes it or not, drastic measures are required to build an economic base for people many of whose origins lie in villages in Asia and West Africa.
Culturally, there are bigger issues yet to deal with. Jobs are one thing but the voting power of semi-feudal Muslim blocs and Black pentecostalist churches offer a challenge to the romantic liberal visionary religion of Albion that has scarcely been considered - out of fear.
The Albionist romantics emerge periodically in Anglo-Welsh history like Slavic nationalists in Russian - Cobbett in reaction to early industrialisation, Morris in reaction to late industrialisation, Sinclair in reaction to late capitalism.
I am one of them in my soul but the political pass was sold a long time ago and the romantic psychogeographers seem to be constructing a London of the imagination which they then retrospectively people with many cultures as a means of defence against the facts.
Each romantic revolt was crushed by forces not of reaction but of liberal reform based on economic interests. Cobbett's Toryism was displaced by Peelite free trade policies and Disraeli's 'angels in marble' (the working class Tories who often denied the Left office in the next century).
Morris' romantic socialism was crushed by Fabian planning and the mass organisation of self interested trades unions who captured the State right up to the degraded version of socialism under Blair and Brown. No doubt the romantic anarcho-Albionists will see the same trajectory ...
The beach beneath the streets is still there for those with inner eyes to see but, since psychogeographers tend to be of the anarchist or mutualist rather than fascist or nationalist persuasion, its expression has to be in texts and images, much as it was for Cobbett and Morris.
Eventually, the new migrants will also become Albionist romantics in reaction to some bout of trans-human modernisation in the far future because regret for what is being lost is always going to be part of the human condition.
They will no doubt regret the loss of London villages that mimicked those in Ghana or Gujarat in the maw of internet tribalism or the loss of faith of their young, much as old Methodists and theosophists regret the lack of 'youngsters' in their ranks.
What goes around, comes around. The beating heart of England is creative destruction and we are in a disturbing but inevitable and even necessary bout of that at the moment.
We may certainly not need the crass and provenly incompetent economicism of New Labour's populism but we do need to address the realities on the ground created by the policy failures of our political class of all parties.
Looking backwards is a luxury we cannot afford. The imagined London is beautiful, truly beautiful, and it is real insofar as it is imagined, and it can still be walked, rivers traced, sites remembered, but it is no longer the London of the English alone if ever it was.
[The Swedenborg Society is a highly recommended cultural venue in London with periodic interesting talks and events. Information can be picked up regularly from www.swedenborg.org.uk ] ...more
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Nov 25, 2011
Sep 30, 1985
Although now over a quarter of a century out of date, this is a baseline master work, providing a summary of the state of archaeological knowledge as Although now over a quarter of a century out of date, this is a baseline master work, providing a summary of the state of archaeological knowledge as it was in the late 1970s/early 1980s (depending on the edition).
Andrew Sherratt's contributors cover the then-state of archaeology and dating technologies but the bulk of the book (over 50 region-specific articles) covers, chronologically, the archaeological record from the palaeolithic to the urbanisation of Eastern Europe.
Nor is the book weighted towards 'Western civilisation'. Equal weight is given to Africa, Asia and the Americas with chapters on the Arctic and Near-Arctic (2), Oceania and Australia (2) so that what we have here is a sort of global non-history to act as a corrective to a reliance on texts.
However, the age does tell in some areas rather than others. The sections on human palaeontology would now be seriously misleading and one suspects that, today, there would be significant shifts of interpretative emphasis throughout the book.
The only shame is that there does not seem to be a new edition since 1985 and yet archaeology (and human paleaontology) have continued to make new discoveries and interpretations. A new edition is sorely needed - until then, it stays on the shelf as a good reference point for further questions. ...more
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Nov 21, 2011
Sep 01, 2005
This is the story of a tragic existential hero of British politics, Colonel Marcus Edward Despard, a man of undoubted integrity. Despard took on the B
This is the story of a tragic existential hero of British politics, Colonel Marcus Edward Despard, a man of undoubted integrity. Despard took on the British State, Old Corruption, and lost. He was sentenced to being hung, drawn and quartered in 1803.
This book is not so much original work (though Mike Jay is recovering the real man rather than the false myth of the mad man through researching original documents) as an original interpretation.
The story is really about the political conditions that existed in England in the late eighteenth century and it is a game of two halves.
The first tells of a young Anglo-Irish officer's experience of British imperial expansion at the very margins of Empire and what he learned there.
Class interests overwhelmed the instinctive democracy of a mass settler society in favour of rich traders and endorsed racial strategies, more by cynical accident than scientific design.
The story of Despard's experiences in what is now British Honduras is the story of the road that eventually leads to the casual racism of twentieth century Britain.
Racism appears here as the monstrous creation of the self interested few defending their turf against the legitimate aspirations of the many.
The second half suggests how Despard's reluctant but accurate analysis of the British State leads him remorselessly down a path towards political direct action.
This led to him participating in serious conversations about overthrowing the State with the help of disaffected soldiers. That he did so is beyond reasonable doubt.
I have no doubt that, by a definition of the British State which defined its own terms, Colonel Despard was a traitor and so his judicial murder under conditions of state terror was fully 'justified'.
But I also have no doubt that this book exposes the degree to which the State declined into despotism under William Pitt the Younger who started as a reformer.
Pitt ended up the creator of the 'Crown' as we know it today, an entity that can reserve emergency powers to itself of staggering ruthlessness.
The trajectory of Despard is the trajectory of a man of great natural integrity as his eyes open to the realisation that what he serves as a patriot is corrupt, malign, self-interested and brutal.
He also discovers that those who claim to oppose Old Corruption in Parliament are weak, ineffective and egoistic. Much like today, in fact.
It is the story of many such men in many circumstances who are simply written out of history as stupid or mad (which they are by the lights of the system) in a world where integrity is a crime.
Itis a truism that no one in power every really wants integrity around them – it shows them up. The tragedy here is really the eternal tragedy of British political culture.
Jay raises interesting questions (well rehearsed in the academic community) about the degree to which the English were radical or conservative in the 1780s and 1790s.
What applies then probably applies now. Being normally human, most people most of the time are indifferent to their rulers so long as they deliver the economic goods.
And, of course, so long as they don't push them (rather than their neighbours) around directly. Sentencing a couple of Facebook naifs to four years in jail is a fact to be observed not acted upon by most.
When the economy weakens or a rival bunch of gangsters emerges at Calais, in Kabul or from within, the State will then start pushing people around.
But it will be adroit at building up the anxieties that bind those who fear losing their small pittance of wealth against those who are actually losing it.
Add to this the fact that most people are actually rather ignorant about how power is exercised. This ignorance is eminently exploited because there is a core of legitimate conservative fear of change.
Thus, it is probably true that, at any one time, in non-extreme circumstances, around two thirds of the population is naturally prepared to accept the State's narrative even if a third will not.
The numbers, in short, are always for Old Corruption, today as much as in (say) 1780 and, if one wants proof of that, we only have to compare the rule of New Labour with that of Pitt the Younger.
Despard wanted the impossible – an honourable politics that kept its word and preserved old liberties. Old Corruption simply wanted to generate economic growth and preserve itself by any means necessary.
In the end, Despard had to die because he was a genuine ideological, organisational and moral threat to the thugs at the top.
The book is thus instructive not only about England at the end of the eighteenth century but about the essential nature of the 'Crown'.
This is the centralised machine, using the dynasty as figurehead, that represented itself and the interests of landowners and traders then and itself and that of bankers and special interests today.
Despard was led by circumstances into a cul-de-sac. Jay refers to other radicals like Burdett, Place and Henry Hunt. He was far from alone and E.P. Thompson famously recovered them for the modern age.
All these men proposed a system of society that was defeated at the time (including democracy, basic human rights and even the lineaments of welfarism) but that is now taken as read.
Most did not follow Despard to the point where armed resistance was considered but most were not men of action but of words.
The problem for Despard was that it was rare to find a trained and experienced soldier in a radical context and this is probably why he had to die, after some failed attempts on other radicals.
What has not improved in our society despite all the wins forced through by brave men such as these, the Chartists, the original Labour Movement and others is the general attitude to both State and Empire.
Having achieved so much, the low point of contemporary British history is almost certainly the arrival into office of New Labour which consciously sought power through appealing to the conservative middle.
This was a centre-left Party that to all intents and purposes rapidly became direct heir to the centralised operations of Pitt the Younger in defence of its own special interests and alliances.
Many of the original radicals were country Tories as much as working men or the colonised Irish, often people like Despard and Cobbett.
These saw the State at close quarters and were horrified by its combination of self interest and corrupt action in favour of small minorities of supporters. This led them to opposition.
Grenville and Dundas are fully matched by a recent succession of Home Secretaries with little interest in liberty, manipulators of the media agenda to isolate and traduce critics.
If Pitt is also matched by recent war-mongering Prime Ministers, then there are other parallels to be found in the detail. But history never entirely repeats itself.
Despard undoubtedly had moral right on his side as a radical and probably as an atheist, one of a politicised mass unpolluted by Marxism but reliant on the rigorous polemic of Thomas Paine
History was against him in three regards whatever the debate over whether England was ripe for revolution at some point in the 1790s (it was certainly ripe with the potential for civil war at one point).
The first was the sheer ruthlessness and authoritarian lust for power of the State itself. More died in Cornwallis' punitive raid on Ireland in 1798 than in Robespierre's terror.
The State organised networks of spies on high salaries, fixed juries, lied to the public and hired people like Gillray for them.
The second was the ancient fear that split radicals on the meaning of a colonial revolt in nearby Ireland.
The original Irish revolts united Protestants and Catholics in one cause but the British State cleverly set the two communities against each other and exploited ancient fears of priestly reaction at home.
The third was the collapse of the ideals of the French Revolution into Napoleonic despotism.
High ranking radicals could plausibly introduce the conspiracy trope of Pitt and Napoleon being in league to militarise their societies and introduce a centralised despotism for the benefit of their elites.
By 1802, the probability of holding down the population was high but not if the radicals were led by people from its own ranks with military expertise.
