Author: Geoffrey Gibson

MY TOP SHELF – Chapter 28

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[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.]

28

THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

T B Macaulay (1980)

Folio Society, 1980; edited by Peter Rowland; introduction by J P Kenyon; red cloth embossed in gold; with stone slip case.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind, if anything which gives so much pleasure  ought to be called unsoundness … Truth indeed is essential to poetry; but it is the truth of madness.  The reasonings are just but the premises are false.

This is how an English gentleman, and man of letters, a member of parliament, described the founding of his national church:

A King, whose character may be best described by saying that he was despotism itself personified, unprincipled ministers, a rapacious aristocracy, a servile Parliament, such were the instruments by which England was delivered from the yoke of Rome.  The work that had been begun by Henry, the murderer of his wives, was continued by Somerset, the murderer of his brother, and was completed by Elizabeth, the murderer of her guest.  Sprung from brutal passion, nurtured by selfish policy, the Reformation in England displayed little of what had, in other countries, distinguished it, unflinching and unsparing devotion, boldness of speech, and singleness of eye.

Here is an assessment of the key players.

We do not mean to represent Cranmer as a monster of wickedness.  He was not unwantonly cruel or treacherous.  He was merely a supple, timid, interested courtier, in times of frequent and violent change.  Henry, Cranmer, Somerset and Elizabeth were the great authors of the English Reformation.  Three of them had a direct interest in the extension of the royal prerogative.  The fourth was the ready tool of any who could frighten him.

But Macaulay likes the result obtained in the English church.

From this compromise, the Church of England sprang.  In many respects indeed, it has been well for her that, in an age of exuberant zeal, her principal founders were mere politicians.  To this circumstance, she owes her moderate articles, her decent ceremonies, her noble and pathetic liturgy.  Her worship is not disfigured by mummery.  Yet she has preserved, in a far greater degree than any of her Protestant sisters, that art of striking the senses and filling the imagination in which the Catholic Church so eminently excels. 

This book is a collection of essays as is a similar book published by Folio on England in the Eighteenth century.  You can therefore have Macaulay on the whole history of England, as his masterpiece, The History of England from the Accession of James II, starts at the beginning.  Thucydides, Gibbon, Carlyle and Namier were conscious stylists.  Maitland was not.  Macaulay certainly was.  ‘There will however be some passages which will not require constant references to authorities; and such passages I may be able to compose and polish in my chaise or at an inn.’

The principal work is a celebration of the Glorious Revolution, and is seen as the Bible of the Whig view of history.  Since the word ‘Whig’ had a different meaning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and has none now, that term is at best slippery.  But it would be churlish to write off the truth that underlies the triumphalism.

The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the revolution of 1688 is this, that it was our last revolution … And if it be asked what has made us to differ from others, the answer is that we never lost what others are wildly and blindly seeking to regain.  It is because we had a preserving revolution in the seventeenth century that we have not had a destroying revolution in the nineteenth. 

That is dead right, and was shown in 1789, 1848 and 1917, and will be shown in every nation in the Middle East and North Africa.

Macaulay of course had his dislikes.  Here he is on Strafford.

He was the first of the Rats, the first of those statesmen whose patriotism has been only the coquetry of political prostitution, and whose profligacy has taught Governments to adopt the old maxim of the slave-market, that it is cheaper to buy than to breed, to import defenders from an Opposition than to rear them in a ministry.  He was the first Englishman to whom a peerage was a sacrament of infamy, a baptism into the union of corruption.  As he was the earliest of the hateful list, so was he also by far the greatest; eloquent, sagacious, adventurous, intrepid, ready of invention, immutable of purpose, in every talent which exalts or destroys pre‑eminent, the lost Archangel, the Satan of the apostasy.

You might think that is over the top, but I have heard similar passion, if not venom, displayed about the apostasy of Paul Johnson by a descendant of a people of haters, and those views would have been widely shared by English people when they determined that Strafford was ‘so dangerous as to require the last and surest custody, that of the grave.’  The means used were, both Macaulay and Churchill had to concede, revolutionary.  ‘Stone-dead hath no fellow.’

Penn was traduced but the Establishment was not immune.  Churchill’s ancestor regularly got a backhander.  ‘Churchill, in a letter written with a certain elevation of language, which was the sure mark that he was going to commit a baseness ..’; ‘…endowed with a certain cool intrepidity which never failed him in either fighting or lying …’; ‘Churchill … made his appearance with that bland serenity which neither peril nor infamy could disturb’; ‘it was written with that decorum which he never failed to preserve in the midst of guilt and dishonour.’

This is England at the height of its imperial power with its first empire.

The situation which Pitt occupied at the close of the reign of George III was the most enviable ever occupied by any public man in English history.  He had conciliated the King; he domineered over the House of Commons; he was adored by the people; he was admired by all Europe.  He was the first Englishman of his time; and he made England the first country in the world.  The Great Commoner, the name by which he was often designated, might look down with scorn on coronets and garters.  The nation was drunk with joy and pride.  The Parliament was as quiet as it had been under Pelham.  The old party distinctions were almost effaced; nor was their place yet supplied by distinctions of a still more important kind.

Then they lost America.  How?

We are inclined to think, on the whole, that the worst administration which has governed England since the Revolution was that of George Grenville.  His public acts may be classed under two heads outrages on the liberty of the people, and outrages on the dignity of the Crown.  As he wished to see the Parliament despotic over the nation, so he wished also to see it despotic over the Court.  In his view, the Prime Minister, possessed of the confidence of the House of Commons, ought to be Mayor of the Palace.  The King was a mere Childeric or Chiperic, who might well think himself lucky in being permitted to enjoy such luxurious apartments as St James’s, and so fine a park at Windsor……The Stamp Act was indefensible, not because it was beyond the constitutional competence of Parliament, but because it was unjust and impolitic, sterile of revenue and fertile of discontents.

