Month: November 2018

MY TOP SHELF

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book published in 2015 called ‘The Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’.  The extracts are as originally published, and they come in the same order.]

10

THE LIFE OF MOZART

Edward Holmes (1845)

Folio 1991; half red cloth with gold lettering and red silhouette on gold on blue cloth front with red slip-case.

For this blessing, I daily thank my Creator, and from my heart wish it participated in by my fellow-men.

Is there any point in reading lives of the great artists?  What we know about Shakespeare can be comfortably set out on an envelope, and none of it tells us anything at all about King Lear.  It was a drama in verse – what can fact or fancy in prose tell us?  Does it help to know that Michelangelo had a fight with a pope or that Beethoven went deaf?  Perhaps; but if you read too much about Wagner, you may never want to hear him again, and you might swear off Parsifal forever.

Well, there may be something to be said for reminding ourselves that even geniuses are, au fond, merely human, and only one man may have had a better claim to genius than Mozart.

Edward Holmes went to school at Mr Clarke’s Academy in Enfield where a boy called John Keats was a pupil.  He learnt music with the very musical Novello family and became something of a music critic.  He idolized Mozart, but this book is useful for the letters of Mozart and contemporary reminiscences.  This Folio copy is beautifully produced.

In a letter to his father, Mozart says that he played to a count for two days.  This one knew how to behave – ‘he always says bravo in those places where other cavaliers take a pinch of snuff…’  He went on to say that ‘on hearing German melodrama, I felt a violent inclination to write.’

The letters contain many references to his love of the German nation, and to his love of the fugues of Bach and Handel.  He put several of the fugues of The Well-tempered Clavier into his own handwriting.

According to Mr Hodge, Mozart always composed in the open air when he could.  Don Giovanni was said to have been composed on a bowling-green, and the principal part of the Requiem in a garden.  In a letter written in a garden, he told how he had arrived in Vienna to find that dinner was served ‘for me unfortunately rather too early’ – 11.30 am!  Mozart sat down with, among others, two valets, the confectioner, two cooks ‘and my littleness.’  (He was only about five feet in height.)  Mozart told his father that there was ‘a great deal of coarse silly joking’ from which he remained aloof.  Perhaps, but we know that Wolfie was big on ‘coarse silly joking’ in a way that may still evoke a mild blush in the matronly glitterati in the concert-hall set.  But all this was far too much for the Victorian sensibility of Mr Holmes.  Against silhouettes of Mozart, Salieri, Gluck and Haydn, Mr Holmes says: ‘That he whose transcendent genius had asserted its empire over the whole musical world, and who even at this time had put forth unmistakeable evidences of his greatness should be put down to table with cooks and valets, is something to marvel over in this retrospect of Mozart’s chequered existence.  But how admirably he bore himself in this situation, silent and grave and keeping aloof from the rude company…’

Here is a trivia question.  Name the opera taken from Comedy of Errors.  Da Ponte turned it into an opera called Equivoci.  The music was written by Signor Storace whose sister played the first Nanette in The Marriage of Figaro, for which Da Ponte wrote the libretto.  Mozart wrote the opera in a month.  The tradition was that the overture to Don Giovanni was written the night before it was first given, and was first played unrehearsed.

An Irish singer called Michael Kelly played in the first Figaro.  He reminisced about Mozart.  ‘Mozart told me that great as his genius was, he was an enthusiast in dancing, and often said that his taste lay in that art rather than in music….He always received me with kindness and hospitality.  He was remarkably fond of punch, of which beverage I have seen him take copious drafts.  He was also fond of billiards, and had an excellent billiard-table in his house.  Many and many a game I have played with him, but always came off second best.  He gave Sunday concerts at which I was never missing.  He was kind-hearted and always ready to oblige, but so very particular when he played, that if the slightest noise were made, he instantly left off.’

Mozart was only thirty-five when he died.  He was working on the Requiem, and had composed the Ave verum corpus, possibly the most ethereal sacred music ever written.  Einstein said of it that, Mozart had resolved the problem of style.  Either work could only have been written by a man of profound Catholic conviction.

We may be allowed to hope that Mozart was at peace with himself when he died.  A few years before that, this man beloved of God (amadeus), wrote to his father: ‘As death, rightly considered, fulfils the real design of our life, I have for the last two years made myself so well acquainted with this true friend of mankind, that his image has no longer any terrors for me, but much that is peaceful and consoling; and I thank God that he has given me the opportunity to know him as the key tour true felicity.  I never lie down in bed without reflecting that – young as I am – I may never see another day….’  Some hold that those who are beloved of God die young.

Passing bull 176 Bull about theory and politics

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When the English decided that they needed to have a revolution in 1688, they went ahead and did it, and they justified it with a theory later.  It was a great success – it was largely peaceful, and it continues to form the basis of our constitutional settlement.  When the French decided that they needed to have a revolution in 1789, they first developed a theory, and then they sought to implement it.  The result was a cruel failure from which France still suffers – they are lethally rioting against government as I write.

The difference between these two world views is as deep as the English Channel.  It lies behind the famous observation of Oliver Wendell Holmes that ‘the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.’

The young republic of the United States sought to bridge those two outlooks.  The English Bill of Rights was the end product of centuries of development of the common law by judges and of the conflict between the Crown and Parliament.  It is still on the books and part of our mindset, but it gives us no grief.  We could repeal it tomorrow.

The Americans went further and wrote it into their Constitution.  That means it can only be altered legislatively by referendum.  But it can be altered – de facto or de iure – by judicial decision, in the form of a judgment of the Supreme Court.  What is the upshot of that excursus into locking in high principles and theory?  One is the frightful consequence of the right to bear arms as that right is currently interpreted by the judges.  Another is that those judges are now more than ever seen to be part of a political process and the outcome of pitched partisan battles.

We find either result to be equally repellent.  The law of abortion in the U S is for the most part written by unelected judges.  The current president was in some part elected by people voting in an election for the executive so that he can appoint to the judiciary people whose declared positions suggest that they can be relied on to rewrite the law to conform to the platform of one political party.  We abhor that mongrel process.