Over and over again, informants repeat Despard's character as a 'gentleman' (notably his green umbrella!) and the experience of dealing with Wolfe Tone was immediate in the memory.
The man had to be taken out or purged by the State and if jury-fixing and dubious witness statements would do it, then so be it.
Despard had fallen into the trap of desperation, consorting with Irish radicals and implicitly connected to the French just as Tory radicals were seeing Napoleonic France as just another thug state.
A ruthless State found an easy target and took it out for the narrative value of suggesting that its own terrorism was justified in the past by real threat (how familiar from New Labour tactics!).
It also saw the opportunity to promote a new populist narrative of national mobilisation when war was to start again, ironically making great use of Despard's friend, the Lord Nelson.
Part of that narrative was not to present Despard as desperate and naive (because that left space for him being right) but that he was mad.
An accusation of madness could evade any sense that his and others' critique of the State was correct and that it had a moral integrity not shared by the dynastic thugs.
So, this is a tragic tale of someone who, under other circumstances might have led a revolt that would probably have been crushed in any case.
Perhaps better to die with dignity as murder victim than compromised as leader of a revolt that would have meant atrocities on both sides.
Yet he is still an existentialist hero, alongside, say, St. Maximilian Kolbe, someone who did what was right even though it was absurd and would end with his own extinction.
There is no real evidence of a French connection and his purposes appear reasonable and honourable. His conduct on the scaffold was certainly a model of dignity and courage.
Despard was a true soldier to the end, refusing at any time to implicate his own comrades. If anyone plans a statue to him on the site of his murder by the State, I would subscribe.
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Sep 29, 2011
Nov 01, 2011
This short and well written book is an annexe to Ackroyd's 'biography' of London, a history of the city that treats it as if it has a personality. It This short and well written book is an annexe to Ackroyd's 'biography' of London, a history of the city that treats it as if it has a personality. It is also part of the psycho-geographical cast of mind that now defines part of the modern London literary community.
What does he cover? - archaeology, ancient springs, underground rivers, the Fleet, the water conduits, the sewers, the underground railways (at length), the wartime and cold war secret cities and the life of Londoners who went underground in times of danger.
Older and older Londons lie beneath today's London. We have dug tunnels through all of them. He writes with a fine sense of what it is to be grounded in the city and to partake of its literary and cultural heritage.
My own test was whether he mentioned 'Quatermass and the Pit', the classic Hammer horror – he did. But there is not much to review here. It is 180 pages of 'buried treasure' and of further reading. I shall be returning to it for just that purpose. I am even considering a Subterranean Britain Facebook Group.
One thought occurs, however. The underground has many symbolic meanings but Ackroyd perhaps does not emphasise one enough, perhaps because it is one for the future. It is a place of resistance as well as a place of secret control. There is a symbolic struggle under the streets.
The organisation of East Enders in war time at 'Mickey's Shelter' by organised crime under a neglectful Government counters the State's refusal to let any of us take Duncan Campbell's illicit cycle ride across London through a 20 foot tunnel built for 'their' convenience and not ours.
One popular cultural icon Ackroyd does not mention. He should have done so. Dr. Who. In the original 'Dr Who and the Daleks', the English resistance (a coded reference back to the sewers of Warsaw, with the Daleks as a remembrance of Nazi storm-troopers) takes place in the London Underground.
Until this book, I had thought resistance underground was no more feasible than the existence of the Daleks. Now I know better. No wonder the State, having built or overseen this massive interconnected warren, is determined to seal off what it can against 'terrorists', perhaps against us one day.
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May 15, 2011
Jun 02, 2005
Jun 07, 2007
This is an exceptional biography at so many levels. It recovers not so much a person as a period.
Emma, Lady Hamilton, was a clever but perhaps not alw This is an exceptional biography at so many levels. It recovers not so much a person as a period.
Emma, Lady Hamilton, was a clever but perhaps not always intelligent person of great beauty and charm, and acting skills, who rose from extreme poverty to become the wife of an ambassador and the mistress of a national hero, Lord Nelson.
Many biographies of such women present romantic fantasies – the sort of rubber-necking at history of those women who wish life was like a Jane Austen novel. This book is a good corrective.
What we have instead is a profound insight into a pre-industrial aristocratic culture where sexuality was a tradable community that women could employ at successive levels of skill in order to rise from the gutter to become the confidante of queens.
The morality that started to be imposed on society not long after Emma's heyday (of which Austen's novels represent an important cultural staging post) may have helped to weaken much overt exploitation but it also closed off avenues of advancement for poor, good-looking women.
The early chapters of her life and the book give us a world far more familiar to us than the late-Victorians – a full-blown celebrity culture with people living on credit and manipulating the media with narratives of sexual scandal.
Emma and Nelson were the Posh and Becks of their day with an added element of hysteria that was closer to the fascination of moderns with Diana, Princess of Wales - and with the same public fickleness as soon as their heroes and heroines are shown to be men and women of straw.
There is the same merchandising industry, public performance, status games, fashion-setting, and damned hard work that would be recognisable to the likes Jordan, Britney and Rihanna today.
For Emma, having done time as a high class hooker and in the period's equivalent of the adult entertainment industry, and been the good little mistress for a while, the path up the ladder came from her celebrity as an artist's model, equivalent today to a fashion model.
She gets passed by her 'master' to his older relative and, somehow, manages, as supermodel, to get herself married, to get entitled by that marriage and to become confidante to the Queen of Naples (which is when Nelson turns up).
These central sections of the book are perhaps the most interesting. This is not a book that will endear the reader to the human species. You need be no Marxist to see the essential truth that morality arises from economic conditions – 'First bread, then morals' as Brecht pithily put it.
The early chapters have already painted a picture of extreme poverty and sexual exploitation that is not a simple case of men exploiting women but of them's 'as 'as exploiting them's as 'asn't.
The final chapters will provide a picture of greedy cynicism amongst relatives who would be nothing without the two lovers and whose selfish sheltering behind the strange customs of aristocratic society resulted in a kind if rather dim Emma ending up in poverty and dying in a foreign land.
But all this soap opera nastiness – easily most nasty when within families ambitious for cash and preferment – is as nothing compared to the brutalities of Neapolitan aristocratic society towards its own subjects.
While deploring the rape and murder of Marie Antoinette's confidante, the blood lust of the guillotine and Napoleon's murderous march through Europe, the roots of that horror lie in the callous brutality of the ancient regime.
Naples in the late eighteenth century was the epitome of aristocratic cruelty. De Sade might be regarded as the moralist that he rightly was in the context of the actual thuggery of the Neapolitan aristocracy.
At one festival, these vile specimens would pile up a mountain of excess food and then entertain themselves by watching the poor fight amongst themselves and tear live animals apart to get at the food.
Emma, though born in conditions equivalent to those of the Neapolitan Poor in Northern England, is not one for class-consciousness. She becomes the classic lackey of an oppressing class that only takes to her because she is beautiful and patronised by great men.
This is when that vain and courageous little man Nelson pops up – Becks to her Posh in terms of achievement. The man who scores for Ingerland now acquires the media icon of the day.
A sort of polyamorous arrangement emerges – Hamilton is in debt and needs Royal patronage, the war hero want to join the highest ranks and will get into debt to do so, and Emma's sees her future secured as escort to the war hero and 'England's Mistress'. But Nelson does not come out of this story well.
The little patriotic display near HMS Victory in Portsmouth allows that his treatment of his wife Fanny was problematic. She was not right for him at all but his wanton humiliation of her in public and in favour of Emma was celebrity politics at its most vile.
But the real story of Nelson – something to be remembered as we drone people to death across the world – is that he was a war criminal, using a form of slave labour (through impressments) to mount his victories.
Impressment is not such an issue. The pressed seemed to have lived better lives than in the rookeries and to have loved their commanders in that way the weaker or more economically desperate members of our species will kow-tow before bigger 'baboons'.
However, in one of the few actions he was involved in away from the sea, Nelson's breach of treaty with the rebels made him directly complicit in the murder of many Neapolitans in the subsequent purges.
We get an account of his vicious treatment of the defeated Admiral Carraciolo that is filled with unnecessary cruelty and malice ... Nelson lacked honour in this act of personal barbarism. But let us put the rather unpleasant and emotionally hysterical Nelson to one side.
What is equally interesting is the public hysteria around him and his mistress that certainly required eighteenth century celebrity culture to fuel it but which took such matters to another level entirely. What was this all about?
The book is less explicit here but the truth of the matter is that the English middle classes were probably genuinely terrified that their throats would be cut and their property taken by blood-crazed Jacobins.
The hysteria about Nelson kicks off with the Battle of the Nile by which Napoleon was deprived of the opportunity to threaten the British stranglehold over India – and a great deal of English wealth was based not on manufactures but on trade at this time.
The US colonies had also recently been lost so that the loss of the East might have been a serious economic matter, while the war itself was causing a major down turn with some important trading interests already questioning its purpose.
Nelson is thus positioned as saviour of the middle classes and as their 'boy', a lad made good. Emma cements the vision with super model glamour – sex and violence providing the basis for a massive cathartic outpouring that spreads across anti-Napoleonic middle class Europe.
This is the same psychology of interwar fascism – fear resulting in a loss of self into the hero figure. Of course, it goes rather badly wrong for Nelson and Emma.
He fails to provide for her in a ruthless age, saddles her with massive debts, get conveniently killed (from the point of view of the Government) and becomes a still more massive but dead icon - Emma is surplus to requirements. The rest is depressing tragedy.
This is not a jobbing biography for middle aged female romantics. This is much better than that. It is a rare insight into the heartless centre of English aristocratic society, the lying mystifications of celebrity economics and middle class terrors.
As for Emma herself, I suspect that she would have driven me up the wall for all her beauty and charm. But she comes across as kind if not very bright on occasions.
Her greatest achievement was not to have been Nelson's Mistress or even Europe's leading model but to have produced a stable, level-headed daughter, Horatia, who lived long, prospered and built her own extensive middle class family.
