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Being on the nose – the perils of minority

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Where people within a community behave differently as a group within that community, you can get friction.  The Gypsies represent a paradigm case, but history offers many other examples.  Race and religion are the main drivers – say, black and white, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Christian – but the friction can have many drivers. 

Internal religious fights can be worse than those between faiths.  Apostasy is one thing – heresy is something else again.  The hereafter may be on the line.  And the friction can manifest itself in different ways.

Acceptance or rejection?

If the members of the minority have to behave and be seen to behave differently to others in their community, are they not satisfied with what the rest do?  Are they in substance rejecting the community at large? 

Believing in your faith or tribal connection does not warrant your being seen to demean or despise that of others.  But there is a real risk of deadly antagonism where a group in an otherwise tolerant society believes it has an exclusive answer. 

This is how Rome saw the early Christians.  The pagans were very tolerant when it came to religion – their own, and that of others.  But the Christians were fanatics who believed that they had the exclusive answer in the way of the Cross.  The Romans were insulted in their majesty, and in their civilised tolerance.  The Christians were in truth zealots, even more so than the obscure and singularly distinct tribe that spurned them, and no government likes to deal with zealots. 

This leads to a much deeper and slippery trap for a minority.

The fear of combination

Very few in government welcome people coming together to review, comment on, or act in response to government.  Milton said that ‘fear of change perplexes monarchs’, but monarchs are in truth aware of the trade union motto that strength comes from unity.  And this just gets worse when the true believers shun rather than court their home-grown neighbours.  Gibbon was caustic.

By embracing the faith of the Gospel, the Christians incurred the supposed guilt of an unnatural and unpardonable offence.  They dissolved the sacred ties of custom and education, violated the religious institutions of their country, and presumptuously despised whatever their fathers had believed as true or reverenced as sacred.

These zealots were following the teaching of a holy man executed under Roman law – and their numbers and fanaticism were bound to be seen to be threatening.  Here is Gibbon again.

Roman policy viewed with the utmost jealousy and distrust any association among its subjects; and the privileges of private corporations, though formed for the most harmless or beneficial purposes, were bestowed with a very sparing hand.  The religious assemblies of the Christians, who had separated themselves from the public worship, appeared of a much less innocent nature: they were illegal in their principle, and in their consequences might become dangerous; nor were the emperors conscious that they violated the laws of justice, when, for the peace of society, they prohibited those secret and sometimes nocturnal meetings.

Some may be reminded of the Freemasons in Europe at the time of Die Zauberflote; people of colour in the American South may be reminded of a truly evil association given to ‘secret and sometimes nocturnal meetings’.

The embryonic English Labour movement was boosted by a decision of the House of Lords in 1901.  In the Taff Vale Case, the English courts held that at common law, a trade union could be liable for loss of profits to employers caused by strike action by members of the union.  Although that may now look to be a case of class bias, the action for damages for breach of contract had to be dealt with by parliament if unions were to retain a workable right to strike.

But a more stunning example of the fear of combination can be found in France after the fall of the Bastille.  Some workers decided to press for better rewards.  Workers used strike federations (coalitions) to get a share of improved trade.  This led to the Loi Le Chapelier which in 1791 prohibited all such associations Well, whatever else may be said of 14 July 1789, nothing could have happened without associations.  The historian J M Thompson mordantly remarked:

It forbids corporate action, in the name of liberty.  It denies it to all alike, in the name of equality.  It prohibits any appeal to force, in the name of fraternity.

That is the history of the world – after a huge fight, children win control of the tree house, and then slam the trap-door shut to stop the next hungry lot claiming their share.  How could you square slavery with the Rights of Man?  How could the Declaration of Independence say that all men were created equal?

And traditionally, the targets of such laws against combinations were directed at the workers rather than the employers.  The first economist, Adam Smith, would have none of it.

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters [employers]; though frequently of those of workmen.  But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.  Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.  To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals.

Those remarks caused me to ask if The Wealth of Nations was banned in some think tanks.

Divided loyalties

The Bible says that no man can serve two masters (Matthew 6 24).  It is hard to think of any ruler who does not subscribe very firmly to that view.

Catholics in England after Henry VIII had to explain how they could be loyal to the king or queen of England as their monarch and the head of the Church England, and at the same time owe allegiance to the head of the Universal Church in Rome – who happened to regard the English monarchs as heretics. 

The question that had been fraught became unanswerable after the Armada.  There is little doubt that the Spaniards would have burnt Queen Elizabeth I at the stake; and then along came Guy Fawkes. 

Charles I tested the boundaries, and paid for it with his life.  He was not Catholic.  James II was, and he went out of his way to provoke every part of the Anglican Establishment in a way that led to his losing the crown and to a change in the English Constitution after the Glorious Revolution.  It was, and is, impossible for a Catholic to be the head of state of England – or, now, Australia. 

That may all look old hat now, but any attempt to revoke that law – which is entirely repugnant to our general laws – may not be well advised.

The extreme peril of heresy

It is sufficient to set out lengthy citations from Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone.

Now, when, as usually happens, a church proclaims itself to be the one church universal (even though it is based upon faith in a special revelation which, being historical can never be required of everyone), he who refuses to acknowledge its (peculiar) ecclesiastical faith is called by it ‘an unbeliever’ and is hated wholeheartedly; he who diverges therefrom only in path (in non-essentials) is called ‘heterodox’ and is at least shunned as a source of infection.  But he who avows allegiance to this church and; diverges from it on essentials of its faith (namely, regarding the practices connected with it), is called, especially if he spreads abroad his false belief, a ‘heretic’ and, as a rebel, such a man is held more culpable than a foreign foe, is expelled from the church with anathema (like that which the Romans pronounced on him who crossed the Rubicon against the Senate’s will) and is given over to all the gods of hell.  Exclusive correctness of belief in matters of ecclesiastical faith claimed by the church’s teachers or heads is called orthodoxy.  This could be sub-divided into ‘despotic’ (brutal) or ‘liberal’ orthodoxy ….

We have noted that a church dispenses with the most important mark of truth, namely, a rightful claim to universality, when it bases itself upon a revealed faith.  For such a faith, being historical (even though it be far more widely disseminated and more completely secured for remotest posterity through the agency of Scripture) can never be universally communicated so as to produce conviction.

For heresy, thousands upon thousands of human beings who were perceived to be deviant would be executed by the followers of a holy man who was executed for just that sin against God.

Imported strife

The conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Great Britain was made far worse by events in Ireland.  The contempt felt for indigenous Irish people in England was originally a contempt for a race.  It all began before the Reformation split the Universal Church – with, say, the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366.  But over time, the division came to be driven by religious differences.  And it became even more vicious because the stakes were so much higher.

In a migrant nation like Australia, where still about thirty per cent of the population was born overseas, there is a risk that people coming from foreign regions of conflict may bring that conflict here with them and so infect the people at large.  Something like that appeared in the fifties when people coming from the Balkans brought with them the products of centuries of conflict in their old homes.

But far worse for Australia, and so much more lasting, was the conflict between Ireland and England, and Catholic and Protestant.  It flared in an ugly and damaging way during World War I, and after World War II it was fundamental to the split in one of two parties in a two-party system.  The result marred our politics for a generation.  The problem then dissipated, largely because of the decline of religion.

There does not appear to be much risk of imported strife now, but if a group owes or expresses some form of allegiance to a foreign power, its members will need to tread warily if representatives of that power turn publicly against an Australian government.  That may well call for a test of allegiance.

Scapegoats

Migrants are usually in a minority, and so become prime candidates for the role of scapegoats.

In Ancient Greece there was a practice or rite of casting out someone like a beggar or cripple or criminal in the face of some natural threat or disaster.  There are traces of a far older tradition in Syria when a goat would be invoked in the purification rites for the king’s wedding – a she-goat was driven out into the waste with a silver bell on her neck.  More recently, but before the Greek custom developed, the Old Testament, Leviticus 16:8, said that ‘And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for Azazel.’  The goat of the Lord was sacrificed, and the high priest by confession transferred the sins of himself and the people to the goat that was permitted to escape in the wilderness – where its fate would depend on what sort of predators it may have to contend with.  This was a form of atonement.  The goat that escaped became the ‘scapegoat’.  The traditions or rites might be said to prefigure the role of the Son of God being offered up to redeem mankind by atoning for its sins.  A scapegoat is one who is punished for the sins of others.  This ancient Middle Eastern rite has become a universal custom involving people rather than goats.

But the term has got much wider than that – a scapegoat now is not just one that has to answer for the sins of others; it has to answer for all the problems and failings of what might be called the host people. 

The worst example occurred in Nazi Germany.  The war had been lost only because of the failings of some generals and because Socialists and Communists had stabbed the nation in the back.  Once the German people got released from the hold of these forces of evil, it could realize its potential for the first time, and nothing could stand in its way.  The German character was not just innately good – it was superior; therefore, the reason for any failings had to be found elsewhere. 

You can see that now in what are called ‘populist’ politicians in the U K, Europe, and the U S.  Migrants become the source of all evil.  The scapegoat is the natural first base for a weak and insecure person who is a moral coward. 

It is also the kind of sloppy thinking that attracts insecure people, edgy commentators and journalists, and weak governments.

The threat to the status quo

The Gypsies may have been seen as a threat to civil order, but they were hardly a threat to the status quo.  A minority needs a lot more clout to achieve that status. 

The Huguenots in France and the Puritans in England had that clout, in large part because so many came from so high in the society that they were part of.  If you are going to be a strident minority, it does not help if you were already far better off than most before you stated your own particular claim to standing in the social fabric.  That could lead to the St Bartholomew Day Massacre, what would otherwise be called a pogrom.  Historians assess the standing of the Huguenots by looking at what they call the brain drain in France after their brutal suppression and expulsion.

The Puritans would come to be seen as a pest in England.  Under Cromwell, this fevered minority wanted to shut the pubs.  (They had previously shut the theatres – we could have been denied Shakespeare.) 

In America, the Puritans had the numbers – and it shows.  Among other things, they could make life difficult for Quakers.  The Quakers had been fined, whipped, jailed and banished during Puritan rule in Maryland before it passed its Toleration Act in 1649.  Women had been stripped to find signs of witchcraft, but this act made it unlawful to use hostile language about the religion of others, such as ‘Heretick, Schismatic, Idolater, Puritan, Jesuit…’  Then Penn started his Holy Experiment with Quakers in Pennsylvania.  At this stage of their development in the New World, the colonists prefigured the Enlightenment.  That did not last.  Slavery is not compatible with civilisation.

Religion does sadly seem to be at ease with hierarchy – rather like the judiciary.  And whatever else may be said about the Friends, they made the existing hierarchy feel uneasy – you could see traces of anarchy – and they were very effective leaders of the movement against slavery together with members of the Church of England.  If you take the view that slavery is contrary to any decent notion of civilisation, then the world had to wait until at least this level of abolition before it could consider itself civilised.  That is no small proposition.  And no small vindication of the Quakers.

The position of the Puritans in England was discussed by Paul Johnson in The Offshore Islanders.

English Puritanism was born among the Marian exiles of the 1550s [when the Catholic Queen Mary was burning Protestants]; it was thus an alien import.  It had a consistency wholly foreign to the English….The doctrine of predestination was ludicrous…. The Puritans, like the Roman Catholic extremists, believed that religion was the only important thing in life, whereas most Englishmen thought it was something you did on Sundays.  They were influential out of all proportion to their numbers because, like the Communists in our own age, they were highly organised, disciplined, and adept at getting each other in positions of power…. They oozed hypocrisy …But they did not believe in free speech.  They believed in doctrinaire religion, imposed by force and maintained by persecution…. The privileges the Puritans claimed for themselves they would certainly have denied to others…Above all, Puritanism was the dynamic behind the increase in witch-hunting.

No wonder they got up the noses of the English, and then took their love of witch-hunting to the New World. It still loves the hunt.  Just ask the President.

Caste from within

It is odd to many of us that some minorities have elaborate rules for confining contact with people outside their group.  It is as if they were creating their own kind of caste from within – and most Australians regard caste as a dreadful form of discrimination.  They are utterly and implacably opposed to any form of hierarchy imposed at birth.  We believe, with Sir Henry Maine, that the progress in human society has been from status to contract – we get where we can, not from what we are born with, but what we can achieve in life.  The caste system of the Hindus is anathema to us.  Among other things, it is an invitation to see people as type-cast, and that offends what Kant called the ‘principle of humanity’.

For example, the Gypsies had elaborate rules relating to dealings with gadze – non-gypsies – with life-changing consequences for those who infringed.  Here is what Sir Angus Fraser says in The Gypsies:

Even more pervasive is the dread of contamination….their purity beliefs can now be seen as a core element of their cultures, serving to express and reinforce an ethnic boundary and to delineate a fundamental division between Gypsy and gadzo….Wherever it is strictly adhered to, the taboo system informs all interaction between male and female and Gypsy and Gadzo, and for a Gypsy to be declared polluted is the greatest shame a man can suffer, along with his household.  It is social death…. but their overwhelming concern is with the uncleanness of the female and her potential threat to ritual purity…. The code thus serves to isolate those Gypsies who practise it from any intensive, intimate connection with the gadze; and its existence makes all the more understandable the concern, so apparent in their history, to avoid any form of employment that would require such contact.

This book of Sir Angus strikes me as reliable.  First, when the author refers to an ‘ethnic’ division, he is referring to what we call ‘race’.  Secondly, the strictures relating to cleanliness, women, and contact with others have a lot is common with the beliefs of other ethnic or religious groups.  Thirdly, it confirms the truth of the saying that we all need someone to look down on, and that those who see themselves as different very rarely see themselves as inferior – the contrary is the case.  Fourthly, these codes militate against assimilation with or acceptance by the majority, with the result that the minority ends up worse off.  The various defence mechanisms come back to bite their adherents.  Fifthly, to the extent that any such code may require or authorise discrimination against those found to have breached it, it may well be against the law of the land.

Nor should we forget that some among us just get unsettled to run into someone who just wants to be different.  Some get unsettled by doubt – they crave certainty where that is illusory. 

Others fear a failure to conform – it threatens their attachment and subscription to the body politic which gives them such security and standing as they have.  That is why some go clean out of their minds during revolutions – their whole world is exploding under them, and just what will they be left to stand on?  It is like driving on dry ice.