Macaulay will be read while the English language lasts.  His description of England in 1685, the last minute conversion of Charles II, the depredations of Jeffreys, and the trial of the seven bishops are integral to the English story.  His account of the massacre at Glencoe is high theatre, a kind of genocide that the Scots inflicted on themselves.  ‘The extirpation planned by the Master of Stair was of a different kind.  His design was to butcher the whole race of thieves, the whole damnable race.’  He began by referring to ‘the Glen of Weeping….the most dreary and melancholy of all the Scottish passes, the very valley of the Shadow of Death’.  This was said to be typically over the top.  I have been to Glencoe three times and you need no sense of history to feel that this stark outcrop is pregnant with doom.  And his explanation of the awfulness of it all is just right.  The passage ends with his saying that we could not imagine that ‘Robespierre would have murdered for hire one of the thousands whom he murdered from philanthropy’.  The following should be printed and shown in every house of government:

We daily see men do for their party, for their sect, for their country, for their favourite schemes of political and social reform, what they would not do to enrich or avenge themselves….virtue itself may contribute to the fall of him who imagines that it is within his power, by violating some general rule of morality, to confer an important benefit on a church, on a commonwealth, on mankind.

Passing Bull 203 – The strange and quick collapse of conservatives

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The conservative parties in the U S and the U K – Republicans and Tories – have collapsed, morally and intellectually, in about three years – since the U K voted to leave Europe and the U S elected Donald Trump.  The U K is about to consummate its collapse by appointing – that is the word – Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.

The Spectator is a venerable weekly paper that has been solidly conservative and represented the Tory line.  It is now in sharp descent and on its way down to the level of its Australian version, which is as inane as it is vulgar.  The Weekend Australian printed an opinion piece from The Spectator that included the following.

For those capable of looking beyond Brexit, the potential of a Trump-Boris alliance is arguably Britain’s biggest hope.

Boris isn’t by nature a pushover, which is one of the reasons he and Trump will get along.  And he seems to understand the President’s mentality: play nice, and Donald returns the favour.

The two men have a chemistry that goes beyond their unusual hairstyles.  Both grasp that a profound shift is taking place in politics, one that has propelled people like them to power.

They also sense, in the way that macho beasts often do, a certain destiny in each other.  Trump is possibly the last great Anglophile president; recall his delight as he visited Buckingham Palace last month.  Trump likes Britain, Brexit and Boris; it’s that simple.

Boris, for his part, was born in New York and gave up his American passport only for tax reasons – something Trump can understand.  He’s a Churchill enthusiast, therefore an Atlanticist in outlook.  He’s always preferred America’s stress on national unity to the fragmented federalism of the EU.

Trump and Boris will see each other being attacked by the same kinds of people for the same reasons: offending political correctness, not paying attention to detail, lacking the gravitas high office demands.  Yet both men draw crowds and inspire loyalty.  Trump and Boris are seen by their supporters as leaders who can shake up a failed system.

Apart from the reference to the ‘profound shift’ in politics, it is very hard to detect one proposition that is not just pure moonshine, but nauseating moonshine.  But even if you agreed with everything said, it is impossible to dream of any meaning of the word ‘conservative’ that is consistent with it.  Trump and Johnson don’t want to conserve the status quo – they want to wreck it.  It is sufficient to mention three things.  First, The Spectator urges appeasement (‘play nice’) of this ‘macho beast’ – ask Mrs May about that policy (yes, the ‘foolish’ Mrs May).  Secondly, The Spectator sees an English reliance on Europe being replaced by a reliance on the U S; people of this ilk like the word ‘vassal’; being in service to Donald Trump is not a pretty or safe sight.  Thirdly, The Spectator says both men ‘draw crowds and inspire loyalty.’  Has anyone offered a better description of a ‘populist’, the exact reverse of a ‘conservative’?

To whom can rational conservatives turn?  Or has the word now lost all meaning?

Bloopers

Instead of changing the channel or reading a different newspaper, Richard Di Natale was caught during the last election saying that he wanted sections of Sky and News Corp shut down…..The sacking of Israel Folau is bigger than a legal biff about a contract and a code of conduct.  Folau was sacked for sinning against the new moral code.  It is a totemic clash of religions, between old ones such as Christianity (but it could be Islam next) and the new religion promulgated by a new secular class that wants to stop a man from posting different moral judgments drawn from a centuries-old code of conduct called the Bible.

Janet Albrechtsen, The Weekend Australian, 13-14 July, 2019

Well now, where to start?  A politician was ‘caught’ saying he wanted parts of the press shut down.  Goodness, gracious, me!  People who work for Mr Murdoch want the ABC shut down and they regularly attack it.  And with this government, they are having success.  The government is strangling the ABC.

As part of the Murdoch campaign, Albrechtsen attacks the ABC in the same piece.  ‘If the ABC is the media arm that spreads the new religion, Rugby Australia’s Raelene Castle has become its self-appointed priestess.’  This is prize-winning bullshit.  As these journalists do, she says the ABC is tax-payer funded.  News Corp is also funded by public money.  The ABC does not I think trade – in the legal sense – but the two corporations have something in common.  They have stakeholders and if they set out to annoy or offend those stakeholders, there will be consequences.  How would the Murdoch press react if the ABC refused to sack an announcer (or if News Corp refused to sack a journalist) for saying that because of their faith they believe that: Sharia law should be adopted throughout Australia; Burmese Buddhists should hound Muslims out of the country; or Australians should be encouraged to make deductible donations to the Church of Scientology – so that it too could become taxpayer-funded?  And what if the employer said it was powerless to act because the offender was merely exercising their freedom of religion?

And why not just change the channel – or read a different newspaper? Just think of the load that would take off the shoulders of Mr Henderson if he was not doomed to maintain his watch on the Antichrist.

Then there is Mr Folau again.  May I say that when I ran a statutory tribunal, we decided cases within six weeks of the reference and usually after a hearing concluded in one morning?  I see no reason why the Folau case could not be disposed of in that time and at a cost of less than $2OK.  Only God knows where the $3M figure comes from.