From a background of dire poverty and exploitation herself, it would seem that, unable to leave her anything but a moderate education and an example, a loving mother created something more important than her fame. That is a lesson to us all ...
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Jan 19, 2009
Jan 19, 2009
This is a first rate readable single volume of the history of the United States, fully annotated with references, which takes account of recent revisi
This is a first rate readable single volume of the history of the United States, fully annotated with references, which takes account of recent revisionism without polemic. The author is English, although a specialist in American history.
The book may be a tad more useful for non-Americans seeking some sense of the broad sweep of the US story than it might be for Americans who know its stories from school.
His theme (because some theme is necessary to cover over 400 years of history in under 600 pages) is that the United States can be defined by the three-way tension of its religious faith in a secular political framework, its expansionism and its particular and fraught ideology of liberty.
Understanding this complex interplay of aspirations is required if non-Europeans are to get any understanding of why Americans appear so sure in their moral rectitude when the bulk of humanity sees nothing (at least in recent years) but inconsistent blundering and hypocrisy.
The truth is that the Americans and the rest of the world are talking different languages and this history helps to tell us why. Although Reynolds does not make it specific, US history, after the colonial age, seems to fall into three very broad phases.
Reynolds deals with the first and the third well but he somewhat skips over the second of which more in a moment. There is an argument that we are now just entering a fourth phase – of which more, also, in a moment.
The first phase is about the lengthy resolution of an accident. When the British withdrew, they left behind two very different and competing cultures that should perhaps have been allowed to go their separate ways if a clash within the new State was not to be averted.
There was, first, a slave-owning plantation culture in the South and, second, a more sophisticated proto-industrial liberal culture in the North, both competing for the fruits of expansion westwards.
The whole business was held together on a wing and a prayer by Northern acceptance of the domination of the Southern aristocracy in politics and the lack of interest of Southerners in extending rather than retaining their very peculiar institution of slavery.
Reynolds is very good on this era in which those who wanted a free aristocratic republic competed with more radical democrats from the North and then faced evangelical religious pressure (the same impetus that has gone sour in recent American politics) to contain and even abolish the basis for their wealth.
The tensions built up reaching a critical cultural point in the 1850s. A liberal intellectual renaissance on the East Coast fuelled constant challenges to the status quo.
It ended inevitably in the South seeking secession and the North engaging in what amounts to an imperial determination to keep the South bound to a piece of paper, the American Constitution. But the rise of the US as major global power was not inevitable.
The South was doomed only because the British Empire failed to come to its aid, thus giving the superior industrial strength of the North a chance to overwhelm it in campaigns of unparalleled ferocity (and atrocity).
Such campaigns must have brutalised the soldiery for its campaigns against the indigenous peoples in subsequent decades. The American mythos demands that the Civil War be cast as a 'good war', like the war against fascism, and the ending of slavery is the oft-quoted justification.
But nothing is so simple – Sherman's total war in Georgia destroyed an economy so that it could feed neither white nor black alike for a short while and the black population, after a period of liberation, were crushed, arguably in little better state, without federal help for another hundred years.
Southern resentment, although pragmatists might accept the inevitable, was turned against the blacks rather than the victors and it was forgotten that war exigencies had even begun to free the slaves so that they could defend a common homeland in the very last stages of the war.
Serious racism as opposed to labour exploitation grew after a victory that could not be followed through by the Northern liberals who seem, quite simply, to have lost interest.
More to the point, the smashing of the constraint on central government policy of the states' rights ideology of the South, though it has remained a force in American politics to this day, finally turned a loose confederation into the potential to become a centralised war machine.
This development was delayed but the rise of a superpower was almost inevitable once America has absorbed the full economic potential of its vast internal market and its never-ending supply of cheap labour.
Reynolds rather skates over the next phase, from reconstruction to the First World War. Yet this is the phase that enables empire and which created the ideology of liberty that would be market-tested by Woodrow Wilson and then imposed by FDR.
At one end of the story, the tale is simply one of expanding to natural limits and of adding a couple of colonies in the European manner with the usual lies and brutalities involved in such enterprises.
At the other end, which is where Reynolds is weakest in analysis, there is the struggle to create a polity that can have values at all. The core values were set by the Constitution and the victory sealed at Appomattox.
However, there were many issues left hanging, of whom those of the blacks, women, indigenous tribes and 'sexually different' (the last weakly handled by Reynolds) were simply inconvenient and required resolution in the Sixties in a way that soon created a conservative reaction.
The central issue was how to bind the useful cheap migrant labour required by the capitalist machine into an earlier society of small farmers and tradesman, especially when the migrant labour might not hold to Protestant small town values.
This was not a new problem but an intensification of early nineteenth century problems.
Equally important and growing in salience with time was the clash (and sometimes co-operation) between the owners of capital, some now of immense wealth with significant power in and over Washington, with the aspirations of the wider population.
People in general wanted improved social conditions and, as consumers, unadulterated and low priced food and consumables. These struggles created the ideology of progressivism and the practice of American capitalism.
Progressivism sought to use executive authority, whether State or Federal, to make major changes in the structure of power to benefit the general population.
Unfortunately, it had the unfortunate effect of binding an appreciation of strong central Government to the capture by progressives of that strong central Government for the extension of progressive values overseas.
This is a continuous story of a development that has no formal ending date (indeed, it continues today) but the key transitional point is when America becomes a net exporter of capital and uses that leverage to control in stages the global conduct of its old rival, the British Empire.
Even as late as 1942 in the North African campaign, the British had the whip hand, but, by 1944, the export of US resources effectively broke any remaining pretensions to global leadership of the British Empire, a position already weak but from which it never recovered.
The story of the Atlantic Alliance is really little more than the de facto acquisition of the old British Empire by Washington without a fight and on the cheap.
The third phase starts not with Woodrow Wilson's aspirations but with FDR, a remarkable politician, who faced a major economic meltdown, sustained the polity (without initially solving the underlying problems of economic weakness) and then discovered war as a means to economic growth.
Pearl Harbour was a tragedy but it was also a lucky break because it enabled an aspiration – the assertion of American Power globally on the back of the re-allocation of American resources into an expanded version of the same model that had won the American Civil War and had opened up the West.
This model was a strategic alliance between the private sector and the executive on terms of equality.
This is the essence of the objection to Sovietism – not only its tyranny (which was sincerely held as a concern across America) but also its threat as an economic model in which the State replaced what would later be called 'public/private partnership'.
The US Government did not expropriate. It developed a system that might rightly be called 'socialism for corporations' that maintained a massive war effort in the 1940s and enabled the basis for the later information revolution. The model was not foolish. It opened up the West after the Civil War.
But it also did two things fraught with danger. It created the famous 'military-industrial complex', an interest in high government spending directed at perpetual warfare (even if frequently 'cold'), and it encouraged politicians to sustain similar projects designed to build middle class support.
The expenditures were accordingly lopsided – from the GI Bill through to Eisenhower's major investment in the road system (allowing rail in effect to collapse) and onwards, the US Federal Government extended the undoubted triumphs of the New Deal.
However, it also shifted them to benefit middle class voters and allies rather than the community as a whole. The road investment created the national dependence on Saudi Arabia. Cheap housing was not built but encouraged through unsustainable securitised debt.
Government bought off sections of the community successively by fiddling the legislative and budgetary books which encouraged identity politics, pork barrel-ism amongst legislators and policies whose consequences were never thought through.
This third phase is essentially the surprisingly short period in which the US was a major superpower, first in competition with communism and then alone.
The status was established by 1944 and probably reached its apogee (despite the problems of the 1970s) with the Coalition of the Willing that mounted the rescue of Kuwait in 1991, the last major assertion of UN values before Bush II introduced the concept of pre-emption.
This is a phase that continues. The seeds of being a superpower lay in the ability of a successful economy to become a net exporter of capital and act as arbiter to an increasing degree during the Great European Civil War of 1914-1945.
The seeds of a fourth phase were set when the US became a net importer of capital as its deficits grew. 9/11 is a neat marker but probably the failures of neo-con fantasists in Iraq will prove more significant in the long run.
FDR planted the seeds of crisis by building an unwieldy and often irrational system of social provision that locked in so many voters that even Reagan could not unravel it but this was married to the cost of fruitless wars (as in Vietnam).
It also became linked to a global system of bases that was simply a massive containment operation that eventually proved unable to deal decisively with global insurgency when it emerged in force a decade ago. In fact, welfarism is probably more of an economic problem than imperialism.
The 'theory' would have America dealing with its debt through constant economic growth – debt and the dependence on foreign investors would not matter so long as America remained a super power and its economy remained the most innovative (as evidenced by the information revolution).
The Chinese support America because they are now embedded in the system but America is no longer master of its own destiny in quite the same way. Instead of getting side-tracked into 'opinion', we should return to Reynolds and ask what his themes suggest about the future of the US.
No one can predict the future and America has the capacity to surprise – both FDR and Reagan were transformative to the fortunes of their country and there is no reason why a similar figure could not perform similar miracles but there are disturbing fundamentals to consider.
First, the crash of 2008 has still not worked its way through the system. Obama may be symbolically significant in historical terms but his Administration shows no sign of being in control of events.
He does not appear to have any strategy beyond accepting the need to bolster the private part of the private/public partnership system with massive thefts from the general population to sustain it. Perhaps there is no alternative now ...
Second, culture wars tend to be less important in times of economic hardship but if there is no leadership then culture wars can become proxies for economic demands.
The assumption that internal violence can be entirely crushed by what amounts to a growing 'secret police' capability within the country is to be doubted.
Reynolds rather passes over the extent of Western violence from Reconstruction to the 1890s but it was a strain of growth and violence could be a strain of decline.
As the US ceases to be able to direct global politics through the use of capital and arms, then it has to start sharing power, cutting deals and avoiding further entanglements until it has recovered at home.
The massive military presence worldwide has done little to stabilise key centres of insurgency just as we are about (March 2011) to go into what is expected to be another surge in global food prices
And at home, the oft-forgotten criminal insurgency in Northern Mexico is in serious danger of spilling into South-Western states already highly sensitised about immigration.