Jealousy

Green-eyed jealousy is destructive.  When felt at a social level, it arouses the hurt felt at apparent unfairness.  It is then potentially lethal.  It is a real risk for minorities that are seen to beat the system.  Examples are the Huguenots, who came from the upper layers of their world, and the Armenians, who showed a business acumen apparently beyond many of their Turkish neighbours. 

I say that as someone who bought this flat in Yarraville from an Armenian chicken farmer in Sydney who just happened to pick up a few blocks of local real estate on a trip to Victoria.  The Armenians were certainly very active in redeveloping Toorak – in a manner that held no appeal to the remaining elders.  ‘Upstarts’ or ‘nouveaux’ were polite epithets.  It is one thing to see people do well; it is altogether another to be overtaken by someone you once saw as beneath you.  If you really insult someone, you hit them just where it hurts. 

The last tax case I heard involved a scarcely literate Sicilian who migrated here.  He was at first a butcher and then a baker who bought land around Werribee so that by the time he got to me, he was worth north of $40 million.  Some locals could handle that success story better than others.  This will always be a potential problem for what are called ‘aspirational’ migrants who happen to do so much better than the old timers because that is their chosen destiny.

Unity in revolt or persecution

When Benjamin Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence, he remarked: ‘Well, Gentlemen, we must now hang together, or we shall most assuredly hang separately.’  He was surely correct.  They would either be the heroes of a new nation or very dead martyrs of the ancien regime.  You see the same theme in the Tennis Court oath at Versailles and all the propaganda of the artist David – Lenin and his ilk were rather more prosaic; so was their murder rate.

And persecution is a great bonding force.  For ‘persecute’, the OED has ‘treat someone in a cruel or unfair way, especially because of their race or beliefs.’  That was the fate, and the conditioning, of the early Christians, Gypsies and Quakers, and the response to the persecution so often just fuelled the fire by binding the victims together and making them identifiable. 

The study of victimhood, which can descend to self-righteousness, is a favourite of those parts of the press that decry ‘identity politics’ – while positively revelling in themselves; and at the same time rubbishing ‘virtue signalling’.  It is remarkable how so many who are so well off can feel so oppressed.  That is just another record claimed by Donald Trump – and a good slice of the United States.

A triumphant minority

Finally, there is the tragedy than can occur when the minority becomes the majority. 

Take the United States and Australia as examples.  When the white people first appeared in each, they were in the minority.  Because of their overwhelming strength in fighting capacity, they became the majority, and shattered the lives of the indigenous people forever, and in ways that should continue to evoke shame. 

In America, the degradation was made much worse by the importation of black African slaves, with the mordant consequence now that fear levels among many white people are made worse by the day by the threat that the white people may find themselves in the minority.

Conclusions

It would be tart to say that when peoples live together, numbers matter – but they do.  And scripture may be correct when it says that there is nothing new under the sun.

For many, there is some comfort about the slippery impact of the supernatural in the droll remarks of Edward Gibbon:

The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.  And thus, toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.

Finally, some people may get up noses of others just because they seem to be different.  At least, that is why I think my dog looked askance at cats.  And I don’t blame him.

Being on the nose – the perils of minority

Where people within a community behave differently as a group within that community, you can get friction.  The Gypsies represent a paradigm case, but history offers many other examples.  Race and religion are the main drivers – say, black and white, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Christian – but the friction can have many drivers. 

Internal religious fights can be worse than those between faiths.  Apostasy is one thing – heresy is something else again.  The hereafter may be on the line.  And the friction can manifest itself in different ways.

Acceptance or rejection?

If the members of the minority have to behave and be seen to behave differently to others in their community, are they not satisfied with what the rest do?  Are they in substance rejecting the community at large? 

Believing in your faith or tribal connection does not warrant your being seen to demean or despise that of others.  But there is a real risk of deadly antagonism where a group in an otherwise tolerant society believes it has an exclusive answer. 

This is how Rome saw the early Christians.  The pagans were very tolerant when it came to religion – their own, and that of others.  But the Christians were fanatics who believed that they had the exclusive answer in the way of the Cross.  The Romans were insulted in their majesty, and in their civilised tolerance.  The Christians were in truth zealots, even more so than the obscure and singularly distinct tribe that spurned them, and no government likes to deal with zealots. 

This leads to a much deeper and slippery trap for a minority.

The fear of combination

Very few in government welcome people coming together to review, comment on, or act in response to government.  Milton said that ‘fear of change perplexes monarchs’, but monarchs are in truth aware of the trade union motto that strength comes from unity.  And this just gets worse when the true believers shun rather than court their home-grown neighbours.  Gibbon was caustic.

By embracing the faith of the Gospel, the Christians incurred the supposed guilt of an unnatural and unpardonable offence.  They dissolved the sacred ties of custom and education, violated the religious institutions of their country, and presumptuously despised whatever their fathers had believed as true or reverenced as sacred.

These zealots were following the teaching of a holy man executed under Roman law – and their numbers and fanaticism were bound to be seen to be threatening.  Here is Gibbon again.

Roman policy viewed with the utmost jealousy and distrust any association among its subjects; and the privileges of private corporations, though formed for the most harmless or beneficial purposes, were bestowed with a very sparing hand.  The religious assemblies of the Christians, who had separated themselves from the public worship, appeared of a much less innocent nature: they were illegal in their principle, and in their consequences might become dangerous; nor were the emperors conscious that they violated the laws of justice, when, for the peace of society, they prohibited those secret and sometimes nocturnal meetings.

Some may be reminded of the Freemasons in Europe at the time of Die Zauberflote; people of colour in the American South may be reminded of a truly evil association given to ‘secret and sometimes nocturnal meetings’.

The embryonic English Labour movement was boosted by a decision of the House of Lords in 1901.  In the Taff Vale Case, the English courts held that at common law, a trade union could be liable for loss of profits to employers caused by strike action by members of the union.  Although that may now look to be a case of class bias, the action for damages for breach of contract had to be dealt with by parliament if unions were to retain a workable right to strike.

But a more stunning example of the fear of combination can be found in France after the fall of the Bastille.  Some workers decided to press for better rewards.  Workers used strike federations (coalitions) to get a share of improved trade.  This led to the Loi Le Chapelier which in 1791 prohibited all such associations Well, whatever else may be said of 14 July 1789, nothing could have happened without associations.  The historian J M Thompson mordantly remarked:

It forbids corporate action, in the name of liberty.  It denies it to all alike, in the name of equality.  It prohibits any appeal to force, in the name of fraternity.

That is the history of the world – after a huge fight, children win control of the tree house, and then slam the trap-door shut to stop the next hungry lot claiming their share.  How could you square slavery with the Rights of Man?  How could the Declaration of Independence say that all men were created equal?

And traditionally, the targets of such laws against combinations were directed at the workers rather than the employers.  The first economist, Adam Smith, would have none of it.

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters [employers]; though frequently of those of workmen.  But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.  Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.  To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals.

Those remarks caused me to ask if The Wealth of Nations was banned in some think tanks.

Divided loyalties

The Bible says that no man can serve two masters (Matthew 6 24).  It is hard to think of any ruler who does not subscribe very firmly to that view.

Catholics in England after Henry VIII had to explain how they could be loyal to the king or queen of England as their monarch and the head of the Church England, and at the same time owe allegiance to the head of the Universal Church in Rome – who happened to regard the English monarchs as heretics. 

The question that had been fraught became unanswerable after the Armada.  There is little doubt that the Spaniards would have burnt Queen Elizabeth I at the stake; and then along came Guy Fawkes. 

Charles I tested the boundaries, and paid for it with his life.  He was not Catholic.  James II was, and he went out of his way to provoke every part of the Anglican Establishment in a way that led to his losing the crown and to a change in the English Constitution after the Glorious Revolution.  It was, and is, impossible for a Catholic to be the head of state of England – or, now, Australia. 

That may all look old hat now, but any attempt to revoke that law – which is entirely repugnant to our general laws – may not be well advised.

The extreme peril of heresy

It is sufficient to set out lengthy citations from Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone.

Now, when, as usually happens, a church proclaims itself to be the one church universal (even though it is based upon faith in a special revelation which, being historical can never be required of everyone), he who refuses to acknowledge its (peculiar) ecclesiastical faith is called by it ‘an unbeliever’ and is hated wholeheartedly; he who diverges therefrom only in path (in non-essentials) is called ‘heterodox’ and is at least shunned as a source of infection.  But he who avows allegiance to this church and; diverges from it on essentials of its faith (namely, regarding the practices connected with it), is called, especially if he spreads abroad his false belief, a ‘heretic’ and, as a rebel, such a man is held more culpable than a foreign foe, is expelled from the church with anathema (like that which the Romans pronounced on him who crossed the Rubicon against the Senate’s will) and is given over to all the gods of hell.  Exclusive correctness of belief in matters of ecclesiastical faith claimed by the church’s teachers or heads is called orthodoxy.  This could be sub-divided into ‘despotic’ (brutal) or ‘liberal’ orthodoxy ….

We have noted that a church dispenses with the most important mark of truth, namely, a rightful claim to universality, when it bases itself upon a revealed faith.  For such a faith, being historical (even though it be far more widely disseminated and more completely secured for remotest posterity through the agency of Scripture) can never be universally communicated so as to produce conviction.

For heresy, thousands upon thousands of human beings who were perceived to be deviant would be executed by the followers of a holy man who was executed for just that sin against God.

Imported strife

The conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Great Britain was made far worse by events in Ireland.  The contempt felt for indigenous Irish people in England was originally a contempt for a race.  It all began before the Reformation split the Universal Church – with, say, the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366.  But over time, the division came to be driven by religious differences.  And it became even more vicious because the stakes were so much higher.

In a migrant nation like Australia, where still about thirty per cent of the population was born overseas, there is a risk that people coming from foreign regions of conflict may bring that conflict here with them and so infect the people at large.  Something like that appeared in the fifties when people coming from the Balkans brought with them the products of centuries of conflict in their old homes.

But far worse for Australia, and so much more lasting, was the conflict between Ireland and England, and Catholic and Protestant.  It flared in an ugly and damaging way during World War I, and after World War II it was fundamental to the split in one of two parties in a two-party system.  The result marred our politics for a generation.  The problem then dissipated, largely because of the decline of religion.

There does not appear to be much risk of imported strife now, but if a group owes or expresses some form of allegiance to a foreign power, its members will need to tread warily if representatives of that power turn publicly against an Australian government.  That may well call for a test of allegiance.

Scapegoats

Migrants are usually in a minority, and so become prime candidates for the role of scapegoats.

In Ancient Greece there was a practice or rite of casting out someone like a beggar or cripple or criminal in the face of some natural threat or disaster.  There are traces of a far older tradition in Syria when a goat would be invoked in the purification rites for the king’s wedding – a she-goat was driven out into the waste with a silver bell on her neck.  More recently, but before the Greek custom developed, the Old Testament, Leviticus 16:8, said that ‘And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for Azazel.’  The goat of the Lord was sacrificed, and the high priest by confession transferred the sins of himself and the people to the goat that was permitted to escape in the wilderness – where its fate would depend on what sort of predators it may have to contend with.  This was a form of atonement.  The goat that escaped became the ‘scapegoat’.  The traditions or rites might be said to prefigure the role of the Son of God being offered up to redeem mankind by atoning for its sins.  A scapegoat is one who is punished for the sins of others.  This ancient Middle Eastern rite has become a universal custom involving people rather than goats.

But the term has got much wider than that – a scapegoat now is not just one that has to answer for the sins of others; it has to answer for all the problems and failings of what might be called the host people. 

The worst example occurred in Nazi Germany.  The war had been lost only because of the failings of some generals and because Socialists and Communists had stabbed the nation in the back.  Once the German people got released from the hold of these forces of evil, it could realize its potential for the first time, and nothing could stand in its way.  The German character was not just innately good – it was superior; therefore, the reason for any failings had to be found elsewhere. 

You can see that now in what are called ‘populist’ politicians in the U K, Europe, and the U S.  Migrants become the source of all evil.  The scapegoat is the natural first base for a weak and insecure person who is a moral coward. 

It is also the kind of sloppy thinking that attracts insecure people, edgy commentators and journalists, and weak governments.

The threat to the status quo

The Gypsies may have been seen as a threat to civil order, but they were hardly a threat to the status quo.  A minority needs a lot more clout to achieve that status. 

The Huguenots in France and the Puritans in England had that clout, in large part because so many came from so high in the society that they were part of.  If you are going to be a strident minority, it does not help if you were already far better off than most before you stated your own particular claim to standing in the social fabric.  That could lead to the St Bartholomew Day Massacre, what would otherwise be called a pogrom.  Historians assess the standing of the Huguenots by looking at what they call the brain drain in France after their brutal suppression and expulsion.

The Puritans would come to be seen as a pest in England.  Under Cromwell, this fevered minority wanted to shut the pubs.  (They had previously shut the theatres – we could have been denied Shakespeare.) 

In America, the Puritans had the numbers – and it shows.  Among other things, they could make life difficult for Quakers.  The Quakers had been fined, whipped, jailed and banished during Puritan rule in Maryland before it passed its Toleration Act in 1649.  Women had been stripped to find signs of witchcraft, but this act made it unlawful to use hostile language about the religion of others, such as ‘Heretick, Schismatic, Idolater, Puritan, Jesuit…’  Then Penn started his Holy Experiment with Quakers in Pennsylvania.  At this stage of their development in the New World, the colonists prefigured the Enlightenment.  That did not last.  Slavery is not compatible with civilisation.

Religion does sadly seem to be at ease with hierarchy – rather like the judiciary.  And whatever else may be said about the Friends, they made the existing hierarchy feel uneasy – you could see traces of anarchy – and they were very effective leaders of the movement against slavery together with members of the Church of England.  If you take the view that slavery is contrary to any decent notion of civilisation, then the world had to wait until at least this level of abolition before it could consider itself civilised.  That is no small proposition.  And no small vindication of the Quakers.

The position of the Puritans in England was discussed by Paul Johnson in The Offshore Islanders.

English Puritanism was born among the Marian exiles of the 1550s [when the Catholic Queen Mary was burning Protestants]; it was thus an alien import.  It had a consistency wholly foreign to the English….The doctrine of predestination was ludicrous…. The Puritans, like the Roman Catholic extremists, believed that religion was the only important thing in life, whereas most Englishmen thought it was something you did on Sundays.  They were influential out of all proportion to their numbers because, like the Communists in our own age, they were highly organised, disciplined, and adept at getting each other in positions of power…. They oozed hypocrisy …But they did not believe in free speech.  They believed in doctrinaire religion, imposed by force and maintained by persecution…. The privileges the Puritans claimed for themselves they would certainly have denied to others…Above all, Puritanism was the dynamic behind the increase in witch-hunting.