But we are told that’s not what this case is about.  The writer rewrites history in a fact free zone.  This, we are told, is ‘a totemic clash of religions’.  To get there, she makes one religion up.  This is astounding bullshit.  Fortunately, and the paper should be congratulated, two other pieces, this time on the Op Ed page, makes plain at least some of the bullshit.

Peter Van Onselen says:

It’s the once all-powerful religious types claiming victimhood against one of the groupings in society they long victimised, the gay and lesbian community….Poor Israel Folau had his freedom of religion curtailed apparently because his employer has an expectation that its employees adhere to a code of conduct.  The extent to which he isn’t oppressed could hardly have been better demonstrated than via the fast and lucrative flow of donations that came his way when the Australian Christian Lobby decided to get involved.

The intervention of the ACL will do as much for religion in this country as the sight of its Prime Minister offering government comfort to 20,000 cheering Hillsong members at a floodlit night-time parade.  The ACL is apparently against a charter human rights.  I don’t know if freedom of religion is a human right or a divine right.  The Folau campaign is publicly funded, but are donations to it tax deductible?

Katrina Grace Kelly (quel nom!) says:

Ironically, and just as an aside, it has been terrifically amusing of late to observe those usually demanding legal change to make it easier to dismiss workers vociferously demanding legal change that will make it harder to dismiss workers – by virtue of their support for a high-profile footballer, recently sacked.  (Emphasis added.)

It does rather look like people are invoking freedom of religion to destroy freedom of contract.  Put differently, it is novel that people claiming to be ‘conservatives’ – that word again – want a statutory tribunal to be able to relieve a person of the burden of a contact from which he has derived great profit but which he now finds in part unsuited to his needs.  Roscoe Pound is good on this.

Equity in America shows the same influence [protecting private rights].  The Puritan has always been a consistent and thorough-going opponent of equity.  It runs counter to all his ideas. For one thing, it helps fools who have made bad bargains, whereas he believes that fools should be allowed and required to act freely and then be held for the consequences of their folly.  For another thing, it acts directly upon the person.  It coerces the individual free will.

That is very Boston – and very IPA.  We can imagine a statutory intervention into freedom of contract attracting all kinds of epithets – including the dreaded ‘S’ word.

And it is a little hard to take seriously a claim of victimhood by a church in a nation whose head of state must be a communicant member of that church.

But why let mere facts stop a good dream?  It’s that simple.

Here and there – Disraeli – Portrait of a Conservative

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On 26 February 1868, the leader of the Tories in the House of Commons called on Her Majesty Queen Victoria at Osborne on the Isle of Wight.  The queen ‘came into her closet with a very radiant face and saying ‘You must kiss hands.’’  This her caller did, heartily, falling on one knee.  Well, that was and is the traditional way in which the English sovereign acknowledges the choice of her parliament for the office of Prime Minister.  In a letter preceding the kissing of hands, the queen had said in that third person mode: ‘It must be a proud moment for him to feel that his own talent and successful labours in the service of his country have earned him the high and influential position on which he is now placed.’  It certainly was a proud moment.

The grandfather of this PM had migrated to England sixty years before he was born.  Benjamin Disraeli, the grandson of an Italian Jew, was the leader of the Tory Party, the Prime Minister of England, and he would become the closest confidant and adviser to the most powerful monarch in the entire world, and whom he, Disraeli, would anoint as the Empress of India.  It is a truly remarkable story.

It had not always been so smooth.  Disraeli had been a frightful dandy, and he had an acid tongue.  The queen had called him ‘detestable, unprincipled, reckless & not respectable.’  Her husband had dismissed him as ‘having not one single element of the gentleman in his composition.’  Well, Her Majesty and His Royal Highness may have had held strong views, but they were free to change their mind.  And Disraeli could ‘work’ the queen.  He said that with her, you had to ‘lay it on with a trowel’ – and he did so, ever so shamelessly; and he was always careful to heap honour and praise on the late Prince.  Her Majesty loved it, and she loathed poor Mr Gladstone.  She felt like he addressed her like he was addressing a public meeting.

And besides, having a PM with a background in finance might be useful.  In 1875, the bankruptcy of the Sultan of Turkey left the Khedive of Egypt wanting to sell his shares in the Suez Canal.  The French were in the market.  Disraeli was determined to get this stake in the Canal.  He could not get the money from Parliament as it was in recess.  He sent his private secretary to ask Baron Rothschild for a loan of 4,000,000 pounds.  Baron Rothschild asked two questions:  ‘When?’, and after eating a grape and spitting out a grape skin, ‘What is your security?’  (The crown jewels?)  The money was available next day to the British government at 2 ½ %, and a one-off fee of 100,000 pounds.  Disraeli wrote: ‘It is just settled: you have it Madam.’  The Queen was ‘in ecstasies’ but was keen to hear how her Prime Minister had got the ‘great sum.’  ‘What particularly delighted the Faery was the thought of Bismarck’s fury, for only shortly before, he had insolently declared that England had ceased to be a political force.’

Not long after this, the French nation would be convulsed by controversy over the fate of a Jewish officer named Dreyfus, and it is more than a little difficult to imagine the third generation of a migrant Jewish family becoming Prime Minister of any country in Europe at that time.

What I have said so far about Disraeli comes from something I wrote years ago. Since that was supposed to be a constitutional history of England, you can guess how keen I was to get those anecdotes out there.  That is the kind of stuff I live for.

One leading  biography was written by André Maurois. That name can evoke the same kind of snobbery that the name Puccini does.  Maurois was a writer rather than a historian.  And he excelled in biography.  He followed in the steps of Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (which is looked at here) – although he did say that Strachey was ‘a shade nastier than is really fair’: which sounds like a very English thing to say.  Maurois said:

The search for historical truth is the work of a scholar; the search for the expression of a personality is rather the work of the artist; can the two things be done together?