The demands of Christian fundamentalism do not only require 'change' in the broadly liberal cultural infrastructure of the US but also expect Congressional and Presidential support for its massive surge in missions overseas. Neither of these two pressures are well reported.
Despite the determined rhetoric of the neo-conservatives under Bush II, there is no scheming Hitler out there worthy of a 'crusade' that would kick-start the American economy and create national cohesion with total mobilisation.
America as nation-state was created (War of Independence), centralised as a corporate-executive power (American Civil War) and created as a superpower (the Second World War and the Cold War that followed) out of war.
Small wars are just not cutting the mustard. Teddy Roosevelt's Spanish-American War might have helped create a culture ready to go overseas in 1917 but Vietnam smashed any taste for conscription.
Iraq has created a profound distrust between liberal America and the nationalist-patriotic and imperialist other half of it. To go to war in full patriotic mode today might even be a trigger for low key civil war, especially if the evidence is not clear and America has not been attacked.
So, this worthwhile history (the views above are mine, not Reynolds) provides a back-drop to these general thoughts.
It will help understand how America not merely moved from a colonial outpost to troubled empire but will help non-Europeans understand why Americans often believe in their moral destiny despite their own crimes, how they hold to their ideals and why they are very, very different from the rest of us.
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This is a book by an antiquarian and no doubt has been superseded by subsequent research (it was published in 1974).
Nevertheless, it provides a usefu This is a book by an antiquarian and no doubt has been superseded by subsequent research (it was published in 1974).
Nevertheless, it provides a useful account of some of the sources for the loss of our (UK) larger mammals as agriculture expanded during the Middle Ages.
Dent is primarily interested in the beaver, the boar, the wild cat and the wolf but he also explores and dismisses claims of the later presence of a number of other large mammals.
He reckons the reindeer has disappeared by the Neolithic in Southern Britain (possibly surviving into the Early Middle Ages in the far North of Scotland) and the elk disappeared before the Middle Ages.
He reviews the fate of the aurochs, the bear, the pine marten and he notes bird losses but this first general section is the weakest section of the book, marred by some school-masterish and lecturing syntax.
Although all dogs are descended from wolves, our English cats are all of foreign stock and the native genetic component of our horses and cattle is small. Our sheep and goats are entirely imported.
The most 'natural' of our domestic animals is probably the English pig.
The book is also a useful debrief on the 'hunt' in English society and it suggests that the fox only becomes the prime target of the sportsman once the wolf (and presumably boar) had been eliminated and once hare coursing was no longer feasible for practical reasons.
A curiosity of a book but a nice reference text for the library. There are some useful illustrations from medieval sources.
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This is less of a social history than it might have been but one cannot complain if the title is crystal clear about what is being offered - a history
This is less of a social history than it might have been but one cannot complain if the title is crystal clear about what is being offered - a history of magic books. And, as such, it is excellent.
At times, it seems not much more than a compilation of information about these books century by century but this serves one important purpose - it strips away any notion that the bulk of these books served any other purpose than personal aggrandisement in an age of poverty and lack of welfare provision. Men and women had every reason to clutch at straws.
One common theme from earliest times until quite recently has been the use of such texts to discover treasure by calling up demons and dark spirits and then binding and interrogating them to reveal it. John Dee's graveyard excursion was not novel. He was in a very long line of 'magical practitioners' who wanted a fast track to wealth - or to sexual pleasure or even just good health and a bit of happiness in a grim world.
The spiritual content of these early modern books is minimal despite the attempts of later generations to read back their own spiritual searchings into the grubby grab for power and money of what probably amounted (no doubt with exceptions) to a succession of charlatans, fraudsters, small time criminals and half-educated cunning folk determined to prey for profit on the unhappiness of the masses.
Perhaps the only person in our era to have got this magical past right was that inveterate rascal Anton LaVey whose Church of Satan used the tropes of popular 'high' magic to sell his hedonistic mix of Californian individualism and cynicism. This was the same carnival gulling of country folk, in the tradition of medieval hucksterdom, that underpinned the eighteenth century French bibliotheque bleue.
This is not to say that some of the original sources of the grimoires of early modern Europe were not of considerable spiritual importance or that the presence of grimoires did not prove vital to the creation of modern alternative spiritualities as ready-mades for interpretation.
The Hebrew cabbalistic tradition and pagan hermeticism as well as alchemy and possibly the tarot - alongside attempts to come to terms with the demonic lore of the religions of the book - were all sincere paths for the exploration of consciousness and alternative realities. Later, the equally sincere researches of Eliphas Levy, the creation of the Order of the Golden Dawn, the experimentation of Crowley and the 'invention' by Gerald Gardner of Wicca all made use of the conceits of the grimoire in order to explore consciousness and 'spirituality' in new and imaginative ways.
Even between these time poles of sincerity, there are islands of genuine investigation into 'other forces' - Kelley may have been a fraud but Dee really does seem to have believed that he could talk with the angels. Many others took demons to be really existing creatures who could be bound safely for service without threat of eternal damnation.
The fears of the Church and the authorities were part fear of the heretical and part fear of new thinking but, on closer investigation, they were equally related to the potential for grimoires to be used to part peasants and small townpeople from their money or to promote unacceptable distance between community and church.
Immense efforts have gone into rooting out popular grimoires (including the terminal force against sorcerers) over the centuries. The first relevant book burnings were of pagan writings by the newly assertive and totalitarian Christian communities of the late Roman Empire (although the Roman authorities were quite happy to burn books that defied state control of religion long before Constantine).
It is little known that book burnings continued in Germany long after the Nazis lost power. Instead of Jewish and liberal books, religious campaigners were burning books of magic. Indeed, though they disapproved of magic (despite the fantasies of Western propagandists), the Nazis seem far less extreme in this matter than fanatical Christian Democrats and Protestants.
More could perhaps have been written by Davies on the attitudes of the authorities in modernising America who seem, sensibly, to have seen grimoire production as a branch of fraud, precursors to much modern 'new age' nonsense, rather than as some threat of a more fundamental kind.
It might be argued that the detachment of these texts from educated high society and their survival out of that context also detached them from their pagan spiritual meaning and folk purpose. It degraded these texts into non-communal individualistic tools of power - personal weapons in life's struggle for oneself and against others.
Grimoires are certainly ambiguous in pre-industrial and colonial society. Davies is excellent in tracing their path from Europe into the New World and other Western colonies and back and forward across Europe, linking their influence to practical factors such as the availability of the printing press and the willingness and determination of the authorities to suppress them. Levels of literacy are key in both permitting grimoires to flourish (they require someone to read them) and defining their acceptability and use.
Once a population got a taste for such books, these texts embedded themselves deep into some communities of migrants and former slaves - most often when literacy was combined with a low level of education and canny entrepreneurs were able to provide sufficient cheap copies of 'classic works'. Magical sub-cultures emerged that were both proponents of sometimes unutterable nonsense and the basis of a culture of resistance to a non-inclusive high culture that had nothing to say to the poor and uneducated.
This, one suspects, was very different from the highly cultured world of Toledo in the High Middle Ages where Jewish, Muslim and Christian traditions and thought mingled to create the radical thinking of which the early modern grimoires were but a pale reflection. The folk memory of Toledo as centre of dark sorcery reflected this cultural debasement of a high intellectual tradition.
In successive totalitarian Christian reformations, magic became debased into a presumption of evil when all it really was was a challenge to intellectual authority. Manuscripts got mangled, attributed inappropriately, given antiquities that do not stand up to scrutiny. Whether manuscripts or printed books, these texts became systematically degraded from their origins in a tolerant High Mediterranean Culture.
Perhaps some of the more genuine intellectual magicians were still being hunted to extinction as late as the early seventeenth century in Catholic Europe but it is fairly clear that the printed versions of their texts in the eighteenth century and their adaptations in America and across Europe and their colonies in the nineteenth were little more than gobbledy-gook for cunning folk. There are some wonderful tales of gullible treasure-seeking yokels being thoroughly done over by trickster 'sorcerers' in the chapter on the pre-revolutionary era in France and Switzerland.
Davies is usefully corrective on one widespread assumption, derived no doubt from the lurid stories of Montague Summers and Dennis Wheatley that witchcraft and demonic grimoires were closely associated. The witch trials were about ... well, witches. There may have been occasional links between sorcery and witchcraft but, outside Iceland, they were rare.
This is, again, probably down to levels of literacy at the height of the witchcraft trials. You could scarcely blame a witch of sorcery by grimoire if she could not read or write. Iceland, on the other hand, had a high level of literacy for women at the time of its witch trials. There also seems to have been a greater chance of sorcery being invoked in a witch trial elsewhere if priests were being implicated in the alleged crime - their literacy permitted use of the grimoire.
There are other insights - into the controversial debate over Mormonism's debt to the grimoire tradition, into irrationalism in American settler society, into the adaptation of grimoires to creole needs and their use by various Caribbean cultures (often cleverly exploited by American pulp publishers) and, more generally, into capitalist exploitation of folk demand for grimoires (with much useful background on the American pulp publisher entry into the market).
The influence of the specialist publisher Delaurence on the creation of new religious forms in the Caribbean and Africa whose antiquity has probably been much exaggerated would be worth an anthropological study in its own right. A thoroughly Western literary form appears to have assisted in constructing new forms of religion on a basis of inherited tribal magic and cultural dislocation. Some 'slave' religions may be surprisingly modern with the same link to the past as (say) Wicca or Asatru - more tenuous than some might like to believe. Even today, DeLaurence Scott books are explicitly banned by the Jamaican Customs Service as threats to local order.
This is quite a dense book but perfectly readable. It comes alive, becoming more than a linking of antiquarian facts, when it gets to the eighteenth century. Here, the narrative starts to strengthen, especially with the narrative of migrant and former slave use of grimoires that really requires yet another historian to interpret, perhaps more theoretically. Davies certainly seems very loath to experiment with theory. What people did with grimoires is well covered. Why they used them, much less so.
The book also adds a very large footnote to Hutton's and others' work on the rise of magic amongst the elite in the industrialising West. The key figure here is the autodidact Eliphas Levy, an eccentric who played an important role in re-presenting the grimoire and the high magical tradition as a possible source for attaining access to an alternative reality.