Australians have for the most part followed their English ancestors in preferring results to theory, and in preferring experience to logic.  ‘Just get on with it and do it – and preferably, shut about it.’  We don’t like or trust ‘ideology’ and what people call ‘culture wars’ are irrelevant distractions from people who did not have enough intellectual toys in their youth.  Most of us think that the phrase ‘political science’ is a contradiction in terms, and that therefore the most dangerous siren is likely to be blown by someone who confesses to a Ph D in that part of the domain of the arcane – and who of course has never held down a real job, or run a political campaign.

Now, all that stuff is very general, and open to the suggestion that it is unwarranted abstraction or empiricism without the benefit of evidence, but it also looks to me to be true.

And that is the simplest way to look at the way we voted in Victoria on Saturday.  We thought that one party had been too infected and divided by theory.  We preferred the crowd who said ‘Bugger the theory – let’s just get on with it.’

The consensus is that this truth will be ignored by those in the media who profit from banging on about theory.  That’s because that’s how they derive their livelihood.  It follows that the leaders of the federal opposition will each night fall on their knees and pray that their opponents continue to listen to and be guided by Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt.  They can be relied on to lead the Liberals into temptation and deliver them to evil – and an almighty thrashing from a vengeful public that justly feels betrayed by people who act more like mice than men.

There is after all a matter of tone.  I don’t want my Prime Minister pandering to shock jocks.  Mr Turnbull didn’t do that and that’s one reason I voted for him.  My estimation of Mr Andrews went up when I read that he refuses to talk to our resident shock jock in Melbourne.

May I go back to England?  It is in a frightful and humiliating mess.  They forgot their mode of operation.  They settled on some ideological objective and then sought to implement it.  They can’t.  Their high theories have collapsed in a heap against the facts of life.  They, like we, should remember what got us here.

Bloopers

Abbott calls for Liberal voter unity.

The Weekend Australian, 27 October, 2018.

Leading headline page one.  Marked Exclusive.  Who else would be silly enough to print that?

**

‘We are very mindful of the response that our announcement about recognising people who have served in defence has had today, and it was a gesture genuinely done to pay respects to those who have served our country,’ he said.

‘Over the coming months, we will be working consultatively with community groups and our own team members who have served in defence to determine the best way forward.’

‘If this consultative process determines that public acknowledgement of their service through optional priority boarding is not appropriate, then we will certainly be respectful of that.’

The Guardian, Melbourne Cup Day, 2018

We blew it.

HERE and THERE – ROSCOE POUND and THE SPIRIT OF THE COMMON LAW

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The United States of America have produced some great jurists – scholars of the common law and what we call jurisprudence.  In the end, their work may verge on idolatry.  There is likely to be a touch of alchemy at the fringe of every great field knowledge or applied technique.  Occasionally even the bounds of logic get pushed.  But the work of these great thinkers and writers of the law is vital to the bloodstream of what we call the common law.

Roscoe Pound was not born into learning.  He was born just after the end of the American civil war and he died in the same year that the Olympic Games were held in Tokyo.  His parents were true pioneers in the west.  At one time or another he was a scholar (and that’s not a dirty word in America), generalist, professor, dean, reformer, and, perhaps most importantly, a trial lawyer.  He had three degrees, including a Ph D in Botany, but he never took a law degree.  Toward the end of the 19th century, he fought many cases as a trial lawyer before cow-punching juries in Nebraska.  Later he served as a Commissioner of Appeals in the Nebraska Supreme Court.  He wrote a very influential article for the ABA on ‘The Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice.’  His trial experience left him with a distaste for ‘forensic gladiatorial show.’  He wanted the ideals of the common law to be relieved from the ‘yoke of crudity and coarseness which the frontier sought to impose.’  He then taught at Harvard where he was Dean for twenty years.

He had a mighty written output, but all his work is informed by his time at the Bar.  It is difficult to imagine Oliver Wendell Holmes before a Nebraska jury, but is easy to imagine him in deep philosophical discourse with Roscoe Pound.  Pound concluded his preface to The Spirit of the Common Law this way:

When the lawyer refuses to act intelligently, unintelligent application of the legislative steamroller by the layman is the alternative.

The first chapter is ‘The Feudal Element’.

In the sixteenth century, when the Roman law was sweeping over Europe and superseding the endemic law on every hand, the common law stood firm.  Neither the three R’s, as Maitland called them, Renaissance, Reformation, and Reception of Roman law, nor the partial reversion to justice without law under the Tudors shook the hold of our legal tradition.  In the seventeenth century, it contended with the English crown and established its doctrine of the supremacy of law against the Stuart kings.  In America, after the Revolution, it prevailed over the prejudice against all things British, which for a time threatened a reception of French law….

Pound makes a passing reference to elected judges and says:

A system of law-making through judicial empiricism calls for much more in a judge than popularity, honest mediocrity, or ignorant zeal for the public welfare may insure.

That is elemental – but too many elected officials don’t see it.

More on feudalism.

While the strict law insisted that every man should stand upon his own feet and should play the game as a man without squealing, the principal social and legal institution of the time in which the common law was formative, the feudal relation of lord and man, regarded men in quite another way.  Here the question was not what a man had undertaken or what he had done, but what he was.

Here is the distinction made by Sir Henry Maine in Ancient Law between contract and status.  It is fundamental to our history, as is the role of contract.

Then comes ‘Puritanism and the Law’.  In America, the puritans had the numbers.

What is peculiar to Anglo-American legal thinking is an ultra-individualism, an uncompromising insistence upon individual interests and individual property as the focal point of jurisprudence…..Two main factors may be recognised, namely, the emancipation of the middle class and Protestantism.

Further on:

The early history of New England furnishes abundant applications of the idea that covenant or compact – the consent of every individual to the formation and the continuance of the community – was the basis of all communities, political as well as religious.

Just look at the covenant that God made with his chosen people.

In ‘The Courts and the Crown’, Pound looked at the celebrated conference between James I and my Lord Coke.  His trial-bred realism allowed him to see the flip side.

Thus the Sunday-morning conference between King James and the judges, which is the glory of our legal history, led in the nineteenth century to constitutional doctrines that for a time enabled a fortified monopoly to shake its fist in the face of the people, and defy investigation or regulation.