Putting the question that way focuses on the writer.  What about us – the readers?  We know what we want.  For someone like Pitt the Younger or perhaps Gladstone, we might stick with the prosaic.  But for titans like Disraeli, Lloyd George or Churchill, we want Romance – with the Full Monty.  And Maurois delivers in his inimitable style.  The word ‘readable’ could have been invented for him – even when read in translation.

What was the dandy like?  ‘A coat of black velvet, poppy-coloured trousers broidered with gold, a scarlet waistcoat, sparkling rings worn on top of white kid gloves.’  What drove Disraeli in the Commons?  Perhaps it was the standing, cheering ovations, or the opportunity to say: ‘I am not one who will be insulted, even by a Yahoo.’  Why did he marry Mary Anne?  For money – and it may have been the most loving marriage ever felt.  How did he feel on becoming PM?

The adventurer, his genius tolerated by some, his authority contested by others, referred to as ‘Dizzy’ with a familiarity sometimes affectionate, sometimes scornful, had now become an object of respect….No people are more sensitive than the English to the beauty wherewith time can adorn an object; they love old statesmen, worn and polished in the struggle, as they love old leather and old wood.

You can see that there is great merit in reading an urbane Frenchman portray an English comet – a man described by Lord Sumption in the Reith Lectures as possibly the only authentic genius to reach the top in English politics.  (And there was merit in having a Scot, Thomas Carlyle, write a long tone poem about the French Revolution.)  Disraeli was a titan who walked among giants.  Now we get pygmies following charlatans.  The agony of our fall is made explicit by this gorgeous book.

Passing Bull 202 – Bull on recognition

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Stand by for an outpouring of bullshit about recognition of the First Nations.  It will come from people like Andrew Bolt and Craig Laundy.  These people, who falsely claim to be Conservatives, thrive on division.  Bolt makes a handsome living from it.  On what basis will Mr Laundy oppose any constitutional change?  ‘I think that idea is divisive.’  It is a fair bet that the opposition will come from those who said, and possibly believed, that the vilification of Adam Goodes had nothing to do with the fact that he is an Aboriginal.

Bloopers

And they all live in Byron Bay? Yes. According to a Vanity Fair article, they are ‘a cross-tagging, cross-promoting, mutually amplifying, audience-sharing group of friends living, loving, working and posting aspirational lifestyle content in a highly Instagrammable paradise’.

I hate them. You are not alone, but it is working for them. The Instagram mums of Byron are brands, exploiting themselves and their families to push either their own products or those of select sponsors.

The Guardian, 5 July, 2019.

I don’t believe in an afterlife – like Einstein, I think once is enough – but if there is, I pray that there are no mobile phones.

**

There is a misdiagnosis that credibility for a voice comes from a constitutional anchor, when its credibility would come from connection to community and country.

Tim Wilson, MP, in The Age, 11 July 2019.

Brother Tim is a talking head and the undisputed King of Bullshit in this country, but you can expect an avalanche of bullshit on this subject.

 

Passing Bull 201 – Bull about activists

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‘Activist’ is a term of abuse for some.  I am not sure why.  If an activist is someone who actively seeks to change public attitudes, is there anything necessarily wrong with that?  Prime candidates would be Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King.  And, for that matter, Martin Luther and that son of a Jewish carpenter who started it all.

Are we wrong to look up to these people?  What makes them heroic but makes other activists nasty?  The answer is I think that you accuse someone of being an ‘activist’ when you don’t want the change in public attitudes that they wish to bring about.  Like a reduced reliance on coal.

This intellectual lesion – for that is what it is – is linked to another.  Some people say – and for the most part they keep a straight face – that corporates or business people generally should not engage in public debate about political, social or moral attitudes.  Again, I am not sure why.

This response is odd for two reasons.  First it mainly comes from people who sprout about freedom of speech at the drop of a hat – but here they want to restrict that freedom in others.

The second reason that this response is odd is that it is bullshit. Business is conducted in a community and if the business people get offside with their community, that may well be bad for business.  That is why a body in the entertainment industry like the AFL has to take and be seen to take an active interest in diversity issues like gay rights, aboriginal recognition, and equal pay for women.

That is why Rugby Australia had to adopt the position it did with Folau.  If people in that kind of business are seen to act against gays or indigenous people or women, the commercial consequences could be dire.

The same goes for BHP and aborigines.  Mining companies have to work with aborigines and be seen to maintain a good relationship with them.  Alcoa said as much in a successful libel action against the ABC for saying they did not care about aborigines.

None of that is hard to understand.  The Financial Times today had an interview with the house counsel of BHP.

BHP was among the companies named in an investigation begun by the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines in 2015, into whether fossil fuel groups have violated human rights by causing climate change. The company formally severed ties with the World Coal Association last year, after Australian green groups urged it to quit industry lobby groups whose policies did not match the miner’s support for the Paris climate agreement. Ms Cox says climate change is high on her team’s agenda because the company knows its long-term sustainability depends on support from investors, regulators and the broader society. ‘We need the support of our communities in order to be successful’, she says.

That is basic business common sense.  It is why Woolworths are getting out of gaming and why the AFL is advised to do the same.

Why, then, the criticism?  The answer is the same.  The critics reject the message.  An ‘activist’ is likely to be a ‘progressive’.  It worries these people not a bit that one term is as senseless as the other.  And the irony is that this activism is a response to a gross failure of leadership by governments of the kind the critics machinate for.

Still we are living at a time when people are giving millions to a millionaire who is suing for more millions a body he pledged his loyalty to and then ratted on – and they claim to be doing so in God’s name for a man content to damn one in every ten people on earth to be blasted in fire for eternity because they are different to him.

There is one born every minute.

But if, which I doubt, there is a God, there is every chance that He is very down and dirty on these galahs because they are trashing His product here on Earth.