A community of 'clerks' rather than of high-born aesthetes (pace Wheatley's fantasies) relieved the humdrum nature of their lives and created an alternative vision of society that found its early brief high point in the Order of the Golden Dawn from which all subsequent 'positive' use of grimoires probably derives. This was a moment of cultural sea-change that in France, Britain, America, Germany and Italy led to many different forms of creative irrationalism that are still transforming society as we write.
The book ends with a review of the three 'fake' modern grimoires that have spawned their own intense followings - Lovecraft's wholly fictional 'Necronomicon' (as used in Chaos Magick), Gardner's 'Book of Shadows' (which is central to Wicca) and Lavey's cobbled together 'Satanic Bible' (which is central to Satanism but which, of course, has nothing to do with Satan at all).
All three made use of grimoire lore. Before we get hyper-critical about their provenance, we might ask just how reliable the claims of divine authorship of the books of the Bible or the Koran are if we really, really think about this instead of accepting claims on faith. From this perspective, the leap of faith made by Chaos Magicians (who are just playing with belief quite knowingly), Wiccans (who, in fact, are honest that each text is personal and to be recast by every practitioner in the light of their own needs) and Satanists (who have no illusions that LaVey wrote their text and know full well that Satan does not exist) seems less absurd than that of their rivals.
Perhaps this may be one clue to the determination of the authorities to suppress the grimoire - in its cack-handed way, the grimoire says that no intermediation is required between the punter and his book. Any person with the power to interpret the book can decide their own destiny in terms of sex, power and spirit which is a standing challenge to all established priests, experts and intellectuals.
At its worst, the grimoire is not merely obscurantist but dangerous, not because it can conjure devils or perhaps give cause in extreme cases to murderous fantasy (of which there are cases) and has a proven history of fraud, but because, in truly ignorant hands, it can block the use of 'good' expert knowledge to deal with 'real' problems of sexuality, power relations, conditions of life, healthcare and spirituality. It is probably why socialists and progressives loathe it as much as any cardinal.
But, at their best, their use represents a revolutionary act under conditions where there is no power for the people, where sexual repression is normal, where conditions are poor and life short and where religion represents social order rather than personal meaning. Their use under these circumstances says that 'we the people' will, in your lack of dialogue with us, choose our own experts and our own ways of intermediation with life amd matter. We will use magic because you have given us nothing or what you give us is conditional on our acceptance of your standards and 'morality' without asking us what we want. Irrationalism represents psychic resistance to the arrogance of the powerful.
Magic as resistance will never go away except where it is decisively crushed under the authoritarian boot of State and Church. Maybe that is the eventual solution of many liberal intellectuals as well (certainly many liberal intellectuals in the West have taken the neo-conservative turn in despair at the masses' inability to be 'rational') but it seems a price too high in terms of liberty for the majority.
An alternative may be to permit a degree of healthy irrationalism within a culture based on communication and general welfare where grimoires (as symptom) have no cause to be used for fraud or criminality because their function has changed. Under new conditions, they can be used, as they increasingly are being used in the modern West, for fun and for spiritual growth rather than for the assertion of power by the powerless over circumstance and the even less powerful.
Davies makes one very profound point - perhaps his only attempt at deep analysis in a largely narrative history. It is quite simply that most of us in the West no longer need magic in our lives. Economic development, mass education and technology provide our magic because magic is nothing more nor less than a means of empowerment.
If we see magic re-emerging today (albeit mostly in the spiritual and social sphere), it is because we need it again. The new religions are actively transforming persons and cultures where old systems have failed and this process is likely to accelerate under the influence of the internet. As Davies suggests, magic and grimoires are unlikely to disappear from our culture very soon.
Finally, let me add that the illustrations of various texts, scattered throughout the book, are extensive and well placed. Oxford have done a fine editorial job and there are copious and detailed footnotes and signs to further reading.
The book is also very broad-based with information on all the main Western and Northern European markets and on North America and the European colonies. There will be gaps but a book that covers Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland and Norway as well as the different Caribbean Islands cannot be called parochial. Recommended. ...more
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Despite the somewhat abrupt start and ending to the narrative, this is a fairly solid, evidence-based history of trangressive male clubs (with a side Despite the somewhat abrupt start and ending to the narrative, this is a fairly solid, evidence-based history of trangressive male clubs (with a side view at moral majority reactions to the media coverage of the day and to very real disorder in the streets) in eighteenth century North Atlantic culture.
Unfortunately, the determination of Evelyn Lord not to speculate beyond the available evidence is limiting. The organisations being studied (actually very disparate in nature) are, by definition, secret. This means that, while the author's conclusions are always sensible and she is probably reliable in representing the most likely function of the clubs in any one situation and at any one time, many questions remain about the motivation and meaning of transgression for the middle and upper classes of the time.
It may be that such questions will never be answered. One school of thought likes to push the clubs into the territory of the esoteric. Another likes to explain them more sociologically in pragmatic or merely playful terms. As always, the truth is probably somewhere in-between. The evidence tends to drive us away from the esoteric and the spiritual but the evidence is also so sparse that we can never be sure of our ground - hence the interpretative vacuum in which so many, often quite demented, speculations are allowed to flourish.
Still, this book is an excellent starting point for further investigation. The difficulty with it is that the author's reluctance to analyse in favour of just telling the story leaves that burden with us. We, the readers, have to try and order a narrative that is fairly clear as to what happens when to whom but remains unclear as to the story's full meaning.
Sometimes it descends into the anecdotal with short sections on many one-off clubs, some of which (like the Beefsteaks) seem far from transgressional and others (like the Kingdom of Dalkey) merely carnivalesque and very public. If we learn anything, it is that transgressional clubs (with the probable exception of the Beggar's Benison movement) are exceptional, marginal and isolated even if, on occasions, they may be culturally initiative and sometimes highly entertaining to read about. Perhaps we can start by trying to break down the phenomenon into its probable components ...
First, there is a political story about how a class of psychologically vulnerable young aristocrats, returning from exile after a puritanical bourgeois revolution against their kind, and dependent on a strong Crown for patronage, threw their victory in the face of the still-strong middle class urban establishment as gross bad behaviour and the type of extreme sexual transgression that is represented in literature by the Earl of Rochester.
The establishment had permitted the return of monarchy - Charles II did not return to England except by invitation and it was an invitation that might be withdrawn at any time. The struggle between executive authority and its 'court' and a 'country' which had re-ordered itself completely after the execution of Charles I would continue in many forms over many decades.
The frustration of some elements in the aristocracy at their uncertain condition (alongside a natural bit of youthful revolt against their elders) often expressed itself in transgressive behaviour - in drinking and whoring 'clubs' sometimes with a link to Jacobitism after the arrival of the Hanoverians. The more personally unstable members of the aristocracy exhibited wild behavior closer to that of, say, the tabloid image of a Pete Docherty today than, say, that of the people's princess, Cheryl Cole.
In this context, the transgressive behaviour of Anglo-Irish aristocrats of the Protestant Ascendancy might be regarded as the most 'in yer face' of all as far as the wider population were concerned. If aristocrats in England were insulting the mores of tradesmen, at least the tradesmen were free men on middle class incomes. In Ireland, the aristocrats were insulting a vast under-nourished and depressed peasantry whose entire culture was alien to them. To drink toasts to the devil (if this ever happened) was not just arrogant and contemptuous of 'ordinary folk', it was rubbing a crushed people's noses in the aristocrat's own shit. No wonder the peasants clung to their simple Catholic faith against such people - or at least as the latter were presented to them in the media of the day and by story-telling repute.
This leads us to the second factor. Much of this transgression in the first third or so of the century wass taking place amongst late adolescents and early twenty-somethings with too much money, expectations of future inheritance (and so too easy credit) or hoping for the patronage of the first two categories. The book is good on the role of the new hack media and pamphlets in fuelling what we would now call tabloid accounts of what went on amongst what were really little more than local gangs of testosterone-fuelled lads.
This was the sort of behaviour that footballers are now said to get up to in hotel rooms with willing groupies and hookers - with added violence. Eighteenth century England was becoming, for a while, before various 'reform' movements began their back-lash, an increasingly libertarian culture with no effective restraint in terms of public morality, one where the majority were pruriently fascinated by transgression and yet seeking to control it as socially damaging - the analogy with contemporary culture is surprisingly close although Lord determinedly avoids such comparisons.
Young males of wealth were also being sent on the Grand Tour by mid-century as a matter of course. Though most travelers probably conducted themselves much as expected by their elders, we have a creative minority who developed a fascination with what they saw and who sought to bring new ideas back to England where they fuelled a new aristocratic high culture that was more private, less urban, based on their estates and, because behind closed doors, more able to adopt transgressive forms where the will existed.
This brings us to the third model of transgression - the so-called 'Hell-fire Club' of Sir Francis Dashwood and friends. The name is a journalistic creation and there is no point in reproducing the detail of the story here.
In conformity with the author's concern only to deal with available evidence, this undoubtedly sexually transgressive Club, which has to be seen in the context of the significant and fertile contribution of Dashwood and his high aristocratic and intelligent bourgeois friends to wider British culture, is dealt with a bit cursorily in the book, repeating material easily found elsewhere (if here with more judgement).
However, what is clear (a visit to the re-modelled Parish Church in West Wyncombe is sufficient evidence of this) is that Dashwood was seeking to recreate a pagan Mediterranean sensibility behind the hedges and fences guarding the one final truth of the English revolution - the right of an estate-holder to do what he willed without interference of the State on his own property so long as he treated other English people as men and women with free choices (and so distinct from continental aristocratic practice). Basically, a whore could decline to be used if the price was not right and staff must be paid in coin.
The most charged speculations have always surrounded the sexual and esoteric aspects of the Club and the degree to which the highly intelligent but self-avowedly dilettante Dashwood was cocking a snook at the respectable establishment of the day. Even the significance of the sexual element has probably been exaggerated at the expense of the convivial because it is fairly clear that Dashwood was merely taking existing eighteenth century attitudes and just playing them out to their logical culmination under conditions where money and privacy were no object. Dashwood just added intellect to the mix.