We get more of an attitude that would not have gone down well with most donors to Ivy League universities.

…the fact remains that the present state of the law operates unequally and invites oppression and lawlessness.  No rich man has been subjected to the third degree to obtain proof of violation of anti-trust or anti-rebate legislation, and no powerful politician has been so dealt with in order to obtain proof of bribery or graft.  The common-law right of the accused poacher became the natural right of the accused magnate and entrenched in the bill of rights, shows how legal machinery may defeat its own ends when one age conceives it has said the final word and assumes to prescribe unalterable rules for time to come.

A glance at our jails since the Great Financial Crisis shows that that problem has just got worse.

Under ‘The Pioneers and the Law’:

A pioneer or a sparsely settled rural community is content with and prefers the necessary minimum of government.

This is how this remarkable man concludes this great book.

For through all vicissitudes, the supremacy of law, the insistence upon law as reason to be developed by judicial experience in the decision of causes, and the refusal to take the burden of upholding right from the concrete ‘each’ and put it wholly upon the abstract ‘all’ have survived.  These ideas are realities in comparison whereof rules and dogmas are ephemeral appearances.  They are so much part of the mental and moral makeup of our race, that much more than legal and political revolutions will be required to uproot them.

This book should be read by any lawyer who has what I may call faith.  It should also be read by those historians and philosophers who stubbornly refused to acknowledge the central role played by contract in the development of our laws and of our constitution.

And there’s a bonus – across the 216 pages of this mighty book, there is not one bloody footnote.

So, a man from the back-blocks of the West is generally ranked at the top level of jurists across the common law world – and he got there without a law degree but after running hard cases before outback juries.  He did a lot of work for railroad companies.  He would lose those. Juries did not like big corporations.  One day, when the railroad company had brought the suit, he won!  Someone got one of the jurors in a bar in the capital of Nebraska.  The conversation went something like this.

What happened?

Well, that judge tried to trick us.

How?

He said that the railroad company was the plaintiff.  We know the railroad companies are always the defendant.  So, we came back with a good verdict for the plaintiff – to shove it right up the railroad company.

They don’t often teach you that kind of stuff at Harvard.  Roscoe Pound knew all about it.

MY TOP SHELF

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book published in 2015 called ‘The Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’.  The extracts are as originally published, and they come in the same order.]

9

THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

Jane Austen (1791)

Folio Society, 1993; quarter bound in vellum, with gold title, and marbled boards, in embossed card slip-case.

…with one argument I am certain of satisfying every sensible & well disposed person whose opinions have been properly guided by a good Education – & this argument is that he was a Stuart.

Like Emily Bronte, Jane Austen was the daughter of a clergyman who spent her life as a member of the very discreet provincial middle class, and who never knew the love of a man – worse, according to the scheme of things back then, neither of them ever married.  It was a time when so many women were condemned to live and die in obscurity.  It is therefore remarkable that their novels were so different – it is like comparing a Haydn minuet to Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony.

This little history stands on the shelf for the novels of Jane Austen.  She wrote it when she was barely sixteen.  The handwritten manuscript is there in facsimile as illustrated by her sister Cassandra, and the text is set out in print.  As histories of England go, this one has the supreme advantage that it can be read in the time that it takes to give the dog a short walk.

In Northanger Abbey, the seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland says: ‘But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in….I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me.  The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.’  That would be the view of the author of this little history, the ironical tone of which is signified by the observation that it ends with and which is set out at the head of this note.

The little book is notable chiefly for the fact that the author does not seek to hide or apologize for the fact that she is a she – and one who valiantly defends those of her sex – such as Joan of Arc (yes, the French witch!), Anna Bullen, and Mary Queen of Scots.  Curiously, she buckets two – Margaret of Anjou (the She-Wolf of France) and Elizabeth (‘that disgrace to humanity, that pest of society’) – who were the strongest of the lot, and more than capable of standing toe to toe with the men.

And what of the novels?  The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English says that Austen’s ‘life was conspicuous for its lack of event – allowing biographers to make it a study in quiet contemplation or quiet frustration – and for the strength of family ties.’  That for some would be a fair assessment of the novels, pretty and prim comedies of manners, where nobody works for a living, and nobody seems to live, and hardly anything ever seems to happen.  The revolting measure of the worth of a person by their income – all unearned – and the even more revolting dependence of women on the institution of rightless marriage to take them from one form of oblivion to another form of servitude can, after a while, get you down.

I prefer now to take these novels being read to me by Patricia Hodge, Amanda Root, or the woman with the best voice on the planet, Juliet Stephenson.  That way, the worst reaction that you can get is like that which comes a couple of hours after downing a Chinese take-away.

But, then, who could ever forget the way that the gruesome Mr Collins grovelled before the awesome Lady Catherine de Burgh, or the lordly magnificence of the disdain of Laurence Olivier to Greer Garson when he declined an invitation to take part in archery on the ground that he was in no humour to indulge the middle classes at play.  If you want to get down and dirty about snobbery, the Poms are bloody geniuses at it, and I think that the artistry of Jane Austen was a significant part of the English awakening – and a badly needed awakening.

People like Balzac, Ibsen and Chekhov put their own bombs under the bourgeoisie.  They were all brilliant and compelling in their own right – and they are all on this top shelf – but none was as dry or as subtle or as English as Jane Austen.

Passing bull 175 – Going over the top – and misusing the word ‘conservative’

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

One of the fads corroding our discourse is the tendency to go over the top with language.  Critics of the current proposal to see the U K out of Europe say that it would make the U K into a vassal state of Europe.  A ‘vassal’ is a term found in the feudal system that meant ‘one holding lands from a superior on conditions of homage and allegiance.’  The U K is not in that position now, and would not be under the proposal.  Still, when people flaunt the term sovereignty in this context, you must expect some loose thought and looser language.

Another example came from the suggestion that we might move our embassy in Israel.  Not surprisingly, this suggestion troubles our two biggest neighbours – whose people are of a different faith.  But we are solemnly told that we must not let them dictate to us.  That is silly.  What we are being asked to do is to take their position into account.  That is what we should have done before making this rash announcement.  My local Post Office has an answer to our unneeded predicament.  Pull the embassy out altogether – it is a waste of bloody money.