Passing Bull 200 –Bloopers

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

For number 200, may I celebrate with three Bloopers?  They are all crackers, but the third is already a short-priced favourite for Blooper of the year.  It is spell-binding.

But Johnson’s camp was adamant the row was nothing more than a typical contretemps.

‘The couple intend to live together in No. 10 if he is elected Tory leader and to marry after his divorce is finalised’, a source said.

The Age, 25 June 2015.

Well, at least the police will not have so far to go for the next typical contretemps.

**

We are embarking on something new in the country, which is not new outside of the country, which is utilising all of this practice, utilising these examples, utilising this expertise as one of many inputs to better inform us so we can then write reports and provide the feedback.

James Shipton of ASIC in AFR, 29-30 June 2019.

It is little wonder that the same article reported someone as saying ‘The problem is we have a regulator that is deeply steeped in timidity’.  That problem is not reduced by having hirsute he-men chasing the press and huffing and puffing and threatening to blow down whole houses.  As for the English language, this looks like an attempt at assassination.

**

Almost all Christians believe in the reality of judgment and hell, as well as forgiveness, redemption and heaven.  But even though I think Folau made a couple of mistakes, he is manifestly a good person.  He was trying to help people not hurt them.  And the disproportion of his punishment to his offence is absolutely insane.  The idea that he should lose his ability to earn a living for the rest of his life for expressing his beliefs is truly shocking.

Greg Sheridan, The Weekend Australian, 29-30 June, 2019.

Of all the bullshit about Folau, this wins the prize.  There are nearly as many errors as words.  If you believe that Izzie was not trying to hurt people but to help them, you should seek urgent medical advice.  Did Hitler try that line on with Mein Kampf?  Did he say that he was trying to help the Jews by giving them a fair warning?

And where does a journalist get the right to pronounce on the ‘goodness’ of anyone?  I would not allow Izzie into my house – not because I think that he is a dangerous religious fanatic with no moral judgment, and I do think that, but because I think that he has let down his team-mates and his country for reasons that can only be described as selfish.  He put himself above his team, and no decent team would want to have anything to do with him.

Just two more things.  Every time someone who professes that faith parrots stuff like this, you will be able to count the empty pews in church next Sunday.

And the editorial in the AFR was nearly as bad.

God help us all.

Passing Bull 199 –Hypocrisy on high

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I congratulate the Hawthorn players on their decision to honour Goodes.

I am revolted but not surprised that most social media response has been ‘negative’.  We have a real problem about this in this country.  And what kind of ‘supporter’ refuses to back their players on some political ground – not least a ground espoused by Andrew Bolt?

It is clear that the AFL and its clubs must sever all ties with anyone connected with gaming.  The time has I think  now passed when trading corporations can seek to be morally neutral.  It is hard for the AFL to lecture people about gambling when it is, slut-like, living off the earnings of gambling.

I think Footscray and Collingwood are taking real action on gaming – if so, I congratulate them, too.

I gather that the Goodes film is wrenching.  Certainly, the reactions of some people who think that they are intelligent was appalling at the time – and it shows just how deep this problem runs in this country.  It is just what people like Bolt and Hanson (and Trump) run on.

And in case you missed it, Sam Kerr is getting a different kind of abuse from people similarly embittered.

Bloopers

Peter Dutton claims asylum seekers and refugees on Manus Island and Nauru are refusing resettlement offers in the United States because of the medevac legislation claiming 250 applications for medical transfer were currently being reviewed by ‘activist’ doctors.

The Guardian, 24 June, 2019

An ‘activist’ is presumably someone actively seeking a result.  Not many of those in parliament.

 

 

Passing Bull 198 – Following the leader

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

 

The herd instinct is on full display in the letters of today’s Weekend Australian.  There are nine letters about John Setka.  All appear to be sympathetic.  I doubt whether many readers of that paper have met a worker, much less a union official, much less a warrior with the heft of Setka.  No one mentioned that Setka has said that he will plead guilty to a criminal offence.  We get the usual stuff about ‘political correctness’ and ‘virtue signalling.’  Setka says he was elected my members.  I can’t recall hearing a bank director on the way out saying he had been elected by shareholders.

This sensitivity about our being free to speak our minds takes a bit of hit on the front sports page.  The headline is ‘Bitter’ retort sours Matildas win.’  Their captain, after a gutsy win, said of their critics ‘Suck on that one.’  Good on her.  But the Oz finds two past Matildas to criticise her.  It is one thing to form an adverse view (although it is beyond me how a Matilda expects our captain to be ‘humble’).  It is another thing to go public and fuel controversy when those representing us are trying to make a comeback in a foreign country.  If that is their notion of loyalty, it is little wonder the Matildas have issues.

But is not the point more simple?  We have better things to talk about.

Bloopers

No one wants to be lectured on humanity by politicians, let alone backers of porous borders whose compassion resulted in more than 1000 deaths at sea.

The Australian, 10 June, 2019.  Jennifer Oriel.

As ever, there is the horrifying thought that she might believe it.

Here and there – Shakespeare on Chivalry

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

 

The Iliad of Homer ends: ‘So the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses.’  The death of Hector marks the end of the play Troilus and Cressida of Shakespeare written more than 2000 years after the Iliad.  This, then, is an enduring myth.  Horses hardly figure in the Iliad, but later they became decisive in war.  The medieval knight on a horse (cheval) was their Panzer tank.  Tales were told about the deeds of knights (chevaliers).  They had their own code – chivalry – and it in turn was a fertile source of myth.

What does the word ‘chivalry’ denote?  ‘The character of the ideal knight, disinterested bravery, honour and courtesy’ (OED).  The word ‘ideal’ suggests that we may be near romance.  There is much romance in the epic tales of chivalry – like those of Arthur and Roland.  They speak of knightly love, and they end in tragedy.  They are also full of blood and guts, but Kenneth Clark in Civilisation got lyrical about it all.  He thought that the age of chivalry now looks ‘infinitely strange and remote’.