No wonder they got up the noses of the English, and then took their love of witch-hunting to the New World. It still loves the hunt.  Just ask the President.

Caste from within

It is odd to many of us that some minorities have elaborate rules for confining contact with people outside their group.  It is as if they were creating their own kind of caste from within – and most Australians regard caste as a dreadful form of discrimination.  They are utterly and implacably opposed to any form of hierarchy imposed at birth.  We believe, with Sir Henry Maine, that the progress in human society has been from status to contract – we get where we can, not from what we are born with, but what we can achieve in life.  The caste system of the Hindus is anathema to us.  Among other things, it is an invitation to see people as type-cast, and that offends what Kant called the ‘principle of humanity’.

For example, the Gypsies had elaborate rules relating to dealings with gadze – non-gypsies – with life-changing consequences for those who infringed.  Here is what Sir Angus Fraser says in The Gypsies:

Even more pervasive is the dread of contamination….their purity beliefs can now be seen as a core element of their cultures, serving to express and reinforce an ethnic boundary and to delineate a fundamental division between Gypsy and gadzo….Wherever it is strictly adhered to, the taboo system informs all interaction between male and female and Gypsy and Gadzo, and for a Gypsy to be declared polluted is the greatest shame a man can suffer, along with his household.  It is social death…. but their overwhelming concern is with the uncleanness of the female and her potential threat to ritual purity…. The code thus serves to isolate those Gypsies who practise it from any intensive, intimate connection with the gadze; and its existence makes all the more understandable the concern, so apparent in their history, to avoid any form of employment that would require such contact.

This book of Sir Angus strikes me as reliable.  First, when the author refers to an ‘ethnic’ division, he is referring to what we call ‘race’.  Secondly, the strictures relating to cleanliness, women, and contact with others have a lot is common with the beliefs of other ethnic or religious groups.  Thirdly, it confirms the truth of the saying that we all need someone to look down on, and that those who see themselves as different very rarely see themselves as inferior – the contrary is the case.  Fourthly, these codes militate against assimilation with or acceptance by the majority, with the result that the minority ends up worse off.  The various defence mechanisms come back to bite their adherents.  Fifthly, to the extent that any such code may require or authorise discrimination against those found to have breached it, it may well be against the law of the land.

Nor should we forget that some among us just get unsettled to run into someone who just wants to be different.  Some get unsettled by doubt – they crave certainty where that is illusory. 

Others fear a failure to conform – it threatens their attachment and subscription to the body politic which gives them such security and standing as they have.  That is why some go clean out of their minds during revolutions – their whole world is exploding under them, and just what will they be left to stand on?  It is like driving on dry ice.

Jealousy

Green-eyed jealousy is destructive.  When felt at a social level, it arouses the hurt felt at apparent unfairness.  It is then potentially lethal.  It is a real risk for minorities that are seen to beat the system.  Examples are the Huguenots, who came from the upper layers of their world, and the Armenians, who showed a business acumen apparently beyond many of their Turkish neighbours. 

I say that as someone who bought this flat in Yarraville from an Armenian chicken farmer in Sydney who just happened to pick up a few blocks of local real estate on a trip to Victoria.  The Armenians were certainly very active in redeveloping Toorak – in a manner that held no appeal to the remaining elders.  ‘Upstarts’ or ‘nouveaux’ were polite epithets.  It is one thing to see people do well; it is altogether another to be overtaken by someone you once saw as beneath you.  If you really insult someone, you hit them just where it hurts. 

The last tax case I heard involved a scarcely literate Sicilian who migrated here.  He was at first a butcher and then a baker who bought land around Werribee so that by the time he got to me, he was worth north of $40 million.  Some locals could handle that success story better than others.  This will always be a potential problem for what are called ‘aspirational’ migrants who happen to do so much better than the old timers because that is their chosen destiny.

Unity in revolt or persecution

When Benjamin Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence, he remarked: ‘Well, Gentlemen, we must now hang together, or we shall most assuredly hang separately.’  He was surely correct.  They would either be the heroes of a new nation or very dead martyrs of the ancien regime.  You see the same theme in the Tennis Court oath at Versailles and all the propaganda of the artist David – Lenin and his ilk were rather more prosaic; so was their murder rate.

And persecution is a great bonding force.  For ‘persecute’, the OED has ‘treat someone in a cruel or unfair way, especially because of their race or beliefs.’  That was the fate, and the conditioning, of the early Christians, Gypsies and Quakers, and the response to the persecution so often just fuelled the fire by binding the victims together and making them identifiable. 

The study of victimhood, which can descend to self-righteousness, is a favourite of those parts of the press that decry ‘identity politics’ – while positively revelling in themselves; and at the same time rubbishing ‘virtue signalling’.  It is remarkable how so many who are so well off can feel so oppressed.  That is just another record claimed by Donald Trump – and a good slice of the United States.

A triumphant minority

Finally, there is the tragedy than can occur when the minority becomes the majority. 

Take the United States and Australia as examples.  When the white people first appeared in each, they were in the minority.  Because of their overwhelming strength in fighting capacity, they became the majority, and shattered the lives of the indigenous people forever, and in ways that should continue to evoke shame. 

In America, the degradation was made much worse by the importation of black African slaves, with the mordant consequence now that fear levels among many white people are made worse by the day by the threat that the white people may find themselves in the minority.

Conclusions

It would be tart to say that when peoples live together, numbers matter – but they do.  And scripture may be correct when it says that there is nothing new under the sun.

For many, there is some comfort about the slippery impact of the supernatural in the droll remarks of Edward Gibbon:

The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.  And thus, toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.

Finally, some people may get up noses of others just because they seem to be different.  At least, that is why I think my dog looked askance at cats.  And I don’t blame him.

The War in the Middle East

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

There is what is called a ‘war’ in the Middle East.  Israel is one party.  The legal status of its opponents has not been identified to me.  Nor have I seen any ‘rules’ for a war between one nation and people who are identified merely by their occupying a neighbouring territory. 

In fact, the hostility between Jewish people and Muslims in the area in and around what used to be called the Holy Land has been going on for very many centuries.  One war last century led to Gaza becoming occupied territory.  I do not know what legal standing it has.

What we do know is that a group known as Hamas, which claims to represent the people of the land called Gaza, launched a brutal attack on Israel, and that Israel, as was both expected and intended by Hamas, responded.  The war is still going after nearly two years.  There is now another front in Lebanon, and Iran felt obliged to surface openly in the conflict.

Some, including some high in the government of Israel, say that Israel started a war without knowing how to finish it.  That appears to be mandatory in that part of the world.  And we all know about a ‘war on terror’ or a war on a nation holding ‘weapons of mass destruction.’

Most outsiders would say that Hamas is a ‘terrorist’ group.  But you may wish to draw the line at saying that any people who employ terror to achieve rights on land occupied by others are ‘terrorists’.  That would catch the founders of the United States, the Commonwealth of Australia, and the nation of Israel.  (And of course England for about eight hundred years in Ireland.)  You can make up your own mind about those called the ‘settlers’.

It is certainly the case that Hamas is committed to the destruction of Israel – for whatever that threat may be worth in fact.  But it also looks to be the case that Israel has prevented the nation of Palestine being born – with, it must be said, a lot of help from those claiming to represent the people of Palestine.  (A friend of mine says that the leaders of Palestine never miss a chance to miss a chance.)  They may be more fractious than those claiming to stand for the people of Israel.  (And that is a very large statement.)

People in Australia will take sides if they are connected by blood or faith to the combatants in this war overseas.  And their inclination or bias will be quickly apparent, and almost certainly not throw any light or warmth on what is on any view a colossal human tragedy. 

Most of the rest of us just want to keep our mouths shut and do what we can to stay neutral.  What we certainly want to avoid is bringing conflict into Australia that arises from a conflict on the other side of the world with which we as a nation have no apparent connection.

I am not sure how the numbers between Jews and Muslims add up here now, and the war in Gaza will have consequences.  But there is no doubt about the power of the Israeli lobby in this country.  And their apparent capacity to commandeer the local Establishment, at least with the parties of the Coalition, does not command universal assent.

Prejudiced commentators show bias in deciding how far back we should go in order to understand this war.  Some start at the most recent attack by Hamas.  Some with the birth of Israel. 

In truth, this whole area has been a hot spot since the time of Moses.  Jonathan Sumption disposed of the first fallacy as follows.

One is the idea that this story began with the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023; the other is that any attack on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is anti-Semitic.  A fortnight after the attack, António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, pointed out in the Security Council that it “did not happen in a vacuum”.  It followed 56 years in which the Palestinians in Gaza had suffered “suffocating occupation… their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people displaced and their homes demolished.”  He was expressing the self-evident truth that if you persistently treat people like that, hatred, violence and terrorism will eventually be the response.  The Israeli ambassador objected to his attempt to “understand” terrorism and demanded his resignation on the ground that his words were an anti-Semitic blood libel.  This neatly encapsulated both falsehoods.

In my view, the only place to start is with the first books of the bible – that each of the three main faiths gives some heed to. 

Those books stand for the following propositions.  There is only one God.  But there are many tribes or peoples.  Those tribes or peoples are all different and in no way equal.  God has a favourite tribe.  It is therefore in order for some people to be better off than others, just because Providence has raised their tribe above others.  God has promised land to his favourite tribe or people.  And authorised them to kill women and children who get in the way.  One example of that authority is set out below.  People outside of God’s protection – beyond the Pale, if you prefer – could choose between forced labour and death.  Then there is one example of the exercise of that authority.  According to the Bible, with the help of God, the Israelites killed 12,000 men, women and children in one day at the town of Ai – because they had chosen to live on the Promised Land.

Ever since then, that land has seen similar acts of brutality.  They have seen the worst kind of wars – those where each side is convinced, or at least persuaded, that it has God on its side.  Warriors claiming to be Muslims sought conquest by the sword.  So did Crusaders claiming to be Christians.  They got prepared to massacre Muslims by massacring Jews on their way to the Holy Sepulchre.  Such has been the horror and destruction wrought in the name of religion in the Holy Land.

To return to the present, the current casualty rate in the war is running at about twenty to one.  There are tens of thousands of Australians who have an interest in the conflict on either side.  Anyone claiming that one side is blameless is blind.  Anyone claiming the right to give an objective judgment is deluded.

So, the only course for our government is one of neutrality.  That is, I think, the course followed by the relevant minister, who is so much ahead of her colleagues, it is embarrassing.

But it was not the course followed by the Opposition.  It looks to have put votes before principle and the national interest.  It has done this before.  It is ironic that the Opposition supports the claims on one side in the Middle East that go back a few thousand years, but wiped off like a dirty bum the claims of peoples here that go back sixty thousand years.

I have no idea what the answer may be.  But it seems clear that decent people on both sides will bear the scars of this tragedy for ever. 

The various emanations of God behind this vast human tragedy are, we are told by people on all sides, omnipotent and eternal.

The War in the Middle East

There is what is called a ‘war’ in the Middle East.  Israel is one party.  The legal status of its opponents has not been identified to me.  Nor have I seen any ‘rules’ for a war between one nation and people who are identified merely by their occupying a neighbouring territory. 

In fact, the hostility between Jewish people and Muslims in the area in and around what used to be called the Holy Land has been going on for very many centuries.  One war last century led to Gaza becoming occupied territory.  I do not know what legal standing it has.

What we do know is that a group known as Hamas, which claims to represent the people of the land called Gaza, launched a brutal attack on Israel, and that Israel, as was both expected and intended by Hamas, responded.  The war is still going after nearly two years.  There is now another front in Lebanon, and Iran felt obliged to surface openly in the conflict.

Some, including some high in the government of Israel, say that Israel started a war without knowing how to finish it.  That appears to be mandatory in that part of the world.  And we all know about a ‘war on terror’ or a war on a nation holding ‘weapons of mass destruction.’

Most outsiders would say that Hamas is a ‘terrorist’ group.  But you may wish to draw the line at saying that any people who employ terror to achieve rights on land occupied by others are ‘terrorists’.  That would catch the founders of the United States, the Commonwealth of Australia, and the nation of Israel.  (And of course England for about eight hundred years in Ireland.)  You can make up your own mind about those called the ‘settlers’.

It is certainly the case that Hamas is committed to the destruction of Israel – for whatever that threat may be worth in fact.  But it also looks to be the case that Israel has prevented the nation of Palestine being born – with, it must be said, a lot of help from those claiming to represent the people of Palestine.  (A friend of mine says that the leaders of Palestine never miss a chance to miss a chance.)  They may be more fractious than those claiming to stand for the people of Israel.  (And that is a very large statement.)

People in Australia will take sides if they are connected by blood or faith to the combatants in this war overseas.  And their inclination or bias will be quickly apparent, and almost certainly not throw any light or warmth on what is on any view a colossal human tragedy. 

Most of the rest of us just want to keep our mouths shut and do what we can to stay neutral.  What we certainly want to avoid is bringing conflict into Australia that arises from a conflict on the other side of the world with which we as a nation have no apparent connection.

I am not sure how the numbers between Jews and Muslims add up here now, and the war in Gaza will have consequences.  But there is no doubt about the power of the Israeli lobby in this country.  And their apparent capacity to commandeer the local Establishment, at least with the parties of the Coalition, does not command universal assent.

Prejudiced commentators show bias in deciding how far back we should go in order to understand this war.  Some start at the most recent attack by Hamas.  Some with the birth of Israel. 

In truth, this whole area has been a hot spot since the time of Moses.  Jonathan Sumption disposed of the first fallacy as follows.

One is the idea that this story began with the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023; the other is that any attack on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is anti-Semitic.  A fortnight after the attack, António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, pointed out in the Security Council that it “did not happen in a vacuum”.  It followed 56 years in which the Palestinians in Gaza had suffered “suffocating occupation… their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people displaced and their homes demolished.”  He was expressing the self-evident truth that if you persistently treat people like that, hatred, violence and terrorism will eventually be the response.  The Israeli ambassador objected to his attempt to “understand” terrorism and demanded his resignation on the ground that his words were an anti-Semitic blood libel.  This neatly encapsulated both falsehoods.

In my view, the only place to start is with the first books of the bible – that each of the three main faiths gives some heed to. 

