History

Games

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Games were an integral part of life in ancient Greece.  The funeral games of Patroclus show us that they go back to the days of Troy and the Iliad.  Their place in the Olympic Games continues in a very different form until today.  The historian of Greece, H D F Kitto, said that ‘among us it is sometimes made a reproach that a man makes a religion of games.’  He was probably then (1951) thinking of football and cricket.  Only God knows what he would say about the alpine levels of bullion involved in that part of the entertainment industry now known as sport. 

But the point that Kitto wanted to make was that the Greeks made games part of their religion.  The various games were held in the honour of the gods – such as Zeus of Olympia.

Moreover, they were held in the sacred precinct.  The feeling that prompted this was a perfectly natural one.  The contest was a means of stimulating human aretê [excellence], and this was a worthy offering to the god.  In the same way, games were held in honour of a dead hero, such as Patroclus in the Iliad…..But since aretê is of the mind as well as the body, there was not the slightest incongruity or affectation in combining musical contests with athletic…..It was aretê that the games were designed to test – the aretê of the whole man, not a merely specialised skill…The victor in one of the great games was a Man.  He was indeed almost something more, a Hero, and was treated as such by his fellow citizens.

Later –

So, at every hand we meet the idea of ‘contest’, agȏn.  Those things that we weakly translate ‘Games’ were, in Greek’ agȏnes – contests in which poet was pitted against poet, actor against actor…. Our word ‘agony’ is  a direct development from agȏn; it is the anguish of the struggle that reveals the man.

So, what they looked for was the drama in the contest that reveals the man.  The particular kind of contest was irrelevant to the test of character in the contest.  Those who confine themselves to the techniques on display miss the whole point of the drama inherent in the context. 

If I am laboring this point, it is because it is fundamental.  As I have remarked elsewhere (in the forthcoming book The Pursuit of Happiness):

So much in sport turns on character – for those on both sides of the fence.  The great champions of sport and the great minds of letters and history and the artists make and discover things that arouse our sense of wonder and remind us of our limitations.  It is not just their genius that we admire, but their courage to go on with it….

In professions, politics, business, or sport, I believe that you take a certain amount of ability as given, and then the rest is character.  This is what gives interest to sport, theatre, and the practice of the law – and life generally….

In my view, when you get a leader in their field – say opera, or rugby, or in the court room or the operating theatre, or test cricket, or politics – you take for granted a certain amount of talent, training, and experience – up to say ninety per cent of the package – and the rest is character.  You can’t teach or buy that, but in the end, it is often character that makes the difference.  And it is very moving to be there when that happens. 

The successful businessman who rebuilt the Geelong Football Club, Frank Costa, had a sign in his office: ‘Character first.  Talent second.’  He got that dead right.  Formula 1 is another good example of the importance of character – on top of unbelievable skill.  And every now and then you get a freak, someone who has something no one else has.  Call it alchemy.  You might get one in a generation. 

If I keep going, someone will put the Dog Act on me.  Perhaps the rot began to set in when the Romans employed professionals to drive in chariot races, and then threw dissidents to the lions.  But the emphasis on the test of character in games – sport – at the highest level remains constant – not least in life a great city when the community meets to celebrate the life of a hero.

Why am I saying this?  Because it was all on show on the Queen’s Birthday game at the MCG last evening between Collingwood and Melbourne.  It caused me to shed tears just on television replay.  This was truly a celebration of life in our city.

And God knows just how much we need it.

Inventing Japan

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

hird book I have read by Ian Buruma.  He could have been a devastating advocate.  He has the knack – he sees the point, and articulates it, in a way that commands intellectual assent.  And that is that.

Buruma has lived in Japan.  This book gives its history for a century after 1863.  It does so in 170 pages – with one footnote (to name a source for a quote).  It is an extraordinary intellectual achievement.  It should be prescribed reading for intellectually deprived lawyers who believe that more is better.

So, we start with the Americans arriving in their demanding manner on this closed enclave.  We have the fad-like adoption of the West in the Meiji restoration.  Then, nativism of the crudest and most racist kind takes hold with the corruption of German philosophy and Buddhist teaching.  Crimes against humanity are committed at Nanking and elsewhere.  The Japanese are worse than animals.  Person to person, they look more savage than the Nazis.  The horror only ends with the bomb – and even then, reluctantly.  The American occupation makes difficult judgment calls – they allow the Emperor to remain – but when MacArthur leaves, he gets a heroes’ send off.  By the time of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 – when I first visited Japan – the Japanese are ready to rejoin the world order.  They are a very necessary ally for us, and their culinary intervention here grows by the day.  They are, like Germany, a leading nation – even to the point of talking of re-arming.

It is a gripping story – and a necessary one.  It deserves to be read – if just for the observation that uniqueness cannot be exported.  That should be put up in neon with the suggestion that no one likes armed invasion.  Just look at the history of the great European powers in Africa, Asia and the Americas. 

I cannot recommend the book too highly – it is up there with the author’s recent history of Berlin during the war, and his book about Spinoza.

By chance, the next book I read was about Vermeer by Andrew Graham-Dixon.  It is a big book of industry and learning.  But I fear that Vermeer may be as singular as Shakespeare.  We know very little about his life and it tells us nothing new about the art.  We are left with the few paintings that survived, and a lot of probabilities.

The Buruma book of course deals with Pearl Harbour.  It was the subject of an appalling lapse of taste by Trump with the Japanese Prime Minister.  But perhaps it was warranted.  What Iranian would have looked on that unheralded attack and the killing of the leader of Iran as anything other than ‘a date which will live in infamy’. 

As for the reasons for what is sometimes called a ‘war’, have we moved on from the remark of Thucydides (1.23) that ‘what made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.’

Populists

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Two major sources of bad thinking and communal strife are our tendency to resort to labels and the herd instinct.  I set below what I wrote about these vices in a book written with Chris Wallace-Crabbe (What’s Wrong?)  The extracts are long, but the issue is serious.  This was the most important part of the book.

The vice of labelling

Some years ago, a woman at Oxford, en route from the reading room to the dining room for breakfast, was heard to say: ‘I have just been described as a typical Guardian reader, and I’m trying to work out whether I should feel insulted.’ A discussion about the meaning of the word ‘presumptuous’ then followed.

There is no law or custom that says we should apply a label to people – or put them in boxes, or in a file, or give them a codename. There is also no law that we should not. But most of us can’t help ourselves. So what?

Well, most of us don’t like being put into boxes. That is how we tend to see governments or Telstra or a big bank behaving toward us. Nor do most of us want to be typed. When someone says that an opinion or act of yours is ‘typical’ of you or your like, they are very rarely trying to be pleasant.

Most of us just want to be what we are. You don’t have to have a university degree specialising in the philosophy of Kant to believe that each of us has his or her own dignity, merely because we are human. We are not in the same league as camels or gnats. If I am singled out as a Muslim, a Jew or an Aboriginal, what does that label add to or take away from my humanity? What good can come from subtracting from my humanity by labelling me in that way?

So, the first problem with labelling is that it is likely to be demeaning to the target, and presumptuous on the part of the labeller. In labelling, we are detracting from a person’s dignity. We put registration numbers on dog collars, and we brand cattle, but we should afford humans the courtesy – no, the dignity – of their own humanity.

The second problem with labelling is that it is both loose and lazy. If you say of someone that they are a typical Conservative or Tory, that immediately raises two questions. What do the labels ‘Conservative’ and ‘Tory’ mean? What are the characteristics of the target that might warrant the application of the label?

In this country, at the moment, the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ hardly mean anything at all – except as terms of abuse – which is how ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ started in England. These terms are now generally only applied by one side to the other. Not many people are happy to apply either of those labels to themselves. The categories are just too plastic and fluid.

Similarly, in Australia the labels ‘Liberal’ and ‘Labor’ hardly stand for any difference in principle any more. At the time of writing, on any of the major issues in Australian politics, what were the differences in the policies of those parties that derived from their platform? The old forms of name calling between Liberal and Labor mean nothing to our children – absolutely nothing. These old ways are as outmoded as name calling between Catholics and Protestants. And there is some common ground in the two shifts: very many people have lost faith in both religion and politics. The old tensions or rivalries just seem no longer to matter.

Unfortunately, and notwithstanding the obvious problems we have just referred to, labelling is not just common, but mandatory in far too much political discussion in the press, and certainly for shock jocks or those who make a career out of working TV chat shows. While some people naturally thrive on conflict – Napoleon and Hitler were two bad cases – some journalists in the press engage in conflict for a living. These people rarely have a financial motive to respond reasonably, much less to resolve the conflict. To the contrary, they have a direct financial interest in keeping the conflict as explosive as possible. It is notorious that controversy feeds ratings and that bad news sells newspapers.

If you put up an argument to one of these people who live off the earnings of conflict, the response will very commonly involve two limbs – a personal attack on you (the Latin tag for which is ad hominem), followed by some labels, which are never meant as compliments. For example, if someone dared to query the rigour of the government’s policies toward refugees, a predictable response would be ‘What else would you expect from someone who subscribes to the ABC? How would you like these people to move in next door?’ There is no argument – just vulgar abuse. The disintegration of thought is palpable, but a lot of people are making a handy living out of it – and not in ways that do the rest of us any good.

There is commonly a third problem with labelling: it generally tells you a lot more about the labeller – some would say the sniper – than the target, and the answer is rarely pretty. And if you pile cliché upon label, and venom upon petulance, the result is as sad as it is predictable. You disappear up your own bum.

Let us take one label that became prominent in 2016 right across the Western world. There has been a lot of chatter, or white noise, about ‘populists’. Who are they?

One of the problems with this word is that people who use it rarely say what they mean by it. If you search the internet, you will find references to ordinary or regular or common people against political insiders or a wealthy elite. These vague terms don’t help – to the contrary. What do they mean? Is dividing people into classes a good idea in Australia now – or anywhere, at any time? If it is simply a matter of the common people wresting control from a wealthy elite, who could decently object? Is this not just democracy triumphing over oligarchy?

Populus is the Latin word for ‘people’, with pretty much the same connotations as that word in English. Do populists, therefore, appeal to the people for their vote? Well, anyone standing for office in a democracy does just that. The most famous political speech in history concludes with the words ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’.

But ‘populist’ is not used to describe everyone standing for office. It is used to refer to only some of those, and the difference seems to be in the kinds of people who are appealed to and the way in which that appeal is made.

So, what kind of public do populists appeal to? Those who use this word say that the people appealed to are anything but the ‘elite’ – those who have got on well in life because of their background or education, or both. In both the United Kingdom and the United States this feeling about the elite – which might look like simple envy to some – is linked to a suspicion of or contempt for ‘experts’. People do, however, tend to get choosy about which experts they reject. (This rejection does not extend to experts who may save their life in the surgery, or at 30,000 feet, or their liberty; but it may explain the curious intellectual lesion that many people of a reactionary turn of mind have about science and the environment.)

Another attribute of the public appealed to by populists is that they have often missed out on the increase in wealth brought about by free trade around the world and by advances in technology. These movements obviously have cost people jobs and are thought by some experts to be likely to cost another 40 per cent over the next ten years.

A third attribute of those appealed to by populists is said to be that, in their reduced condition, they value their citizenship above all else, and they are not willing to share it. They are therefore against taking refugees or people whose faith or colour threatens the idea of their national identity.

Now, if folk who use the word populist are describing politicians who appeal to people with those attributes, they may want to be careful about where they say so. The picture that emerges is one of a backward, angry and mean chauvinist failure. That picture is seriously derogatory. If that is what people mean when they refer to populists, then it is just a loose label that unfairly smears a large part of the population. The term does then itself suffer from the vice of labelling that we have identified.

So, we would leave labels with George Bush Senior, who said that labels are what you put on soup cans.

Tribalism

We started this chapter on the subject of prejudice as the main corrupter of thought, and near the end of it we come to a common source of prejudice. You might call it tribalism or clannishness, or just the herd instinct. It is a human tendency to surrender judgment, and therefore dignity, to the crowd, or the mob. In its most terrifying form, the mob is the lynch mob, to which the French were subjected on a national scale during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, a period of state-sanctioned violence and mass executions. The surrender was more complete, and the consequences were more financially severe, during the 1929 stock market crash, but we see it all round us every day, and as often as not we don’t notice when we have switched into the mode of group control.

A harmless form is the one‑eyed Collingwood supporter. Indeed, one reason why people enjoy that part of the entertainment industry called sport is that this is just the area, either in the stands or on the terraces or around the office coffee machine, where independent judgment can be suspended and blind prejudice masquerading as loyalty can be safely put on show. (You might, from time to time, graciously applaud someone from the other side, but you may want to watch who you do that in front of.) You can even blow the ref a raspberry without going to the slammer.

One worrying form of clannishness is the tendency of some groups to form their own language and retreat behind it when they come under attack, when they feel insecure or when they just feel like being pompous. Doctors and lawyers used to be notorious for this, but both have improved. It is no longer smart or clever to be obscure; the contrary is the case.

A clannish corruption of thought is dangerous because it obscures meaning – it makes the author harder to pin down – and it masks a crude self‑interest in protecting the relevant group as the proper or even the sole repository of truth. This is very worrying when the author is unable to spell out a verifiable meaning for the benefit of the uninitiated. Secular thinkers for many centuries have accused priests of doing just this – of denying ordinary people access to the truth – or, if you prefer, the light – by refusing to give them the keys to the codes. You might recall that, before the Reformation, you could be burnt at the stake in England if you dared to translate the Bible into the native language of the believers. That must be the ultimate example of people being asked to take articles of faith on trust.

We see examples of this form of clannish or tribal protectionism, and the consequent mutilation of logic and language, in the newer social sciences (which some think is a phrase that contradicts itself), in marketing, among ideologues (especially think tanks and their acolytes, political advisers) and also in some parts of academia.

We tend to see the problem at its worst with the political ideologues – the advisers tend to be hard‑headed people who hardly believe anything, whereas the ideologues bring commitment and passion, and so are likely to invoke that most dangerous ingredient in rational discussion: sincerity.

The problem now is that you are dealing with people with a position and with a patch to defend (people Helen Garner referred to as those ‘who have an agenda’). You are dealing with someone who subscribes to articles of faith, and they may not realise or accept that articles of faith lie outside the borders of rational debate. You might therefore be talking to a zealot. Zealots are people whose zeal has infected their judgment. They become like one‑eyed Collingwood supporters – but much, much worse, because they believe that the stakes are so big. In the language of the stock market, they have their own skin in the game. Unable to see the world from the other person’s point of view, they are very likely to think they have uncovered the logical answer – that is, the answer, and there can only be one of those. They become progressively less able to see that reasonable people might differ on almost any question relating to human behaviour or belief. That is to say, they get less and less tolerant, and intolerance is the cancer of sensible discussion.

Agenda bearers tend to look on disputes not as debates about ideas, but as conflicts between the kinds of people who hold various ideas. They become emotionally attached to their own side and emotionally opposed to the others. We saw that the writer in The Australian who is obsessed with ‘political correctness’ said it was unfair that ‘we’ did not have the same remedies as her adversaries.With agenda bearers, judgment goes clean out the window. They are ready to argue about things they know little or nothing about, and that must end up in bullshit. They then get ready to attack almost anything said by the other side, and to defend almost anything that has come out of their side. They become driven by, and to, conflict. They therefore pick fights that they do not have to pick, and so they ignore the first rule of advocacy: If you have a good point, make it, and don’t bugger it up with a dud; if you don’t have a good point, shut up.

Agenda bearers are heavily into mockery, and into nodding and winking among themselves. They are not beyond leering or even jeering, and they may have an obsession about sneering: one of those cases where they project their own feelings and reactions onto their opponents. They often accuse others of being dogmatic or feeling morally or intellectually superior because they have right on their side.