In a world where men were married off for reasons of property as much as women, it was widely understood that pleasure and affectional relationships would have to operate within a parallel system to that of the conventional. The attraction of paganism would simply have been that it endorsed emotional reality (a precursor of romantic sensibility) rather than forced men of wealth into a 'tyrannical' Judaeo-Christian straitjacket, an imposition on the wealthy by those people who could not afford their natural instincts to be openly expressed under urban or small town scrutiny.
Pepys diary (not covered in this book) is full of perfectly reasonable affection and regard for a wife alongside erotic and affectional regard for other women, including the wives of friends, and this was quite normal for the time. By the mid-eighteenth century, 'reformers' (so often the bane of the lives of free men alongside the good they do for the truly oppressed) had made such freedoms a matter of censure for both men and women alike, moving England slowly but steadily towards the era of High Victorian morality where no respectable member of society could put a foot out of place in any social space, even the otherwise private space of the club. All that misplaced sexual energy was soon expanding an empire and slaughtering natives ...
As for the esoteric, there is no real evidence of some serious 'cult' in Dashwood's circle but only of free-thinking men and probably women exploring transgressional ideas and adding transgressional behaviour to spice up their sexual lives - perhaps with foreign travel, the collection of texts and the plots and schemes of English politics creating an air of secrecy and resistance to the growing air of worthy conformity that was to be almost totalitarian in its effect on English culture by the mid-Victorian era.
The fact that Dashwood and his circle were (outside the influence of Benjamin Franklin on the American Revolution) effectively political failures suggests a degree of boredom behind the transgression. What do you do when you are a rich man without gainful employment? Wilkes became a 'success' by making a career of political transgression but only after he had broken with this set and was forced into extremity in order to be noticed.
It must be said that these transgressors were all rich enough to indulge their tastes. They tended to flaunt (like modern financiers) their wealth and freedom in front of struggling tradesmen engaged in six day trudgery and church on Sunday. There is no evidence that Dashwood did not pay his bills but many aristocrats did not. Failure to pay a tailor's bill could ruin his family. In a world where such tailors read the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress, this aping of French disregard of 'ordinary folk' was not liberation to them but oppression.
The final turn to this aspect of the story, before the arrival of the next generation of dull establishment political clubs, such as the Beefsteaks where Gladstone and royalty ate comfortably, is the association of Dashwood with Benjamin Franklin and the work that they did together to simplify the Book of Common Prayer.
It is implied in many quarters that they might have talked of liberty in terms that would be understood in the American taverns that later revolted against local tyranny, first against local puritanism and then, at the right time, against a Crown whose only interest seemed to be to tax the middle classes to maintain wars to benefit the 'big men' of their day.
So matters turned full circle - eighteenth century transgression had started as an aristocratic revolt against an embedded establishment. A century later transgression is placed partly, if marginally, at the service of revolt by the more libertarian small man of property against that very same establishment, now in office for over a hundred settled years and probably to reach its apogee of sclerosis under Wellington and Castlereagh in the 1820s.
This brings us to the second half of the book which is an eye-opening account of a community of apparent transgression, based in Anglo-Scottish culture, that was clearly a revolt against the tendency of the Kirk to claim rights on all private life. This expressed itself as a network of voyeuristic and masturbatory clubs of prominent establishment males which may have been much more widespread than the remaining evidence (at St. Andrew's University) suggests and which spread through northern trade routes.
This 'Beggar's Benison' movement seems to have started around the Firth of Forth at mid-century, to have had no or little connection with English aristocratic transgression (although it had some possible link to the emergence of pornographic literature in London) and to have spread through the Baltic to the 'British' community in Russia and West to the United States. As it spread, it seems to have 'cleaned up' (as it did over time in Scotland) and become part of the tavern club culture that we noted above as potentially revolutionary in force.
The customs of this Movement are so counter-intuitive to our vision of Scottish sexual puritanism that they can only be explained by our making a major mental paradigm shift back into the world of Scottish modernisation and, at least for its precursors, into the debates over the Union with England (analogous to the debate over the European Union today) and the role of the Kirk. Secrecy about being pro-English or anti-Presbyterian might have been as sensible at one time as, amongst other political choices, being pro-Jacobite.
However, the Scottish-origin transgressive clubs appear to have been cultural rather than political. The real interest here is in the nature of Scottish sexual repression where the prime interest (and this appears to occur elsewhere in the story) is not in sexual conduct per se so much as in 'scientific' observation of female genitalia and in proving manhood through public (or rather private to the club) production of semen.
This is 'behind the bike sheds' stuff. It seems like an extension of all male education into adulthood as fixed and fetishistic sexual behaviour. There is none of that implied 'Eyes Wide Shut' eroticism of high English aristocratic transgression with willing whores and mistresses. This is paying servant girls to show their pussies and then expelling from the club the man who got so excited that he actually touched one ... the nearest analogy here is with the modern lap-dancing club and the 'no touch' rule. You can imagine the girls laughing all the way to the bank.
So, the author is offering us two separate narratives. The first is of the increasing attempt by some of the people considered to be natural rulers of their country, frustrated at having to bow down before a restrictive cultural conformity, to take their revolt from the streets as arrogant kids and back into the safety of their private estates before finally giving up and joining the establishment, reserving their subsequent sexual pleasures to the whore house and the mistress.
The second is of a repressed modernising and increasingly libertarian middle class of traders and businessmen trying to come to terms with their sexuality without risking their property and using the cover of Enlightenment investigation to find some low risk non-homosexual male bonding and a bit of sexual titillation behind closed doors.
The two narratives never quite converge though there are other stories - of the emergence of pornographic literature, of high aristocratic interest in radical libertarian ideas and of 'tavern' culture as a form of resistance to the power of the established church - that overlap a little with both. Transgressive clubs are interesting less because of what they say about their members as that they were ever necessary in the first place.
These clubs are a back-handed compliment to the power of the Judaeo-Christian culture in which they were embedded. Think of the growing power of methodism, of anti-alcohol and anti-sex industry campaigns, of the evangelical drive against slavery, of the promotion of the place of the woman as angel of the home, of the increasing need to be sexually discreet, of the relationship between sexuality and property and the increasing expectation that order be imposed by the State. On top of this, observe the perils of rapid modernisation and the management of emotion into 'sentiment' (and away from its raw expression as violence or lust).
All this is combined into one dominant culture that was eventually structured to repress any sexual dialogue and then channel it back into faux-pagan performance art and that peculiar British attitude that sex is 'naughty but nice', much like a cream cake, to be eaten and enjoyed only occasionally, in private and with considerable guilt at its presumed bad effects on both body and soul.
The roots of the decadent rebellion of the 1890s (with its faux-paganism and its fetishistic attitude towards sexuality) were in this same culture. Both rebellions, whether of the Hellfire Club or the decadents, certainly based on any sensible assessment of what happened afterwards, only point up the extent of the repressed sexual culture of the bulk of the British in history. Repression has been the national cultural norm of the British people from the Glorious Revolution to the 1980s. Even now, occasional moral panics from our modern tabloids and the commercialisation of sexuality suggest that underlying attitudes remain driven by sensational and by the 'naughty but nice' cream cake model of sex.
The book covers none of this cultural ground in depth but it is very good on the politics and sociology of the eighteenth century. Evelyn Lord is not interested in 'lessons from history' but only in telling the story as she finds it.
It is also a mine of amusing anecdotes with the added advantage that Evelyn Lord is very good at sifting fact from fiction and ensuring that we understand that most tales of transgression were probably fictional and certainly over-blown. On that basis, the book is recommended but you will have to make up your own mind as to its 'meaning'.
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Mar 1982
Available for only 1 from the Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury, this graphic novelisation of the life of Emanuel Swedenborg provides a simple and acce Available for only £1 from the Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury, this graphic novelisation of the life of Emanuel Swedenborg provides a simple and accessible introduction to one of the geniuses of early Modern Europe.
He is as important in his way as Da Vinci or Paracelsus, as a person struggling to make sense of the world he had been born into and coming up with radical new ways of perceiving it within the frameworks of belief that everyone else around him would have taken for granted.
Such people do not shift paradigms but they make a stab at making existing paradigms work and, in doing so, they open the door to new and creative ways of seeing the world far into the future. In Swedenborg's case, his more creative ideas were lost in an age of scientific materialism but they may yet be discovered again as fruitful raw material for a new age that takes us beyond the limits of pure science.
Where to begin with Swedenborg without simply reproducing the text of this short work with glosses? In summary, this polymath and undoubted genius was a Swedish representative of the movement, led from Northern Europe, that was to place science and scientific exploration at the centre of Western culture and of which the Royal Society might be regarded as the type.
Well travelled and highly intelligent, the first half of his life was dedicated to the service of his country as a politician, as mining specialist and as diplomat.
Fortunate to be born well out of the territory of the Catholic Church, he was permitted free range to that turn towards the inner and the spiritual that can affect many men as they reach middle age. He applied himself to this with the same determination that he applied to the investigation of matter as an engineer and metallurgist - and to whatever other sciences took his fancy.
His revelation was really an adaptation of Christianity (some might say a heresy though no such charges ever stuck in his life time), based on 'visions' that, to him, were undoubtedly real, of what heaven, hell and God's will were really all about.
This was Christianity for the Enlightenment in which he (or rather God and the angels) castigated the existing churches for cupidity and being run like corporations (Catholicism in particular) or for dour joylessness (the Reformed Churches of Northern Europe) while equally claiming that pleasure for the sake of pleasure (in the conditions of eternity) would soon pall and that the spirit was most fulfilled when it worked with and for others.
His vision of Heaven (and Hell) certainly requires a leap of faith today but it is attractive in its basic humanity and downright goodness. It also accords far more with what free men of good will are actually like while his Enlightenment criticisms of conventional Christianity were certainly spot on and stand today.