It is as enchanting, as luminous, as transcendental as the stained glass that is its glory – and, in the ordinary meaning of the word, as unreal.

That unreality had been revealed by two of the great characters of Western letters.  Don Quixote and Falstaff came to us at about the same time.  Each was a torpedo under the ark of chivalry and knightly love.  Falstaff was a dangerous ratbag, but we have too much of that in each of us to let that put us off a man who makes us laugh so much at our betters – and ourselves.  Don Quixote was dead-set mad, but we have the insight that we all tip-toe around that particular volcano, and the Don comes down to us as kind of off-centre Christ.  These are two of our most loved characters.  You would have to have to be really mad to describe either as ‘disinterested.’

By contrast, Troilus and Cressida is a far more brutal demolition job on chivalry and knightly love, and there is hardly a decent person in it.

So, how does Troilus start?  In the second line we get one of those nuggets that this author puts in our path.  The Greek princes sailed for Troy, we are told, ‘their high blood chafed.’  Those four words tell us the story of this pointless war.  What were they chafed about?  A wife of one of their princes has shot through – with a bloody Asian!  Well, at least that romance was consensual.  When the Greeks get to Troy, Achilles is sulking because his king has pinched his Trojan trophy, a woman that Achilles has taken a shine to – notwithstanding his love for Patroclus (who is here described as a ‘male whore’).  Then our two lovers no sooner get into bed than Cressida is traded for a Trojan prisoner.  And when she gets traded, she starts to enjoy herself sexually far too quickly.  Her uncle, Pandarus, is a pimp who has set up the consummation.  Her father, who is a priest and a traitor, sets up the trade.  Women are just tradeable commodities, handy in bed if your taste goes that way, but otherwise useless.  So much for courtly love.

When Don Quixote could not think of a better way to start a fight, he would demand that his protagonist acknowledge the supreme beauty of Dulcinea (who did not exist).  That is how single combat is set up in this play.  The protagonists go to defend the honour of their ladies  Aeneas, a very unpleasant puppet-master, taunts the Greeks in his challenge saying that unless they accept the challenge, the Trojans will say that ‘Grecian dames are sunburnt and not worth the splinter of a lance.’  The slippery Ulysses pulls the levers so that the mad Ajax goes to fight Hector.  But by this time, Achilles, who is not too bright, realises that his ‘reputation is at stake’ and that his fame is ‘shrewdly gored.’  When he runs into Hector, the two confront each other like ruckmen before the bounce in a grand final.  And when he comes across Hector unarmed, he instructs his version of the Waffen SS to murder Hector in cold blood.  So much for chivalry.

The repudiation of chivalry is express.  Troilus taxes Hector for sparing the lives of vanquished Greeks.  Hector actually uses the term ‘fair play.’  Troilus responds with ‘fool’s play’.  Troilus was dead right.  The unarmed Hector asks Achilles to ‘forgo this vantage’ in vain.  In this play, the ball-tamperers win.  Those who don’t cheat are losers and bloody idiots – and this play has lots of references to fools and idiots.

At the start, we are told that ‘expectation, tickling skittish spirits…sets all on hazard.’  But young Troilus experiences the kind of emptiness felt by young Prince Hal.  He thinks there are fools on both sides.  ‘I cannot fight upon this argument….It is too starved a subject for my sword.’  But when the Greeks offer to call it off if they get Helen back – she presumably not being consulted – Paris and Troilus fall out with their brother Hector.  Hector says Helen is not worth the cost of her keeping.  Troilus refers to that weasel word ‘manhood’ and the most lethal word in the language – ‘honor’.  He then equates worth, or dignity, with value.  Hector asks the kind of question that some of us might ask about our role in Iraq and Afghanistan.

…..Or is your blood

So madly hot that no discourse of reason,

Nor fear of bad success in a bad cause,

Can qualify the same?  (2.2. 115 – 118)

Troilus is a shallow sulk.  He tamely lets Cressida go.  His first concern is that Aeneas does not reveal that he found Troilus in the same house as Cressida so early in the morning.

But Cressida gets what might be called the full Anita Hill treatment.  That unfortunate woman was branded ‘a little bit sluttish’.  When Cressida gets handed over to the Greeks, the big hitters take it in turns to kiss her.  ‘Lewd’ is the word.  Ulysses says:

…..Her wanton spirits look out

At every joint and motive of her body…

……Set them down

For sluttish spoils of opportunity

And daughters of the game.  (4.5.56 – 63)

The last line is scarily modern.  And revolting.  The appalling behaviour of these ageing white males may in part be behind the insight offered to us by Tony Tanner that there ‘is a kind of hapless honesty about Cressida.’  Beside her male elders, including her own family, she comes across like a saint.

This play may be the most brutal repudiation of war outside of Goya.  As you would expect of a classic, it still speaks to us now.

Ulysses and Aeneas are political operatives – manipulators.  Like our shock jocks now, they embody what a wise man called power without responsibility, the ‘prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’.  They think that they can manipulate the politicians – by, for example, playing on the hideous vanity of Achilles – and then get the mob to take the bait because they are mostly fools or idiots.

They do all this in a world that has no moral base.  We saw that Troilus equated dignity with value.  Ulysses says that ‘no man is the lord of anything’ until he communicates to others and that he will not know himself until he sees himself realised in the applause of others.  (Just ask yourself if any of this catalogue does not apply word for word to Donald Trump.)

How some men creep in skittish Fortune’s hall,

While others play the idiots in her eyes!

How one man eats into another’s pride,

While pride is fasting in his wantonness.  (3.3. 134 – 137)

In this moral desert – ‘war and lechery confound all’ – the political leaders treat the people with contempt.  It is a measure of the empty vanity of Achilles that he tolerates Thersites, the most crude cynic of our stage, but this nasty clown sums up the play when he says that Achilles is the ‘idol of idiot-worshipers.’