They disdain experts, but they are long on conspiracies, especially when it comes to the newspapers or television consulted by the other side. Indeed, they stereotype people by reference to their chosen media – readers of Fairfax or viewers of the ABC must be like readers of The New York Times or The Guardian and must oppose the Murdoch press or Fox News. (Would you be insulted if described as a typical Age reader or an adherent to Fox News? Or would you just think that the author of the remark was both thick and presumptuous?)

If you are not into these nuances, a word that people known as culture warriors may be fond of, you are not part of the game. Indeed, there are times when they seem unable to choose their cheerleader – the Famous Five or Kim, Enid Blyton or Rudyard Kipling.

Ideologues are defensive about their own culture or faith – words broad enough to mean or contain just what they want them to mean or contain – and very suspicious of those who want to share the good life or who threaten to change its underlying fabric. For this purpose, they may allow a shock jock or some other gutter rat to put up kites for them, but the sensible ones always preserve deniability and a distance from the overtly vulgar.

Their arguments are mainly aimed at the man, in part because of the innate or acquired hostility of those advancing the arguments, in part because they tend not to play by the rules, and in part again because they have lost control of their moral or intellectual compass. They always accuse the other side of hypocrisy, of which they are World’s Best Practice exponents, and of utter indifference to the consequences of their ideology – which they are past noticing in themselves. Even when they set out their own contradictions in black and white, they cannot see them for what they are. They are not just biased or unbalanced; they are wilfully beyond persuasion. In ordinary terms, they are crippled by the chips on their shoulders.

You will recognise here many of the attributes of a bush lawyer and of far too many of our politicians. It will only get worse – as people subscribe to internet sites for the true believers, commune in language‑killing terms on what are preposterously described as social media settings, and banish the anxiety that comes with uncertainty by cocooning themselves in their own echo chambers.

***

I have set out those observations at that length because they bear on so much of what passes nowadays for political discussion – especially as it is applied to people grouped together under a label – such as Catholics, gypsies, Collingwood supporters, boat people, the Irish, academics, or just plain old fashioned bludgers.  And by segmenting the people around us, we are of necessity speaking of minorities.

The cancer comes in two phases.  First, something in the history of those in a group leads to people being referred to, or identified as, members of that group.  Secondly, it is thought appropriate to attribute to every member of that group some attribute or characteristic. 

That is a form of branding, and it detracts from the worth or dignity of every human being to whom it is applied.  I do not subscribe to any doctrine of Original Sin, but if I did, this would be my prime candidate.  And it may start when people are content or proud to place themselves in a box and claim to share one common attribute as a result.

What do I care about my skin colour, faith, or ancestry?  What difference does any of them make?  In the name of Heaven, in the bad old days we believed – we were taught – that Catholics were somehow different to Protestants. 

In my view, Sir Henry Maine was spot on when he said in Ancient Law that the whole course of legal history saw the movement from status to contract.  What matters in life is not what I do with what I landed here with from my ancestors, but what I do with other people while I am here.  The contrary view dooms us to lie low under the weight of the past.

Let me just look again at two labels.  ‘Elite.’  According to my Compact OED, this is ‘a group of people regarded as the best in a particular society or organisation.’  Is there a problem?  Do we repudiate our best people?  Can you think of anyone going to a medical clinic or law firm saying – ‘Don’t give me your best – just the mediocre’?  Or saying to our Test selectors – ‘Don’t send the best to England – just the run of the mill journeymen’?

‘Populists’.  There is an obvious difficulty in applying this term to those seeking office in a democracy, when that is achieved by appealing to people to support you.  (Shakespeare wrote a play about it – Coriolanus.) 

Three examples are Trump, Farage, and Hanson.  Each has indeed one thing in common for me.  None would be welcome in my home.  The vices and charms of the first two are well known. 

The Australian presents as a scheming, heartless and venomous bigot who is unfit to hold any form of public office in Australia.  She has none of the élan of Trump or Farage, or those vicious mountebanks who broke Europe and the world in the last century.  If that statement sounds large, what do you think might be the response of our Muslim brothers and sisters?  Or have they not been here long enough to touch our conscience?

The Royal Commission into the Bondi massacre will have to navigate waters like these, and I don’t envy them.  There are obvious difficulties in conducting any form of forensic process to what the Letters Patent refer to as ‘religious and ideologically motivated extremism and radicalisation’. 

The Commission will hear of the most dreadful behavior to members of our Jewish community.  There is one thing they will not hear of.  That is of a sitting member of the Australian Parliament saying ‘There is no such thing as a good Jew.’ 

That statement by Hanson looks to me like a textbook case of ‘religious and ideologically motivated extremism and radicalisation’.  The difference is that she is not facing jail for hate speech.  On the contrary.  She shouts it out loud and infects Parliament by insulting faith – and takes off in the polls as a reward, and is saluted by uncomely goons in dark places who don’t know any better. 

And the lucky country stands indicted.  And on a bad day we might feel with Milton that earth felt the wound.

Well, the categories of evil are never closed, even if, as someone said, there is nothing new under the sun.  Perhaps the old French proverb stands vindicated – the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

We are not as free of the primal slime as we would wish to be.  We do after all live in a country where you can step into your garden paradise and die from the venom of a brown snake taking its repose in your bed of roses.

Populists

Two major sources of bad thinking and communal strife are our tendency to resort to labels and the herd instinct.  I set below what I wrote about these vices in a book written with Chris Wallace-Crabbe (What’s Wrong?)  The extracts are long, but the issue is serious.  This was the most important part of the book.

The vice of labelling

Some years ago, a woman at Oxford, en route from the reading room to the dining room for breakfast, was heard to say: ‘I have just been described as a typical Guardian reader, and I’m trying to work out whether I should feel insulted.’ A discussion about the meaning of the word ‘presumptuous’ then followed.

There is no law or custom that says we should apply a label to people – or put them in boxes, or in a file, or give them a codename. There is also no law that we should not. But most of us can’t help ourselves. So what?

Well, most of us don’t like being put into boxes. That is how we tend to see governments or Telstra or a big bank behaving toward us. Nor do most of us want to be typed. When someone says that an opinion or act of yours is ‘typical’ of you or your like, they are very rarely trying to be pleasant.

Most of us just want to be what we are. You don’t have to have a university degree specialising in the philosophy of Kant to believe that each of us has his or her own dignity, merely because we are human. We are not in the same league as camels or gnats. If I am singled out as a Muslim, a Jew or an Aboriginal, what does that label add to or take away from my humanity? What good can come from subtracting from my humanity by labelling me in that way?

So, the first problem with labelling is that it is likely to be demeaning to the target, and presumptuous on the part of the labeller. In labelling, we are detracting from a person’s dignity. We put registration numbers on dog collars, and we brand cattle, but we should afford humans the courtesy – no, the dignity – of their own humanity.

The second problem with labelling is that it is both loose and lazy. If you say of someone that they are a typical Conservative or Tory, that immediately raises two questions. What do the labels ‘Conservative’ and ‘Tory’ mean? What are the characteristics of the target that might warrant the application of the label?

In this country, at the moment, the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ hardly mean anything at all – except as terms of abuse – which is how ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ started in England. These terms are now generally only applied by one side to the other. Not many people are happy to apply either of those labels to themselves. The categories are just too plastic and fluid.

Similarly, in Australia the labels ‘Liberal’ and ‘Labor’ hardly stand for any difference in principle any more. At the time of writing, on any of the major issues in Australian politics, what were the differences in the policies of those parties that derived from their platform? The old forms of name calling between Liberal and Labor mean nothing to our children – absolutely nothing. These old ways are as outmoded as name calling between Catholics and Protestants. And there is some common ground in the two shifts: very many people have lost faith in both religion and politics. The old tensions or rivalries just seem no longer to matter.

Unfortunately, and notwithstanding the obvious problems we have just referred to, labelling is not just common, but mandatory in far too much political discussion in the press, and certainly for shock jocks or those who make a career out of working TV chat shows. While some people naturally thrive on conflict – Napoleon and Hitler were two bad cases – some journalists in the press engage in conflict for a living. These people rarely have a financial motive to respond reasonably, much less to resolve the conflict. To the contrary, they have a direct financial interest in keeping the conflict as explosive as possible. It is notorious that controversy feeds ratings and that bad news sells newspapers.

If you put up an argument to one of these people who live off the earnings of conflict, the response will very commonly involve two limbs – a personal attack on you (the Latin tag for which is ad hominem), followed by some labels, which are never meant as compliments. For example, if someone dared to query the rigour of the government’s policies toward refugees, a predictable response would be ‘What else would you expect from someone who subscribes to the ABC? How would you like these people to move in next door?’ There is no argument – just vulgar abuse. The disintegration of thought is palpable, but a lot of people are making a handy living out of it – and not in ways that do the rest of us any good.

There is commonly a third problem with labelling: it generally tells you a lot more about the labeller – some would say the sniper – than the target, and the answer is rarely pretty. And if you pile cliché upon label, and venom upon petulance, the result is as sad as it is predictable. You disappear up your own bum.

Let us take one label that became prominent in 2016 right across the Western world. There has been a lot of chatter, or white noise, about ‘populists’. Who are they?

One of the problems with this word is that people who use it rarely say what they mean by it. If you search the internet, you will find references to ordinary or regular or common people against political insiders or a wealthy elite. These vague terms don’t help – to the contrary. What do they mean? Is dividing people into classes a good idea in Australia now – or anywhere, at any time? If it is simply a matter of the common people wresting control from a wealthy elite, who could decently object? Is this not just democracy triumphing over oligarchy?

Populus is the Latin word for ‘people’, with pretty much the same connotations as that word in English. Do populists, therefore, appeal to the people for their vote? Well, anyone standing for office in a democracy does just that. The most famous political speech in history concludes with the words ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’.

But ‘populist’ is not used to describe everyone standing for office. It is used to refer to only some of those, and the difference seems to be in the kinds of people who are appealed to and the way in which that appeal is made.

So, what kind of public do populists appeal to? Those who use this word say that the people appealed to are anything but the ‘elite’ – those who have got on well in life because of their background or education, or both. In both the United Kingdom and the United States this feeling about the elite – which might look like simple envy to some – is linked to a suspicion of or contempt for ‘experts’. People do, however, tend to get choosy about which experts they reject. (This rejection does not extend to experts who may save their life in the surgery, or at 30,000 feet, or their liberty; but it may explain the curious intellectual lesion that many people of a reactionary turn of mind have about science and the environment.)

Another attribute of the public appealed to by populists is that they have often missed out on the increase in wealth brought about by free trade around the world and by advances in technology. These movements obviously have cost people jobs and are thought by some experts to be likely to cost another 40 per cent over the next ten years.

A third attribute of those appealed to by populists is said to be that, in their reduced condition, they value their citizenship above all else, and they are not willing to share it. They are therefore against taking refugees or people whose faith or colour threatens the idea of their national identity.

Now, if folk who use the word populist are describing politicians who appeal to people with those attributes, they may want to be careful about where they say so. The picture that emerges is one of a backward, angry and mean chauvinist failure. That picture is seriously derogatory. If that is what people mean when they refer to populists, then it is just a loose label that unfairly smears a large part of the population. The term does then itself suffer from the vice of labelling that we have identified.

So, we would leave labels with George Bush Senior, who said that labels are what you put on soup cans.

Tribalism

We started this chapter on the subject of prejudice as the main corrupter of thought, and near the end of it we come to a common source of prejudice. You might call it tribalism or clannishness, or just the herd instinct. It is a human tendency to surrender judgment, and therefore dignity, to the crowd, or the mob. In its most terrifying form, the mob is the lynch mob, to which the French were subjected on a national scale during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, a period of state-sanctioned violence and mass executions. The surrender was more complete, and the consequences were more financially severe, during the 1929 stock market crash, but we see it all round us every day, and as often as not we don’t notice when we have switched into the mode of group control.

A harmless form is the one‑eyed Collingwood supporter. Indeed, one reason why people enjoy that part of the entertainment industry called sport is that this is just the area, either in the stands or on the terraces or around the office coffee machine, where independent judgment can be suspended and blind prejudice masquerading as loyalty can be safely put on show. (You might, from time to time, graciously applaud someone from the other side, but you may want to watch who you do that in front of.) You can even blow the ref a raspberry without going to the slammer.

One worrying form of clannishness is the tendency of some groups to form their own language and retreat behind it when they come under attack, when they feel insecure or when they just feel like being pompous. Doctors and lawyers used to be notorious for this, but both have improved. It is no longer smart or clever to be obscure; the contrary is the case.

A clannish corruption of thought is dangerous because it obscures meaning – it makes the author harder to pin down – and it masks a crude self‑interest in protecting the relevant group as the proper or even the sole repository of truth. This is very worrying when the author is unable to spell out a verifiable meaning for the benefit of the uninitiated. Secular thinkers for many centuries have accused priests of doing just this – of denying ordinary people access to the truth – or, if you prefer, the light – by refusing to give them the keys to the codes. You might recall that, before the Reformation, you could be burnt at the stake in England if you dared to translate the Bible into the native language of the believers. That must be the ultimate example of people being asked to take articles of faith on trust.

We see examples of this form of clannish or tribal protectionism, and the consequent mutilation of logic and language, in the newer social sciences (which some think is a phrase that contradicts itself), in marketing, among ideologues (especially think tanks and their acolytes, political advisers) and also in some parts of academia.

We tend to see the problem at its worst with the political ideologues – the advisers tend to be hard‑headed people who hardly believe anything, whereas the ideologues bring commitment and passion, and so are likely to invoke that most dangerous ingredient in rational discussion: sincerity.

The problem now is that you are dealing with people with a position and with a patch to defend (people Helen Garner referred to as those ‘who have an agenda’). You are dealing with someone who subscribes to articles of faith, and they may not realise or accept that articles of faith lie outside the borders of rational debate. You might therefore be talking to a zealot. Zealots are people whose zeal has infected their judgment. They become like one‑eyed Collingwood supporters – but much, much worse, because they believe that the stakes are so big. In the language of the stock market, they have their own skin in the game. Unable to see the world from the other person’s point of view, they are very likely to think they have uncovered the logical answer – that is, the answer, and there can only be one of those. They become progressively less able to see that reasonable people might differ on almost any question relating to human behaviour or belief. That is to say, they get less and less tolerant, and intolerance is the cancer of sensible discussion.

Agenda bearers tend to look on disputes not as debates about ideas, but as conflicts between the kinds of people who hold various ideas. They become emotionally attached to their own side and emotionally opposed to the others. We saw that the writer in The Australian who is obsessed with ‘political correctness’ said it was unfair that ‘we’ did not have the same remedies as her adversaries.With agenda bearers, judgment goes clean out the window. They are ready to argue about things they know little or nothing about, and that must end up in bullshit. They then get ready to attack almost anything said by the other side, and to defend almost anything that has come out of their side. They become driven by, and to, conflict. They therefore pick fights that they do not have to pick, and so they ignore the first rule of advocacy: If you have a good point, make it, and don’t bugger it up with a dud; if you don’t have a good point, shut up.

Agenda bearers are heavily into mockery, and into nodding and winking among themselves. They are not beyond leering or even jeering, and they may have an obsession about sneering: one of those cases where they project their own feelings and reactions onto their opponents. They often accuse others of being dogmatic or feeling morally or intellectually superior because they have right on their side.

They disdain experts, but they are long on conspiracies, especially when it comes to the newspapers or television consulted by the other side. Indeed, they stereotype people by reference to their chosen media – readers of Fairfax or viewers of the ABC must be like readers of The New York Times or The Guardian and must oppose the Murdoch press or Fox News. (Would you be insulted if described as a typical Age reader or an adherent to Fox News? Or would you just think that the author of the remark was both thick and presumptuous?)