And while the PM said that his faith had nothing to do with the move, a proposition that seemed more plausible to some than others, we have not heard the same from our high-rise Treasurer who looks like he lives to be photographed by the press.

But then we are told that if the P M backtracks, he will be eviscerated by the conservatives in his own party.  This is a shocking abuse or misuse of the term ‘conservative’.  As best as I can see, the people referred to are nothing like ‘conservatives’.  They look to have the following views.

They are attracted to factions, plots, conspiracies and coups in the same way that little boys like playing with matches.  They love rubbishing the elites of the political class, even though they occupy the commanding heights of that class.  They think that patriotism is a decent and useful term.  They even have a closet hankering after Donald Trump’s Operation Faithful Patriot, because they neither like nor trust migrants, which can lead to problems in a migrant nation.  They get misty-eyed about civilisation, but then they get coy about how the epithet Western might qualify the noun.  They have never held down a real job.  They would not know what a working man looks like.  They believe that people without a tertiary degree, even those as useless as theirs, are bloody lucky to have the vote, and that if there is such a thing as a dinkum Aussie, he would be the definitive pain in the bum.  They consort with shock jocks and the Murdoch press.  If you took away their clichés and labels, they would be stark naked.  They hold that it is not right to criticise Donald Trump.  They maintain that Israel and its current PM can do no wrong.  They think that supporters of Palestinians are Green/Left dupes of the Love Media who are soft on border security and sovereignty to boot.  They practise a curious form of faith that allows them to hold that running a concentration camp for children in the Pacific conforms with the Sermon on the Mount.  They believe that most experts are frauds (unless they are involved in saving their life or liberty).  Science is bullshit and worries about the climate are alarmist (it is bad taste to mention California Burning so near the event – that’s like talking about the dead after another massacre).  Thoughts and prayers can cure most ills since by and large God is all that He is cracked up to be – even if you don’t take His word too seriously too close to home.  They have bizarre dreams about liberty or freedom that would have led to a fit of the giggles in Edmund Burke or Disraeli.  They are relieved that the gorgeously photogenic imports into the House of Windsor comfy rug will save these colonies from the delusional insecurity of Home Rule or independence.  They believe – devoutly – that cadres of the IPA are well educated and rational philosophers and economists who have election-winning ideas for the true believers.  And while it is both polite and meaningful for them to label others as progressives, it is neither polite nor meaningful for them to be labelled as regressive, reactionary or retrograde.

In short, this motley is a viscerally uncomely mix of the clown, the dunce, and the jerk.  They are a dream come true for Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.  If you want an example, look out for the unsullied brashness of that boyish senator who looks like his mum dresses him and then combs his hair.  Or catch a glint of that Chesty Bond smile of Tim Wilson, M P.  And then salute the flag and hum a few bars from the Goons’ classic hit ‘I’m walking backwards for Christmas – across the Irish Sea.’  I wonder if they have their own version of a Masonic hand-shake?  And just what condition was God in when he set up this Comédie Humaine?

The saddest part about these falsely named ‘conservatives’ is that they are prone to endorse what is called populism, which is the antithesis of conservatism, and while they bemoan the death of faith in politics and liberal democracy, they are among the principal instruments of that death.

Then I read that a Conservative MP in England said that the current proposal for leaving Europe was not what people in the U K had voted for.  That raises two questions.  First, how does she know what the people voted for?  So much of what passes for debate on this issue is the assumption that the people gave a clear instruction – or worse, a clear mandate.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Secondly, if the MP is saying that the people voted for a much better deal than this – a deal that would leave them in no way worse off – then she is saying that the lies they were told were effective – scintillatingly so.

What is the upshot of this exercise in what is called democracy?  It looks to me as if there is a majority against the present proposal to leave of about two to one.  But there is a similar majority against leaving with no deal.  If therefore Europe is to be taken at its word, England looks set to get a result either way that a clear majority does not want.  How they resolve that without going back to the source – the people – for new instructions escapes me.

Bloopers

The climate debate has become a vehicle for the promotion of political ideology, civilizational guilt, global wealth distribution, virtue signalling and doomsaying.  Alarmism is a prime post-material preoccupation for the prosperous in Western liberal democracies.  In an age of identity politics, climate concerns are trumpeted as a demonstration of the proponent’s selflessness and sophistication while its technological edge creates hobbies for those wealthy enough to indulge in electric cars, cover their roof in solar panels or invest in taxpayer-subsidised renewable projects

**

More voters see themselves as swinging voters.  Yet it’s the declining Left and Right activists who dominate parties and the political message we see and hear via the media.  It distorts the discussion when the vast majority of voters see politics through an issue-by-issue prism rather than the mindless tribal banality of cheering on one side or the other.  As a result, disillusionment sets in for most of us, which soon leads to disengagement from the political process.  This exacerbates the problem because the world is run by those who ‘show up.’

The Weekend Australian, November 17-18, 2018

The ‘mindless tribal banality’ of the first citation (Chris Kenny) warrants the validity of the second (Peter Van Onselen).

A pleasant anecdote

While reading again Graham Robb’s Balzac – and it is a great read – I learned that early in his intellectual life, Balzac adopted the view of the Epicureans that the world was created while God was drunk.  I do not wish to offend my religious friends, but with the world as I have described it above – La Comédie Humaine – that view gave me a lot comfort.  Even if I was surprised to learn that God and Epicurus were on speaking terms.

Passing bull 174 –Liberals and Progressives – Labels gone berserk

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

In a recent piece in The New York Times, the author sought to explain the difference between ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives.’

In recent decades, the label ‘progressive’ has been resurrected to replace ‘liberal,’ a once vaunted term so successfully maligned by Republicans that it fell out of use….

Historical progressivism is an ideology whose American avatars, like Woodrow Wilson, saw progress as the inevitable outcome of human affairs. Of course, liberals and conservatives believe that their policies will result in positive outcomes, too. But it is another thing to say, as American Progressives did, that the contemporary political task was to identify a destination, grip the wheel and depress the accelerator.