Those books stand for the following propositions.  There is only one God.  But there are many tribes or peoples.  Those tribes or peoples are all different and in no way equal.  God has a favourite tribe.  It is therefore in order for some people to be better off than others, just because Providence has raised their tribe above others.  God has promised land to his favourite tribe or people.  And authorised them to kill women and children who get in the way.  One example of that authority is set out below.  People outside of God’s protection – beyond the Pale, if you prefer – could choose between forced labour and death.  Then there is one example of the exercise of that authority.  According to the Bible, with the help of God, the Israelites killed 12,000 men, women and children in one day at the town of Ai – because they had chosen to live on the Promised Land.

Ever since then, that land has seen similar acts of brutality.  They have seen the worst kind of wars – those where each side is convinced, or at least persuaded, that it has God on its side.  Warriors claiming to be Muslims sought conquest by the sword.  So did Crusaders claiming to be Christians.  They got prepared to massacre Muslims by massacring Jews on their way to the Holy Sepulchre.  Such has been the horror and destruction wrought in the name of religion in the Holy Land.

To return to the present, the current casualty rate in the war is running at about twenty to one.  There are tens of thousands of Australians who have an interest in the conflict on either side.  Anyone claiming that one side is blameless is blind.  Anyone claiming the right to give an objective judgment is deluded.

So, the only course for our government is one of neutrality.  That is, I think, the course followed by the relevant minister, who is so much ahead of her colleagues, it is embarrassing.

But it was not the course followed by the Opposition.  It looks to have put votes before principle and the national interest.  It has done this before.  It is ironic that the Opposition supports the claims on one side in the Middle East that go back a few thousand years, but wiped off like a dirty bum the claims of peoples here that go back sixty thousand years.

I have no idea what the answer may be.  But it seems clear that decent people on both sides will bear the scars of this tragedy for ever. 

The various emanations of God behind this vast human tragedy are, we are told by people on all sides, omnipotent and eternal.

Passing Bull 409 – The President and the Homeless

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The serenity of the golf day for Donald Trump the other day was cruelly disturbed by the sight of the homeless.  He has ordered in the National Guard. 

This sad episode calls to mind a passage from Carlyle, The French Revolution about another absolute ruler. King Louis XV.

Louis, we say, was not so happy; but he did what he could.  He would not suffer Death to be spoken of; avoided the sight of churchyards, funereal monuments, and whatsoever could bring it to mind.  It is the resource of the Ostrich; who, hard hunted, sticks his foolish head in the ground, and would fain forget that his foolish unseeing body is not unseen too.  Or sometimes, with a spasmodic antagonism, significant of the same thing, and of more, he would go; or stopping his court carriages, would send into churchyards, and ask “how many new graves there were today,” though it gave his poor Pompadour the disagreeablest qualms.  We can figure the thought of Louis that day, when, all royally caparisoned for hunting, he met, at some sudden turning in the Wood of Senart, a ragged Peasant with a coffin: ‘For whom?’—It was for a poor brother slave, whom Majesty had sometimes noticed slaving in those quarters. ‘What did he die of?’— ‘Of hunger:’—the King gave his steed the spur.

The Woes of the AFL

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The front and back pages of The Age today are all bad news for the AFL.  Commercial TV has snubbed the game tonight between two ‘giants’, Carlton and Essendon.  The sports pages discuss the sacking of the coach by Melbourne, and ask whether this is the worst AFL season ever.  The final eight looked settled half way through the season, and too many matches since then have been just frightful.  A grizzly Melbourne winter just got a lot worse for most of its people – including me, a Melbourne supporter for more than seventy years. 

It now looks like three ‘powerhouse’ clubs – Carlton, Essendon, and Melbourne – need a revolution from within to revive; while the Eagles are declared broken, North Melbourne has lost whatever spark it had, and St Kilda is the forever bridesmaid.  The performance of Brisbane and the two new clubs are the bright lights.

Football in Australia is a game vital to the upbringing of our children and to the sanity of us adults.  It is an essential – indispensable – part of our communal life.  For most of us, it takes the place of religion, with the MCG as its communal heart and shrine.  If you have not been there on Grand Final Day or Boxing Day, you have not lived in Melbourne. 

Football is an integral part of a vibrant city.  There are times when you can feel it in the air, and we can survey each other with what John Keats called ‘wild surmise’. 

And somehow life just gets better.

For those reasons, the people who run football hold offices of public trust.

Football at the top is still a game, but it is also a business.  The clubs are part of the entertainment industry, revolving around the rights to view and broadcast the games on television. 

As such, the standing of a football club will turn on the quality of its business management.  And the way to test the business management of each club is to assess its performance in the AFL competition each year.  How did your team go?  Where did it finish?

If you look at the results of the AFL competition for this century, it is clear that Collingwood, Geelong, Hawthorn, and Sydney have been well managed, but Carlton, Essendon, and Melbourne have not – indeed, they are what may be called ‘basket cases’.  (I put the others to one side.)  The sometime chieftains of the tribe are no more now than spent uncles, who can be relied on to spoil a family gathering.  (If you think that is an allusion to The Dead of James Joyce, you are correct.)

The conclusion is in my mind inevitable – there has been a bad failure of management at each of those clubs.  But the response is the same as that of our government ministers – they do not accept responsibility, but on a bad day, they just sack the poor bunny in the limelight. 

And utter some worthless bromide.  The head of Melbourne said ‘we are a proud club…. and an ambitious club.’ 

And for that, our pride gets us one flag in sixty years, and the rest is just purgatory. 

The people running footy are like those in government.  They are wont to bang on – ‘bloviate’ is the term – as if they think we came down in the last shower.

What we can see, then, is a failure of management in the way that most AFL clubs conduct their business.  (If it matters, I doubt whether many of the top 100 on the ASX come out much better.)

And it looks like that failure is now manifest in the management of the AFL – from the Chairman down.  A somber veil of mediocrity has descended, a house specialty here in Oz.  There is far too much mumbling and grumbling, and it passes my understanding that the AFL can slap us all in the face by counting out free TV on some nights, and saying ‘If you want to watch the best we can offer in the comfort of your home on a miserable winter night in Melbourne, you will have to shell out a kicker to Rupert Murdoch, or the like.’ 

It is hard to imagine a worse case of business management.  It all depends on keeping faith with your customers – and the AFL is losing it.  And that is before you get to the swooning salaries of the hangers-on.

It looks to me that those running the AFL have lost touch with you and me after being duchessed with cocktails and canapes by the set lovingly patronized by their Chairman when at home at fortress South Yarra.  When did they last down a Four’n Twenty in the outer with the real footy followers?

The AFL is also losing it by its grubby dealings with and condescension to the gaming industry.  This is a simple but gross moral failing, and one that taints the AFL – and all of us who support it.  And our governments.  If the AFL was listed on the ASX, I would refuse to invest in it on this ground alone.

And then there are the grifters in the press and elsewhere who just want to clip their ticket, and make the simple sound tricky.  They are like flies buzzing on refuse, and with their fellow travelers in sleaze, they show why I have not been to a game since 1999. 

I still enjoy tuning into a game occasionally, but so much of the tribal fervor has gone with the wind of the dollar and the glare of the machines. 

I have been fortunate to have a fall-back in Melbourne Storm, who have been well managed since their inception, and who have therefore kept my patronage and membership – although the big contribution of the NRL was to make themselves public enemy number one south of the Murray.  It was like test cricket – a sworn enemy!  A simple verity of childhood and youth.  (I subscribed to the Rebels four days before they finally hit the fence in another display of Australian communal incompetence.)

And there was a time when you went to watch the footy on Saturday arvo, and your one regret as a Melbourne supporter was leaving the Prince Alfred beer garden after lunch.  The rest was just foreseen misery – penitence, if you prefer.

Otherwise, those in charge of management at the AFL and its clubs, and those in the media and government, need, in the immortal words of the Couldabeens, to have a very good look at ‘votre selves.’  You are badly letting down us and our game. 

And that is a very bad place to be in the City of Melbourne.  Even if this comes to you from one who has grown old, and one, like King Lear, who is cranky as a result. 

But oh, for those times in Glen Iris more than seventy years ago, when every second kid in Rosedale Road had an Essendon jumper with number ten on his back, and the world was so much simpler – and, on a good day, even innocent.

The Woes of the AFL

The front and back pages of The Age today are all bad news for the AFL.  Commercial TV has snubbed the game tonight between two ‘giants’, Carlton and Essendon.  The sports pages discuss the sacking of the coach by Melbourne, and ask whether this is the worst AFL season ever.  The final eight looked settled half way through the season, and too many matches since then have been just frightful.  A grizzly Melbourne winter just got a lot worse for most of its people – including me, a Melbourne supporter for more than seventy years. 

It now looks like three ‘powerhouse’ clubs – Carlton, Essendon, and Melbourne – need a revolution from within to revive; while the Eagles are declared broken, North Melbourne has lost whatever spark it had, and St Kilda is the forever bridesmaid.  The performance of Brisbane and the two new clubs are the bright lights.

Football in Australia is a game vital to the upbringing of our children and to the sanity of us adults.  It is an essential – indispensable – part of our communal life.  For most of us, it takes the place of religion, with the MCG as its communal heart and shrine.  If you have not been there on Grand Final Day or Boxing Day, you have not lived in Melbourne. 

Football is an integral part of a vibrant city.  There are times when you can feel it in the air, and we can survey each other with what John Keats called ‘wild surmise’. 

And somehow life just gets better.

For those reasons, the people who run football hold offices of public trust.

Football at the top is still a game, but it is also a business.  The clubs are part of the entertainment industry, revolving around the rights to view and broadcast the games on television. 

As such, the standing of a football club will turn on the quality of its business management.  And the way to test the business management of each club is to assess its performance in the AFL competition each year.  How did your team go?  Where did it finish?

If you look at the results of the AFL competition for this century, it is clear that Collingwood, Geelong, Hawthorn, and Sydney have been well managed, but Carlton, Essendon, and Melbourne have not – indeed, they are what may be called ‘basket cases’.  (I put the others to one side.)  The sometime chieftains of the tribe are no more now than spent uncles, who can be relied on to spoil a family gathering.  (If you think that is an allusion to The Dead of James Joyce, you are correct.)

The conclusion is in my mind inevitable – there has been a bad failure of management at each of those clubs.  But the response is the same as that of our government ministers – they do not accept responsibility, but on a bad day, they just sack the poor bunny in the limelight. 

And utter some worthless bromide.  The head of Melbourne said ‘we are a proud club…. and an ambitious club.’ 

And for that, our pride gets us one flag in sixty years, and the rest is just purgatory. 

The people running footy are like those in government.  They are wont to bang on – ‘bloviate’ is the term – as if they think we came down in the last shower.

What we can see, then, is a failure of management in the way that most AFL clubs conduct their business.  (If it matters, I doubt whether many of the top 100 on the ASX come out much better.)

And it looks like that failure is now manifest in the management of the AFL – from the Chairman down.  A somber veil of mediocrity has descended, a house specialty here in Oz.  There is far too much mumbling and grumbling, and it passes my understanding that the AFL can slap us all in the face by counting out free TV on some nights, and saying ‘If you want to watch the best we can offer in the comfort of your home on a miserable winter night in Melbourne, you will have to shell out a kicker to Rupert Murdoch, or the like.’ 

It is hard to imagine a worse case of business management.  It all depends on keeping faith with your customers – and the AFL is losing it.  And that is before you get to the swooning salaries of the hangers-on.

It looks to me that those running the AFL have lost touch with you and me after being duchessed with cocktails and canapes by the set lovingly patronized by their Chairman when at home at fortress South Yarra.  When did they last down a Four’n Twenty in the outer with the real footy followers?

The AFL is also losing it by its grubby dealings with and condescension to the gaming industry.  This is a simple but gross moral failing, and one that taints the AFL – and all of us who support it.  And our governments.  If the AFL was listed on the ASX, I would refuse to invest in it on this ground alone.

And then there are the grifters in the press and elsewhere who just want to clip their ticket, and make the simple sound tricky.  They are like flies buzzing on refuse, and with their fellow travelers in sleaze, they show why I have not been to a game since 1999. 

I still enjoy tuning into a game occasionally, but so much of the tribal fervor has gone with the wind of the dollar and the glare of the machines. 

I have been fortunate to have a fall-back in Melbourne Storm, who have been well managed since their inception, and who have therefore kept my patronage and membership – although the big contribution of the NRL was to make themselves public enemy number one south of the Murray.  It was like test cricket – a sworn enemy!  A simple verity of childhood and youth.  (I subscribed to the Rebels four days before they finally hit the fence in another display of Australian communal incompetence.)

And there was a time when you went to watch the footy on Saturday arvo, and your one regret as a Melbourne supporter was leaving the Prince Alfred beer garden after lunch.  The rest was just foreseen misery – penitence, if you prefer.

Otherwise, those in charge of management at the AFL and its clubs, and those in the media and government, need, in the immortal words of the Couldabeens, to have a very good look at ‘votre selves.’  You are badly letting down us and our game. 

And that is a very bad place to be in the City of Melbourne.  Even if this comes to you from one who has grown old, and one, like King Lear, who is cranky as a result. 

But oh, for those times in Glen Iris more than seventy years ago, when every second kid in Rosedale Road had an Essendon jumper with number ten on his back, and the world was so much simpler – and, on a good day, even innocent.

Who cares any longer about race?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Many summer schools at Cambridge and Oxford – and one at Harvard – have been lights in my life.  One or other university in England used to ask questions about what I suppose might be called my ‘race’.  Fortunately, they gave me the option of declining to answer.  This was just as well.  It’s not just that I did not know what the answer was – why was I even being asked?  I could not give a hoot about what label about race someone may seek to pin on me – but why would someone even try?

I suppose an exception would be if someone tried to pin me as being ‘Aryan’.  That would be deeply offensive – like calling someone – of either sex – an acolyte of Ayn Rand.  For that matter, I would be unsettled to be called ‘white’ – what decent inquiry could that be a response to?

As best I can see, I am a common garden Australian – in the name of God, anything but ‘Aussie.’  My dad’s mum was born in Scotland – hence my middle name ‘McPherson’.  On one of my trips through the Highlands, I got into the heart of the territory of the clan McPherson and visited the clan museum.  I went in thinking I might make a donation – as a member of the family, so to speak.  But I was informed, and not apologetically, that I was disqualified because the alleged clan connection was through the female line. 