If you are not into these nuances, a word that people known as culture warriors may be fond of, you are not part of the game. Indeed, there are times when they seem unable to choose their cheerleader – the Famous Five or Kim, Enid Blyton or Rudyard Kipling.

Ideologues are defensive about their own culture or faith – words broad enough to mean or contain just what they want them to mean or contain – and very suspicious of those who want to share the good life or who threaten to change its underlying fabric. For this purpose, they may allow a shock jock or some other gutter rat to put up kites for them, but the sensible ones always preserve deniability and a distance from the overtly vulgar.

Their arguments are mainly aimed at the man, in part because of the innate or acquired hostility of those advancing the arguments, in part because they tend not to play by the rules, and in part again because they have lost control of their moral or intellectual compass. They always accuse the other side of hypocrisy, of which they are World’s Best Practice exponents, and of utter indifference to the consequences of their ideology – which they are past noticing in themselves. Even when they set out their own contradictions in black and white, they cannot see them for what they are. They are not just biased or unbalanced; they are wilfully beyond persuasion. In ordinary terms, they are crippled by the chips on their shoulders.

You will recognise here many of the attributes of a bush lawyer and of far too many of our politicians. It will only get worse – as people subscribe to internet sites for the true believers, commune in language‑killing terms on what are preposterously described as social media settings, and banish the anxiety that comes with uncertainty by cocooning themselves in their own echo chambers.

***

I have set out those observations at that length because they bear on so much of what passes nowadays for political discussion – especially as it is applied to people grouped together under a label – such as Catholics, gypsies, Collingwood supporters, boat people, the Irish, academics, or just plain old fashioned bludgers.  And by segmenting the people around us, we are of necessity speaking of minorities.

The cancer comes in two phases.  First, something in the history of those in a group leads to people being referred to, or identified as, members of that group.  Secondly, it is thought appropriate to attribute to every member of that group some attribute or characteristic. 

That is a form of branding, and it detracts from the worth or dignity of every human being to whom it is applied.  I do not subscribe to any doctrine of Original Sin, but if I did, this would be my prime candidate.  And it may start when people are content or proud to place themselves in a box and claim to share one common attribute as a result.

What do I care about my skin colour, faith, or ancestry?  What difference does any of them make?  In the name of Heaven, in the bad old days we believed – we were taught – that Catholics were somehow different to Protestants. 

In my view, Sir Henry Maine was spot on when he said in Ancient Law that the whole course of legal history saw the movement from status to contract.  What matters in life is not what I do with what I landed here with from my ancestors, but what I do with other people while I am here.  The contrary view dooms us to lie low under the weight of the past.

Let me just look again at two labels.  ‘Elite.’  According to my Compact OED, this is ‘a group of people regarded as the best in a particular society or organisation.’  Is there a problem?  Do we repudiate our best people?  Can you think of anyone going to a medical clinic or law firm saying – ‘Don’t give me your best – just the mediocre’?  Or saying to our Test selectors – ‘Don’t send the best to England – just the run of the mill journeymen’?

‘Populists’.  There is an obvious difficulty in applying this term to those seeking office in a democracy, when that is achieved by appealing to people to support you.  (Shakespeare wrote a play about it – Coriolanus.) 

Three examples are Trump, Farage, and Hanson.  Each has indeed one thing in common for me.  None would be welcome in my home.  The vices and charms of the first two are well known. 

The Australian presents as a scheming, heartless and venomous bigot who is unfit to hold any form of public office in Australia.  She has none of the élan of Trump or Farage, or those vicious mountebanks who broke Europe and the world in the last century.  If that statement sounds large, what do you think might be the response of our Muslim brothers and sisters?  Or have they not been here long enough to touch our conscience?

The Royal Commission into the Bondi massacre will have to navigate waters like these, and I don’t envy them.  There are obvious difficulties in conducting any form of forensic process to what the Letters Patent refer to as ‘religious and ideologically motivated extremism and radicalisation’. 

The Commission will hear of the most dreadful behavior to members of our Jewish community.  There is one thing they will not hear of.  That is of a sitting member of the Australian Parliament saying ‘There is no such thing as a good Jew.’ 

That statement by Hanson looks to me like a textbook case of ‘religious and ideologically motivated extremism and radicalisation’.  The difference is that she is not facing jail for hate speech.  On the contrary.  She shouts it out loud and infects Parliament by insulting faith – and takes off in the polls as a reward, and is saluted by uncomely goons in dark places who don’t know any better. 

And the lucky country stands indicted.  And on a bad day we might feel with Milton that earth felt the wound.

Well, the categories of evil are never closed, even if, as someone said, there is nothing new under the sun.  Perhaps the old French proverb stands vindicated – the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

We are not as free of the primal slime as we would wish to be.  We do after all live in a country where you can step into your garden paradise and die from the venom of a brown snake taking its repose in your bed of roses.

Buruma on Spinoza

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Following my success with this writer on Berlin during the war, I tried my luck with his book on Spinoza, Freedom’s Messiah.  (I have ordered one on Japan during the war.)  It is certainly up to scratch.  This man knows how to put such a book together, on a subject that can be both tricky and touchy. 

Spinoza was a most extraordinary man – who managed to wind up all sorts of people – to the extent that he got expelled from his own community in a country that was pleased with its own level of toleration.  As it happens, I idolize Spinoza – for the reasons given in the note on his most read work that is set out below.

I commend this book by Ian Buruma.  I think he has handled a difficult subject extremely well.  He is like a good lawyer sifting the material and getting to the point in a coherent and persuasive manner.  It is a most useful gift.

I will not review the book, but focus on one point that bears on the current discussion about what some call hate speech. 

We have long had laws that enable police to intervene when someone is offending others in public in a way that may lead to a fight.  The primary driver of the growth of the common law was the felt need to maintain the king’s peace and end the vendetta. 

But once you seek to go beyond that and control what people may lawfully say about religious, political or tribal issues, you get into trouble with that very sensitive notion called freedom of speech.  (I see it is about to be tested in the U S in the case of a man indicted for sending a photo of sea shells – a case brought by dull bigots with a straight face and no sense of shame – all desiderata in the current federal government.)

In the note below I referred to ‘doctrinal dynamite’.  The dynamite went much further than doctrine – in a community where the author had been kicked out of a community by a community that had been kicked out of another country.

Mr Buruma gives one example.  In the Treatise referred to, Spinoza said the Hebrew nation was not chosen by God because of intellect or peace of mind, but because of its social order and the fortune by which it came to have a state.  Mr Buruma says the ‘idea of the Jews as chosen people was nonsense.’

That they had survived for so long was no surprise, since they had ‘separated themselves so from all nations that they have drawn the hatred of all men against themselves, not only by having external customs contrary to the customs of the other nations, but also by the sign of circumcision, which they maintain most scrupulously.’

That makes dynamite look like mother’s milk.  Mr Buruma says:

It is hard to think of anything that would cause greater offense to Jews, and particularly to Jews of his own family, who had suffered persecution, forced conversion, and were trying so hard in Mokum, the Safe Place, to become practising Jews again…. his suggestion that Jews had brought the hatred of others upon themselves by refusing to give up their own traditions was especially hurtful…. Spinoza’s argument for assimilation is naïve, and if it had been made by a gentile, it could easily be construed as a form of anti-Semitism.

Well, as someone said, there is nothing new under the sun.  But if we have learned anything in three thousand years of Western philosophy, it is that there is no such thing as the answer. 

And from where I sit, those who think they may get lasting relief on issues like these from a group of civil servants sitting as a royal commission may feel let down.  The Holy Grail may be a phantom outside of Wagner, and whatever else you may say of him, he was not a model politician.

There are limits to the extent to which we should either expect or wish the State to control how we think or talk about others.  The law can only deal with what it can – the rest belongs to the grind or mire of politics.  And the law is not good at politics.

I commend the book.  It is well presented by Yale University Press in the series Jewish Lives, and it comes with luscious rough-cut pages and a French style dust jacket with a portrait – which shows a much softer version of the subject than the one looking down on me in my study.

As for Spinoza, if you wish to join issue with him on any issue of religion or philosophy, gird yourself well, because he has more intellectual firepower in one toe than the rest of us in our whole frame.

BOOK EXTRACT

TRACTATUS THEOLOGICO-POLITICUS

Benedict de Spinoza (1670)

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

Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved and fostered by fear.

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

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

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

The Tractatus was published anonymously and was immediately condemned on all sides.  His master-work, Ethics, was not published until after his death.  He lived alone, and frugally – although he enjoyed a pipe and a glass of wine, he could go for days on milk soup made with butter and some ale. 

Spinoza says that his chief aim in the Tractatus is to separate faith from philosophy.  He says that Moses did not seek to convince the Jews by reason, but bound by them a covenant, by oaths, and by conferring benefits.  This was not to teach knowledge, but to inspire obedience.  He then says, ‘Faith consists in a knowledge of God, without which obedience to Him would be impossible, and which the mere fact of obedience to Him implies’. 

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

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

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

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

The little Dutch Jewish outcast also said:

Every man’s true happiness and blessedness consist solely in the enjoyment of what is good, not in the pride that he alone is enjoying it, to the exclusion of others

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

Spinoza was a very holy man who crossed on to the turf of less holy men.  Turf wars are the scourge of religion.  The great gift of Spinoza and Kant to mankind was to stand up and stare down those clever and subtle men – alas, they were all men – who claimed to have exclusive rights to the box of tricks without which the rest of us could not get near God or enjoy the grace of true religion. 

They both should be remembered as two of our greatest liberators.  Their legacy is worth so much more than the brackish howls of those bothered God-deniers whose very loudness bespeaks the bankruptcy of philosophy.  Just what does philosophy have to show for itself?  And, just before dawn, did Bertrand Russell see himself as one of those who were intellectually superior to Spinoza?

Buruma on Spinoza

Following my success with this writer on Berlin during the war, I tried my luck with his book on Spinoza, Freedom’s Messiah.  (I have ordered one on Japan during the war.)  It is certainly up to scratch.  This man knows how to put such a book together, on a subject that can be both tricky and touchy. 

Spinoza was a most extraordinary man – who managed to wind up all sorts of people – to the extent that he got expelled from his own community in a country that was pleased with its own level of toleration.  As it happens, I idolize Spinoza – for the reasons given in the note on his most read work that is set out below.

I commend this book by Ian Buruma.  I think he has handled a difficult subject extremely well.  He is like a good lawyer sifting the material and getting to the point in a coherent and persuasive manner.  It is a most useful gift.

I will not review the book, but focus on one point that bears on the current discussion about what some call hate speech. 

We have long had laws that enable police to intervene when someone is offending others in public in a way that may lead to a fight.  The primary driver of the growth of the common law was the felt need to maintain the king’s peace and end the vendetta. 

But once you seek to go beyond that and control what people may lawfully say about religious, political or tribal issues, you get into trouble with that very sensitive notion called freedom of speech.  (I see it is about to be tested in the U S in the case of a man indicted for sending a photo of sea shells – a case brought by dull bigots with a straight face and no sense of shame – all desiderata in the current federal government.)

In the note below I referred to ‘doctrinal dynamite’.  The dynamite went much further than doctrine – in a community where the author had been kicked out of a community by a community that had been kicked out of another country.

Mr Buruma gives one example.  In the Treatise referred to, Spinoza said the Hebrew nation was not chosen by God because of intellect or peace of mind, but because of its social order and the fortune by which it came to have a state.  Mr Buruma says the ‘idea of the Jews as chosen people was nonsense.’

That they had survived for so long was no surprise, since they had ‘separated themselves so from all nations that they have drawn the hatred of all men against themselves, not only by having external customs contrary to the customs of the other nations, but also by the sign of circumcision, which they maintain most scrupulously.’

That makes dynamite look like mother’s milk.  Mr Buruma says:

It is hard to think of anything that would cause greater offense to Jews, and particularly to Jews of his own family, who had suffered persecution, forced conversion, and were trying so hard in Mokum, the Safe Place, to become practising Jews again…. his suggestion that Jews had brought the hatred of others upon themselves by refusing to give up their own traditions was especially hurtful…. Spinoza’s argument for assimilation is naïve, and if it had been made by a gentile, it could easily be construed as a form of anti-Semitism.

Well, as someone said, there is nothing new under the sun.  But if we have learned anything in three thousand years of Western philosophy, it is that there is no such thing as the answer. 

And from where I sit, those who think they may get lasting relief on issues like these from a group of civil servants sitting as a royal commission may feel let down.  The Holy Grail may be a phantom outside of Wagner, and whatever else you may say of him, he was not a model politician.

There are limits to the extent to which we should either expect or wish the State to control how we think or talk about others.  The law can only deal with what it can – the rest belongs to the grind or mire of politics.  And the law is not good at politics.

I commend the book.  It is well presented by Yale University Press in the series Jewish Lives, and it comes with luscious rough-cut pages and a French style dust jacket with a portrait – which shows a much softer version of the subject than the one looking down on me in my study.

As for Spinoza, if you wish to join issue with him on any issue of religion or philosophy, gird yourself well, because he has more intellectual firepower in one toe than the rest of us in our whole frame.

BOOK EXTRACT

TRACTATUS THEOLOGICO-POLITICUS

Benedict de Spinoza (1670)

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

Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved and fostered by fear.

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

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

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

The Tractatus was published anonymously and was immediately condemned on all sides.  His master-work, Ethics, was not published until after his death.  He lived alone, and frugally – although he enjoyed a pipe and a glass of wine, he could go for days on milk soup made with butter and some ale. 

Spinoza says that his chief aim in the Tractatus is to separate faith from philosophy.  He says that Moses did not seek to convince the Jews by reason, but bound by them a covenant, by oaths, and by conferring benefits.  This was not to teach knowledge, but to inspire obedience.  He then says, ‘Faith consists in a knowledge of God, without which obedience to Him would be impossible, and which the mere fact of obedience to Him implies’. 

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

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

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

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

The little Dutch Jewish outcast also said:

Every man’s true happiness and blessedness consist solely in the enjoyment of what is good, not in the pride that he alone is enjoying it, to the exclusion of others

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

Spinoza was a very holy man who crossed on to the turf of less holy men.  Turf wars are the scourge of religion.  The great gift of Spinoza and Kant to mankind was to stand up and stare down those clever and subtle men – alas, they were all men – who claimed to have exclusive rights to the box of tricks without which the rest of us could not get near God or enjoy the grace of true religion. 

They both should be remembered as two of our greatest liberators.  Their legacy is worth so much more than the brackish howls of those bothered God-deniers whose very loudness bespeaks the bankruptcy of philosophy.  Just what does philosophy have to show for itself?  And, just before dawn, did Bertrand Russell see himself as one of those who were intellectually superior to Spinoza?

Berlin at War

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The post below sets out my attitude to the Germans.  As it happens, I gather that Ian Buruma, in his latest book, Stay Alive, Berlin 1935-1945, has come to a similar conclusion.  It concludes: ‘The city itself is a monument, not only to man’s blackest depravity, but to its capacity to be reborn and to live again.’  On the previous page, he had referred to ‘the way the scars of its worst crimes are openly on display.’

While I had heard favourably of him, I had not read any of the work of this writer before.  He has been prolific and successful.  He can afford good research assistants, and he is a master of composition – something so often lacking north of Mexico.  He is also engagingly humane.  He understands that people make history and that it is a collection of biographies.  This book is a string of anecdotes.  What kind of evidence is not anecdotal?  They are strung together artfully and seamlessly throughout.  Mr Buruma is, I think, a natural.

The story of Berlin at the end of the war – not long before I was born – is as close to a picture of Hell on earth as I can imagine.  It is certainly beyond my comprehension.

I was completely engaged from the first page to the last, and I commend the book to your attention.  It is not often now that I am so sorry to put a book down.