The basic premise of liberal politics, by contrast, is the capacity of government to do good, especially in ameliorating economic ills. …A liberal can believe that government can do more good or less, and one can debate how much to conserve. But progressivism is inherently hostile to moderation because progress is an unmitigated good. There cannot be too much of it…..

Unlike liberalism, progressivism is intrinsically opposed to conservation. It renders adhering to tradition unreasonable rather than seeing it, as the liberal can, as a source of wisdom…..Because progress is an unadulterated good, it supersedes the rights of its opponents.

Where liberalism seeks to ameliorate economic ills, progressivism’s goal is to eradicate them…..

But neither liberalism nor conservatism opposes rationality.  Conservatism holds that accumulated tradition is a likelier source of wisdom than the cleverest individual at any one moment….. One cannot, of course, make too much of labels.….The appropriate label for those who do not believe in the ideology of progress but who do believe in government’s capacity to do good is ‘liberal.’ They would do well, politically as well as philosophically, to revive it.

It is unusual to find such vintage bullshit in such a fine newspaper that usually knows enough to leave undergraduate ideology well alone.

The author clearly sees himself as a liberal, and not a progressive, a term that he wants to malign in the same way that Republicans successfully maligned ‘liberal’.

If you ran into John and Betty in the street, and you were told that John was different to Betty – he was a liberal, but she was a progressive – you would not know what to make of it.  And you would be no better off after reading what I have set out above.

As it seems to me, there are at least two mistakes.  In spite of his caveat, the author makes ‘too much of labels’.  The assumption is that people can and should be put in boxes marked liberal or progressive.  The truth is that all of us have views that partake of the two categories mentioned plus that of conservative.  The person who is purely one and not any of the other two doesn’t exist.  We look at the policies of a party and form an assessment of its capacity to implement them.  If they get elected, we expect them to ‘identify a destination, grip the wheel and depress the accelerator.’  And we do so believing in ‘government’s capacity to do good.’  Is there another way in which we could proceed?

The second mistake comes with the criterion of distinction.  We are told that for a ‘progressive’, progress is an unmitigated or unadulterated good.  Very few sane people could believe any such thing.  The problem comes with the word ‘progress,’ which the author does not define.  Progress is the ‘action of stepping or moving forward or onward; travel, a journey, an expedition.’  If you want to go from A to B, and half way there, you start going backwards, then while you are doing that, you are not making progress.  But whether your going forward is desirable will depend on your choice of destination, and the way that you will get there.  If you want to go to Heaven, every step on the way is good; if are heading for Hell, every step on the way is bad.  Let’s say you want to go from A to B.  One way is through mountainous jungle infested with taipans; the other is longer but flat and safe.  It would be absurd to say that any movement on the first route must be good, because it involves being progressive.  It is also absurd to say that any movement that qualifies as ‘progress’ could be an unmitigated or unadulterated good.  The timber of our humanity is far too crooked for this abstract purity.  It belongs in another world.

Bloopers

Whatever the outcome…Mr Trump is showing himself to be a far more savvy political operator….The dispatch of what the President says could be 15,000 troops to confront the migrant caravans snaking north through Mexico may have Democrats in a state of apoplexy, especially when he warns the troops could respond with gunfire if attacked.  But the polls show that Mr Trump’s tough stance on what has become the main issue in the campaign is winning votes and the caravans of defiant would-be migrants, many organised by leftist and communist groups in Honduras, Venezuela and Cuba, are a gift for Mr Trump’s mid-term aspirations.

The Weekend Australian, November, 3-4, 2018

It could happen here.  With the same sponsor.

A pleasant anecdote

Politics in England in the 18th century turned on what they called patronage and we call corruption.  Votes had to be bought and office rewarded.  This was the fare for the thirty-two voters of Bath on St Peter’s Day, 1698:

2 venison pasties, 2 haunches boiled, 2 chines of mutton, 4 gees, 4 piggs, 12 Turkey chicken, plain chickens and rabbits sans number and abundance of claret and sherry.  [The spelling is as it was.] 

A ball followed for the ladies, and

….in the evening there were glass windows broke on purpose that the glaziers that were not worthy to eat with them might have some benefit by the matter.

Now, democracy was a long way off in the U K, and the yet to be born U S, but do you not just marvel at the way the better people looked after those ‘that were not worthy to eat with them’?  An essential part of the constitutional history of England consisted of doing through the back door what they couldn’t do through the front.  That’s why they never had a revolution as vicious as those of France or Russia or a collapse as complete as those of Germany, Italy, Spain and Greece.

MY TOP SHELF

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book published in 2015 called ‘The Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’.  The extracts are as originally published, and they come in the same order.]

8

A BOOK OF MEDITERRANEAN FOOD

Elizabeth David (2005)

Folio Society; green cloth with gilt lettering in green slipcase; decorations by John Minton; watercolours by Sophie MacCarthy; preface by Julian Barnes

For some reason, we do not often use that good and complimentary word ‘urbane’ to describe a woman.  Well, Elizabeth David was nothing if not urbane.  She came from a very wealthy and elevated family, and it showed in manner that could be woundingly waspish.  She had a flaky way about her that showed in failed romances and difficult business arrangements.  She could just be difficult.  But she changed the way that the English and others thought about food cooking and wine.  The liberation was felt as far away as Australia.

Elizabeth David lived with a French family while studying French history and literature at the Sorbonne.  Having seen out World War II in comfort and style in Egypt, she was appalled at the hardship and dourness that she found on her return to England.  She set out to master the fundamentals of cooking and to study it on site in France, Italy, and Greece, and around the Mediterranean.  She published many books and was a journalist writing on food for the best journals in England.  This book contains one of the cooking books and some extracts from her journalism published under the title An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. 

Auberon Waugh said of her ‘if I had to choose one woman this century who had brought about the greatest improvement in English life, my vote would go to Elizabeth David’.  She may or may not have been a natural cook, but she was certainly a natural writer.  Vogue, to which she contributed, said: ‘Her pieces are so entertaining, so original, often witty, critical yet lavish with their praise, that they succeed in enthusing even the most jaded palette.’  She did, in fine, make a real contribution to our civilisation.