‘McPherson’ means ‘son of a parson’.  My wife was born Clark and said to be Irish.  Clark meant ‘cleric,’ and the Scot thought she may have a stronger claim to being Scottish.  At that point I decided that they could stick any donation in a place happily made more accessible to those wearing a kilt.

That is a full account of any inquiry into my ancestry.  (But I was glad to hear years later that the McPhersons had a claim to fame.  Culloden was the site of the battle where the English toweled up the Scots once and for all.  My lot, I was told, were a day late.  Smart bastards.)

I was reflecting on this the other day while going to see my podiatrist.  He is Indian.  How do I know?  Because he is a person of colour with an Indian name and accent and we naturally discussed his background when discussing cricket, which has the power of religion in India.  Like so many from India, he is a passionate follower of cricket, especially when India is involved. 

We discussed a recent Test Match in England when most of the crowd was said to be Indian.  Perhaps I should say ‘of Indian extraction,’ since most of them probably lived in the U K.  We laughed at the difficulty of imagining such a scene in the land of any other former imperial power – like France, Spain or Holland.

When I lived an hour out of Melbourne in the sticks, I was occasionally heard to mutter that the problem was that there were too many white men.  In Yarraville, our needs are mostly met by people from every part of Asia.  The Greek and Russian Orthodox churches and the Greek and Italian cafes now look very Establishment, and if you cross over to Footscray, you may wonder what part of Africa or Asia you have landed in.

But in what instances might it be appropriate to talk of the racial background of someone?  If I say my mate Joe is Australian, Chinese, Aboriginal, Muslim, White, Coloured or Jewish – what does the epithet add to the conversation?  (I put to one side instances where the epithet may have consequences for the times of the meeting or the food to be served.)

If I say Joe is Aboriginal or Jewish, I am I think making a statement about his racial antecedents.  When might that matter?  Put differently, when might a statement about the race of a person become racist?

The Australian Constitution contains on my search only one reference to race.  Section 25 refers to persons of any race being disqualified from voting by the laws of a state.  ‘Race’ is not defined, but had its own meaning in the Imperial Parliament of the Empress of India.  The primary criterion was colour, even when Disraeli was Prime Minister of the U K.

Nor is the word defined in the Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act 1975.  Its operative provision (s. 9) refers to ‘race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin.’  Those terms are not synonymous.

A glance at the Macquarie Dictionary (7th Edition) shows what a minefield we have.

race…. a group of people sharing genetically determined characteristics such as skin pigmentation or hair texture…. the differentiation of people according to genetically determined characteristics…. a group of people sharing a language or culture or traditional beliefs or practices….

racism…. the belief that human races have distinctive characteristics which determine their respective cultures, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule or dominate others…. behaviour or language…. either demonstrating an inherent prejudice without specific hostile intent or, alternatively, intended to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate…

Jewish: of or relating to or characteristic of the Jews; Hebrew…

Hebrew…a member of that branch of the Semitic people descended from the line of Abraham; an Israelite; a Jewish person….

Perhaps I should set out s. 9 of the Commonwealth Act:

 It is unlawful for a person to do any act involving a distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of any human right or fundamental freedom in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.

It is apparent that the Commonwealth regarded the qualifier of ‘race’ as being at least potentially different to the qualifiers of ‘colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin.’  ‘National’ looks to be in a different kind of field to ‘race’, ‘colour’, ‘descent’ or ‘ethnic origin’.  But if you are speaking of ‘national origin,’ that may be as hard to shake off as ‘ethnic origin’ or ‘race’ ‘colour’ or ‘descent’.

But when might any such distinction matter – decently or at all? 

As I recall it, the Irish got justifiably sick of being on the wrong end of tasteless slips or slurs.  There is no doubt that England’s ‘Irish problem’ began many hundreds of years ago because they regarded the Irish as racially inferior – they had about the same level of contempt for indigenous peoples in Ireland as their successors would show to indigenous people in Australia when they settled here.  ‘Beyond the pale’ was an exercise in apartheid in the fourteenth century.  (The English had similar feelings of superiority toward the Scots, but the Scots were armed and dangerous to the people of England in their own homes, and accordingly were treated with less obviously lethal contempt.)

If you can afford a Zegna suit, a Panerai watch, or a Ferrari, you will be said to enjoy ‘Italian flair’ – and pay heaps for the privilege.  The Germans on the other hand have not had a good press since Dante or even Tacitus – where they are treated as a nation of drunks.  But they also meet more sinister and persistent aversions.  When I started following F1, Michael Schumacher was preeminent.  He was also guilty of misconduct – that I was, and am, prepared to make allowances for.  Then I read a sensible analysis by an English journalist who said that Ayrton Senna was much worse.  But his misconduct was mere ‘Brazilian flair,’ whereas Schumacher showed ‘ruthless Teutonic efficiency’ – and ‘Teutonic’ has shades that go back to the Dark Age.

Here was a typical case of how we slip back to prejudice through a combination of haziness, laziness, and nastiness.

If I talk about Joe’s beliefs, these are matters that Joe can, at least in theory, change.  But that is not the case if I am talking about qualities ascribed to Joe at birth – race, colour, or descent.

The real vice in each case is the same.  I am allowing an incursion into Joe’s dignity or worth that arises merely from the fact that he is human.  If it matters, the person who most clearly stated that opinion was a German named Immanuel Kant.  It may be described as a masthead of the Enlightenment – which was in large part driven in Germany. 

The other disservice I do Joe in looking at attributes he might be said to have been saddled with at birth is that it may appear that he has been denied the benefit of the movement, in what we call the civilized world, by which our rights are said to derive from Contract rather than Status.

And if we find that status is in some way genetically determined, at what point might we enter the verboten world of caste?

The upshot is that I see little or no point in talking about my race or that of any other people.  There are of course some harmless exceptions – like the wonderful capacity of Pacific Islanders to play rugby, or the endurance of Africans in long distance athletics, but they are exceptions.

And I am happy enough to live with ‘Australian’ as my only relevant signifier of my background or standing in my community.  If I had been embraced by the McPhersons at Newtonmore, and become a devoted self-proclaimed Scot, with the zeal of a convert, could I perhaps have got to the stage where I felt being called on to decide which was my best call sign – Australian or Scots? 

Or perhaps I may have reflected on The Divided Self written by the Scot R D Laing who said that if you put up a front long enough, you might wind up with nothing left behind the screen.  (At least, that is how I read it a very long time ago at university.)

As for religion, most people believe that religion holds nothing for them – except the one they subscribe to.  That is my view, except that I have no exception.  I have no faith in any religious faith.  Others can do what they like that is lawful, while I hope that they do not get in my way, either politically, or so as to cause me grief when it comes my time to go.

If you want to know why I am so cool about God, consider Deuteronomy 20:16-18.  The passage begins:

But of the cities of these peoples which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive.  But you shall utterly destroy them….

As I follow it, the three major faiths to come from the Middle East give some credence to the book that contains this command from God to annihilate tribes other than God’s chosen people: ‘let nothing that breathes remain alive’.  Can you  imagine anything more lethal?  On a bad day, it might lead me to believe in another venomous proposition – Original Sin.

Since I was born in 1945, I came into man’s estate in Australia in a democracy crippled by the strife within one of the two major parties.  That strife was in no small part driven by forces out of Ireland and Rome – at least, that is what I was taught as a God-fearing Protestant.  The bigotry was both hurtful and harmful.  To my mind, it showed a national immaturity that only ended with the steep decline of religion. 

When the English and Irish strife arrived here, both sides were holier than thou, and my country right or wrong.  But it was beyond doubt that England had treated Ireland appallingly over the centuries, at first just on racial grounds, and later on both racial and religious grounds.  We don’t need to see anything like it again, and I am relieved that my children know nothing about sectarian or foreign division within Australia.

As I recall it from the mists of time, there were two twists in the tail for the Irish diaspora and the sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics here in Australia.  One was that if people here wanted to identify with people in Ireland, they were entrusting their standing to forces beyond their control.  What did they have to say about terrorism and the IRA? 

If I claim to be identified with a foreign regime because of some perceived genetic connection with those who run it, I may bring down on my own head unwelcome imputations if that regime behaves inhumanely.

The other issue with the Irish was that of divided loyalty.  This erupted in Britain with the Reformation, the Act of Supremacy, the Spanish Armada, and Guy Fawkes.  It was settled in the Glorious Revolution of 1689.  The result is that under the English constitution, and therefore relevantly ours, we cannot have a Catholic head of state. 

I wonder if we could pass a law to that effect now.  A key part of our inheritance from the United Kingdom would be against the laws that we presently have in place.

Well, then, in the year of Our Lord – anno domini – 2025, why do any Australians feel any need to get tied up about their ancestry?  Isn’t being Australian enough? 

After all, have we not enough on our plate already in dealing with the oppression of our indigenous people in the years that have elapsed since Governor Arthur Phillip ran up the Union Jack at Sydney Cove in 1789, and commenced the process leading to the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia? 

It helps to remember that Australia, as it now is, started off as a jail for the rejects of Britain – and those in charge were not much better than the convicts.   And not one of either had an ancestry to write home about. 

Not much of a rock to build a bloody nation on.

Non sequiturs

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The most common form of fallacy, in the broad sense of that term, is a statement that the premises of an argument lead to a conclusion that they do not.  The conclusion simply does not follow from the premises.  The Latin term is non sequitur.  ‘My uncle smoked fifty a day and lived until he was ninety – when he got hit by a bulldozer.  Therefore, I can smoke the same amount without impairing my health.’

If I criticise the present government of Ireland, that act alone cannot establish that I have an irrational prejudice against Irish people at large – especially those people claiming to be Irish at the other end of the world.  That would be an obvious non sequitur.

But if Irish people in Australia accused me of such irrational prejudice against all Irish people on that basis, and no other evidence, I would resent that very much. 

And that resentment would be much greater if those making this untenable charge – because that is what it is – are plainly not stupid, but hold positions of responsibility and power.  (On a bad day, they may even get the sobriquet of being ‘influencers’, people who are rarely seen without a smart phone or podcast mike in their hands.)  I would regard this false charge from such a source as malicious. 

What do I mean by malice in this conduct?  In the words of Justice Holmes, ‘harm to another person was intended to come of it, and … such harm was desired for its own sake as an end in itself.’

The risk then is that a false charge against me has led to my having an adverse opinion of at least some Irish people.  And this might then be urged to support a claim that I had an irrational prejudice against Irish people at large.  And so, a false statement gets what some call ‘traction’, and this rolling ball can gather plenty of moss.

People can have their own views about the bearing of this analogy on the current discussion surrounding suggestions put forward by the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism.  The lady is obviously one of outstanding credentials and honours.  She is one of the most privileged people in Australia, one who could attract the ear of government – or, if you prefer, call on our government to hear her voice.  Her Wikipedia entry is a trainline of civic adornment and government recognition in the Sydney Establishment.  University Medal.  Harvard.  Associate to High Court Judge.  Partner of the Sydney Establishment law firm.  Director of a bank.  Officer of ASIC, member of the Opera board, and other quangos.  Order of Australia.  As elite as it is possible to get in Oz, she would be as far removed from Old Jack out the back of Yuendemu as any person, white or black, in this Commonwealth.

And at least two things seem clear about the envoy. 

First, someone of this training and experience would be quite incapable of committing the non sequiturs that I have referred to above.

Secondly, we are asked to accept that those as elite as their envoy are in need of protection over and above that afforded by our laws and governance to identifiable minority groups who do not have the same political clout or economic heft.

And even this discussion seems both petty and insensitive when we reflect on the inexpressible horror of events in the Holy Land that have led it to it.  Is it not the case that a whole ocean of ink cannot wash away the stain left by one lost child?

But, still, in what sense is the lady an ‘envoy’ – a title certainly denied to the people of Old Jack? 

If I look at the Shorter English Oxford Dictionary, I find ‘A public minister sent by one sovereign or government to another for the transaction of diplomatic business’ and ‘An agent, commissioner, deputy, messenger, representative.’ 

Surely neither party contemplated the kind of separation in our community that those terms would suggest.  Do the people the envoy was appointed to represent really want to be seen to be that different to other Australians?  Should I be looking at my friends of Irish or Jewish descent as being somehow different to me – branded, even?  Do Albanian or Anglican Australians see themselves as separated from the rest of us by race or at all?  Outside of the First Nations, does human pedigree somehow count in my country?

I will look later at some issues arising from the appointment of this envoy and her recommendations to the government that appointed her.  The only thing I wish to say of it now is that both the appointment and her advice seem to me to be predicated on the proposition that events in the history of one race of people may entitle or even require a government to treat all people who belong to that race differently as a matter of law to people of other races. 

That in my view is a proposition that is as pernicious as it is baseless.  And I fear it will generate real resentment and cause just the kind of grief and stress that the creators of the office of envoy sought to contain.

Trying to deal with Australians who are seen by some to be different is not, then, this Prime Minister’s strong suit.  He is in my view honest and well meaning, but this is his second gutser in the tricky realm of race in Australia.  Honesty may be necessary, but it is not sufficient, and the old saying remains true – the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Well, at least some Australians may get some light relief from reflecting that those who support the appointment and the work of the envoy include a lot of those political and press warriors who spend so much time banging on about elites, identity politics (the tendency of people in a group to forge exclusive alliances), virtue signaling, or giving our First Nations people a Voice recognized in the Constitution – because, wait for it, it would be ‘divisive’ in the Australian community!

And then we could look at those people whom the envoy was appointed to represent, and ask how many people of, say, Aboriginal, Chinese, Arab, or Muslim descent or connection have risen to the same commanding heights as her lot in in the professions, business or government of Australia – or even just attained common garden membership of the Melbourne Club or Royal Melbourne Golf Club.

Events, dear boy, events – are what keep our weather cocks turning in the wind. 

, , , ,

Race – racism – Special Envoy.

Flowering Times at the English Bar

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

[This began as a short note in comparison with the US but got expanded into a potted history of English law.]

During the period historians call the waning of the Middle Ages, the history of England was shattered and then shaped by the Wars of the Roses.  As Shakespeare envisioned it, these wars were ignited during a meeting of the leading members of the ruling class at a place called the Inner Temple, a lawyers’ communal house in central London.  They argued about who had the better title to the English crown.  It got so loud that they quit the hall and repaired to the garden.  Richard Plantagenet, the Duke of York, had stated his claim and he asked those who followed him to pluck a white rose for the House of York.  Others chose a red rose for the House of Lancaster.  It was all very English – people of power and substance who had been trained in the law debating ‘nice sharp quillets of the law’ – until it descended into ‘blood-drinking hate’ condemning a ‘thousand souls to death and deadly night.’  We get a grim combustion of privilege, savoir faire, and raw violence.