And this is on a subject – the capacity for evil in all of us – that we have an abiding moral obligation to confront head on.

The Germans and I

What is it about the Germans that attracts me? 

When I left school in 1963, they gave me a copy of Alan Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  When we got to 1934, I was shocked to read that in some churches they replaced the crucifix with a sword and the bible with Mein Kampf.  In a perverse way, that had as much impact on me as the mass murders.  How could a people that gave the world Bach, Mozart, Kant, Beethoven and Goethe have murdered millions of people and taken us all back to the primal slime? 

That question has stayed with me since, and it is behind almost everything I have read or written of history. 

In 1967, I hitch-hiked the length and breadth of the nation.  I found people trying to answer the same question.  I went to Dachau, which was not a death camp, and I wept in the snow for what its inmates had suffered. 

But I went to Berlin and saw the Wall keeping out a new form of soulless barbarism.  (I did not know then that Stalin’s murders probably exceeded those of Hitler.) 

When I returned to Berlin in the 80’s, I was transfixed by the progress of reconstruction and the richness of its cultural life.  I was falling in love with the city.  I made a point of going to Dresden twice to see the site of the maximum suffering of the Germans.  I do not regret one bomb.  When a resident said that that raid was late, I had to bite my tongue – it was only months later that some of the ovens were turned off.  A nation that stands behind a government that created the SS Death’s Head Division, and waged a war of aggression against Europe, the USSR, and the United Sates, a nation that buried its doubts about that war or its government when they thought they were winning, simply has no standing to complain if the nations that it has attacked respond with attacks of their own to the last fibre of their being. 

And some forget that the failure of the Allies to finish the job in 1918 led to the result that General Pershing predicted and made it imperative for the Allies to demand unconditional surrender on this occasion.  Both Germany and Japan were reduced to ashes because they were led by manic war criminals who could not bring themselves to surrender. 

Later I went to Wannsee and Sachsenhausen.  Then after the Wall came down, and the country was reunited, the Germans had to come to grips with the horror – that is the word – of the Stasi, and the misery inflicted on so many Germans by so many other Germans.

Lawyers at a high-level conference descended into the heart of darkness and mile after mile of files in the Stasi HQ at Normanenstrasse.  Later I would compare the agony of those taken there by the Stasi to that suffered by those taken to the HQ of the Gestapo at Prinz Albertstrasse (corner of Wilhemstrasse).  The new Jewish Museum is the only building I have been in that feels to me like a work of art. 

All the while, I was penetrating the history of the common law that might fairly be said to have crossed over to England from the forests of Germany – one American jurist said that the laws of America were more German than those of Germany itself. 

I have visited Berlin and New York on about six occasions.  They have about them a kind of in-your-face cosmopolitan directness that makes me want to laugh out loud when I step outside.  I have so many happy memories from both. 

There is a pub at the top of Friedrichstrasse where I was once recognised as some kind of local.  That’s where I ate the most outrageously large pork knuckle and drank the biggest glass of beer I have ever seen.  It’s not far from a guest house named after one of my absolute heroes, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. 

It became a ritual for me to buy a Picasso or Chagall lithograph from Bridget, the flamboyantly displayed owner of an art gallery on Dorotheenstrasse.  I toured the canals with my German friend Gudrun and saw how moved she was at the remnants of the Wall that had divided her nation’s capital. 

Berlin has the best transport system and museums in the world, and at least until recently, it was the one city in Europe where I did not feel like I was being suffocated by traffic and tourists. 

Angela Merkel is head and shoulders above any other statesman in the world, but the Germans do not aspire to leadership, and they get nervy if they see too many flags out. 

I have long wrestled with the fact that the beauty of the music in the Ring Cycle was given to us by a jerk who was so egocentric that he had to write his own libretti (as Gough Whitlam said), but if we cut out art created by unattractive people, we would miss an awful lot. 

When I started to follow Formula I, Michael Schumacher was way ahead of the rest.  He did some bad things.  So did Ayrton Senna – worse, in truth.  But we were told that with Senna, it was Brazilian flair; with Schumacher, it was ruthless Teutonic efficiency.  Stereotyping shows a very bad state of mind. 

In fine, I am very fond of Germany and the Germans.  And one thing I do know.  The evil and misery created by the Gestapo and the Stasi did not come from a German weakness.  It came from our human weakness.  Those who believe otherwise risk treading in the footsteps of Stalin and Hitler.

Robespierre and Iran

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The tomb of Napoleon is a Paris landmark and tourist attraction.  You will not find anything remotely like it for Robespierre – and Napoleon was not even French.  Such are the ways of memory and history – and the voice of the people.  And the Marseillaise so righteously intoned by Paul Henried in Casablanca.

Maximilien Robespierre was a little-known French provincial lawyer.  As a consequence of a series of events that we label as ‘the French Revolution’, Napoleon became the Emperor of France, with more power than any Bourbon king ever held, and sought to become ruler of the world.  The battle of Waterloo was, in the words of his Grace, the Duke of Wellington, a ‘damned nice thing – the closest thing you ever saw in your life’.  But it was enough to see off the Corsican, who died in the exile generously allowed him by the Allies.

The images of Napoleon are many and consistent – and they fit nicely into the flowering of the Romantic movement, and the celebration – salutation, even – of the ego. 

This has never been so with Robespierre, a shy man born to serve a cause.  He was the definitive French ideologue and bearer of the gospel of Jean Jaques Rousseau.  Through his dedication and transparent commitment to the revolution, Robespierre rose above the herd to become the de facto leader of the French nation. 

Nothing in his life, or that of any other person, could have equipped Robespierre to deal with the issues facing someone in his position.  He had served as a part time judicial officer, but he had given up that when he had had to sentence a man to death.  Was he cut out for high office – let alone leadership of a nation in chaos?

The French nation was simply not ready for the nation-shattering changes that followed in the five years after the fall of the Bastille.  To secure those kinds of changes, the English had spent about six hundred years house training their kings, nobles and priests. 

France under Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety was surrounded by life threatening enemies from within and without.  Its response was the Terror, and the guillotine, and horrors that prefigured the worst of those in Europe of the following century. 

We can see ourselves as Hottentots dancing round the rim of a live volcano – and no mere human has found a way to avoid the risk of falling in.  The canvas is masterfully painted by Thomas Carlyle, at times in terms that prefigure the horrors of Nazi Germany. 

Robespierre, the ‘sea green incorruptible’, was sanctified, and then hardened, and then, like Macbeth, rendered devoid of his humanity.  It was kill or be killed – and the others through blind fear finally found enough nerve to get him.  The unkillable Fouché, who survived to serve Napoleon, whispered in their ears that their leader had delusions of godliness – and a list.  ‘Is your name on it, Citizen?’ 

Robespierre died by the guillotine, and he comes down to us now as the archetypal terrorist.   He was a decent young man who got crushed in an earthquake.  ‘O unhappiest Advocate of Arras, wert thou worse than other Advocates? …A man fitted in some luckier settled age to have become one of those incorruptible, barren Pattern-Figures, and have had marble tablets and funeral sermons……May God be merciful to him and to us!’  (Carlyle).

By the time Robespierre was killed, his naïve obsession with ideology and the Supreme Being were as childlike as his sky-blue jacket.  His cat-like features did not mask his capacity to inspire dread, and his conviction of the infallibility of his faith was at best dangerous when he preached about ‘virtue’ and ‘terror’ to a politically naïve audience.  He had no mates.  Dr J M Thompson said:

No one was so admired by his fellow citizens, no one so little loved…. he was too small-minded to forgive, and yet powerful enough to punish.  But punishment is a measure of despair.  It may cause conformity; it cannot produce conviction…. So, he failed and fell – the victim of men who had no convictions, and who were in most respects worse than himself.

As ever with that teacher, there is much wisdom.  Punishment as ‘a measure of despair’ may be seen as the dilemma underlying our whole criminal justice system.

You will not, therefore, find in Paris, or even Arras, a great monument to the person seen as the author of that lethal cancer called the Terror.  But that does not make it any easier to deal with the lingering wistful charm of the Corsican, who wanted to conquer and rule Europe, India, and the world.

Robespierre and Napoleon were very different men.  Not least in the number of those who died as a result of their acts of governance.  With Robespierre, the number runs into thousands.  With Napoleon, the number runs into millions. 

These numbers pass all understanding and would only be matched by monsters like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.  And it was Stalin who had that most shocking insight: ‘The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic’.

But Robespierre had an insight into people and history, and the sense and courage to espouse the lessons of history, that are not sufficiently remembered.

At the beginning of 1792, the French were discovering that it was very hard to translate the glory days of 1789 into a body of government that worked.  The nation was simply not politically mature enough.  But the French knew that they were surrounded by foreign and internal forces that would punish them and restore the old regime.

Having declared war on the Crown, the Nobility, and the Church, the fledgling government embarked on a war against Europe.  France declared war on Austria in April 1792.  In hindsight, some kind of showdown looks to have been inevitable, but declaring war was another thing. 

The war party was led by Brissot and Vergniaud.  The king went along with it.  He and Lafayette thought that one way or another, a war might assist the cause of the king, win or lose. 

Their motives were very different.  The people’s war party had this fixed idea that their revolutionary principles had universal application.  Brissot, a later victim of the Terror, got carried away.  He called for another crusade, ‘whose name is nobler and holier, a crusade on behalf of universal liberty.’ 

Well, if that sounds like moonshine that would warm the hearts of Shelley or Byron, it was also the kind of guff spread later by Napoleon and his disciples.  Nor have the French entirely dropped this noble aspiration from their world view.

Since France hardly had an executive government, the war was voted on by the Assembly.  The Declaration said that it followed a formal proposal of the king and that ‘the Court of Vienna, in contempt of treaties, has continued to grant open protection to French rebels; that it has instigated and formed a concert with several European powers against the independence and security of the French nation.’  The thinking was that a war would pull together a nation that was dividing.  That was true – but at what cost? 

Robespierre was almost on his own in opposition.  He showed real fibre, and he was nothing if not consistent.  ‘The source of the evil is not in Coblenz – it is among you, it is in your midst.’ 

There was some dreadful pride on show.  Brissot wrote to his general saying they should not act like ministers of the Old Regime: ‘How can their petty schemes compare to the uprisings of the whole planet and the momentous revolutions that we are now called upon to lead’.  He thought they would be marching into Berlin next year.  Vergniaud spoke in terms that are revoltingly familiar: ‘Men have died in the recent fighting.  But it is so that no one will ever die again.  I swear to you in the name of the universal fraternity which you are creating, that each battle will be a step towards peace, humanity, and happiness for all peoples.’ 

They really thought they had the answer for the liberation of all Europe.  They thought that when they crossed the Rhine, they would be greeted with acclimation by the oppressed peoples of Germany.  (Before they started the war that ended so badly at Sedan, and scarred the French psyche permanently, they all bought Baedeker Guides for touring and sight-seeing in Berlin!)  On the eve of war, people go off their heads.

The decision to go to war became fundamental to the way that what we call the Revolution unfolded, and to the implementation of what we know as the Terror.  And it was taken over the vigorous, sustained, and courageous protest of the young and highly principled provincial lawyer from Arras, who was also opposed to capital punishment on moral grounds.  This says a lot for the true character – the character devant le déluge – of the young avocat from Arras.

Robespierre said the king hoped to use the war to restore the old regime; Brissot wanted to set up a bourgeois republic – but the kind of bourgeois a little above Robespierre and his followers in the social scale; and Lafayette wanted war to help set up a military dictator ship.  These were not charges of small change.

Robespierre expressed his opposition in terms that might usefully be etched into the front door of both the White House and 10 Downing Street, and even at Canberra.

The most extravagant idea that can arise in the mind of a politician is the belief that a people need only make an armed incursion into the territory of a foreign people, to make it adopt its laws and its constitution.  No one likes armed missionaries; and the first counsel given by nature and prudence is to repel them as enemies.

‘No one likes armed missionaries.’  How on earth could any sane person suggest otherwise?  Well, George Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard did with Iraq.  Do you remember all that nonsense about a ‘beacon of democracy’ or a ‘freedom deficit’? 

If you are being bayoneted or raped, or you are watching your husband or children being tortured, do you stop to inquire into the political bona fides or ideological driver of the leader of the invading army? 

It is not just that the Americans saw this in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – they had seen it all at home it in their own war of independence.  That conflict had its own ghastly brand of civil war.  Appalling crimes were committed on both sides, especially in the civil war in the south between the Patriots and Loyalists.  There were, Churchill said, ‘atrocities such as we have known in our day in Ireland.’  Professor Gordon S Wood said that the ‘war in the lower south became a series of bloody guerrilla skirmishes with atrocities on both sides.’

There is one other thing to say of Robespierre and his role in the governance of France from 1789 until his death in 1794.  He did not seek or obtain any position or power by force or falsehood.  (That very humane English historian, J M Thompson, said Robespierre was impervious ‘to any bribe except flattery.’)

Let us look back, not with the eye of eternity, but with hindsight.  We now know that the French people suffered breakdowns and agonies for about a century after the apocalypse of 1789.  It is not a matter for a mere mortal to compare the various infamies suffered by and in France in that time, but it may allow us to get a clearer view of the position of Robespierre if we look at five critical factors that dominated the period of time traditionally labelled ‘the French Revolution’ and continued to give rise to instability, pain, and war for about 100 years. 

Those five factors are: the uselessness and desertion of the royals and the nobility; the outbreak of a state of war with the Church; the declarations of war by and against Europe; the betrayal of the French nation by the king and his family and by leading generals; and the rise to power of man of military genius the like of which we had not seen.

Nevertheless, the resistance to invasion – by ‘armed missionaries’ or whoever – remains constant.  It is part of the human condition – part, if you like, of la comédie humaine. 

But it is with us yet again.  In the current war involving Iran, what armed force would repel the people of Iran more – that commanded by Donald Trump, or that commanded by Benjamin Netanyahu?  Could your average Iranian imagine any person on earth more Satanic than either of those two people?

When I visited Moscow in 1988, I took a tour of the Kremlin.  When we climbed to a spot that gave an aerial view, our guide got very emotional.  ‘That is the gate he came in by – and that is the gate that he left by.’ 

He was not referring to Hitler – who had not learned the lesson of the defeat of Napoleon by winter and the peoples of Russia.

But it is Napoleon who gets the monument. 

We refuse to learn.

Robespierre and Iran

The tomb of Napoleon is a Paris landmark and tourist attraction.  You will not find anything remotely like it for Robespierre – and Napoleon was not even French.  Such are the ways of memory and history – and the voice of the people.  And the Marseillaise so righteously intoned by Paul Henried in Casablanca.

Maximilien Robespierre was a little-known French provincial lawyer.  As a consequence of a series of events that we label as ‘the French Revolution’, Napoleon became the Emperor of France, with more power than any Bourbon king ever held, and sought to become ruler of the world.  The battle of Waterloo was, in the words of his Grace, the Duke of Wellington, a ‘damned nice thing – the closest thing you ever saw in your life’.  But it was enough to see off the Corsican, who died in the exile generously allowed him by the Allies.

The images of Napoleon are many and consistent – and they fit nicely into the flowering of the Romantic movement, and the celebration – salutation, even – of the ego. 

This has never been so with Robespierre, a shy man born to serve a cause.  He was the definitive French ideologue and bearer of the gospel of Jean Jaques Rousseau.  Through his dedication and transparent commitment to the revolution, Robespierre rose above the herd to become the de facto leader of the French nation. 

Nothing in his life, or that of any other person, could have equipped Robespierre to deal with the issues facing someone in his position.  He had served as a part time judicial officer, but he had given up that when he had had to sentence a man to death.  Was he cut out for high office – let alone leadership of a nation in chaos?