Here she is on an Edwardian gourmet, Colonel Newnham-Davis, at the time that gave rise to great hotels – the Savoy, the Ritz, the Carlton, and Claridges.  (Do you recall the supper scene in Chariots of Fire?)

Mrs Tota and her husband George were friends from the Colonel’s Indian Army days.  George, it has to be faced, was a bore; he grunted and grumbled and refused to take his wife out to dinner on the grounds that the night air would bring on his fever.  So the Colonel gallantly invited Mrs Tota, a maddeningly vivacious young woman, to a select little dinner for two.  She was homesick for the gaieties of Simla, the dainty dinners and masked balls of that remarkable hill station.  ‘We’ll have a regular Simla evening’, declared the colonel, and for this nostalgic excursion, he chose to dine in a private room in Kettner’s, which still exists today [1952], in Romilly Street, Soho; after dinner they were to proceed to a box at the Palace Theatre, return to Kettner’s, where they arranged to leave their dominoes, and thence to a masked ball at Covent Garden.  The meal, for a change, began with caviare, continued with consommé, fillets de sole a la Joinville, langue de boeuf aux champignons with spinach and pommes Anna (how agreeable it would be to find these delicious potatoes on an English restaurant menu to-day) followed by chicken and salad, asparagus with sauce mousseline, and the inevitable ice.  They drank a bottle of champagne (15 s. seems to have been the standard charge at that period, 1 s. for liqueurs).  Mrs Tota was duly coy about the private room decorated with a gold brown and green paper, oil paintings of Italian scenery, and gilt candelabra (‘very snug’, pronounced the colonel); she enjoyed her dinner, chatted nineteen to the dozen, and decided that Room A at Kettner’s was almost as glamorous as the dear old Chalet at Simla.

Well, those times have all gone, and they will not come back.

Here is a vignette from The Spectator in 1961.

A military gentleman I know who used to run a club once told me that one of his clients was asking for the kind of dishes ‘which are practically burnt, you know.’  After some investigation, I tumbled to what was wanted and it seemed it wasn’t so much a question of the breakfast toast as of that method of cooking which is so typically French, the method whereby gelatinous food such as pigs’ trotters and breast of lamb is coated with breadcrumbs and grilled to a delicious, sizzling, crackling crispness, deep golden brown and here and there slightly blackened and scorched.  At the same time the meat itself, usually pre-cooked, remains moist and tender…..To achieve the characteristic stage of doneness in this kind of dish needs a bit of practice and a certain amount of dash.

The words ‘doneness’ and ‘dash’ are very much Elizabeth David.

Many of her recipes assume that the recipient is at home in the kitchen.  They are not for beginners, or boys.  Beginners of either sex require much more detailed and structured tuition – of the kind that Jamie Oliver gives.  If you go to some of the classics in French Provincial Cooking, the book that made Elizabeth David’s name in 1960, you will find a lot that gives you so many options to get it wrong.  If you go to her recipes for the famous cassoulet, you will find a very detailed version from the French and another shorter version, neither of which would be good for amateurs.  Neither uses duck, but the French one gives a useful tip for the water used to cook the beans the purpose of which cooking ‘is to make them more digestible and less flatulent’:

Throw away the water out of doors, not down the sink; its smell infects the kitchen for twenty-four hours.  In the Languedoc the housewives keep this liquid in well-corked bottles and use it for removing obstinate stains on white and coloured linen.

Again, those days are gone.  Here is a Swiss recipe for Tranches au fromage by Docteur Edouard de Pomiane which David says ‘is the best kind of cookery writing.’

Black bread – a huge slice weighing 5 to 7 ounces, French mustard, 8 oz. gruyere.  The slice of bread should be as big as a dessert plate and nearly I inch thick.  Spread it with a layer of French mustard and cover the whole surface of the bread with strips of cheese about ½ an inch thick.  Put the slice of bread on a fireproof dish and under the grill.  Just before it begins to run, remove the dish and carry it to the table.  Sprinkle it with salt and pepper.  Cut the slice in four and put it on to four hot plates.  Pour out the white wine and taste your cheese slice.  In the mountains this would seem delicious.  Here it is all wrong.  But you can put it right.  Over each slice, pour some melted butter.  A mountaineer from the Valais would be shocked, but my friends are enthusiastic, and that is good enough for me.

As David remarked, ‘enthusiastic beginners’ might add olives, parsley or red peppers, and the ‘school-trained professional might be tempted to super-impose cream, wine, mushrooms upon this rough and rustic dish.  That is not de Pomiane’s way.  His way is the way of the artist; of the man who could add one sure touch, one only, and thereby create an effect of the pre-ordained, the inevitable, the entirely right and proper.’  It is in truth the case of a professional having the nerve to back his own judgment – and forget about white wine in the Alps, the dish looks just right to me to have with red wine in front of a fire and the rugby on a Friday or Sunday night.

A restaurant on Mont-St- Michel was famous through all France for its single menu – an omelette, ham, fried sole, lamb cutlets, roast chicken and salad, and dessert.  The omelettes were the talk of all France.  What was the secret of the cook’s magic?  She revealed it in 1932 in a letter to La Table:

Monsieur Viel,

Here is the recipe for the omelette; I break some good eggs in a bowl, I beat them well, I put a good piece of butter in the pan, I throw the eggs into it, and I shake it constantly.  I am happy, monsieur, if this recipe pleases you.

Annette Poulard

Let’s face it – the French have style.  But David lamented the decline in French provincial cooking in her time.  She looked back on a lunch at a pension de famille run by three ladies in the Vosges in 1968, two thin and spinsterish, the third a young and graceful niece.  First came a quiche Lorraine (which had no cheese in the filling and was baked in a tart tin).  It was served with a salad of crisp green leaves.  Then came coarse country sausage poached with vegetables.  One of the thin ladies apologised that they did not have the trout that day – so they went straight to the roast – braised pigeons with whole apples cooked in their skins which by some trick were still rosy red.  Then came the local cheese with caraway seeds.  Then came another cartwheel of pastry.