Well, that is certainly high drama – enough to be shown in an evocative painting that hangs in the House of Commons.  There is a copy of it at the entrance to my Yarraville flat, because it stands for the confluence of the law, history, language, and theatre that has coloured my whole professional life. 

And it leads to the following reflections.

The ‘activist’ is commonly the kind of person who gets up the noses of other people.  Just look at the fate of the Jewish hasid whose gruesome execution on Good Friday is annually recalled with reverence by millions throughout the world.

The institution known as the English bar, the grouping of its first lawyers, has a very long history.  It is a story that comes from centuries before the white men arrived in America, and even more before they settled, if that’s the word, in Australia. 

An English legal historian – it was Theodore Plucknett – said that by about 1300 there was ‘a very brilliant bar’ in England.  I once wondered how a legal historian or jurist could be so confident about that – but I don’t now.  And what I do know is that this bar would unleash activists who shaped the history of England in a way not seen anywhere else in the world.

The lawyers were obviously involved in drafting Magna Carta, which we now see with the common law as the foundation of the English constitution – and therefore ours here in Australia – and what we call the rule of law.   You can watch Kenneth Clark’s Civilization yet again, but I doubt if you will see any reference to the rule of law.  What Magna Carta established in 1215 was that the king was under the law because the law made the king.  And the king could not proceed against me except by and with the law. 

The world had not seen anything like it – and most of the world – say China, Russia and nearly all of Africa and South America – is yet to experience anything like it even now.  But there is not much point in having a Ph D on the enigmatic smiles in Leonardo, or the opera buffa of Mozart, if you live in perpetual fear of a knock on the door just before dawn, when two programmed thugs in black leather take you away, and you are not seen or heard of again.  We only get a hint of that powerlessness when we go, say, to Moscow or Rio for the first time – or, as I am now told, you get off the plane now in the U S under President Trump.

For reasons I have never understood, English jurists tend to be coy about the contractual effect of the Great Charter.  Well, there was an enforcement clause, that was Exhibit A in the duress case at the Vatican, but the promises were mutual, and intended to be binding, by the most sacred bonds then known to the law, and by and large they were.  That is what we call a contract.  It was just like the service contract entered into now by the CEO of a public company or the principal of a private school.  And Richard II was just one of a number of kings removed from office, and then life, for falling into what lawyers might call a fundamental breach of contract or a repudiation of his fundamental obligations contained in his coronation oath.

The lawyers made their presence felt in Magna Carta.  They could see a monopoly in the offing and moved to protect it.  Clause 45 of Magna Carta provided that the crown would only appoint as officers of the law ‘such men as know the law of the kingdom and well desire to observe it’.  This is still part of our law (although it is routinely ignored by governments intent on promoting activists that are to their liking).

Then in 1292, the king sent a writ (a form of letter) to the Common Bench ‘concerning attorneys and learners’ stipulating that the ‘better, worthier and more promising students…. should follow the court and take part in its business; and no others’.  It is fundamental that legal education and the profession as a whole were put under the direction of the courts, and not some institution of learning or government at large.  From the very start, the English bar, or profession, asserted its independence from government by the crown.  That has been so for 800 years.  It is no longer so in the United States.

The English, for this is what they now called themselves, liked to get involved ‘politically’ at all levels.  They also invented pubs and gentlemen’s clubs.  It was only natural, then, that the lawyers would gather socially and professionally in collegiate groups.  They were called Inns of Court.  One of them was the Inner Temple referred to above, and eating dinners was a fixed part of the regime of becoming a lawyer.  You went there to be indoctrinated – rather as a Catholic later might subscribe to the Society of Jesus the better to practise and champion his religious faith, rather than a learned profession. 

You had the bar and the bench, and the tradition that judges should only come from the bar soon hardened into custom, and then into law.  But your membership of an Inn stayed with you for life, and over time the Inns would become a kind of finishing school for young men wanting to take part in the governance of England.  The apprentices had to attend so many dinners each term, and such teaching as there was never extended to anything like theory or philosophy.  They learned on the job, and only on the job.  That is still the case.  Universities had little or no place in the training of working lawyers until many centuries had passed.  The result was that the lawyers were not just involved in formulating the law – they were driving it from birth.

Now, people coming together to gain strength in numbers, especially if they owe a form of allegiance to their group, unsettle monarchs and government generally.  (Milton noticed that ‘fear of change perplexes monarchs’.)  The French revolutionaries quickly banned combinations in a manner that would be followed by the ruling class elsewhere to the appearance of trade unions.  Indeed, as the great French historian Marc Bloch suggested, it is hard to think of a more evocative term in the history of Europe than commune.  Well, the communal life of the English bar would justify all those apprehensions, and it would haunt and finally tame the English crown.

The Serjeants at the bar had their curious outfits and head gear; their coifs reminded some of tonsured clerics (or latterday nuns); and their descent into the esoteric may have reminded others of strolling players, the Freemasons in The Magic Flute, or besotted Tarot card readers.  But their whole training and close upbringing led them, in the words of the legal historian Sir William Holdsworth, to ‘maintain in the common law and the common lawyers that boldness in the face of authority which has always been the chief bulwark of our constitutional liberties.’  This attribute of the lawyers, and the readiness of the nobility to join with them against the English Crown, are two massive columns of the political differences between England and Europe.

Then there was the way the English bar and bench went about making the law.  The great legal historian F W Maitland published lectures under the heading The Forms of Action at Common Law.  It is rarely taught now.  That is worse than a blunder.  What we call the common law is law made by judges applying the doctrine of precedent.  It is as natural as Pavlov’s dog to deal with a problem by asking ‘How did we deal with this before?’.  The notion that like cases should be treated alike is fundamental to our sense of fairness – that is, justice.

It started in England with arguments about whether the person moving the court had bought the right form from the court.  Not just pink for trespass or blue for debt, but something like that.  This dedication to forms was par for ‘primitive’ law – as it is now the curse of our lives under robots. 

After a while, lawyers started taking notes of these arguments.  These were published as the Year Books.  They are our first law reports.  (I used to be the proud owner of a complete set – Law French and Latin in Gothic Print.)  Perversely, our ancestors worked back from the legal process to look at what kind of legal right was being invoked – a process that led to the celebrated remark of Sir Henry Maine that our substantive law was secreted in the interstices of procedure.

(The English also played a leading part in the development of sports like football, cricket, tennis and golf.  It may well be that in each case, what started as a simple custom for idle pastimes settled into something more permanent and mature when the English took the trouble to formulate elaborate bodies of written rules for the governance of sports that now underlie businesses worth billions of dollars.  You can see a similar thread of accidental growth.  Perhaps the Corsican parvenu may have been closer to the mark had he described them as a nation of book-keepers rather than shopkeepers.)

While the bar argued and the judges decided cases, texts began to appear that that would become what were called ‘works of authority’.  There were names like Glanvill, Bracton, Fortescue and Hale.  In the 18th century, Blackstone’s Laws of England would achieve something like biblical status in the U S. 

The descendants of the Anglo-Saxons in Germany had been corralled by the Normans from France, but whereas Germany and France adopted Roman law, the English willfully, stubbornly, and then proudly refused to do so.  The common law was native to England – indigenous if you like, just as the boomerang was indigenous to the first peoples of Australia – so that a distinguished American jurist, Professor James Barr Ames, could say with a straight face in his Harvard lectures that the ‘English common law is more German than the law of Germany itself’.  Their law was Teutonic in origin, even when filtered through German folk laws preserved in the Salic Law published in the fifth century.

It follows that the law books of the English were quite unlike Roman law texts – they were the for the most part collections of precedents with some commentary.  Anyone looking for any theory of the law would have sounded very odd – as odd as someone sounding off about the elegantia juris (juristic excellence) of the laws of Justinian that had evolved from the Tablets of Rome over a period of about one thousand years, and by which almost all the known world had been ruled.  In the result, this perverse island stubbornness has left the world divided between two great legal systems – common law and Roman law.

Students of philosophy – the few of them still left – are brought up to know the difference between the empirical approach of the English and the rationalist approach over the Channel.  It, too, is fundamental, as is the difference between the adversarial and inquisitorial mode of trial.  It is very sad that an insular attitude of our places of higher learning leaves our graduates ignorant of this mighty chasm which is as deep as the Atlantic.

The Roman law derived from codes.  It prefers codification.  The Code Napoléon is a good example.  The common law eschews theory, grand designs, and codification.  It arrived, as if by accident, over a period of time – the product of trial and error in applying the doctrine of precedent to events that unguided chance throws up. 

One is the rationalist view of the world.  It leans to theory.  The other is the empirical.  It leans to the experimental – or, simply, experience.  Ultimately that philosophical divide is reflected in the logical divide between deductive and inductive reasoning.  From our point of view – that of the common law – there is a lot of truth in the well-known statement of Oliver Wendell Holmes that the ‘life of the law has not been logic, but experience.’  (The risk in the rationalist view is that logic may dictate that there can only be one correct answer – and then you are on the path to the absolutism of totalitarian government.) 

But the difference in world view (Weltanschauung) between England and Europe is far greater and of more significance than the difference between Aristotle and Plato or Hume and Hegel.  Yet so few understand that difference, and nowadays it takes someone like Jonathan Sumption to refer to it.

If you go back to the period covered by the Year Books (1268 to 1535), you find something else we have not given nearly enough attention to.  The Inns were coming into being and their teaching was taking effect at that point in medieval history when English universities were still getting off the ground.  Until then, the priesthood had had a monopoly of higher learning.  And they had guarded and abused that monopoly viciously by burning at the stake people who wanted to read the gospel or conduct their worship in their own tongue.  Only the priest had the power to loose and bind – and the rest of us just had to take them on trust. 

Now that monopoly was busted.  Sure, the lawyers had their own tricks and quirks, that fascinated Shakespeare and that would revolt Dickens, but they were English foibles.  And they were foibles held by people who did not duck a fight – as nations of Europe would find out severally to their cost.

History has in my view underestimated this achievement of the English bar.  When you link it with events called the Reformation that we are coming to, the priesthood is being put back in its box in a way that we do not see much of anywhere else.  It looks to me to be a form of emancipation in the long march of history from our own self-imposed immaturity.

Luther in Germany protested about religion and the Church.  The Reformation in England had very little to do with religion.  The Tudors came to power when the magnates had exhausted themselves and fractured the nation in the Wars of the Roses.  Henry VIII had to secure his succession.  The Vatican had an imperial conflict of interest, and could not accommodate Harry.  England seceded, and it did so not by royal proclamation, but a series of carefully drawn statutes.  The judges had used ‘fictions’ to break the fetters of the old forms of action.  The parliament was not shy about doing the same in affairs of state.  They trotted out the line used for Magna Carta – they were just confirming the status quo.  ‘Where, by diverse sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire….’  Simple really – you just talk yourself into a position of moral rectitude – and not long after that, Shakespeare would descant on the ‘imperial’ theme in Henry V.

But from then the title of the crown derived from statute – the parliament.  The English were moving toward democracy.  Representatives of the people in parliament made the laws.  Representatives of the people in a jury decided whether someone had broken one of those laws.  They had given themselves Home Rule in religion, and no one else on the world had got even close to any such liberation.

Now, Thomas Cromwell, the lawyer, was actively involved in overhauling not just leadership of the English church, but the whole system of government in England – but we would not say that it was the lawyers who drove the Reformation.  Their most vivacious political flowering time came in the seventeenth century with the Stuarts.  It was as if these four kings were sent by God to put a bomb under the English Establishment that was far more explosive than any bomb dreamed of by Guy Fawkes. 

These erratic kings ran into king-breakers from Hell – landed gentry who had God, and training in the Inns of Court, like Pym, Elliot, Hampden – and Thomas Cromwell.  Behind these ‘amateurs’ was Sir Edward Coke, as tough as old boots, and the bane of the monarchy – whom he could contradict at will because he had the law in him and the kings didn’t.  The others were for the most part polite revolutionaries, armed only by God and the law.  The word ‘activist’ would have been the ultimate insult.  Perhaps it now merely reflects on our anemia.

In the upshot, after a civil war, one king was executed, and another was deposed, or just thrown out.  And the balance of power between parliament and the king was settled in the manner we now find it by the Bill of Rights. 

A bright young junior barrister named John Somers was briefed to do the first draft.  Jefferson would top and tail it for the Declaration of Independence.  Everyone knows about Thomas Jefferson, and his memorial.  Hardly anyone has heard of John Somers.  But in my view, which is biased, Somers was a much better draftsman.

Perhaps I may just refer to one member of the bar, Oliver St John, of St John’s College, Cambridge and the Inner Temple.  Charles I raised money without parliament by resorting to an ancient form of naval levy called Ship Money.  To a constitutional lawyer now who is used to the complexity of tax cases, there were obvious legal problems (as there now are in the tariffs of Donald Trump).  However, a challenge to their legality nearly 400 years ago in England was going to be hard – and out of the question anywhere else.  But a challenge was set up and led by St John, whose arguments were gone over for days in the pubs at Westminster.  It took me a full day to follow his argument in the octavo State Trials.  They were differently educated back then – in Latin, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and boy, can’t you see it. 

St John lost by a tame, slim majority (that the parliament dealt with when recalled).  The whole process would be very hard to replicate now, and just about impossible in most of the world.  I am still not sure that I understand how the legal issue came to be formulated, but St John followed our preference, articulated by Sir Owen Dixon, for a ‘strict and complete legalism’ in sensitive issues of political governance.  The whole process looks to me now to have been centuries before its time – centuries.

Then there was the trial of the Earl of Strafford.  He had been on the side of the Commons, but he had gone over to the crown and King Charles I.  He had an army in Ireland and the force of character to use it against the people in England.  He really put the wind up the English and they determined to take him down – terminally. 

On trial for his life, he ran rings around his pursuers in an impeachment in parliament.  They then dusted off the old process of sentence to death by act of attainder.  To put it softly, this was not really cricket.  If you look at his portrait, you will see both aloofness and something like compassion in the tall striking figure of St John.  But he was a most formidable advocate and opponent. 