The French nation was simply not ready for the nation-shattering changes that followed in the five years after the fall of the Bastille.  To secure those kinds of changes, the English had spent about six hundred years house training their kings, nobles and priests. 

France under Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety was surrounded by life threatening enemies from within and without.  Its response was the Terror, and the guillotine, and horrors that prefigured the worst of those in Europe of the following century. 

We can see ourselves as Hottentots dancing round the rim of a live volcano – and no mere human has found a way to avoid the risk of falling in.  The canvas is masterfully painted by Thomas Carlyle, at times in terms that prefigure the horrors of Nazi Germany. 

Robespierre, the ‘sea green incorruptible’, was sanctified, and then hardened, and then, like Macbeth, rendered devoid of his humanity.  It was kill or be killed – and the others through blind fear finally found enough nerve to get him.  The unkillable Fouché, who survived to serve Napoleon, whispered in their ears that their leader had delusions of godliness – and a list.  ‘Is your name on it, Citizen?’ 

Robespierre died by the guillotine, and he comes down to us now as the archetypal terrorist.   He was a decent young man who got crushed in an earthquake.  ‘O unhappiest Advocate of Arras, wert thou worse than other Advocates? …A man fitted in some luckier settled age to have become one of those incorruptible, barren Pattern-Figures, and have had marble tablets and funeral sermons……May God be merciful to him and to us!’  (Carlyle).

By the time Robespierre was killed, his naïve obsession with ideology and the Supreme Being were as childlike as his sky-blue jacket.  His cat-like features did not mask his capacity to inspire dread, and his conviction of the infallibility of his faith was at best dangerous when he preached about ‘virtue’ and ‘terror’ to a politically naïve audience.  He had no mates.  Dr J M Thompson said:

No one was so admired by his fellow citizens, no one so little loved…. he was too small-minded to forgive, and yet powerful enough to punish.  But punishment is a measure of despair.  It may cause conformity; it cannot produce conviction…. So, he failed and fell – the victim of men who had no convictions, and who were in most respects worse than himself.

As ever with that teacher, there is much wisdom.  Punishment as ‘a measure of despair’ may be seen as the dilemma underlying our whole criminal justice system.

You will not, therefore, find in Paris, or even Arras, a great monument to the person seen as the author of that lethal cancer called the Terror.  But that does not make it any easier to deal with the lingering wistful charm of the Corsican, who wanted to conquer and rule Europe, India, and the world.

Robespierre and Napoleon were very different men.  Not least in the number of those who died as a result of their acts of governance.  With Robespierre, the number runs into thousands.  With Napoleon, the number runs into millions. 

These numbers pass all understanding and would only be matched by monsters like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.  And it was Stalin who had that most shocking insight: ‘The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic’.

But Robespierre had an insight into people and history, and the sense and courage to espouse the lessons of history, that are not sufficiently remembered.

At the beginning of 1792, the French were discovering that it was very hard to translate the glory days of 1789 into a body of government that worked.  The nation was simply not politically mature enough.  But the French knew that they were surrounded by foreign and internal forces that would punish them and restore the old regime.

Having declared war on the Crown, the Nobility, and the Church, the fledgling government embarked on a war against Europe.  France declared war on Austria in April 1792.  In hindsight, some kind of showdown looks to have been inevitable, but declaring war was another thing. 

The war party was led by Brissot and Vergniaud.  The king went along with it.  He and Lafayette thought that one way or another, a war might assist the cause of the king, win or lose. 

Their motives were very different.  The people’s war party had this fixed idea that their revolutionary principles had universal application.  Brissot, a later victim of the Terror, got carried away.  He called for another crusade, ‘whose name is nobler and holier, a crusade on behalf of universal liberty.’ 

Well, if that sounds like moonshine that would warm the hearts of Shelley or Byron, it was also the kind of guff spread later by Napoleon and his disciples.  Nor have the French entirely dropped this noble aspiration from their world view.

Since France hardly had an executive government, the war was voted on by the Assembly.  The Declaration said that it followed a formal proposal of the king and that ‘the Court of Vienna, in contempt of treaties, has continued to grant open protection to French rebels; that it has instigated and formed a concert with several European powers against the independence and security of the French nation.’  The thinking was that a war would pull together a nation that was dividing.  That was true – but at what cost? 

Robespierre was almost on his own in opposition.  He showed real fibre, and he was nothing if not consistent.  ‘The source of the evil is not in Coblenz – it is among you, it is in your midst.’ 

There was some dreadful pride on show.  Brissot wrote to his general saying they should not act like ministers of the Old Regime: ‘How can their petty schemes compare to the uprisings of the whole planet and the momentous revolutions that we are now called upon to lead’.  He thought they would be marching into Berlin next year.  Vergniaud spoke in terms that are revoltingly familiar: ‘Men have died in the recent fighting.  But it is so that no one will ever die again.  I swear to you in the name of the universal fraternity which you are creating, that each battle will be a step towards peace, humanity, and happiness for all peoples.’ 

They really thought they had the answer for the liberation of all Europe.  They thought that when they crossed the Rhine, they would be greeted with acclimation by the oppressed peoples of Germany.  (Before they started the war that ended so badly at Sedan, and scarred the French psyche permanently, they all bought Baedeker Guides for touring and sight-seeing in Berlin!)  On the eve of war, people go off their heads.

The decision to go to war became fundamental to the way that what we call the Revolution unfolded, and to the implementation of what we know as the Terror.  And it was taken over the vigorous, sustained, and courageous protest of the young and highly principled provincial lawyer from Arras, who was also opposed to capital punishment on moral grounds.  This says a lot for the true character – the character devant le déluge – of the young avocat from Arras.

Robespierre said the king hoped to use the war to restore the old regime; Brissot wanted to set up a bourgeois republic – but the kind of bourgeois a little above Robespierre and his followers in the social scale; and Lafayette wanted war to help set up a military dictator ship.  These were not charges of small change.

Robespierre expressed his opposition in terms that might usefully be etched into the front door of both the White House and 10 Downing Street, and even at Canberra.

The most extravagant idea that can arise in the mind of a politician is the belief that a people need only make an armed incursion into the territory of a foreign people, to make it adopt its laws and its constitution.  No one likes armed missionaries; and the first counsel given by nature and prudence is to repel them as enemies.

‘No one likes armed missionaries.’  How on earth could any sane person suggest otherwise?  Well, George Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard did with Iraq.  Do you remember all that nonsense about a ‘beacon of democracy’ or a ‘freedom deficit’? 

If you are being bayoneted or raped, or you are watching your husband or children being tortured, do you stop to inquire into the political bona fides or ideological driver of the leader of the invading army? 

It is not just that the Americans saw this in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – they had seen it all at home it in their own war of independence.  That conflict had its own ghastly brand of civil war.  Appalling crimes were committed on both sides, especially in the civil war in the south between the Patriots and Loyalists.  There were, Churchill said, ‘atrocities such as we have known in our day in Ireland.’  Professor Gordon S Wood said that the ‘war in the lower south became a series of bloody guerrilla skirmishes with atrocities on both sides.’

There is one other thing to say of Robespierre and his role in the governance of France from 1789 until his death in 1794.  He did not seek or obtain any position or power by force or falsehood.  (That very humane English historian, J M Thompson, said Robespierre was impervious ‘to any bribe except flattery.’)

Let us look back, not with the eye of eternity, but with hindsight.  We now know that the French people suffered breakdowns and agonies for about a century after the apocalypse of 1789.  It is not a matter for a mere mortal to compare the various infamies suffered by and in France in that time, but it may allow us to get a clearer view of the position of Robespierre if we look at five critical factors that dominated the period of time traditionally labelled ‘the French Revolution’ and continued to give rise to instability, pain, and war for about 100 years. 

Those five factors are: the uselessness and desertion of the royals and the nobility; the outbreak of a state of war with the Church; the declarations of war by and against Europe; the betrayal of the French nation by the king and his family and by leading generals; and the rise to power of man of military genius the like of which we had not seen.

Nevertheless, the resistance to invasion – by ‘armed missionaries’ or whoever – remains constant.  It is part of the human condition – part, if you like, of la comédie humaine. 

But it is with us yet again.  In the current war involving Iran, what armed force would repel the people of Iran more – that commanded by Donald Trump, or that commanded by Benjamin Netanyahu?  Could your average Iranian imagine any person on earth more Satanic than either of those two people?

When I visited Moscow in 1988, I took a tour of the Kremlin.  When we climbed to a spot that gave an aerial view, our guide got very emotional.  ‘That is the gate he came in by – and that is the gate that he left by.’ 

He was not referring to Hitler – who had not learned the lesson of the defeat of Napoleon by winter and the peoples of Russia.

But it is Napoleon who gets the monument. 

We refuse to learn.

Happy Christmas

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

The United States – Ideology and Problems of Governance Since 1776

Law is a priestly craft…. Societies are not transformed…They evolve…. although abstract thinking matters, it contributes less to the development of societies than instinct and experience.  (Jonathan Sumption, The Challenges of Democracy)

The white people who occupied America were religious zealots who had a covenant with their God.  This enabled them to treat their Promised Land as a source of profit so that their God would never stand between them and the dollar.  It also meant and that they could treat the original inhabitants of the land in the same way those who had first occupied the first Promised Land had been treated in what they called the Holy Land.  The union of God and the dollar was complete from the start.  You see it on their currency.  Then they further debased their humanity by introducing slavery.  Have they ever recovered?

They revolted when the mother country said they should pay their way.  (This was a spoiler for what the United States now says to Europe.)  The War of Independence was in part a savage civil war that England’s traditional enemy, France, bailed them out of.  (And in so doing, bankrupted themselves and brought on their own revolution in 1789.  It is an open question whether France has ever recovered.)

The issue of slavery led to another civil war, this time one that was far more brutal.  Lincoln saved the Union, but too many white Americans have never accepted the verdict. 

The still divided nation came late into two world wars, but the Great Republic finally found its heroic place in the world order by leading its reconstruction after World War II. 

Sadly, it has not won a war since, and a line of mediocre leaders and bruising inequality and racial insecurity has led to a government intent on repudiating most of what was decent in its past.  The United States is withdrawing from the world and forfeiting all trust.

What went wrong?

I Deception and ideology from the start

The Declaration of Independence of the United States was of, by, and for, white men, and not men of any other colour.  Opinions were asserted in 1776 that would find no place in America more than two hundred years later. 

The Indians were written off as savage mass murderers: ‘He [King George III] has incited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.’ 

That is the kind of nonsense we expect from the current administration.  So, an entire people is dismissed, Old Testament style, by reference to race.  It may remind some of incidents in the Holy Land today, and whatever else might be said of Indian war-making, they did not have the same means for dealing out death that their enemies had – they were for the most part just trying to protect their own people and land; and no one could ever accuse the Indians of genocide.  (This, I think, is what psychologists refer to as ‘projection.’)

The reference – or, as the Declaration was issued, the lack of reference – to African Americans is no better.  Jefferson had drafted a clause making the fatuous suggestion that the English – well, they said King George III – had instituted a trade of slavery, frustrated attempts to stop it, and then excited the blacks to rise up against ‘us’ – and ‘we’ were by implicit definition white. 

All this is expressed in the most colourful language: ‘He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the person of a distant people who never offended him.’  ‘This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king …. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce ….’  And so on.  Mercifully, Congress struck all this nonsense out.  But they left as it was the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ and that statement was, to their certain knowledge, untrue in their minds. 

Well, this evasion, if that is the term, on the subject of slavery might be expected from a slave-owner from the largest slave-owning state.  But what was not to be expected was the lack of candour on the causes of the revolt.

The American Declaration of Independence tracks the form of the English Declaration of Rights.  It records the conduct complained of to justify the termination of the relationship.  (This is what common lawyers call ‘accepting a repudiation’ of a contract.)  The English did so in short, crisp allegations that were for the most part devoid of the oratorical colour that we find in the American Declaration.  (The first draft was prepared by a junior barrister named John Somers – whom no-one has heard of.)

How does the American Declaration of Independence go about this process?  Before it gets to an allegation that the king maintains standing armies, which is a relatively specific charge, it made ten allegations of misconduct that were so general that they would not be permitted to stand today as an allegation of a breach of the law on a conviction for which a person might lose their liberty.  The fourteenth allegation, which is hopeless, but which appears to be an attempt to invoke the English precedent, is that: ‘He [King George III] has abdicated government here.’  (During the English revolution in 1688, James II had fled, throwing the Great Seal into the Thames.) 

Then there is the fifteenth allegation: ‘He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.’  If that allegation of plunder and murder – the old word was ‘rapine’ – had been seriously put, you might have expected to see it before an allegation of abdication – and before every other allegation.  The eighteenth allegation relates to the Indians. The nineteenth was the allegation relating to slavery and which was struck out.  Those drafting the Declaration were not evidently keen to get down to the subject of people of another race.  Or tax.

Let us put to one side that all these allegations are made against the Crown, and not the British government, and that none of these allegations refers to any statute of the British government.  There is no history of the American Revolution that has been written that says that the American colonies revolted from their subjection to the British Crown for any of the reasons that are set out in the first eighteen clauses of the Declaration of Independence.  The primary reason that history gives for the revolt of the colonists was the imposition, or purported imposition, of taxes upon them by the British parliament – when those who were being taxed had no direct representation in the parliament levying the tax.  Most divorces are about dollars, and this one was no different. 

But British taxation is only mentioned once in the Declaration of Independence.  That reference is fallacious.  It is against the King.  The Glorious Revolution in England made it plain that the King could not impose a tax in his own name.  (The only reference to the English legislature comes when those drafting the documents scold the English for ‘attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us’.)  Given that the 1688 revolution secured the supremacy of the English parliament over the English Crown, and made it transcendentally clear that only the English parliament could levy a tax on its subjects, it may have seemed a little odd for Jefferson to be suggesting that the American colonies were somehow subject to the English Crown, but not to the English parliament.  ‘Jurisdiction’ is a word that has come to bedevil American jurisprudence, and it looks like the problem may have started very early.

Tax is one price of membership of a commonwealth.  It is inherent in the language of the ‘common weal.’  A childish resentment of that brute fact of life has disfigured the Great Republic since its birth.  And it has reached its apogee under Trump and his rich mates.

The American Declaration of Independence is therefore of limited historical value in explaining why the American colonies proceeded as they did, or what values of humanity they proposed to pursue in their future.  The tragic truth is that the barefaced lie about slavery would haunt the young republic until it was thought to have been expunged by the death of more than six hundred thousand Americans in the Civil War, and by the moral courage, intellectual genius, and cool hand of Abraham Lincoln, the one unquestionable gift of the United States to humanity. 

Then, one of the great tragedies of the Union is that the South did not in substance accept the verdict of the Civil War.

The new republic was born under cover of deceit, and a many splendored deceit at that.

2 Failure of responsible government

Australia adopted the Westminster System of government from the English.  As its name suggests, the English invented it.  And the one fundamental of our (Australian) jurisprudence is that the English common law is the source of the authority of the Parliament of Westminster. 

The Westminster System was in large part in place by 1776, when the American colonies seceded.  They deliberately declined to follow it – which is not surprising given the lethal enmity between the two sides.

For us, government is seen to come in three parts.  The Parliament makes the laws.  The executive branch carries them into effect.  And the judges rule on any disputes about the working of the laws. 

The king is in theory the head of the executive, but there are four parts of the Westminster System dealing with the working of the executive that are fundamental to our notion of ‘responsible government’.  And an essential part of that is that the de facto head of government, the Prime Minister, and the rest of the Cabinet and ministry, sit in Parliament and are answerable – responsible – to Parliament. 

Having the head of government outside Parliament is barely comprehensible to us.  (As would having a CEO of a public company not a member of the board of directors – at least in the way that Australian and British corporations trade.)  The System provides as follows.