It was the normal meal expected by the factory owners when they invited guests to eat with them.  The food was good honest food, honestly cooked.  There was no pretension and not the least ostentation about it.  All the same what a misguided meal.  The quiche and the salad, both of them delicious and combining perfectly, would alone have been enough.

You can understand why some people keep this as bedside reading.  It conduces to peace and well-being.  But as someone remarked in The Guardian on the centenary of her birth:

But someone once told me Jamie Oliver had sold more copies of just one of his books than have been sold of Elizabeth’s entire oeuvre, and what can you say about that? 

Good luck to Mr Oliver – but what about civilisation as we know it?

This Folio edition does not have enough from An Omelette and a Glass of Wine.  It does however display the style of the author across the Med, and it deals with meals we take for granted like souvlaki or kebabs.  Julian Barnes gives a good example of how a short and apparently simple recipe left him bamboozled.  He was better off than the guy who responded to an instruction ‘Separate the eggs’ by moving them further apart on the bench!  Barnes also tells us that when E D collected her OBE, the Queen asked her what she did.  ‘Write cookery books, Ma’am.’  The Queen replied: ‘How useful.’

Elizabeth David left her own testament to grace, style, and food.  If I were to ask God whether, say, Kant or El Greco have had more influence on me than Elizabeth David, the result might be a close run thing.  But while I do not have to do logic or like art, I do have to eat.

Here and there – Some terrorists from God: 4

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 5 Comments

 

[A note comparing the Gunpowder Plot to the 2001 attacks on the US appears in four parts.]

13  Politics or morals?

Guy Fawkes there raised the issue of motive.  These insurrectionists had a political object – regime change – but their motive was religious – the vindication of their idea or brand of religion.  Like Brutus, they wanted to think that they were pure.  They may in some part have persuaded Trevelyan.  He said this of the treasonous conspirators.

But unlike their clerical chiefs, they were pure from self-interest and love of power.  It is difficult to detect any stain upon their conduct, except the one monstrous illusion that murder is right, which put all their virtues at the devil’s service.  Courage cold as steel, self-sacrifice untainted by jealousy or ambition, readiness when all was lost to endure all, raises the Gunpowder Plot into a story of which the ungarnished facts might well be read by those of every faith, not with shame or anger, but with enlarged admiration and pity for the things which men can do.

This is very slippery ground.  On what basis would we refuse this accolade or at least epitaph to the minions of Osama bin Laden who drove their aircraft into the twin towers with courage  cold as steel?  We may be reminded of the suggestion that the invasions and wars of Napoleon were somehow less evil than those of Hitler.  If you are being bayoneted or raped, your misery will not be lessened by the answer of your assailant to the question: ‘Why are you here?’

These conspirators were bent on killing people.  That is evil.  That the conspirators purported to do so in the name of God can only make it more evil.   As can the fact that they applied all their best qualities to achieve their purpose.  As indicated above, on at least two grounds, a person killing for God is worse than one killing for lucre.  First, his zeal makes him more venomous; it gives him strength, and some colour of right.  Secondly, and putting blasphemy to one side, it is obvious that by his crime against others, he exposes other members of his faith to retribution.

Even after he had ascended the scaffold, Father Garnet said, before making his final sign of the cross in this life: ‘I beseech all men that Catholics shall not fare the worse for my sake and I exhort all Catholics to take care not to mix themselves with seditious or traitorous designs against the king.’  No, Trevelyan should have stuck with his proposition that the conspirators put all their virtues at the service of the devil.

But this issue raises the question of how we judge insurrections, whether or not we apply the label ‘terrorists’ to those leading the insurrection.  (What is the difference between George Washington & Co and the IRA, except that the first lot clearly won and the jury is still out on the second?)  The rude truth may be that we assess an insurrection in the same way that we assess a business.  It is good if it succeeds.  If not, it is bad.  This was clearly seen by one of the leaders of what Americans call the American Revolution.  When the Declaration of Independence was finally signed, Benjamin Franklin said: ‘Well, Gentlemen, we must now hang together, or we will assuredly hang separately.’  (As ever, John Adams was different: ‘Power and artillery are the most efficacious, sure and infallible conciliatory measures we can adopt.’)  If you succeed, you are a patriot, a hero and a liberator, a father of the nation.  If you fail, you get topped for treason.

As Antonia Fraser remarked in her book The Gunpowder Plot, ‘terrorism does not exist in a vacuum.’

I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage.  I did not plan it in any spirit of recklessness or because I have any love of violence.  I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people.

It was not Robert Catesby who said that, but Nelson Mandela when in the dock at the Rivoni trial in 1964.  This sometime terrorist is now widely revered as being as close to a secular saint as we can get.  Possibly our only hero who might match Mandela is Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Yet, he was plainly involved in a plot to kill Hitler.  Do we see our two secular saints as terrorists?

So, as ever the kinks in our timber preclude us from formulating wide and fast maxims about any right to resort to violence.  Indeed, even the word ‘right’ is fraught there.  The brute historical fact looks to be that some forms of evil or oppression leave us no reasonable alternative but to resort to a form of action which would otherwise be plainly wrong.  But none of us wants to trust anyone else to make that decision for us.

14  Lessons?

There is one other great reminder in the story of the Gunpowder Plot (that as a kid I celebrated every 5 November with crackers and potatoes in the fire on the night that all dogs loathed – Bonfire Night.)  We say that we allow freedom of religion and that we claim to be tolerant.  Put that bluff or bluster aside.  It is obviously wrong and unfair to brand all those who profess a faith with the blame for wrongs done by fanatics who claim to be of that faith but whose actions show that they reject its teaching for their own motives.  It is like branding people because of the crimes, real or imagined, of their ancestors.  Typing people because of their faith or race is like holding them liable for the failures of others – they are two sides of our original sin.  We need to reach the insight that escaped Napoleon – you do not win people over by killing them or insulting them.  And that’s before you look at the moral question about how you should treat your neighbour.