He was, historically, overtaken by events. He was the last gasp of attempts to build an occult supernatural vision of the human potential for goodness within the bounds of orthodox Christianity (he writes nothing that is not consistent with scripture). Less than two decades after his death, the French Revolution and the cult of the Illuminati shifted the creation of Heaven firmly across the boundary from the next world to this and set in motion the wheels of secularism and of secular religions such as liberalism, scientific positivism, communism and fascism.
It might be thought that he is of no consequence except as a historical footnote but his ideas and his genius remain surprisingly 'sticky' in modern esoteric culture. There are, of course, universalist Christians who find him still inspiring and there are non-Christians who do not accept his visions as necessarily true in themselves (and to be culture-bound) but who see his extensive work and writings as raw material for the study of the primordial nature of the mind as spirit and as a consciousness that is more than what it is immediately conscious of.
This is territory ploughed by Jung and the psychoanalysts, by drug researchers, by anthropologists and by students of comparative religion and now by cognitive and neuro-scientists.
This is recommended as a quick and easy introduction to this genius but the real value might be in the graphic introduction encouraging you to go to the Swedenborg Society's bookshop in London and look over some of the biographies and reprints of his works - and perhaps pick up the works of some of those nineteenth century writers such as Blake who clearly existed in the same general milieu of enlightened criticism of the conventional.
There is one footnote to be added here. Christianity was pompous, corrupt and often vicious, certainly dull and living off negative emotion, but it was never racist. Scientific materialism constructed, with the discovery by Darwin of natural selection, a monstrous view of humanity that ended up in the death camps by way of imperialism, not just as trade with guns but as a moral imperative to 'improve' the lesser breeds beyond the law (an attitude that, shorn of racial prejudice, still underlies much liberal progressivism in its dealings with the emerging world).
Swedenborg was determinedly anti-racist while having a strong view of cultural predispositions (placing we English as far more open-minded than Germans). But, to him, the Africans, treated as slaves, were most beloved in heaven and he saw pagans as more easily brought to God than conventional Christians and the allegedly civilised. These insights place him firmly as superior to the universalising arrogance of what was to emerge from the Enlightenment as it decayed into cant (excuse the pun!) even if he might have been a little patronising from ignorance of non-European peoples in other respects.
The beauty of Swedenborg is that he believed in science as method but was not enslaved by it. His humanity, his commitment to consciousness or spirit as different from matter and as something that emerged by questioning from within, rather than through acceptance of what was enforced as Belief by others, is a high point in Western thought. Only in recent decades are we coming close once again to that combined respect for scientific method, respect for the individual and a constant critique of authority that marks true civilisation and which is at risk from governments frightened of their peoples as we write.
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Dec 24, 1991
'Sex in History' is more than two decades old. It still provides an informed, often wry, and certainly intelligent review of the history of sexuality. 'Sex in History' is more than two decades old. It still provides an informed, often wry, and certainly intelligent review of the history of sexuality. It is a first point of call for anyone new to the subject, looking to understand how we became what we are both as a culture and as individuals (at least in the West).
Her judgement is excellent, given the facts at her disposal. I strongly approve her refusal to take at face value any late imposition of theory on how minds worked in the past. We can know nothing of past thoughts.
Similarly, the Freudianism that was still regarded as respectable when she was writing the book is now seen for what it is - another 'grand projet' from comfortably off dead white males and their camp-followers It gets only a couple of mentions and then with not much respect. Good!
Similarly, she is not sentimental. The Amerindians may have been treated appallingly by the Spanish conquistadores - their culture if not their persons by the incoming bishops - but the sexual laws of the Aztecs and Incas show no indication of 'noble savagery'.
On the contrary, if there is a message of this book, it is that increased state power and empire tend - whether from Constantine or any of the other thugs who get to the top - to increase interference in the life choices of persons. This alone must encourage a slight prejudice towards anarchy and against super-states and a very strong prejudice towards democracy and secularism.
Tannahill has also written an equally informative book on the role of food in history (as well as a book on cannibalism) so that, from this one author, you can be well primed on the nutritional and emotional drivers behind our history. The book ends with the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and it does not include either the latest research into many of the stories she tells here nor does it tell the story of the last two decades.
Since 1989, the character of sexual liberation has changed yet again and entered a new world of interactive net-based communications. Still, this book gives us a grounding from an informed liberal perspective and it should have the effect, if read today, of enabling us to remain highly cautious of dabbling in our sexual lives by priests, governments and 'respectable' feminists.
If there is a criticism, it is that Tannahill takes perhaps at too much face value the mythic narrative of patriarchy, forgetting that male power is rarely a matter of black and white but has depended on women choosing to accept the situation and then manage it from within. The greatest enemy of both the free woman and the free man appears, so often throughout history and as demonstrated by Tannahill repeatedly, not so much the male as the authoritarian and conservative female to whom the powerful male will bend for the quiet life. Liberation is damned hard work!
Respectability, generally based on poor science and the desire to exclude the other and preserve privilege, has so often been cover for racist protectionism - as British wives came to Imperial India to enforce. Anglo-Saxon feminists promoted birth control not for the right reasons, to give women more control over their lives, but as a war on migrant, black or working class population growth.
It is rare nowadays to find a book that creates an inner anger but this one does, an anger less at the patriarchs (though these should cause disdain enough) than at the war on their sisters by middle class respectable women. The imposition by these harridans of prohibitionist morality created the illusion of the good society but it drove exploitation and villainy underground, institutionalising not merely hypocrisy across the West but, eventually, organised criminality in the US.
This is not to exonerate patriarchy by any means, but it is to question the accepted view that 'respectable' Judaeo-Christian morality did much more than protect some at the expense of others. Any good done was at the cost of a massive perversion of the human condition, encouraging an apartheid, quite conscious in some circles by the end of the nineteenth century, between men and women, a conspiracy of sexual silence and of exploitation at the expense of the less propertied, the uprooted and, bluntly, the more sexually aware.
Of course, the Catholic Church itself has to be the most disturbing organisation short of the Nazi Party ever to have interfered in human sexual relations. It is the death instinct institutionalised - a movement of self-reinforcing power that has managed not merely to last two thousand years but will undoubtedly be mounting missions to Mars in another two thousands.
There is a tendency to believe that some institutions cannot be criticised as too 'sacred' - the British monarchy, Parliament, Jewish mothers - but nothing is too sacred for criticism if it does bad things. The really bad thing with the Catholic Church is that it has set up a moral standard that drives sex so far underground as a taboo (unlike the spiritual traditions of Tantra or Tao or even the pragmatic reformism of solid European Protestantism) that vile acts are tolerated - as if not saying is not doing.
The scandal of child abuse by priests and of the treatment of 'fallen women' in Ireland is not recent. It is embedded within a culture of silence and hypocrisy. It is the same with the denial of condom use in Africa which is directly related to the mass murder of (potentially) millions.
Personally, I sympathise with the Church's position on abortion but the stand against sex education, contraception and homosexuality and for celibacy in the spiritual community, for sexual silence and for damn-close-to-enforced child adoption in the past are all expressions not of the right to life but of the death instinct and of the desert.
There are many good priests and catholics but the religion certainly has its dark side. It is a cheap shot to say that the Church had its own brothel during its Avignon period yet, while enforcing sexual continence on the masses, there is evidence enough (and it is only commonsense given the human condition) that some churchmen were far from celibate and often exploitative.
The justification has often been that the office and the man should be regarded separately - an attitude often translated to the modern corporate officer - but the difference here is that the office made claims affecting others while keeping back relevant information about its own conduct.
Not that Protestants were that much better when they started out - Luther saw sex as sinful - but the difference is that they recognised it as a reality instead of living in a fantasy of pure spiritual aspiration that asked for our world to be made more miserable.
The book is not only about Western attitudes - it covers East and South Asia and is generous about the Americas before and after the Spanish Conquest, as well as telling a reasonable tale of Muslim sexual mores and their translation into that peculiar revolution amongst the Frankish upper classes, courtly love.
The dialectic between Christian miserabilism (which has its Roman intellectual antecedents) and a courtly apartheid culture which objectified both men and women into stereotypes seems to be the story of a culture that, like Rome before it, was the most successful on the planet to date and yet doomed to destruction as soon as it could no longer expand to fill every vacuum.
The point of the courtly love model (which was a mere literary conceit when it started and only became serious with industrialisation) is that it turned women into wimps or harridans with nothing in between. How can you have a decent relationship with another human being if you are worshipped as a stereotype? How can you develop a relationship if you can only do it by becoming a stereotype?
The stereotypes are still deeply embedded in Western marital culture. Dialogue, any serious communication, is discouraged because any open discussion is almost inevitably going to expose 'difference' and 'difference' means that the stereotype ceases to be a stereotype.
If the marital deal was predicated on an ideal instead of on a dialogue, there is every incentive to avoid conversation and exposure of one's inner life in case it 'rocks the boat'. Eventually, if the illusion cannot be maintained, misery ensues or one or other party 'snaps' - going into hysteria or prostitution and secret sex in an age of restriction or divorce or detachment in an age of freedom.
'Respectable' people would like to legislate against prostitution and divorce but you cannot legislate against hysteria or for happiness. Indeed, one of Tannahill's themes is that respectability's attempts at legislative control of sexual behaviour is invariably disastrous in its consequences (Fawcett Society, please note). She also uses the case of the various British Contagious Diseases Acts, clumsy attempts to halt the spread of veneral disease through regulation of prostitution, as an example of the opposite - the damage caused to the community by moralists attacking basically sensible legislation!
The apartheid of courtly love created two dichotomies, not only between men and women but between 'us' (the tamed aristocracy of blood) and 'them' (humanity in the raw). Courtly love moderated the Judaeo-Christian death instinct that would have preferred castration and celibacy to sexual pleasure by bringing raw sexuality within some tolerable ideological bounds.
From there, allowing for aristocratic reversion to the animal in the eighteenth century, Christian virtue danced a dance of death with the aspirations of the propertied to maintain 'standards'. These standards, modelled on the aristocracy, were taken up by the middle classes in the nineteenth century and then by the working classes, especially the 'respectable' socialist working classes, in the twentieth.