First, the king only acts on the advice of his Ministers.

Secondly, those Ministers – some of whom comprise the Cabinet – must have the confidence of the Parliament – and they must resign if they do not.

Thirdly, there is a permanent non-political civil service chosen and trained to give effect to the wishes of government, the members of which are under the supervision of a Minister – the Ministers of course being the members of parliament and who have the confidence of parliament.

Fourthly, the Ministers are responsible to the Parliament for the working of the civil service under them.  If the civil service makes a mistake that cannot be dismissed as trifling, the Minister must account to Parliament for the error – and depending on its gravity, either apologise or resign.

That at least is the theory.  The last is at best wobbly for us now, but you see immediately just how different things are in the U S.  Since this point about responsible government is central to this paper, it may be as well to set out what A V Dicey says:

….it is now well-established law that the Crown can only act through Ministers….who not only become morally but legally responsible for the legality of the act…. Hence, indirectly but surely, the action of every servant of the Crown, and therefore in effect of the Crown itself, is brought under the supremacy of the law of the land.

This would cause wild surmise in Washington.  Would it be possible for someone with the history of Donald Trump to head a government in Australia?  Would it be possible for something like the collection that Trump calls its cabinet to be installed in Australia?  Either idea is absurd.

Perhaps because in 1776 the U S was moving away from a monarchical government, its constitution invests much more power in its president than do similar constitutions where the monarchy is retained.  But the Founding Fathers had a taste for ideology that they certainly did not get from the Mother Country.  The English have no taste for theory or doctrine in the common law or governance.  They look only at experience, and ask the simple question: Does it work? 

The English constitution turns on the legislative and political sovereignty of parliament.  The parliament makes laws and ministers must respond in parliament for the formation and execution of policy.  The United States does not share that notion of ministerial responsibility.  Its ministers are answerable to their president, not to Congress.  That to us savours not of 1776 but 1576 – when the nobles in the ministry answered not to parliament but to the king.

Something in the air in the last part of the eighteenth century led the secessionists to think more like the French.  Does our scheme accord with our ideology?  Must we not follow the dogma of Montesquieu and avoid any infringement of the doctrine of the separation of powers?

In the result, the president does not have to answer to Congress in person, but now may be confronted by a hostile Congress, which is bad for both the efficiency of government and the faith of its citizens in the workability of government. 

McConnell and others ruthlessly exploited this weakness against the first black president, and the U S is now held up to world ridicule on a regular basis by being shut down.  Congress effectively takes strike action – against those who put them there, and the institutions they are sworn to uphold.

There is a related problem of the president not being in the parliament – neither is the leader of the opposition, because there is no such office.  This does not conduce to honesty or sense from the party not holding presidential office.  Since neither party is hardly allowed even to mention the word ‘tax’, the result is a sustained divorce from reality that is not healthy and that cannot last. 

As we speak, the absence of a formal Opposition to a president trampling on law and custom poses a direct threat to the U S polity.  We see it as essential to the principle of parliamentary control that ministers sit in parliament and answer to it.  That has never been the case in the United States.  If you said that Trump and his Cabinet were out of control, or simply not responsible, you might be uttering a legal truism.  What, if anything, has Congress done to control President Trump or make him responsible to it?

3 Failure to provide for peace, welfare and well-being

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We see our common law coming from England as having started about when the king sought to replace the vendetta with an action to protect the peace of the king.  Instead of leaving it to the family of the victim to extract revenge from the family of the accused, the king proceeds in his own name against the person accused.  He, most usually, was charged with having acted contra pacem regis vi et armis (‘against the peace of the king by force and arms’).  It was now the function of the king to deal with crime.  As steps forward go, this may be on par with the discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel.

Later, the role of government would be extended to providing for the welfare and well-being of the community.  Matters of health, education and age would no longer be left to the family, the church, charity and the community, but to government itself.

If you asked most Australians or Canadians or New Zealanders if they would prefer to live in the U S, your best result may be a funny look.  If you asked them to say what are the grounds of your hostility, you might reply – guns and medicare. 

Then, you might say that the very first sentence of their Constitution reads:

‘We the People of the United States in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common Defence, and general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity ….’

Well, since we the people outside the United States think that they have failed to ensure domestic tranquility by their gun laws, and that they have failed to ensure general welfare by their other laws, or absence of laws, dealing with the poor and health care, what went wrong?

I will not here rehearse my reasons for saying that the relevant rulings about guns of the U S Supreme Court were sadly unsound in history and at law.  Not the least disturbing thing about Heller was the judicial giggling about a national tragedy, and the cavalier rudeness and malice shown by the majority to those of a different mind.  This misbehaviour simply should not be seen or heard in a court of law.  And when it comes to being rude, the ‘conservative’ justices are anything but conservative.

But I must say something about the failure of the United States to provide adequately for the welfare of its citizens. 

When we speak of the kind of the community that we want to live in here in Australia, we tend to mention notions like a belief in human worth or dignity, universal rights, the prospect of each of us being able to flourish, the government needing our consent to act against us, and a subscription to the notion of the rule of law that gives us reasonable prospects of protecting those rights. 

Some apply the term Liberalism to this bundle of values.  The Americans spoke of inalienable rights to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’  Others might prefer the more emphatic statement of the Germans at the start of their constitution: ‘Human dignity shall be inviolable.  To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.’  

No, we speak of dignity in the sense of intrinsic worth – a word Kant invoked in discussing his ‘principle of humanity.’  The first meaning of dignity in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘the quality of being worthy…worth…desert.’  We speak of that worth being intrinsic because we see it as deriving from the fact that we are human – and nothing more.

But in one way, ‘dignity’ may be a little like an elephant.  We may have trouble defining it, but we know one when we see one.  And we certainly know it when we see the flat opposite – as we do in, say, in governance in Russia or China or Iran. 

Together with the sentiments that some address as Liberalism, there is something else that matters to us here in Australia and those nations that we respect – except for the United States.  We may have a sense of compassion for those not doing so well – like the sick, the aged, or the unemployed – but we go further and recognise that it is a function of government to look after such people.  We think that they deserve more than just our sympathy, and that they need and that they should get help from us through our government.

The English had accepted that view about the responsibility of government for looking after the poor from at least the time of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603).  That was a long time ago, but it never took hold in the New World over the water.  That nation was founded by stern Puritans who saw both success and failure as coming from God.  The Puritans were gladly ushered out of England, but they had the numbers in America.  What is sometimes called the Welfare State is an essential part of our governance.  It is in practice irremovable here.  That has never been so in the U S.

It is worth pausing on this huge chasm between us and America.  In the sixteenth century, before white people had even seen America, the English people had assumed obligations for their poor that would have been abhorrent to their Puritans back then, and which still look at best alien to Americans today.  By 1563, the English had made a law for the compulsory levy for the maintenance of ‘impotent, aged and needy persons’.  The Oxford History of England records that the English accepted that the poor were ‘a charge on public benevolence’ and that ‘responsibility in the matter could not be left to the conscience of the individual, but must be enforced by law upon everyone.’ 

The distance from this very old English position to that in America now is as deep as the Atlantic.  And the Elizabethans were not driven by ideology, God, or charity.  They were too hardnosed for that.  In Tudor times, unemployment took the form of vagrancy.  The Tudors knew the threat to the peace of the realm (pacem regis) posed by vagabonds.  They could terrorise small farms or villages.  (And just look at how they rose up in France in 1789.) 

To repeat, the ‘commonwealth’ inevitably involved the ‘common weal’.  Under the heading ‘paternalism’, Sir Geoffrey Elton said that the ‘doctrine of the body politic knit together demanded obedience and assistance from the governed and put upon the government the duty of looking after its subjects…..Of necessity, therefore, the state had to accept the responsibility for the failures and victims of society, and the admission and elaboration of this important principle mark the development of the effective poor law from 1536 to the great Elizabethan codifications in 1597 and 1601.’  (My emphasis.)

This concern for welfare was to find its clearest statement when two future prime ministers of England presented what would be called the People’s Budget in 1908.  In June of that year, Lloyd George, the son of a Welsh cobbler, introduced a bill for an old age pension to the House of Commons.  In doing so, Lloyd George, who was aided by Winston Churchill, the son of an American heiress, stated the premise of what came to be called New Liberalism.

These problems of the sick, the infirm, of the men who cannot find a means of earning a livelihood … are problems with which it is the business of the State to deal.  They are problems which the State has neglected for too long.  (Emphasis added.)

In so acting, the English were following the example of the great Prussian, Count Otto von Bismarck, hardly a darling of the Left.

But even before the twentieth century and the rise of the Labour Party in England, the old-fashioned conservatives – the lords of the manor, or the Tory knights of the shire – showed what Professor Simon Blackburn in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy called ‘benevolent paternalism’.  That is no mere catch-phrase.  The whole feudal compact depended on the notion that both lords and vassals had obligations as well as rights, and as we have seen the Tudors accepted their paternal role as essential in their governance of the common weal.  Paternalism had been blessed by the ‘law and order’ party.

This vast ocean between us, England, and most of Europe on one side, and the United States on the other, is too little noticed.  The difference in political worldviews is fundamental. 

And one word will never be applied to the United States of Trump’s America – dignity.  It dies on our lips.  MAGA has left America soiled and in the gutter.

It is sad that a flirtation with theory can become an addiction to ideology that leads to what we see as the disasters in America of their attitudes to violence (and not just in guns) and welfare (health and poverty).  Their whole history dictates traits that we and the U K and Europe could not tolerate.

4 Bill of Rights written into Constitution

It is wrong to say that the English do not have a written constitution.  You can find it in documentary form.  The difference is that it is not is not contained, or mainly contained, in a single document or instrument.  At bottom it stands on the common law, a blend of judicial precedent and ancient statutes, mainly Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, the Bill of Rights, and the Act of Settlement.  And the British Parliament could legislate about any of those tomorrow.  There is no requirement of a referendum.  Parliament is supreme.  This is the ultimate endorsement of democracy and the U S Founding Fathers did not want much of that kind of democracy.

The Australian Constitution is set out in a schedule to an act of the Imperial Parliament.  It has long been accepted that the English Constitution forms part of the common law.  As such, each is the result of a natural process of evolution.  It follows that it would be at best problematic and at worst misconceived to take a phrase uttered at one point of that process of evolution and try to freeze its meaning and effect as at the time it first surfaced.  It would be wrong to take a notion expressed in the seventeenth century as frozen in time although invoked in the twenty-first century.  It would be wrong because it contradicts the whole notion and process of evolution.  Evolution and revolution are ‘clean’ two different things. 

(In this context, as I have mentioned before, the Supreme Court in Heller did not refer to the statement of Sir William Holdsworth, the leading authority on the history of English law, that the Tudors had prohibited the carrying ‘of certain kinds of arms – such as pistols and handguns’.  On that basis, the English Bill of Rights would never have applied to hand-guns.  The suggestion would have been ridiculous in any event in light of the history of the law relating to the duty as well as the right to bear arms going back to the medieval fyrd.)

In the U K, the law relating to what we call civil liberties comes from the common law as modified by statute.  As such, the Parliament could change it all tomorrow.  We in Australia do not regard legal issues about civil liberties as part of what we call ‘constitutional law,’ and it may be as well to remember that the Bill of Rights was entered into and enacted to settle the state in England after a revolution which, by definition, was outside the law, and of which the great legal historian F W Maitland said ‘we cannot work it into our constitutional law’.  Ultimately any rule of law must derive from an historical source – a brute matter of fact, such as a conquest, or a revolution that leads to the founding documents of a new regime.

The U S mindset is here fundamentally different to the U K and us.  There the civil rights are most set out in amendments to the written constitution and they can only be changed by the procedures there set out.  So, we can put that form of change to one side.

The Bill of Rights inevitably raises political issues for resolution by the U S Supreme Court.  As a result, that body engages in political or ideological debate that can degenerate into personal abuse in a way that would never happen in a higher court sitting in, say, London, Paris, Canberra or Berlin.  The Court is effectively a law-making body because its power to declare the meaning and effect of the Constitution becomes a de facto power to make laws in a body that is not elected, but the members of which are seen to have an agenda.

Then you get the ultimate irony – and ideological heresy.  People vote for the President, the head of the executive, so that he can appoint well sounding candidates to the judiciary, who will then stand in place of the legislature to make laws about abortion.  But only after they have stone-walled at the inquisition conducted by the real or lawful lawmakers.

That for us is an abomination.

The Australian Constitution is a remarkably prosaic affair that has little to do with what we call civil liberties.  Its one indulgence of the transcendental – trade between the states shall be ‘absolutely free’ – caused heartburn to our High Court justices for ninety years, before their Honours announced that having looked at the debates that produced the Constitution, they could identify the purpose and narrow reach of this law – and normal business was resumed.  That is that the court deals with these issues legalistically, and as apolitically as possible.

In 1942, Sir Owen Dixon, our greatest jurist, said this to the American Bar Association:

…. our constitution makers refused to adopt any part of the Bill of Rights of 1791, and a fortiori, they refused to adopt the Fourteenth Amendment.  It may surprise you to learn that in Australia, one view held was that these checks on legislative action was undemocratic, because to adopt them argued a want of confidence in the will of the people. 

Another way of saying that is that those who framed our constitution did not want to produce a document by which the political aspirations of the people could be frustrated by a claque of nitpicking village elders erstwhile clad in ermine.

It is not surprising, then, that polls give the U S Supreme Court low approval ratings.  I am not aware of any such process for our High Court or the UK Supreme Court.  The question of political alignment in those courts simply does not arise – except beyond the fringe.  And no-one would ask what is the breakdown of religious beliefs in members of our highest court.  (The closest we get to prurience is when we ask how many of them had a private school education.)

Then, by chance, the three Justices appointed by Trump got the chance to do what they were appointed to do – and they changed the law on abortion.  As I read the reports in the press, five of the six justices who voted for the change were Catholic, and the sixth was raised as a Catholic. 

It is hardly surprising that in a contest for loyalty between the nation and God, God won.  Uncle Sam (now called POTUS) is potent.  God is omnipotent.  And depending on which version you choose, He might cause you agony for eternity if you let Him down.  It was to be expected, then, that the altar would prevail over the bench.

And in reversing their law on abortion, the justices used the same kind of strident language that they had used on guns – including the epithet ‘grotesque’ for those of a different mind.  Instead of a reasoned resolution of a legal issue, we get the impassioned assertion or defence of a position.  Judges are not there to take sides.

Haven’t these judges learned the first lesson of judging?  The most important person in the courtroom is the loser.  And the time for fighting cases stopped when they left the bar.  They are there to quell conflict, not provoke it.  You say what you have to say in order to determine the case, and no more – and then you call on the next case.  All we ask is that you do your job – and that’s it.

Well, if the Americans are about three hundred years behind the English on guns, their position is worse with the Germans – well over two thousand years worse.  In his history On Germany, Tacitus said of the Germans before the birth of Christ that ‘it is repugnant to their custom for any man to use arms, before the community has attested his capacity to wield them’.  It is impossible to imagine a state of the U S trying to pass a law to that effect. 

As I recall it, Gibbon said the Romans did not subscribe to the ‘barbarous practice’ of wearing arms in the midst of peace and commented that he ‘who considers this circumstance as the test of civilisation would disdain the barbarism of a European court.’

There are two other differences between us and the U S in our approach to the law.  We follow the English tradition that you learn the practice of the law on the job – and we do not have much time for law schools or universities.  The Americans tend to lionise law schools and their products – especially from the ivy league.  That looks unreal to us – and downright snooty. 

We also follow England in having a separate bar.  We see that as essential to a solid and independent bar and judiciary – both of which were fundamental in the history of the common law and the constitution.  Europe knew nothing like it. 

The response of the legal profession in America to Trump has been at best wobbly.  And that is very worrying.