They are of course heavily into spin and fake news.  No sooner is Hector murdered, than Achilles is telling his bodyguard to broadcast that ‘Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain.’  They even have alternative facts.  When Pandarus and Cressida discuss the complexion of Troilus, Pandarus says ‘to say truth, brown and not brown’ and Cressida says ‘To say the truth, true and not true.’  When Troilus sees Cressida being too fresh too fast with the Greeks, he says that it is not Cressida – at least not his Cressida.  Or as the President of the United States says ‘There is no proof of anything.’  Reality has just gone.

So, this play was written by someone who could have seen at firsthand the heartless inanity of a Trump rally, or the workings in the inner sanctum of an Australian political party.  The play still, therefore, has a lot to say to us.

But it is painfully long.  Cassandra, Pandarus and Thersites are all ghastly to listen to.  For our taste, there is too much word-play of the type that students of rhetoric enjoyed in the early comedies.  And if Qantas plonked Ulysses beside you on a flight to New York, you would want to sue the airline.  The full version of the play is painful in the Wagnerian sense.  The BBC version is repulsive.  This play really is a problem play in production – as difficult for me as Cymbeline.

At the risk of upsetting some, I would suggest that we would enjoy the play a lot more, and take more home from it, if it was cut – say, in half.  For our taste, the play as written breaches the first rule of advocacy – if you have a good point, make it, and don’t bugger it up by banging on.

Since starting this note, I see that I have referred before to the bad press on chivalry in a book about the middle ages.

But the prize for the most appalling hypocrisy must go to the members of the ruling class called knights.  They invented this wonderful code of chivalry about defending the helpless and maintaining the right.  It was almost entirely pure bullshit.  They became mercenaries for hire – the Knight of Canterbury Tales might be a paradigm.  They depended on and lived by violence.  If the Crusades had not been ordained by God, chivalry would have had to invent it to satisfy their lust for blood and booty.  Their crimes against innocent Jews and Muslims are a perpetual stain not just on Christianity, but on humanity at large.  Dante put Saladin in a pleasing part of hell for answering back so handsomely.

Then, after they got home, and whipped their serfs into line, the knights would drift into some dreamy, droopy adolescent puppy love – for another man’s wife, a mother substitute.  If they succeeded in consummating their affair, which we may suspect was almost never, and they got caught, the same code of chivalry would have required them to fight to the death on a point of honour; and, depending on the jurisdiction, and the ripeness of the detection, the guilty wife might have been run through on the spot.

And enfin, do you know what really gets on our wicks about these knights?  Their high blood chafes far too easily.  They had too many tickets on themselves.  That’s why Cervantes and Shakespeare took them down.

MY TOP SHELF – 26

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

MY TOP SHELF

[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.]

26

 

TRACTATUS THEOLOGICO-POLITICUS

Benedict de Spinoza (1670)

Translated R H M Elwes Second Edition, Revised; George Bell and Sons, Covent Garden, 1889; republished in facsimile by Kessenger Publishing, U S; rebound in half yellow leather and yellow cloth with black label embossed in gold.

Superstition then is engendered, preserved and fostered by fear.

The main text that the Inquisition invoked against Galileo was the miracle of the sun standing still for a day to enable Joshua and the Israelites to kill a lot more of the indigenous people whose land God had promised to his chosen people.  This is one of those parts of Scripture that makes a lot of people very nervous about miracles and an all too human God – nor did it do much for Galileo.  Do we really want a God who intervenes in Middle Eastern wars by suspending his own laws to help one tribe kill more of others because he has chosen them as his favourite?  Do we want a God who is so exclusive and so lethal?  If you do not, you may wish turn to Spinoza and Kant.

For some, the only black mark against Spinoza is that Bertrand Russell said that he was ‘lovable.’  This is what Russell said.  ‘Spinoza (1632-77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers.  Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme.  As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness.  He was born a Jew, but the Jews excommunicated him.  Christians abhorred him equally; although his whole philosophy is dominated by the idea of God, the orthodox accused him of atheism.  Leibniz, who owed much to him, concealed his debt, and carefully abstained from saying a word in his praise; he even went so far as to lie about the extent of his personal acquaintance with the heretic Jew.’  That is a fair summary.  Good people, saintly people, can have that kind of effect on others.

Spinoza’s parents were Portuguese Jews forced to ‘confess’ Christianity by the Inquisition.  They migrated to Amsterdam where Baruch (or Benedict) was born.  He was very bright as a child and so intellectually precocious that his own community eventually excommunicated him.  The terms of the cherem chill the blood.  He was described when young as having a beautiful face with a well formed body and ‘slight long black hair.’  He polished lenses by day and wrote philosophy at night.  He died young of a lung condition that was not helped by his work.

The Tractatus was published anonymously and was immediately condemned on all sides.  His master-work, Ethics, was not published until after his death.  He lived alone, and frugally – although he enjoyed a pipe and a glass of wine, he could go for days on milk soup made with butter and some ale.  There is no evidence that he ever sought to harm another, but plenty to suggest that he died in a state of peace, if not grace.

The Ethics contains his full world-view, made up of geometric propositions.  One is: ‘God is without passions, neither is he affected by any emotion or pleasure or pain.’  That is a large part of the Tractatus.  Spinoza says that his chief aim in the Tractatus is to separate faith from philosophy.  He says that Moses did not seek to convince the Jews by reason, but bound by them a covenant, by oaths, and by conferring benefits.  This was not to teach knowledge, but to inspire obedience.  He then says, ‘Faith consists in a knowledge of God, without which obedience to Him would be impossible, and which the mere fact of obedience to Him implies’.  Spinoza supports this assertion with reference to both Testaments.  He then goes on to say that he has ‘no further fear in enumerating the dogmas of universal faith or the fundamental dogmas of the whole of Scripture.’