We have a problem with religion that the ancients did not.  The religions of Greece and Rome look daffy to us.  It is hard for us to think of the Greeks or Romans taking them seriously.  But many of them did, especially if it suited them, like when the people of Athens decided that they had had enough of Socrates.  But one result of having so many all too human gods was that the people were very tolerant of other religions.  That stopped being the case with absolute religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Each of them said that there was only one God.  And it was theirs.  The problem then is one of simple arithmetic.  People are agreed that there can only be one answer.  But there are at least three different answers on offer.  The insight of Kant that I referred to was as follows.

If someone declares himself for this church [one that passes itself off as the only universal one] yet deviates from its faith in something essential (something made out to be so), especially if he propagates his errant belief, he is called a heretic and, like a rebel, is held more punishable than an external foe and is expelled from the church…..and given over to all the gods of hell. 

Kant also observed that the claim of each church to be the only universal church is ultimately ‘based on faith in a particular revelation which, since it is historical, can never be demanded of everyone.’  We might induce people to act on faith; we cannot compel them to do so.  Those remarks go to the heart of what we have been looking at.  So much of the suffering of this world has been caused by ruptures within religions that put themselves above all others.

We have been looking at manifestations of two of those ruptures.  The schism that we call the Reformation started a domino reaction that has been at least as lethal for mankind as the schism in Islam between Sunni and Shia.  As people on both sides could and did predict, the Gunpowder Plot and its aftermath set back the course of religious peace in England in ways that can still be seen.  The reaction of the Protestant Crown left ample room for Catholic reaction and rejection, especially when disabilities were multiplied and decent people were asked to take responsibility for the actions of outright criminals who thought that they could fix their whole world with one big bang.  We might be reminded of the Treaty of Versailles.  The moral offence of Germany was great.  But the savagery of the reaction, as Keynes surely predicted, ensured that there would be another and worse war.

The division and hatred would be worse in Ireland.  The crimes of the English against the Irish were originally founded on a contempt for the Irish race.  A vicious sectarian shade was now added to that hostility.  At Drogheda, Cromwell, the great Puritan, engaged in what we would now call ethnic cleansing in the name of Christ.  As Christopher Hill remarked, ‘religious hostility reinforced cultural contempt.’  ‘Cultural’ there is the polite word for ‘racial.’  Professor Hill, no enemy of Cromwell, went on to compare the attitude of English people to the Irish with that of the Nazis  to the Slavs, and that of the Boers to black Africans, and said that ‘in each case the contempt rationalised a desire to exploit’.  The agony would go on for centuries.

So would blind prejudice.  In 1897, a Jesuit priest with the same name as one who fled when the Gunpowder Plot was exposed, Father John Gerard, published a book What Was Gunpowder Plot?  He said Salisbury made the whole lot up.  Off hand, it is hard to see how such a tract might achieve anything at all.

Those of us who look on glumly while mankind suffers from these two great schisms may just have to take refuge in the remark of a friend of Ben Johnson who gloried under the name of Lord Zouche:

Two religions cannot stand together.

Well, on one view, we may have been discussing four religions.

There may, then, be something to be said for teaching people about Western civilisation.  We saw that John Mortimer said that our Western civilisation is, after all, the product of a religion founded by Jesus of Nazareth.  That is, if I may say so, rather large.  Among other things, the splitting of Christianity has been about as much a blessing for us as the splitting of the atom – or the splitting of Islam.  Perhaps because I am a lawyer, I see the common law, including the rule of law, as fundamental to what I see as civilisation.  That may just be my prejudice.  The impact of religion on the common law has not been large – and part of the great teaching and legacy of the common law is that that’s the way it ought to be.  The alternative, frankly, is bloody dangerous.

Sources

[I apologise to those who like footnotes.  I don’t.  I like writing and reading and think that footnotes are bad for both.  They have clearly ruined our jurisprudence.  Any necessary references may be found below.]

Black, J B, The Reign of Elizabeth, Oxford History of England, 1959, 166-194, esp. 172

Bowen, C D, The Lion and the Throne, The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke, Little Brown & Co, 1957, 252, 261, 267 and 270

Fraser, Antonia, The Gunpowder Plot, Terror and Faith in 1605, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996, passim, but esp. 183, 235, 255, 258, and 295

Hill, C, God’s Englishman, Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, Folio Society, 2013, 99

Johnson, P, A History of the American People, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997, 125, 130

Kant, I, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:109; Religion and Rational Theology, A Wood and G Di Giovanni, C U P, 1996, 141

Lovell, J, Notable Historical Trials, Folio Society, 1999, Volume 1, 482-514, esp. 494, 505, 510

Neale, J E, Elizabeth I, Folio Society, 2005, 243

Ranke, History of England, Oxford, 1875, Volume 1, 403-417, esp. 408,411

State Trials, London, 1816 (Printed T C Hansard), Volume 2, 217-358 (trial of Garnet)

Trevelyan, G M, England Under the Stuarts, Folio Society, 1996, 80, 81, 84

Passing bull 173 – Self-interest and Rupert

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Over the weekend, the Fairfax press carried a piece saying that we would just have to wait for a disaster in cricket before we got loud calls to bring back Warner & Co to save our cricket team (and those making money from televising it).  There was a disaster in our cricket yesterday.  And, Lo!, The Australian today was headed with a colourful banner:

SOS SMITH & WARNER: Perth disaster shows why we need our best batsmen back.

This exercise in Murdoch self-help could have come straight out of The Messiah.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

Perhaps those who read this newspaper should do so to the music of Handel.

Bloopers

Stupid, brainless and servile.  It’s how the American sisterhood describes women who vote Republican.  Ahead of the U S mid-term elections, left-wing sexism has reached fever pitch.  While claiming to support women’s right to vote, the left has subjected women who vote right to dehumanisation, public shaming and misogyny.  White women are bearing the brunt of the Left’s hate speech as desperate Democrats try to coerce conformity among female freethinkers….The PC sisterhood is raising feminist consciousness by stamping a jackboot on the face of dissent.

The Australian, 5 November, 2018.

Dear, dear, dear, dear.  Those who thought that the old Left/Right divide is now meaningless may be wrong.  People who support Donald Trump are merely ‘freethinkers’ publicly shamed by coercion and hate speech on the Left.  Well, we suspected that this kind of hysteria was not read after publication; it now looks likely that it is not read before publication either.