5 Bad electoral laws

When I was about sixteen, I studied nineteenth century English history – the Age of Reform.  One reform was to legislate for a secret ballot at election polls – so that people could vote free of pressure.  I never understood the argument against it. 

Nor have I ever understood the argument against making voting in elections compulsory.  That process is fundamental to our whole process of government, just as stopping at red lights is fundamental to our road traffic regulation.  We do not make that process voluntary – nor do we make jury service, another pillar of our democracy, voluntary. 

There is every reason to think that the U S would not find itself in the mess that it is in now if voting was compulsory.  This is I suspect another case of common sense being trumped by ideology – and party loyalty.  Which looks to be the case with appointing judges for life in the U S.  Why do to the nation what you would not allow people to do to each other?

And that is before you get to gerrymandering and rigging the vote – corruption at the level of eighteenth-century England or nineteenth century Tammany Hall.

This aspect of U S democracy looks to be irredeemably soiled.

6 Failure to deal with God

In England, the Lord Chancellor was a member of the legislature, judiciary and the executive.  Doctrinal anathema!  The head of state was and is the head of the state church – and liable to be deposed if he ceases to be in communion with the Church.  Worse than anathema!  Heresy!  Yet, the influence of religion on the governance in England is so slight as to be invisible.

Not many U S presidents believed in God.  But they could not be heard to say so.  Atheism was verboten, so most of them danced a minuet.  Freedom of speech is a tricky phrase, but no sane person could suggest that the present incumbent believes in God – at least in any way that may impede his ego.

The 1641 revolution in England may be called the Puritan Revolution, but after the death of Cromwell, the Puritan influence in Britain fell, and the Puritans there had trouble keeping up their status as Dissenters. 

It was different in America – the Puritans were in the majority and they had their own way.  It still shows.As we have seen, the upshot of this continuing impact of the Puritan and frontier influences is what the rest of the western world sees as a cold indifference to the fate of those who are less fortunate – a reluctance to legislate for the welfare of the citizens of the United States. 

And the one shot that was heard around the world came in 1831 when the British Parliament outlawed slavery.  That very significant act of political and moral courage was brought about after an inspired campaign to change and direct public opinion in Britain that was organised and directed by the established church, the Church of England, and a group of religious fanatics who had been hardly done by in America, the Quakers.

Otherwise, although the Founding Fathers sought to sterilise the impact of religion in the republic, at least by banning any state church, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the impact of religion on the U S has been as sinister as it was pervasive.  And that would be unthinkable here or in the common Mother Country.

There is not much point speculating which presidents may have been communicant Christians.  Gary Scott Smith devoted years of study to the subject and published the results in Faith & the Presidency, a work of 400 pages and a North American quota of footnotes of half as many pages again.  Its conclusions contain the following remarkable propositions.

The belief that God has especially blessed the United States and selected it for a special mission in the world is biblically suspect.  It has inspired Americans to fight injustice at home and abroad, but it has also contributed to simplistic moralizing, overlooking national flaws, a lack of awareness of moral ambiguity, and an understandable hatred abroad of American hubris.  (My emphasis.)

The author is obviously a deeply religious man, but he agrees with a scholar who spoke of the ‘rhetoric of empire’: ‘The assumption that the United States is morally superior to other nations, the assertion that it must redeem the world by spreading popular government’, and ‘faith in the nation’s divinely ordained destiny to fulfil this mission.’  The ‘rhetoric of empire’ is a lot worse than the Napoleon complex – that cost more than five million lives in European wars fought so that Europe might know the blessing of French republican liberty – and Napoleon did not even claim to be sent by God.

This kind of talk is terrifying to those outside America.  And all of that was written many years before the arrival of Donald Trump.  And J D Vance.

Finally, the twin American indulgences in violence and fake religion came together shockingly in the Ku Klux Klan, an evil group of men more frankly vicious than the Nazis – and with a similar level of representation in the community.  It is a fearful blot on their history that Americans are not handling anywhere nearly as well as the Germans. 

Millions and millions of ‘ordinary’ Americans in the heartlands, for the love of God and the hatred of race, indulged in orgies of violence and loathing that make the torch-lit parades of the Nazis look like Sunday School picnics.  The personal inclination to rape of the Grand Dragon of the Evil Empire would have appalled Heydrich and Himmler, and the rampant credulity and cowardly anonymity of the robed gutter-rats prefigured the banality of evil of Eichmann. 

If you read a book like Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland, you might blanch if you ever have to fly over states like Indiana or Oklahoma again.  Not the least revolting aspect of the Klan was that it became more popular as it brushed with an unavailing law, and its leaders were shown to be anything but ordinary Americans.  The failures of the nation found salvation as the victims of those who kept it down.  The whole history of the Klan was the reaching after a mythical past that left no room for the Civil War or Abraham Lincoln.  The losers erected statues of losers.  On what then could the republic stand?

If you have survived a diagnosis of terminal cancer, you wonder what poison may be left in your blood, and whether it might come back.  We have had, and still have issues of race in Australia, but we have been spared the vicious combination of race hate, raw cruelty, and fake religion that still haunts and disfigures America. 

In 1925, the Klan had more than six million members who paraded grandly in major cities to warm applause.  Their savage cruelty went back to medieval or Roman times.  The journal of their fake religion was The Fiery Cross. 

The Klan and MAGA have something in common – they see themselves as victims – a proposition that would be hilarious in Myanmar, Rwanda, or Venezuela – who have been appointed as champions of other victims.  They are characterised by hatred and contempt for those they regard as inferior – even if only because they are different.  People who are content with their lot in life do not join outfits like the Klan or MAGA.

In April 2025, the federal Attorney-General of the United States said she would call for the death penalty for a man charged with murder pursuant to instructions from the President to Make America Safe Again.  A life for a life.  The victim was a totem of capitalism, and his alleged killer was the subject of broad support among the people.  It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that there is something rotten in the state of America.  And 10 April 2025 sees the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, the novel about ‘careless people’ that blew to Kingdom Come the myth of the American Dream.

7 A right of insurrection?

Article 35 of the 1793 of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man as a Preface to the Constitution of that year provided for a right of insurrection of the people.  ‘When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.’  They may have been influenced by the U S Declaration of Independence of 1776.  ‘That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.’

It would be a serious mistake for a constitution to confer or recognise a right of subjects to rebel against a government that flagrantly breached the rights of its subjects – as the French did and the Declaration purports to do.  But it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that the decision in Heller is predicated on Americans having something like such a right.  In a previous note, I said:

A right to bear arms is not a right to use them but, passive deterrence aside, there is not much point in having a right to bear arms if you will not have a right to use them.  Americans must presumably use their own judgment of their common law rights when in the home they draw their preferred weapon on an intruder.  But when are you allowed to draw your gun on your government?

In using arms against the state, success is its own vindication; failure means death.  As one American rebel remarked, they ‘would have to hang together or be hanged separately’.  Any alleged right to use arms against a government will not be justiciable until the issue of arms has been determined by arms.  The American colonists rebelled against the English Crown over taxation, and those who would have been hanged as terrorists are national heroes.  The continued vitality of the Second Amendment means that the government of the United States is on permanent notice that the people of the United States reserve the right to respond to ‘tyranny’ on the part of their government by the use of the gun.  That may, I suppose, be ultimately the case everywhere.  It is what Plumb called ‘the implicit right of rebellion’.  But nowhere else will you find it celebrated as a constitutional right.  Only in America do you get that.  But even in America, no government would say to its citizens, ‘If you don’t like my taxes, take up your arms and march’.

8 Conclusions

The above look to me to be some of the ways the Americans find themselves in their current decline.  And so much of it looks to come from their failure to follow the English, or Anglo-Saxon, model of preferring the empirical call of experience to the intellectual call for theory. 

Sir Owen Dixon thought that the United States’ adoption of the separation of powers was ‘a curious and surprising departure from, indeed violation of, British constitutional practice and theory.’  His Honour was not, then, pulling punches.

The failure of the doctrine of separation of the powers of government to achieve a full legal operation here is probably fortunate.  Its failure to do so may be ascribed perhaps to mere judicial incredulity…. Legal symmetry gave way to common sense.

Roscoe Pound was the Professor of Jurisprudence at Harvard, but he did not have a law degree.  He got that learning the hard way at the bar table before Nebraskan juries.  (Perhaps for that reason, the book of 224 pages does not contain one footnote.)  Sense before style or theory is the way of the common law.

In 1921, Pound published his majestic treatise, The Spirit of the Common Law.  It contains juristic learning of the kind we do not see now.  On the second page, the author set out his stall:

For the strength of the common law is in its treatment of concrete controversies, as the strength of its rival, the modern Roman law, is in its logical development of abstract questions.

Elsewhere Pound summed it up with the crispness of a botanist:

The doctrine of precedents means that causes are to be judged by principles reached inductively from the judicial experience of the past, not by the deduction from rules established arbitrarily by the sovereign will… The common law doctrine is one of reason applied to experience. 

The latter follows a very well-known statement of Justice Holmes, but at times the United States prefers logic to experience.  We stick with Sir Owen Dixon when he said that conceptions derived from theory may be ‘too transcendental for a working lawyer’.

As I see it, ultimately our whole commitment to the rule of law rests on a certain state of mind that comes from a very long history that goes back to the forests of Germany in the time of Tacitus.  When I refer to a ‘state of mind’, I mean that when the time to decide finally comes, we are likely to be moved unconsciously, perhaps, by what Sir Owen Dixon referred to as ‘instinctive assumptions’ or ‘tacit assumptions’.

Montesquieu said that what mattered was the spirit of the laws, De L ’Esprit des Lois.  It got tricky when others sought to apply his teaching by the letter.  The Founding Fathers preferred the dogma of France to their inheritance from the history of England.

I have tried to set out how I see the relevant state of mind in America as being very different to that which prevails here and in the U K.  We have touched on three ways in which England tended to differ from those across the Chanel. 

First, in thinking – philosophy – they much preferred the empirical to the rationalist or metaphysical.  They disdained theory and were at best uncomfortable with intellectuals. 

Secondly, this mindset is reflected in the distinction between the common law and its preference for experience and Roman or civil law and its preference for codes and formal elegance and logic.  That in turn is mirrored in the distinction between the adversarial and inquisitorial modes of trial and the English reliance on the jury. 

Thirdly, the governance of England has since the Middle Ages involved paternalism toward those not so well off – such that the word ‘socialism’ becomes more fraught than ever.

The deviations of the United States since 1776 look to veer toward the European rather than the English model – and in ways that have no appeal for us.

As we speak, we can see the very fabric of the United States being torn apart by a president elected by a people who were on full notice of his propensity to do just that, having tried and failed to rebel against a duly elected government. 

And in the dark time just before dawn, they and we may have to deal with the unthinkable, and wonder if the nation of the United States has the fibre to go on.  This is how Sebastian Haffner saw the collapse of one of the most civilised nations on earth.

The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called ‘breeding’.  This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial….  At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed.  They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown….  The Kammergericht [superior court] toed the line.  No Frederick the Great was needed, not even Hitler had to intervene.  All that was required was a few Amtsgerichtsrats [judges] with a deficient knowledge of the law. 

I have no idea what the answer may be.  But I cannot see that we or anyone else with a similar history would seek to follow the lead of Uncle Sam.  Rather, in the words of their musical from their one Golden Age, ‘we’re going to wash that man right outa our hair – and send him on his way.’

Notes

Dicey on responsible government: A V Dicey, The Law of the Constitution, Macmillan & Co, 1885, 332.

Presence of Ministers in Parliament: W E Hearn, The Government of England, Longmans, 1897, 236.  (Sir Owen Dixon was a great admirer of this work.)

Prior remarks on gun laws: I refer to District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) and Gibson, The Dragon in the Cave, published in Looking Down the Well, Papers on Legal History, Amazon, 2015. 

Sources on welfare in U S: What follows draws on Gibson, The War against Humanity, The Decline of Courtesy and the Fall of Dignity in Government and Business, yet to be published.  The remarks on governance also drew on it.

Kant on dignity and principle of humanity: Edited extracts from Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 4.431 – 4.435; Practical Philosophy, Kant, Cambridge University Press 1996, 81-84.

Elizabethan property laws: Black, J B, The Reign of Elizabeth 1558-1603, being Volume XIII of The Oxford History of England, Clarendon Press (2nd ed, 1959) 265.   

Elton on paternalism:  England Under the Tudors, Folio, 1997, 183ff.  

Lloyd George and New Liberalism: cited in Gibson, History Essays, The Last Two Samurai, Amazon, 2018.

Bismarck: The role of Germany, and Bismarck in particular, in the introduction of what we call the Welfare State is not generally known here.  In 1883 and 1889, Bismarck pushed through legislation for accident insurance for workers and then old age and disability insurance.  For the first, the German government said it had put an end ‘to all those attempts to make health insurance a private matter …and asserts the role of the state’: see Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck, A Life, Oxford, 2011, 417. 

Blackburn on paternalism: Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, O U P, (2d Ed), 2005, 75.

Maitland on historic foundations: Constitutional History of England, Cambridge, 1963, 285.

Dixon on Bill of Rights: Jesting Pilate, Law Book Co, 1965, 102.

Change in abortion law: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022). 

Tacitus on Germany: Germania, 13.  But it is repugnant to their custom for any man to use arms before the community has attested his capacity to wield them.  Upon such testimonial…. some kinsmen dignify the young man in the midst of the assembly with the shield and javelin.  This among them is the manly robe, this first degree of honour conferred upon their youth.  Before this, they seem no more than part of a private family, but thenceforward part of the Commonweal.  That looks very advanced beside the United States in 2025.

Gibbon on Germans’ wearing arms: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Folio, 1987, Vol 5, 294.

Religion of U S: Scott Smith, Faith and the Presidency, OUP, 2006, 423.

Note on Heller: The Dragon in the Cave, above.

Dixon on separation of powers: Jesting Pilate, above, 52.

Pound on common law; The Spirit of the Common Law, Marshall Jones, 1921, 2, 182-183.

Dixon on the transcendental: The Common Law as an Ultimate Constitutional Foundation, Jesting Pilate, above, 207.

Dixon on assumptions: Jesting Pilate, above, 38,106.

Haffner: Defying Hitler, 2002, 110.

The musical: South Pacific, Rogers and Hammerstein.

The Fading Vision

Saying that you will pursue happiness does sound daft to those of us of Anglo-Saxon heritage, but that is the least of the problems with the Declaration of Independence of the United States.  So much is clear from the book of Don Watson, The Shortest History of the United States of America.  ‘All men are created equal’ was simply not true – it was inevitably false.  And the document was both coy and misleading about the real cause of the divorce – tax. 

This was therefore a very shaky rock on which to build a nation, and the stress was evident from the start.  And is peaking again as we speak.

The problems of race arising from slavery are on show throughout the book, but at least as horrifying is the near extinction of the First Nations.  A form of genocide through outright betrayal and systematic extinction for generation after generation.  The Civil Rights Act 1886 granted rights to all except Native Americans.  Sherman, a hero of the Civil War that led to Emancipation of the Negroes said that ‘All who cling to their old hunting grounds are hostile and will remain so until killed off’. 

White women justifiably thought they were subject to male tyranny, but Native Americans were lower than Black Americans.  That is horrifying since Watson records that the ‘South was an apartheid society, a caste system with terror at its core.’ 

On page one of The Black Book of Communism, we read: ‘The United States remains heavily influenced by a culture of violence deeply rooted in two major historical tragedies – the enslavement of black Africans and the extermination of Native Americans.’ 

And that extermination had begun before major settlements took hold.  The advent of white people, and their diseases, from Europe caused a human disaster that has no parallel.  ‘Virgin-soil’ epidemics devastated a population that had no immunity to these diseases.  By 1650, the original population of about 60 million in 1492 had shrunk to 6 million. 