Strafford and his king were confident when St John got up to speak in Westminster Hall on 29 April 1641, but the ice in his veins left no room for compassion.  He spoke for hours on legal arguments as sophisticated as those in the Ship Money Case.  Then, after nearly three hours of high technique from the Year Books on, he struck to kill – an English gentleman acting like an Australian taipan.

It was never accounted either cruelty or foul play to knock foxes and wolves on the head as they can be found, because they be beasts of prey.

That is by far the deadliest submission I have ever seen or heard.  Strafford was doomed, and his king had to sign the warrant. 

So, the people who gave the world that polite game of cricket could be lethal when stirred.  Many forget that Lord Denning, M R, that latterday champion of the people, had worn a uniform in the First World War.  He held that the executive government must never be allowed more power than is absolutely necessary.  His Lordship said so in a very English way.

…. there must be judges in the land who are ‘no respecters of persons and stand between the subject and any encroachment on his liberty by the executive.’  We taught the kings that from Runnymede to the scaffold at Whitehall: and we have not had any serious trouble about it since.

Quite so.

Well, the governance of England was now set in place.  In the eighteenth century, they developed the Cabinet and the Westminster model, and they started coming to terms with the quite blatant corruption, so finely detected by Sir Lewis Namier, by which the whole country had been run. 

In the eighteenth century, Lord Mansfield rewrote English commercial law with the help of experts who made up special juries – and occasionally supped with his Lordship, even when they were all involved in hearing a case.  Things were different then, and we cannot be heard to say that we do things better.  But some things never change.  The Elizabethans liked an old proverb: ‘Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.’   And they continue to smell each other out at the end.

In the nineteenth century, which is called the Age of Reform, the English sought to clean up their whole act in the administration of both the courts and parliament and the civil service, and make laws to deal with the grosser kinds of our inhumanity.  Then the suffrage became universal, women got the vote, the Welfare State was set up, the United Kingdom saved Europe from Germany, England gave up its empire, and it’s been sadly downhill ever since.

Still, the common law went its own way, and still does.  It does so very differently to the way in which Roman law works, and Sir Owen Dixon reminded us that the rule of law was not known to the Romans or their later followers.  As the common law judges were wont to say to government ‘Don’t tell us what the law is – we made it.’ 

We must recall that as part of their profession, the lawyers spent their time protecting the liberty of the subject and ensuring due process.  As often as not, it was their duty to argue against the crown, or moneyed interests, and if they felt intimidated, they were not up to it.  In the 16th century, the Chancery had a sign on its door: …the refuge of the poor and afflicted; it is the altar and sanctuary for such as against the right of rich men, and the countenance of great men, cannot maintain the goodness of their cause. 

Well, Dickens justly slammed that pious smugness in Bleak House and other novels, but the ‘oppressor’s wrong and proud man’s contumely’ dreaded by the prince of Denmark remain.  Unlike the Romans, we have not yet developed contumely as a separate cause of action, but it is a term you will see in claims for damages to make an example of the oppressor.  And it is in standing up against the oppressor’s wrong and proud man’s contumely that the profession of the lawyers justifies itself.

It all comes down in my view to a state of mind that is fundamental to what we understand, with the teaching of centuries of history, as the rule of law.  And although these things cannot be measured, we see a kind of individualism that underlies our view of government.  As Henry Lawson saw it, we are not keen on tugging the forelock.

This is all a very remarkable story.  The romantically inclined could get downright starry-eyed about it all.  But if we go back to the glory days of the revolts against the Stuarts, we see that the lawyers were in league with the parliament against the crown.  The Trevelyan clan were apt to go over the top about all this, but it is worth recalling what G M Trevelyan said:

Coke had not striven in vain.  He had enlisted the professional pride of the students of the common law against the rival systems especially favoured by the Crown and the Star Chamber, the Admiralty and the Ecclesiastical Court.  He had turned the minds of the young gentlemen of the Inns of Court, who watched him from afar with fear and reverence, to contemplate a new idea of the constitutional functions and of political affinities of their profession, which they were destined in their generation to develop in a hundred ways, as counsel for England had gone to the law with her King.

I used to think that most of  this kind stuff was just waffle.  Now I fear that we are losing it altogether.  And if you want to know what it might mean if you forget the history and role of the bar entirely, just look across the Pacific now.  The legal industry there, for that looks to be all there is, having the dollar as its only regulator, tamely tossed in the towel to a greedy government, and all its members should hang their heads in shame.  They have let down the people they are there to serve.

Perhaps I may be allowed a footnote on my experience with ancient forms of legal process, and the habit of our English ancestors in developing a form of writ, and then going about formulating a law to drive it. 

A great instance is the writ of account.  ‘I left you in charge of my stables while I took the Cross to Jerusalem.  Now that I am back, I find that horses are missing or lame, and I am not happy with what you say about expenses and receipts – and the local ale house is flourishing.  Here is a form of command from His Majesty that you duly account to me for your stewardship.  You know what fate awaits you if you do not respond properly to our Lord King.’

Does this not smell just a little of the Inquisition?  In order to justify this imposition, the judges of our common law later looked to Rome.  They came up with the term fiduciary – which has dazzled and bedevilled us ever since. 

I should know.  I spent the best part of a quarter of a century of practice dealing with greedy but sloppy trustees of family trusts who treated their trust like an Amex account.  I would open the war with a writ of account.  What could be more polite?  Well, this could lead to a public inquiry of great interest to the keepers of His Majesty’s revenue, and no one likes hanging out their dirty washing in public.  (I spent eighteen years hearing tax cases, and could there see all kinds of very nervy diffidence at first hand.) 

Only one lawyer in all that time really called my bluff.  He later ascended the heights, and most worthily, but only after his definitively patriarchal client had made a seven-figure donation to my fair lady, and Truth, Justice, and the Australian Way.  Who said that dragons don’t exist?  They named a bloody footy team after them.

So, I was interested to read that a very long time ago, Professor Ames had said that the action of account ‘is very analogous to a trust,’ and that the important thing to remember is that the action of account is ‘the father of the count for money had and received’. 

Too many lawyers don’t understand this.  We still need every piece of bedrock we can find.  And we should teach lawyers the history of the law because that is what the law is – history drawn up from events of the past to meet the needs of the present.  We don’t unleash doctors on the public who have not been taught anatomy.  Lawyers who do not know the history of their law are hard put to say that they know the law, or what it means to be a member of a learned profession.

NOTES

Wars of the Roses: Henry VI, Part 1, 2.4, 17, 108, 127.

Brilliant bar: T F T Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law, 4th Ed, 1948, 211

King under the law: Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, (Ed Woodbine, trans Thorne) Harvard, 1977, Vol I, 38.

1292 writ: Plucknett, above, 206.

Fear of change: Paradise Lost, Book One.

Ames on German law in England: Lectures on Legal History, Harvard, 1913, 34

Bloch on commune: Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, Folio Society, 2012, 433-4.

Holdsworth on boldness of common lawyers: History of English Law, cited in Gibson, The Common Law, A History, Federation Press, 2012, 41.

Maine on procedure: Sir Henry Maine, Law and Custom, John Murray, 1890, 389.

Homes on logic and experience: The Common Law, Little Brown, 1881, 1.

Self-imposed immaturity: Kant, What is Enlightenment? Kant’s Political Writings, Ed Reiss, Cambridge, 1970, 54.

Realm an empire: Act in Restraint of Appeals, 1533, 24 Henry VIII, c. 12.

Henry V:  Henry V, 3.6.120 and 4.1.42.

Ship Money Case: Hampden’s Case, State Trials, 2nd Ed, 1730, Volume 1, 483.

Trial of Strafford: John Adamson, The Noble Revolt, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2007, 272

Denning on the executive: Freedom under the Law, Stevens, 1949, 15.

Dixon on legalism: Jesting Pilate, Law Book Co, 1965, 247.

Dixon on Roman law: Again, 101.

Sign in Chancery: I have lost the citation – this comes from a book yet to be published.

Trevelyan on English counsel under Coke: England under the Stuarts, Folio, 1996, 105-106.

Writ of account: this matter is now dealt with in great and scholarly detail by J A Watson, The Duty to Account, Development and Principles, Federation Press, 2016.  Life may perhaps have been simpler had it been published forty years earlier.

Ames on action of account: Lectures, above, 119, 121.

Passing Bull 407 – What is the Question?

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In his weekly column in The Age today, Sean Kelly says that a taboo question for the Australian government is ‘at what point does America become the type of country we no longer want to ally with’?

There are two different questions we might have for potential allies.  Do we like their politics?  We are for, example, much more at home with the politics of Japan than say India or Indonesia.  But that does not mean that we should not enter into alliances with either.  Even before Trump, aspects of American politics troubled us – for example guns and Medicare, and their propensity to join with very undesirable governments, and then lose wars.  But that did not preclude us – on a non-partisan basis – from continuing our alliances with the US.  And toeing the line while snapping to attention.

But there is another question that is far more important.  Can we trust the U S to discharge its obligations to us under a treaty of Alliance like AUKUS?  Before Trump, we answered with a wobbly ‘Yes’.  Since Trump, the answer must be ‘No’ – and unequivocally.  Just look at Ukraine or the Middle East. 

And that answer will not change with the passing of Trump.  That will take a long time indeed.  A period in the dog house may be good for them.

It follows in my view that we should be looking to terminate AUKUS and entering into other alliances.  I agree with Mr Brandis that we should enter into an alliance with the E U. 

The bonus is that we are far more at home with their politics than those of the US.  At the age of nearly eighty, I regard both Germany and Japan as more dependable and essentially democratic than the U S.

Sic transit gloria.

Two great Dutch historians

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EXTRACTS FROM TWO VOLUMES OF A CURATED LIBRARY

DEBATES WITH HISTORIANS

Peter Geyl, 1955

B T Batsford, London, 1955; rebound with orange boards in navy slip case.

The Dutch have earned a reputation for tolerance and enlightenment.  In the 17th century, they offered sanctuary to great European thinkers like Spinoza and Locke – Spinoza died there; Descartes also sought protection there. 

Holland has also produced great historians.  One of them was the late Pieter Geyl (1887-1966).  Don’t just take my word for it.  A J P Taylor said: ‘If I were asked to name the historian whom I have most venerated in my lifetime, I should not hesitate for an answer.  I should name Pieter Geyl.’

Every now and then – it is not very often – you come across a writer who soon puts you at your ease.  There is a breadth and depth of learning; there is an absence of arrogance or waspishness; and there is some compassion, some generosity of spirit, too.  We may not be able to call someone ‘wise’ unless we can see something on top of a very fine mind – something like humanity, for the want of a better word. 

The late Professor Geyl qualifies on all counts, in spades.  He was trained in Holland, but he spent a lot of time teaching and writing in England and in the States; he also spent some time in Germany, something that I will come back to. 

The first essay in Debates with Historians comes from about 1952 and is called ‘Ranke in the Light of the Catastrophe.’  A Times Literary Supplement piece had in the eye of Geyl suggested that Ranke had by his ‘political quietism’ been a pioneer of National Socialism – the ‘Catastrophe’ of the title.  (In the fashion of the time, the article was unsigned.  Geyl referred to its ‘vehement one-sidedness’ and had said that in ‘this case it is not difficult to guess who is the writer’.)  Geyl was intent on defending the German historian against this charge, a very decent undertaking for a Dutchman so soon after that war, you might think. 

There are two things.  One is the great insight of Ranke that ‘Every period is immediate to God, and its value does not in the least consist in what springs from it, but in its own existence, in its own self.’  This to me sounds like Bonhoeffer.  It is to preach humility to historians – and some of them could do with the sermon. 

Then there is the magisterial closure to the refutation of the charge that Ranke had prefigured National Socialism.  It contains the following.

If we are tempted by our horror at the culmination of evil that we have just experienced or witnessed to pick out in the past of Germany all the evil potentialities, we may construct an impressively cogent concatenation of causes and effects leading straight up to that crisis.  But the impressiveness and straightness will be of our own constructing.  What we are really doing is to interpret the past in the terms of our own fleeting moment.  We can learn a truer wisdom from Ranke’s phrase that it should be viewed ‘immediate to God’, and he himself, too, has a right to be so considered…..Comprehension, a disinterested understanding of what is alien to you – this is not the function of the mind which will supply the most trenchant weapons for the political rough-and-tumble….To understand is a function of the mind which not only enriches the life of the individual; it is the very breath of the civilization which we are called to defend.

God send us more people who can think and write with that largeness of spirit – and consign our mediocrities to the dustbin that they deserve.

There is an essay on Carlyle, and ‘the spirit of the Old Testament that seems to be present, coupling anathematization with adoration.’  It is about Carlyle’s ‘impatience with baseness and cowardice, his feeling of being out of place in a world of superficial sentiment and mediocre living……the babbling of lifeless religiosity or the sham assurance of modern idealism.  Instinct, intuition, the myth, these were his challenge to the rationalists and glorifiers of science who (unappeasable grievance) had made the Christian certitude of his childhood untenable for him’.  Carlyle was impatient with those in thrall to logic.

Geyl, as it seems to me, gets the sadness in Carlyle exactly right: ‘the sentimental tie to a spiritual heritage which his intellect rejected, the painful reaction against the false teachers who gave him nothing in exchange for what they had robbed him of.’ 

That condition is very common now – it may define our time, as the time of the claimed death of God, but the author concludes on Carlyle: ‘and the perception of that tragic quality makes it possible to accept gratefully that which is vivifying in his work and serenely to enjoy its beauties.’  Would that other professional historians might be so generous with this poetic and prophetic lightning-conductor from the north.

Then follows an essay on Michelet, the first great historian of the French Revolution.  I have read Michelet, mostly in translation, the better to understand the loathing of the French for the church and, for many of them at one time or another, the English.  His father was an unsuccessful printer – as Professor Burrow reminds us, ‘exactly from the stratum from which the revolutionary crowds were chiefly recruited.’  But, Professor Geyl instructs us, business was bad under Napoleon, and ‘the memory of the Revolution was thus, in that poverty-stricken family, allied to detestation of the Corsican despot.’  It helps to have the inside running on the local knowledge of some historians. 