An entire rapacious culture of 'respectability' not merely extended across the white settler world but became the basis of radical nationalism in Europe. It was copied by nationalists elsewhere who thought that they were liberating themselves from the West but whose cultural 'modernisation' merely meant a new slavishness to its mores.
We have noted elsewhere how the Meiji restoration and then the MacArthur period after 1945 imposed such modernisation in Japan - yet somehow, in the last half-millennium, only the Japanese have managed to resist cultural subjection in matters of sexuality.
Tannahill, without emphasising it, points out how the politicisation of Western women has had a direct relationship with eugenics, racial and class prejudice. The rise of women in politics is not quite the story of progressive enlightenment that we would like to believe. This was just one class of women determined on the control of the males of their own class and on the organisation and acculturation of everything below them to their 'standards'. These people were as culturally dangerous as any bunch of celibate priests.
In fact, other than in the mad 'kinder, kirche, kuche' era of interwar Europe and the separate hypocrisies of patriarchal catholicism, the Europeans have retained the basis for a healthy liberalism in sexual matters. Even the British come across as one of the more liberal of nations, successfully negotiating (in general) some sort of freedom out of the weight of respectability. America was another matter ...
America today, still culturally the dominant nation on earth, sends out two contradictory signals. The commercial marketplace operating since the 'liberatory' 1970s sends out a story of sexual liberation and licentiousness, a lack of privacy and discretion, that destabilises many traditional cultures whose upper caste, in aping this, rediscover sexual habits that they deny to their masses.
On the other hand, three hundred or so years of puritanism, patriarchy, respectable feminism and political fear have created a domestic political culture where the sight of a nipple on prime-time television causes a national cultural crisis, a politician is judged on his fidelity to his partner rather than his competence and sexuality is the subject of endless study and torment in which every act becomes a political one.
America is like an inconsistent parent - censorious one day, not caring the next. No wonder the world acts like a dysfunctional family.
The villain of the story is not feminism. On the contrary, widespread contraception and the women's movement of the 1970s democratised the war on patriarchy but it also created the conditions for an appropriate liberation of both men and women based on the elimination of the 'respectable' as a necessary condition for the good life.
It is a revolution that is still localised and metropolitan, still childish, certainly immature. Men, shell-shocked by being blamed for crimes about which they are still confused whether they committed them or not, are developing their own responses, based not on conduct required by an agrarian society out of time and place but on what men and women really are like over a life cycle - on the basis of true equality and respect.
The villain is that malign synthesis of the desert mentality of the Christian hermit and a model of the 'lady' that transmuted itself into that High Victorian horror, a culture of respectability where all went to church and where prostitution was the only deal able to be done by poverty-stricken women and men living an elaborate lie.
These respectable dames, whose attitudes would drift down into the class they oppressed (or gave employment to, if that suits you better), required leisure. While their menfolk employed thousands of prostitutes to give them something that could not be discussed at home (and brought back the risk of veneral disease), the girls had servants - thousands of them. 751,641 girls over ten were domestic servants in 1841. Within thirty years, the number has risen to 1,204,477. Given the conditions in which these girls worked, the labour use of their bodies and the lack of use of their minds was no better than prostitution unless you were determined on a morality of 'respectability'.
The institution of temple prostitute might have been a lot better for some of them than the drudgery and obligatory attendance at church on Sundays just to be told that everyone had their place. The issue comes up today when 'respectable' women, ensconced in nice jobs as lawyers, tell working women that their lap-dancing should be legislated out of existence so that they can be check-out girls at Sainsburys on a third of the wages.
As Tannahill points out, the High Victorian myth of the family and the respectable woman presided over an explosive increase in prostitution, an epidemic spread of veneral disease and the introduction of a morbid taste for masochism amongst the middle class male. She does not say but we would add that it created the conformist death instinct that materially contributed to the dumb willingness to die in a trench for an abstraction.
That abstraction, in one country, turned into a killing machine for the destruction of, symbolically, the race that kicked off the Judaeo-Christian ethic but then got left behind as its Frankenstein monster of Christianity transmuted into the hell of its opposite in national socialism. A Freudian might regard Auschwitz as the grandson attempting to murder the grandfather - Western culture is a continuum and not a series of revolutions.
Deal with the poverty of women and deal with the right of a man to be a man and society might be improved, but this has not been possible until recently because the cult of the 'lady', the cult of the perfect marriage (at its most demotic in the Hollywood romantic movie) and the separation of propertied interests from the unpropertied created a 'faux'-socialism. This was a top-down moralism that crushed the souls and spirits of many men and most women.
Since Tannahill wrote her book, we have seen further revolutions in the West - an increased (though still inadequate) economic equality between the sexes, the slow removal of the faiths from moral governance except where individuals, as is their right, choose to embrace them, the acceptance of non-exploitative consensual sexual difference as 'normal' and the acceptance of a variety of sexual partnerships and liaisons that merely require government to intervene to protect the weaker party.
The point of the revolution is that the culture of the desert has begun to be replaced by a culture of the oasis for many. The land is being irrigated slowly by a refusal of ordinary people to be told how to run their lives by 'essentialists'.
Of course, things 'may have gone too far' in the sense that children are being brought into the world without stability and that exploitation continues, especially in parts of the sex trade. But neither of these are insoluable. Both arise not from viciousness per se but from stupidity and liberal economics and globalisation. Education, the recreation of community, government regulation to deal with exploitation rather than morality and improved barriers on trade where it is exploitative should be sufficient.
Contrasted with the West in the book is what is now clearly its rival, China. This rivalry was far less clear in the 1980s and so China is placed alongside India and the Americas as just 'other'. Today, we must see China differently. It also offers us two contrasting traditions whose dialectic will be as influential as the Judaeo-Christian death instinct and courtly love have been in the creation of the Western soul.
The first tradition is the yin/yang patriarchial but ultimately sexually vibrant culture of Tao. The other is the conformist order-driven top-down culture of Neo-Confucianism which is not, by any means, anti-sexual but is concerned with public propriety.
A point made by the author here is that Chinese sexual life is rich but intensely private. We may extrapolate that Neo-Confucian resistance to Western radical sexual liberalism need not be assumed to mean puritanism in private, although foreign conquest and the malign influence of Western missionaries and Marxist earnestness (as well as state-driven population control) have driven much of the richness away and replaced it with a dogged seriousness that would gain the approval of many an Anglo-Saxon harridan seeking to re-moralise society.
It is impossible to predict the future but we can see a war of trends - private resistance to the commercialisation of sex just as it spreads around the world as an act of defiance against hypocritical leaderships and faith leaders, the continued rediscovery of sexual complexity and its normalisation in the urban West, the attempt of 'respectable' elites to contain a revolution from below driven, in part, by the new communications technology, cultural tensions within highly puritanical new powers as prosperity reintroduces dissident sexual indigenous traditions amongst the younger and more prosperous generations.
As for 'respectability' and social control, it is not dead. It remains strong, as always, on the alleged 'progressive' side of the political spectrum. It is interesting that the new freedom now inclines people to conservatism in the United Kingdom because politicians like Harriet Harman, in the dying days of the least competent centre-left administration in post-war European history, seem to want to use their last year of office to use a legislative sledgehammer to crack the serious nut of exploitation.
The Fawcett Society in its war on prostitution is the grim successor to Frances Willard and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the dim-witted prohibitionist movement whose fruits have been the embedding of organised crime into American society. This book is recommended because it is humane. No-one humane could be a 'progressive' nowadays. ...more
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A solid and entertaining account of Guiseppe Balsamo, self-styled Count Cagliostro, charlatan, magician, healer, adventurer, Freemason and populist ra A solid and entertaining account of Guiseppe Balsamo, self-styled Count Cagliostro, charlatan, magician, healer, adventurer, Freemason and populist radical.
McCalman's book has the virtue of placing him within the right context as an important minor player in the unstable pre-revolutionary politics of eighteenth century Europe where command of the mob and of intrigue within courts were two sides of the same coin of influence. A slip too far in either direction could cost a man his liberty or his life.
Cagliostro's life is one of those examples (a theme of many of our reviews and our writings elsewhere) of how history must be reconstructed from gaps in the official record as much as from the facts that are available. McCalman keeps his feet on the ground throughout. The result is a quite impressive and readable addition to the literature of eighteenth century political culture.
His final brutal treatment at the hands of the Vatican is inexplicable unless you take seriously his potential to mobilise the Parisian and indeed the European mob against traditional values. Freemasonry in this period was not clubbability for the middle classes as it is today but a movement of cultural resistance that we may now understand much better in an age of 'leaderless resistance' strategies against the system amongst insurgents and insurrectionists.
The French Revolution and the consequent vicious reaction which led to the conspiracy theories of Abbe Barruel about Freemasons grew out of an atmosphere of liberal and radical protest to dynasticism and 'ignorance' that really did lead to radical change. Freemasonry and its associated liberalisms were as dangerous then as Islamism and its associated irrationalisms are today, at least in the perceptions of that perennial personality type in politics, the security-minded hardliner charged with defending the ruling order from Washington to Tehran, from St. Petersburg to Rome.
Just as today if an Islamist or 'extremist' steps over a line, any means seems to be permissible to bring them to heel (a message equally apposite in the FBI's treatment of Dillinger as a 'criminal' challenge to the prevailing order in the current Mann-Depp-Bale film 'Public Enemies') so Cagliostro stepped over that line in the 1780s. Any means were then regarded as permissible to take him off the chess board when the crisis came.
It was no accident that he was seized in 1789 in Italy as the Papacy watched the French Revolution unfold or that two years after his death in jail in 1795 the incoming French-commanded liberatory Polish Legion, according to legend, ordered his bones dug up and drank to his memory with wine from his whitened skull.
McCalman does not spend too much time analysing the man and his time. What he does is provide a sensible. highly readable and cohesive narrative that allows us to make up our own minds about this curious figure who contained in equal measure his own charlatan and semi-criminal aspects to match those of the dynastic flummery amongst which he lived and the sort of universalist ideals that are now the dominant ideology (almost to excess) of the modern European Union. ...more
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