This was a far greater catastrophe for the American continent than the Black Death had been for Europe.  It was what one historian called a ‘largely unwitting exercise in biological ethnic cleansing’ that had profound global consequences’.

But the great tycoons were, Watson says, ‘perversely admired.’  What Whitman called the ‘maniacal appetite for wealth’ pushed ‘aside the restraining influences of conscience and religion, or the egalitarian principles implied in the country’s democratic creed’.  The French failed to reach ‘equality’ after their revolution – the Americans never tried. 

By the time we get to Trump, the prevailing view was that ‘not social but self-interest was the primary concern of humankind.’  But ‘the loathing for the liberal elites, and for intellectuals in general was an old one.  As was their contempt for the Washington swamp where, Mark Twain said, ‘rascality reaches its highest perfection’. 

Watson continues:

All these gestures to contemporary grievance connected to threads of belief and myth, and patterns of ideological dispute, that are as old as the country itself.  Extraordinary, even ‘unprecedented’, as the insurrection of 6 January 2021 seemed, it occurred in the same grindhouse of uncrossable divides and undying fixations’.

So, we know that Trump in some ways ‘represents’ the United States.  They have elected him as President twice – at least on the second occasion with full knowledge of every ground for believing that he is utterly unfit for any such office of trust.  The dreadful question facing the rest of us is: Is it the mission of Donald Trump to personify the United States?

One side of the story

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(Passing Bull 414)

The greatest lawyer this country has known said that experience in forensic contests suggests that one story is good until the other side is told.  That obvious truth underlies a large part of our law of civil rights (the Bill of Rights in the United States). 

After a few weeks at the bar in 1971, I turned up at Coburg Petty Sessions with a brief for the respondent husband in a marital maintenance claim.  I spoke to my bloke and then with counsel for the wife.  ‘My bloke says your lady has turned off the sex.’  ‘Only after the night of the razor blade, Mate’.  ‘Bugger. I had better have a chat with him.’  He was less than convincing, and we settled the amount of the maintenance in about an hour. 

Another small notch in the tree of learning.  As in most forms of conflict, the outcome of litigation is a lottery, and you take with a grain of salt what the combatants say.

If you ask about a Collingwood v Carlton game, you will get different responses from each side – sometimes leaving you wondering whether they were at the same game.  The same happens with wars.  (I put to one side the war in Ukraine.  I have not heard any rational defence of the invasion by Russia which looks to me to be a war crime.) 

Take the war in Gaza.  There is obviously a long history, centuries if not millennia, in the world’s most contentious hot spot.  God is involved on both sides, and religious wars are notoriously savage.  So are tribal or ethnic differences that cannot be ignored.  Tribal wars are brutal person to person.  And in Australia, each side has a diaspora, although one has much more power and influence here than the other.  And politicians on both sides in the political arena – if there are still two – are ready to stir the pot for their own political purposes.

That is a frightful cocktail, and it is burning our insides.  The politicians who are seeking to capitalize on the misery of others should be ashamed of themselves.

It is not therefore surprising that prejudice glares straight at us in so much of the commentary.  The violations of logic are dreadful.  Conclusions are asserted that have no basis in their premises.  The Latin term is non sequitur.  If after a collision, one car has damage to the front, it does not follow that the conclusion is that it drove into the back of the other.  It may have been the other way around.  The logicians say the conclusion is not entailed by the premises.  (The OED says of entail – ‘involve something as an unavoidable part or consequence’.)

Well, all that is common experience.  But one fallacy has become endemic.  The war in Gaza provokes wide ranging analyses of causation – as does the recent terrorist atrocity here.  (One question will be – are there any links between the two?)  It is impossible for any fair-minded commentary to canvas all reasonable arguments or theories about causation of either of these human tragedies.

But if one commentator chooses to concentrate on one issue rather than others, it does not follow that that commentator has similarly loaded views on any of the other.  That is plainly a fallacy, and its only function is to remind us of the pervasive risk of prejudice when we mere mortals look at the affairs of the world.  It is as if those offended want to project their passion on to others.  What if the commentator is dispassionate and has no religious, ethnic, or political axe to grind?  Or have we surrendered to the robots and think that no such person exists?

Public emotion is fine and necessary, but it is not decisive, and decisions taken too soon are at best unhelpful.

Australia is said to be, and is, a migrant nation, but most of us have no credal or tribal connection with the combatants in the war in the Middle East.  It would help if those who do have such connection can engage in such a way that we do not face the risk of abuse for what we do not say as much as for what we do say. 

They may also wish to recall that since 1945, the year of my birth, we in Australia have been involved in many foreign wars, and that every one of them was a disaster – for us and others.  Each of those disasters was brought to us by those claiming to lead us – the same people who are now seeking to make party political gain from the most horrendous human misery we can imagine. 

And if the objective of the terrorists is to create division in Australia, those who are here engaged in doing just that might ask just on whose bloody side they are on – because they are not on mine.

Namier on English politics

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Sir Lewis Namier made his name with The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III published in 1929.It landed like a bomb, and Namier attracted conflict all his life.  I idolize him.  As a practising lawyer, I found it odd that Namier was said to be revolutionary because for primary evidence he preferred contemporary notes made at the time to secondary rehearsals made by scholars who were not present at the relevant times.  I then regarded him as I regarded Maitland on the history of the common law – if the inquirer devotes his life to digging so deep and with such understanding, he may well command our intellectual assent when he ascends to make observations that in others may sound too large and unfounded.

In 1961, Namier published the second edition of England In the Age of the American Revolution.  Amid the mountains of primary evidence that Namier assembled in the work of a lifetime, we still find large statements of insights that distinguish the story of England from that of Europe or the United States.  All of what follows comes from that second edition. 

It is a story of a remarkable people written by a most remarkable man.

***

The social history of England could be written in terms of membership of the House of Commons, that peculiar club, election to which has at all times required some expression of consent on the part of the public……In its origin, the House of Commons was akin to the jury, and the representative character of the two were in a way cognate; from an intimate knowledge of conditions, the House declared the sense of commonalty on questions which most patently and directly concerned them….it came to represent not so much the sense of the community, as the distribution of power within it…(3)

England knows not democracy as a doctrine, but has always practised it as a fine art.  Since the Middle Ages, no one was ever barred on grounds of class from entering the House of Commons, and in the House all Members have always sat on equal terms; as between freemen, England never knew a rigid distinction of classes….

Trade was never despised, and English society has always showed respect for property and wealth.  The financial expert, usually a moneyed man, was valued in the House, and the Treasury has for centuries held a pre-eminent position in the government…. ‘gentry are always willing to submit to raising their families by what they call City fortunes….’ (6)

Feudalism was a system of social organisation whereby both army service and administrative functions were bound up with the holding of land. (7)

The fine growth of English Conservatism is due, in a high degree, to the country having been free from the revolutionary action of war within its borders, and of militarism within its social organisation.  The true Conservative is not a militarist. (8)

Trade was not despised in eighteenth century England – it was acknowledged to be the great concern of the nation; and money was honoured, the mystic common denominator of all values, the universal repository of as yet undetermined possibilities…. for the English are not a methodical or logical nation – they perceive and accept facts without anxiously inquiring into their reasons or meaning. (13)

Classes are the more sharply marked in England because there is no single test for them, except the final incontestable result; and there is more snobbery than in any other country, because the gate can be entered by anyone, and yet remains for those bent on entering it, a mysterious, awe-inspiring gate. (14)

Whereas on the Continent scholarships rank as poor relief, at Oxford or Cambridge the scholar holds a privileged position, coveted as a distinction.  More intellectual work is done by aristocrats in England than anywhere else: …. What is not valued in England is abstract knowledge as a profession, because the tradition of English civilization is that professions should be practical and culture should be the work of the leisured classes. (15)

When a tribe settles, membership of the tribe carries the right to share in the land.  In time, the order becomes inverted: the holding of land determines a man’s position in the community. (18)

English history, and especially English parliamentary history, is made by families rather than individuals; for a nation with the tradition of self-government must have thousands of dynasties, partaking of the peculiarities which in other countries belong to the royal family alone.  The English political family is a compound of ‘blood’, name and estate, the last, as the dominions of monarchs, being the most important of the three…. the men who are most intimately affected by the government have a primary claim to share in it; in reality, this conclusion is based on instincts and modes of thinking much deeper and much more cogent than any conscious reasonings…. [the British Parliament] is territorial rather than tribal….

Though the State primarily belongs to the owners of the land, it is the circulating part of the nation which is most directly concerned with government…. (29)  Trade is the natural form for the acquisitive endeavor of islanders… (30) Continental nations engaged in wars for loot and talked of glory (31); the English went out for adventure and talked of trade…. (32)  Colonies… were not ‘planted with a view to founding new empires, but for the sake of trade….’ (37)

No great historic problem has ever been settled by means of a brilliant idea…. Restraint, coupled with the tolerance which it implies and with plain human kindness, is much more valuable in politics than ideas which are ahead of their time; but restraint was a quality in which the eighteenth-century Englishman was as deficient as most other nations are even now. (36)

The basic elements of the Imperial Problem during the American Revolution must be sought not so much in conscious opinions and professed views bearing directly on it, as in the very structure and life of the Empire; and in doing that, the words of Danton should be remembered – on ne fait pas le proces aux revolutions.  Those who are out to apportion guilt in history have to keep to views and opinions, judge the collisions of planets by the rules of road traffic, make history into something like a column of motoring accidents, and discuss it in the atmosphere of a police court.  (40)

History is made up of juggernauts, revolting to human feelings in their blindness, supremely humorous in their stupidity.  One of the greatest caricaturists that ever lived, Francesco Goya y Lucientes, reached the highest level of historical humour in his picture of a military execution of Spanish rebels.  A bundle of feeling, suffering humanity is huddled together in the last stages of agony, despair or defiance, and facing them stands a row of the most perfectly trained Napoleonic soldiers, with their hats and rifles all cocked at the same angle.  One knows that the next moment the rebels will be at peace, inanimate matter, and the firing squad will dissolve into a number of very ordinary, dull human beings.  Similarly in Breughel’s ‘Fall of Icarus’, the true humour of the tragedy is not so much the pair of naked legs sticking out of the water, as the complete unconcern of all the potential onlookers…….History of infinite weight was to be made in the absurd beginnings of a reign which was to witness the elimination of those who had hitherto governed England…..and the break-up of an Empire such as the world had not seen since the disruption of the Roman Empire – history was to be started in ridiculous beginnings, while small men did things both infinitely smaller and infinitely greater than they knew.  (131)

In the absence of distinct definable programs, it was becoming increasingly difficult to say who, from the angle of practical politics, should be considered a Tory and who a Whig …. and parties at all times at all times rest on types and on connections rather than on intellectual tenets…. (179)  Moreover, the disturbing element of personal connexions is always present in politics; the game is played by groups, and human ties continually cross and confound the logic of social and political alignments.  (184)

The territorial magnates were the nucleus of that governing class, whose claims even now are based on rank, wealth, experience, and a tradition of social and political pre-eminence (or, according to George Meredith, are ‘commonly built on birth, acres, tailoring, style, and an air’).  (181)

***

We don’t get history like that anymore.  And that is a great worry, because every word of it bears on our travails here and now.  Namier was I gather from people at Cambridge not easy to like, and I can understand how he may have unsettled the academic Establishment.  But Sir Lewis Namier stands very high in my pantheon because of the depth of his insights into our humanity.

Bismarck

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Count Otto von Bismarck, known as the Iron Chancellor, was a Prussian Junker, and therefore a notable man of the land, and the lord of a German manor.  He was also a servant of his State and of his God, and, to the extent that the word ‘conservative’ still has any meaning, about as conservative as any man at any time could be.  That did not prevent him from becoming the de facto master of Europe by reference, if necessary, to ‘blood and iron’. 

Nor did it prevent him from achieving the following.  The unification of Germany.  The grant of universal suffrage in the German democracy.  And the beginning of the Welfare State. 

As it happened, the first would lead to the most appalling consequences for not just Europe but the whole world in two world wars – but Bismarck could not be held responsible for either.  The second was alarmingly ‘progressive’ for its time, and the third even more so.  History does not give Germany or Bismarck sufficient credit for laying the foundation of the Welfare State – which the United States still refuses to accept.

In 1883 and 1889, Bismarck pushed through legislation for accident insurance for workers and then old age and disability insurance.  For the first, the German government said it had put an end ‘to all those attempts to make health insurance a private matter …and asserts the role of the state’. 

Nearly thirty years later, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill followed that lead in England with the People’s Budget.  They spoke of the ‘business of the state’ in looking after the infirm and the aged.  They provoked a constitutional crisis.  The English averted revolution by having the King threaten to create enough peers to get the legislation passed.  They followed the precedent of the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832.  In each case, the ancient safety valve saved the day.

Bismarck was a most extraordinary man.

Politics are not a science based on logic; they are the capacity of choosing at each instant, in constantly changing situations, the least harmful, the most useful.

As my friends know, that accords exactly with my view of the common law, which underlies our constitution, and politics.  That may not be all that surprising, because that in my view is the Anglo-Saxon – and therefore German – preference for experience over theory, which so distinguishes England from Europe – including Germany.  That is not meant to be confusing.  The roads by which we got where we are have never been straight.

Bismarck had God and could accommodate Him.

A statesman cannot create anything himself.  He must wait until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of his garment…. I am content when I see where the Lord wishes to go and can stumble after him.

Some, especially right now, may wish, like Hamlet, to substitute Providence for God in detecting even the fall of a sparrow.

I have never been a doctrinaire…. Liberal, reactionary, conservative – those I confess seem to me luxuries….

Can you imagine a better statement of the sheer banality of politics today either here or in places we once respected?

Bismarck spent his whole political life dealing with people he could not respect.

There are white men, there are black men, and there are monarchs.

God only knows what fate would await someone rash enough to say that now.

For his scheme of social insurance, Bismarck was content to accept the label ‘progressive’, even ‘socialist’!  A J P Taylor said:

German social insurance was the first in the world, and has served as a model for every other civilized country…At the end, he [Bismarck] talked of ‘the right to work’ and thought of insurance against unemployment – this was the final step to the welfare state of the twentieth century…. He was a despairing conservative, staving off a dreaded though inevitable future, clinging to the present for the fear of something worse.  Real conservatism is rooted in the pride of class.  Bismarck had no feeling for the Junkers from whom he sprung.  In taste and outlook, he was nearest to the rich merchants of Hamburg.

Well, they don’t write history like that anymore.

Nations crave security.  So do their subjects.  The king commanded his subjects to hold him and the state securely.  People now elected governments so that the state would keep the people securely.  That was change indeed.

Bismarck was a soldier who never read Clausewitz.  Ranke was his favourite historian, but he had a soft spot for Taine.  He soaked himself in the Bible and Shakespeare, but he fancied the novels of Dumas.  He naturally had no time for philosophy – Kant, let alone Hegel – and he dismissed Wagner as a monkey. 

In other words, he was ein mensch with whom you knew where you stood – and when you should stop.  What would we give to have on record what passed between this German and Benjamin Disraeli?  A J P Taylor said:

Both had the brooding melancholy of the Romantic movement in its Byronic phase; both had broken into the charmed circle of privilege…. both had a profound contempt for political moralizing…. In politics both had used universal suffrage to ruin liberalism…. Both genuinely advocated social reform….

So much, then, for pigeon holing people.

I referred above to the banality of our politics.  Hannah Arendt, who had some of the most piercing insights of her time, got into trouble talking about the banality of evil.  We now have to live with the evil of banality.  Those vacuous standard-bearers of theory and ideology, who falsely claim to be prophets of ‘conservatism,’ should look on the works of Bismarck and despair.