As doctrinal dynamite goes, there is enough in his exposition for believers and unbelievers of all kinds to inflict a lot of damage on each other.  And Spinoza gives intellectuals another slap in the face:  ‘The best faith is not necessarily possessed by him who discloses the best reasons, but by him who displays the best fruits of justice and charity’.  You might think that a lot, or even most, believers of good will would go along with that proposition, but Plato and Aristotle would have been very, very unhappy, and deeply shocked.

Spinoza holds that if Moses spoke with God face to face as a man speaks with his friend, Christ communed with God mind to mind.  Elsewhere, he puts it that Christ was not so much a prophet as ‘the mouthpiece’ of God; Christ was sent to teach not only the Jews, but the whole human race.  He condemns those who stick to the letter:  ‘If a man were to read the Scripture narratives believing the whole of them, but were to give no heed to the doctrines they contain, and make no amendment in his life, he might employ himself just as profitably in reading the Koran or the poetic drama.

Reason, Spinoza said, was ‘the true handwriting of God.’  His belief is evidenced by the following extracts from the Tractatus.

I have often wondered that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion … should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.

Piety, great God! and religion are become a tissue of ridiculous mysteries;  men, who flatly despise reason, who reject and turn away from understanding as naturally corrupt … are never tired of professing their wonder at the profound mysteries of Holy Writ; still I cannot discover that they teach anything but speculations of Platonists and Aristotelians, to which (in order to save their credit for Christianity) they have made Holy Writ conform; not content to rave with the Greeks themselves, they want to make the prophets rave also….

The Bible leaves reason absolutely free…it has nothing in common with philosophy; in fact, Revelation and Philosophy stand on totally different footings….I pass on to indicate the false notions, which have arisen from the fact that the multitude – ever prone to superstition, and caring more for the shred of antiquity than for eternal truths – pays homage to the books of the Bible, rather than to the word of God.

Spinoza corresponded widely on a very high plane, but some letters show homely insights from the least sect-bound of men.  Christ gave ‘by his life and death a matchless example of holiness’; if the Turks or other non-Christians ‘worship God by the practice of justice and charity toward their neighbour, I believe that they have the spirit of Christ, and are in a state of salvation’; the ‘authority of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates does not carry much weight with me’; and ‘Scripture should only be expounded through Scripture.’  He also asked question similar to one asked by Darwin: whether ‘we human pygmies possess sufficient knowledge of nature to be able to lay down the limits of its force and power, or to say that a given thing surpasses that power?’

In The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, the late Professor Alan Donaghan contributed a paper called Spinoza’s Theology.  Theology is the study of God.  If Spinoza was studying God, you would think that he believed in God.  Sane people do not devote large portions of their lives to discussing something that they do not believe exists.  Spinoza said that he believed in God.  He was emphatic about it.  When you get to his Ethics, published after his death, God is fundamental to his whole world view – to the whole universe.  Yet the other members of his community expelled him on religious grounds.  They said that he did not believe in God.  They said that Spinoza was an atheist.

In the Ethics, you come across propositions that run slap, bang into the face of the Bible.  We have already seen one proposition denying passion to God.  It is fundamental to Spinoza that he takes humanity out of God and identifies God with Nature.  Then Spinoza incorporates the Sermon on the Mount into his metaphysical edifice.  Part IV, Proposition 45, says:  ‘Hatred can never be good’.  A corollary is that envy, contempt, derision and revenge are bad.  Then you get Proposition 46:  ‘He who lives under the guidance of reason endeavours, as far as possible, to render back love, or kindness, for other man’s hatred, anger, contempt etc, toward him’.  This is the doctrine of turning the other cheek in logically modelled Latin.  And later comes a little gem of humane wisdom in Part 4, Proposition 55:  ‘Extreme pride or dejection indicates extreme ignorance of self’.  It is not at all hard to see why Spinoza appealed to the mind of Einstein.

It is fundamental for some that the existence of God can be and has been demonstrated (proved).  Well, even if you accept that this may be the case, or is the case, that proof must leave open the question of which, if any, model of God that is presently on the market has been proved to exist.  The model put forward by Spinoza was not satisfactory to most Jews or Christians, but it is inherently unlikely that any logical proof of the existence of God could lead necessarily to the proof of a god whose characteristics are defined by revelation and in very human terms.  And do not forget that Spinoza, brought up in the Jewish tradition, was not just a great mind.  He was a first-rate Bible scholar – in both Testaments.

Spinoza holds that the sphere of reason is that of truth and wisdom; the sphere of theology is piety and obedience; ‘I consider the utility and the need for Holy Scripture or Revelation to be very great … the Bible has brought a very great consolation to mankind.  All are able to obey, whereas there are the very few, compared with the aggregate of humanity, who can acquire the habit of virtue under the unaided guidance of reason’.  Reason, as he had said, was ‘the true handwriting of God.’

The little Dutch Jewish outcast also said:

Every man’s true happiness and blessedness consist solely in the enjoyment of what is good, not in the pride that he alone is enjoying it, to the exclusion of others.  He who thinks himself the more blessed because he is enjoying benefits which others are not, or because he is more blessed or more fortunate than his fellows, is ignorant of true happiness and blessedness, and the joy which he feels is either childish, or envious and malicious.

Many of those words will ring true for those who have become estranged from religion, and just as many who are struggling to stay with it.  The last citation alone would justify the whole life and work of this very great and holy man.  That sentiment should be put up in neon lights outside every exclusive institution in the land.

Spinoza was a very holy man who crossed on to the turf of less holy men.  Turf wars are the scourge of religion.  The great gift of Spinoza and Kant to mankind was to stand up and stare down those clever and subtle men – alas, they were all men – who claimed to have exclusive rights to the box of tricks without which the rest of us could not get near God or enjoy the grace of true religion.  They both should be remembered as two of our greatest liberators.  Their legacy is worth so much more than the brackish howls of those bothered God-deniers whose very loudness bespeaks the bankruptcy of philosophy.  Just what does philosophy have to show for itself?  And, just before dawn, did Bertrand Russell see himself as one of those who were intellectually superior to Spinoza?