Michelet talks of the ‘people’ – le bon peuple – while Carlyle speaks of the ‘mob’.  Or, rather, as Geyl tells us, it is the people when it is good – the storming of the bastille; but when they are bad – massacring the inmates of prisons until the streets ran with blood – it is not ‘the people’ but ‘three or four hundred drunks.’  If the awful Terror was an awful weapon, it only had to be employed because of the evil English without, and the traitors within – ‘the people’ and France were guiltless.  (Do you recall Francois Mitterrand saying of Vichy France that ‘The French nation was not involved in that; nor was the Republic’?  Did they all come from Mars?  Have you heard a Russian say that it was not Russia that invaded Afghanistan – it was the Soviet Union?) 

On the one hand, Michelet dislikes Robespierre for the lack of that ‘kindness which befits heroes’; on the other hand, the moderates, who literally lost their heads, lacked ‘that relentless severity which it seemed that the hour required.’  Only seemed, Professor?  When people walk on egg-shells like that, they are protecting someone. 

There are four papers on Arnold Toynbee – but we have seen enough to gauge the quality of this fine book.  Professor Geyl represents something very, very fine about the European tradition.  He came from a nation that holds some of the title deeds of western civilization, to adopt a phrase of Churchill’s, a nation renowned for its tolerance.  His was a Europe that had just been convulsed in an appalling war, for the second time in a little more than a generation, but this historian is able to analyse its history in a way that does great honour to his calling.  In those essays, he had defended one German historian charged with being a step-ladder for the Nazis, and he had sought to understand what he saw as the ‘catastrophes’ that had befallen both France and Germany in different centuries and with different dictators.

I mentioned that Geyl had spent some time in Germany and that he wrote the Dutch version of the Talleyrand essay during the German occupation of Holland.  For thirteen months, Pieter Geyl, even then a most distinguished Dutch historian, had been kept at a place that Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Barack Obama visited a couple of years ago.  Its emblem was Jedem das Seine, ‘To Each his Own’.  We know it under a name of unspeakable horror – Buchenwald. 

On his release from Buchenwald, Geyl was kept in a Dutch prison by the Germans until the end of the war.  And, yet, in the period following that war, he was able to write about Europe, and the world at large, in the terms that I have indicated.  This, surely, was a colossal achievement, and one that humbles us. 

Professor Geyl has produced work that helps us come to terms with our humanity, and that is I think the proper purpose of the world of learning, or, as I would prefer to say, men and women of letters.  Or as A J P Taylor is quoted as saying in the blurb on this book, ‘Geyl is one of the few living men whose writings make us feel that Western civilisation still exists.’

MEN AND IDEAS

Johan Huizinga

Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1960; translated by J S Holmes and H van Marle.  Rebound in red and white fancy paper with matching slip.

The Dutch have long enjoyed a reputation for tolerance and for being a refuge for dissident intellectuals – like Descartes and Spinoza.  Johan Huizinga is a model of the European intellectual.  He has a lot in common with Pieter Geyl (whom we looked at in the second volume).  Both were Dutch historians arrested and held by the Germans.  Both were gracious and humane scholars with an open European world view. 

In The Waning of the Middle Ages, Huizinga spoke of the ‘vehement pathos of medieval life’ and the ‘extreme excitability of the medieval soul’.  Incidents were ‘by the sacredness of the sacrament raised to the rank of mysteries’.

Calamities and indigence were more afflicting than at present; it was more difficult to guard against them, and to find solace.  Illness and health presented a more striking contrast; the cold and darkness of the winter were more real evils.  Honours and riches were honoured with greater avidity and contrasted more vividly with surrounding misery.  We, at the present day [1925], can hardly understand the keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine, were formerly enjoyed…. The modern reader of newspapers can no longer conceive the violence of impression caused by the spoken word on an ignorant mind lacking mental food.

Monkeys abounded as pets.  Beggars were everywhere, many disfigured – in fact or fiction.  The legless dragged themselves around by wooden stumps.  The Church put a woman in the Godhead, and persecuted all her daughters on earth as the source of evil, according to a myth that everyone had to believe.  The Church also said that the Mother of God was a virgin, and the cult of the Virgin arose out of the failure of the Church to come to grips with the facts of life – we like sex, and were meant to, because otherwise the human race would just fade and pass away.  Doctors, as some were called, did not know what they were doing, but were admired.  Everyone loathed lawyers, and very few trusted any monk or friar.

Let us see how the commentary of this remarkable historian is so relevant to us right now.

…. the general evolution of the dominant groups – the democratisation of society – constitutes a danger.  Professional scholarship can never be more than for a few: it is aristocratic.  Literature (and with it popular scholarship) is for the many, must be for the many.  Modern culture must be democratic if it is to be at all.  …. The ultimate problem remains like a ghost, ever present and unlaid: Is it possible to extend a higher civilisation to the lower classes without debasing its standard and diluting its quality to the vanishing point?  Is not every civilisation bound to decay as soon as it begins to penetrate the masses?

That question may have been unfashionable, but the crash of all decency and fineness around populists like Trump makes it very urgent.

What about that other accursed ‘–ism’, nationalism?

Whether the relationship was large or small, the basis for the emotion embodied in ‘natio’ was the same everywhere: the primitive in-group that felt passionately united as soon as the others, outsiders in whatever way, seemed to threaten them or to rival them.  This feeling usually manifested itself as hostility and rarely as concord.  The closer the contacts the fiercer the hate. 

Does not what Huizinga called this ‘great ethnic antithesis’ underlie the rise of people like Farage, Hansen and Trump?

The Crusades, far from uniting the faith that was divided by language dissent and allegiance, reinforced the national enmities of Latin Christendom by bringing those peoples together again and again in martial equipment, battle array and a more or less sanctified rivalry…. A Frenchman remarkably observed that the French tend to behave themselves intractably among foreigners if they are not kept well in hand.

And as France, Russia and Germany showed, a revolution just makes things worse.

Then came the Revolution, when the mouth still called out for the universal good of virtue and love of mankind, but the mailed fist struck for the fatherland and the nation, and the heart was with the fist.  The factors ‘patrie’ and ‘nation’ had never before had such an intense influence as in the years from 1789 to 1796.  That fact merely confirms that nature constantly proves stronger than theory.  …. But as soon as one sets out to formulate the rights of man, the state appears to be required as the framework for his society.

That process reached frightful apotheoses under Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Franco and Mao.  But the author goes on:

Since Montesquieu, it had become a doctrine that liberty was born in the forests of Tacitus’ Germania, and that England’s political institutions had developed from that soil of that Old Germanic freedom.  France too had accepted the doctrine.

So had F W Maitland, but are we talking of doctrine or myth?  Whatever the answer may be to that question, this book seethes with insights like these.  This is not just learning or scholarship – this is wisdom of a kind that we so rarely see now.

France and England Compared

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The Lectures on Foreign History, 1494 – 1789, by J M Thompson (see below) may be the most read history book on my shelves.  It fills in a lot of holes, but I want to set out some observations of the author in the final lecture on the events leading to what is known as the French Revolution.  They illuminate major issues in the history of England that, in my view, still set us apart today from the U S.

French writers, unlike the English originals, had no practical experience of politics, and had not experienced a revolution.  ‘They tested their politics not by the experiment of self-government, but by the uncertain analogies of Greek and Roman history’.  Here is the age-old divide between the love of theory over the channel and the commitment to hard experience by the Anglo-Saxons.  It is fundamental and too little noticed.

Dr Johnson was cryptic about class and hierarchy.  ‘The great in France live very magnificently, but the rest very miserably.  There is no happy middle state as there is in England.’  This too is fundamental.  He might have added that the English aristocracy paid its way, in more ways than one, while the effete French refused point blank and got blotted out for their trouble.  While the English nobles in the 17th century joined with what the French called the bourgeoisie to bring the Crown to heal, the French nobles indulged in the Fronde, which delivered the Sun King and an absolute monarchy that a Tsar might have marveled at.  There is a chasm of difference between the two nations.

When the French Revolution came, its first practical reforms followed the English model, but its abstract Declaration of Rights was borrowed from America.  There lay just the difference between the two.’

A ‘mixture of arbitrariness and impotence was the tragedy of Louis XVI’s government.’  That is spot on – in every page of Carlyle.

The French were nothing like a unified nation with a uniform law – that England had been building at least since Magna Carta in 1215.  (Before they achieved Home Rule for religion in 1534.)  Voltaire remarked that ‘you changed your laws, your horses, at every stage of the road’.  (He also accused his countrymen of being ‘so full of vehemence, so free of depth.’)

‘Unjust taxation, because the privileged classes were largely exempt, and the wealthy could afford to compound with the tax-collector, whilst the poor and underprivileged were fleeced in proportion to their apparent means – one must either be very rich, or pretend to be very poor.’  This is another fundamental difference between the two hierarchies, and the world’s richest man now, in a rare lucid moment, might glimpse the truth of the real world.

‘Social disunity, then, and social unrest were the most fundamental causes of the Revolution.  The order of social privilege should correspond to the order of social service; in eighteenth century France the one exactly inverted the other.’  (My emphasis.)  I have always been leery of the phrase ‘ruling class’, but the above seems to be a fair description of the U S ruling class now, especially the revolting robber barons intent on obliterating – with a chain saw Texas and Deliverance style – as much of the order of social service as they can lay their polluted mits on.

This leads to the grand finale.  Speaking of England, Dr Thompson said that the ‘political spirit of the eighteenth century was based not on the equality, but on the harmony of classes.  Poor and rich together took a patriotic pride in ‘our free constitution which they continually contrasted with the slavery of continental countries’.  …. What prevented revolution in England was the social duties of the rich and of the political rights of the poor: it was the absence of this recognition which made the French Revolution inevitable.  Liberty does not depend on the institutions of a country, but upon the spirit in which they are administered.  Democracy is not a constitution, but a state of mind.’

‘It is as difficult for a nation to change its character as it is for an individual’.

These are piercing insights.  As

 it happens, the three passages I have emphasized represent just about all I have learned in seventy years of looking at the past.  The French term is noblesse oblige, and what counts is a state of mind.  If the descendants of slave driving Puritans ever had it – which I doubt – they have certainly now spat it out.  And they have done so with their eyes wide open and their minds utterly closed.

The following note is from A Curated Library.

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LECTURES ON FOREIGN HISTORY 1494 – 1789

J M Thompson

Blackwell, 2nd Ed, 1944, rebound in half claret leather with cream label.

The author wrote extensively on the French Revolution.  I have read and enjoyed everything he wrote on that period.  A tutor at Cambridge understood my respect.  He said that the author wrote at a time when style mattered.

James Matthew Thompson lived between 1878 and 1956.  His father was an Anglican priest.  He studied theology and philosophy at Oxford and was ordained in 1903.  In 1906 he became Dean of Divinity at Magdalen College, Oxford.  He challenged orthodoxy, and resigned as Dean in 1915.  After the war, he returned to teach history.  The lectures in the present book were delivered to first year students during the winter terms of 1921 to 1924.  The book of those lectures was first published in 1925.  It may lack the complete style of the later works on French history, but it is wonderfully assembled and crisp, and it fills in many holes in the historical knowledge of those who go straight from the Renaissance and Reformation to the French Revolution.

In the Preface, Thompson says that ‘the essence of history is not the learning of facts, but the judging of evidence.’  In the first chapter, he puts that another way.

You don’t study history to learn historical facts, but to acquire historical judgment.  It is not learning that makes a historian, but discernment.

That is rolled gold.  Two pages later, we get: ‘Politically speaking, England in 1494 is already 400 years ahead of the rest of Europe’.  That proposition is not just English hubris.

Since the eleventh century it has been virtually one country under one king – a condition that France and Spain are only just reaching, and which Italy and Germany will not reach for another 400 years.  It has the only effective parliament in Europe, and the only limited monarchy which remains limited during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Its kings have suppressed the arbitrary power of the nobles without transferring it to the crown.  By losing their continental possessions, they have learnt the uselessness of foreign conquest.  England in 1494 is peaceful and orderly, and the richest country in northern Europe.

And that’s without mentioning Magna Carta, the common law, habeas corpus, the Inns of Court and the judiciary, or the fact that England would shortly repatriate its church – which would further distinguish itself from Europe, even the Protestant parts.

The cannons of the King of France were inscribed Ratio ultima Regum – ‘the final argument of kings.’

Anyone could learn to fire a gun, and one gunman was almost as good as another.  Armies grew bigger.  Disciplined masses took the place of erratic heroes.  The business of raising and arming troops passed from the feudal lord to the professional soldier, and from the professional soldier to the State. 

An Anglican divine may have something to say about the Reformation.

It is always a difficult question, how far it is proper to receive wages for religious work, or to exact payment in return for spiritual privileges.  But all conscientious men feel (and they felt the same in the sixteenth century) that it is wrong to make a profit out of religion.

What would the Mormons now say?

It was not merely the demand for books, or the interest in theology, which secured Luther his circulation; but also his style.  Michelet compared it to a mixture of Moses and Rabelais [!].    The upshot of Luther’s teaching was to dethrone the Pope and enthrone the Bible.  Authority was not destroyed; it was only transferred.  Orthodoxy was not impaired; it was refounded on the Scriptures.

You now see why style matters.

You might then wonder on the benefits of a marriage between Germany and Luther.

The lecture on the Netherlands Revolt from Spain is riveting.

Politically, the Revolt leaves all Europe in debt.  The success of the northern states gave ‘the right of citizenship to revolutionary principles.’  For the first time since the organisation of the New Monarchies, a whole people had claimed and won its independence…. the Netherlands Revolt was a striking instance of the political results of the Reformation.  It showed that Protestantism could give not only the desire for political freedom, but also the resolution to achieve it

As to the Sun King, Louis XIV, French historians believe that in a single generation, six millions of people died of want.  The author quotes Acton:

It would be easy to find tyrants more violent, more malignant, more odious than Louis XIV; but there was not one who ever used his power to inflict greater suffering or greater wrong.

Louis XV?  ‘…. he was one of the most evil men who ever occupied a throne.’

What is the upshot?

…. we cannot fail to be impressed by the strength of nationalism, and its claim to be the ruling principle of political science.  This is the first lesson of modern European history; and none is more necessary nowadays; for it explains the disaster of 1914 – the nemesis of nationalism…

Those remarks were indeed prophetic in 1924.  The worst of nationalism was yet to come.  It is crude nationalism that now undermines the United States and is undoing the European experiment. 

There are times when I think that my fondness for this book, and books like it, is about on a par with my fondness for footy.  This book is a must for those who want to try to understand where we have come from and where we may be going. 

And it’s worth getting for the Michelet quote on its own.  Moses and Rabelais!  From a sometime divine.