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Yesterday I chanced upon a short interview on some children’s TV type show called T4, with the actor James Purefoy. ‘Purefoy’ is, I now finally know, pronounced ‘pure-foy’, rather than “pure-i-foy”, which I have often wondered about.
Anyway, James Pure-foy is playing Mark Anthony in the hit TV series, Rome, and one of the things he said struck me as really rather illuminating. He said that the difference between us and the Romans was that they regarded weakness as a vice and what we would call cruelty as a virtue.
To many readers here this will seem a banal and obvious observation, but I have never heard it put quite like that, or if I ever have I was not paying attention. Perhaps the clarity of this observation can be attributed to the fact that although the actors in this series are British, the producers are Americans. Americans do love to nail down in a few words what a show is all about. (Until Purefoy went on to say this, I did not even know that Rome was an American production rather than British.)
This cruelty-is-a-virtue meme pulls together lots of different things about the Romans that have never previously made proper sense to me. Basically, why were they such total and utter bastards, and at the very same time so amazingly smug about how virtuous they were? Did they like torturing each other, and even being tortured? Answer: no. But they did believe in it. They were not indifferent to pain. They believed in pain. They believed in inflicting it, and believed that being able to endure it was one of the highest virtues. A lot falls into place once you (by which I mean I) get that.
Given the kind of world that the Romans inhabited, you can see how such beliefs would answer the Darwinian necessities of that time. But perhaps because the Roman political system had such a modern feel to it, the ancientness of their ethical beliefs seems somehow jarring. But yes, the Romans spent a lot of their time ? in particular a lot of their education ? actively trying to be more cruel than their natural inclinations inclined them to be. (See also: Sparta.) → Continue reading: Roman virtues and vices… and ours
All over the UK tonight, the sky will be lit up with fireworks and the evening will reverberate with a lot of loud bangs as folk mark Guy Fawke’s Night. Here is a nifty website explaining all about the event, what is commemorated and why. I’ll be off to Battersea Park later this evening to enjoy the fun. I hope people use their common sense and don’t get hurt.
Here is an informative book about the early 17th Century plot to blow up Parliament and the subsequent anti-Catholic crackdown. There is also even something called the Gunpowder Plot Society.
When I was a student living in Brighton, I once went to nearby Lewes, a town that stages a massive series of processions and bonfires every year. It is pretty non-PC in that a lot of people have muttered that such an event, especially one that involves burning effigies of a 17th Century Pope, stirs up ugly prejudices. I can sympathise up to a point with the grumblers. When I went along to the event there was the smell not just of gunpowder in the air but quite a lot of aggressive body language on display (although that may have been due to the potent local ales). I am glad to say that, all this time on, anti-Popery hysteria is mostly a thing of the past in Britain (apart from the odd bit of nuttiness at Glaswegian local football matches between Celtic and Rangers). Alas, it lingers on in Northern Ireland.
How do they do it? To be more exact and honest, how do we do it? Some of us, that is to say. I am referring to the mysterious tenacity of poshly educated people in British politics. Tony Blair went to a posh school. Now it looks odds on that the Conservatives will pick another posh, after a generation of not-so-poshes, starting with Edward Heath. Why? What is the magic that the canniest and most ruthless of us public school educated people which keeps the most prominent of our kind so prominent?
Part of it is that the education of the non-posh majority has, in Britain, been severely damaged, in the name of advancing the non-poshes. That is certainly part of the story.
But I think that another quality that people like David Cameron manage to exude � honestly or dishonestly, it really does not matter which � is: humility. Personally I tend to find this type insufferable, which may be because I got to know these people close up when they were still perfecting their personas, and in some cases before they were even trying and were just being pure bastards. The nastier the bastard, the thicker the veneer of humility that they later glue on, in my experience. But if you are not intimately acquainted with these nice, nice chaps, that humble act can fool you. Plus, in a few cases, the humility is genuine and was there from the start. Anyway, Cameron’s type radiates the notion that he only got where he is by being very lucky. The cards he was dealt made Cameron what he is, Cameron seems to say. Without these cards, the undoubted skill with which he played the cards he did get would have availed him nothing. One, you know, does one’s best, but one has been fortunate, extremely fortunate.
The trouble with the meritocrats whom the likes of Blair and Cameron come up against is that they seem to believe that they merit their cratness. They deserve it. Gordon Brown, for example, suggests to me a man who not only thinks that himself to be an excellent Chancellor of the Exchequer, but also a man who thinks that he deserves to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and for that matter deserves to be Prime Minister, instead of recognising with his every public word and gesture that he also needed a hell of a lot of luck to get anywhere near either job. → Continue reading: Posh politicians and not-so-posh politicians who actually do things
Just to remind everyone that today is a rather special Trafalgar Day.
Nicely done, Horatio.
I went from Instapundit to this this presumably not-so-instant pundidtry by Glenn Reynolds called The old industrial state, and from there, via an eBay reference, to another Glenn Reynolds piece called Is small the new big?.
The idea here is that that new big businesses – eBay, Amazon – are getting big by helping the small guy to do his thing, unlike the old big business, which was an economically deluded tyrant.
But did not the big, bad old industrial system – which only became a “state” in the years of its dotage – also empower people? For as long as it was properly run, it did.
The Model T and the Sears Roebuck Catalogue empowered the little guy, just like eBay and Amazon now. The Model T was the basis of many a small business. Sears Roebuck made it possible for smaller operators outside the big cities to function on level terms with the city folks by letting them buy the same stuff and get their money back if not satisfied, just as if they were buying it from a big city store. Most of the USA still lives in small towns, I am constantly told. The old industrial “state” is what enabled them to do so, comfortably.
More recently, the personal computer industry – now dominated by big, bad, old Intel and Microsoft – has empowered millions of individuals, and made possible the growth of enterprises like eBay and Amazon. Empowering the little guy is not a new idea. I can still remember the thrill of empowerment that I felt from my first computer, an Osborne 1.
There are two quite distinct ideas rubbing together here. One is bigness, and its alleged badness. The other is the genuinely bad idea that it is both smart to try to – and actually possible to – insulate huge numbers of people from market pressures, indefinitely. J. K. Galbraith, quoted by Reynolds, thought that this could happen, and his big idea, if you can call it that, was that business bigness meant being above and beyond market realities. The truth is that a big business that ignores market realities is heading for a big fall.
But the little guy is just as prone to economic delusion as the big guy. That is often why he is so little. Like the guy making a small fortune in sport, he started out with a large fortune.
The ultimate embodiment of the Galbraith delusion was of course the USSR, which copied the bigness of US business without copying any of the market responsiveness that brought the USA’s business bigness into being in the first place. The USSR just stole bigness from others, and eventually the loot ran out.
What is true is that formerly successful and still established ways of doing things can get into serious trouble, and because they once were so successful, they can last way beyond their days of success. There is a lot of ruin in them. Big and successful businesses become Galbraithian. They become, on a tiny scale, economically speaking, the USSR. But they cannot last, any longer than the USSR could. Not being able to murder all their rivals and critics, they last a lot less long.
Business bigness is the consequence of a new business idea becoming thoroughly understood by a few exceptional people, who proceed to organise it, and then to triumph over almost all of their rivals. Then, times change, and that kind of bigness needs to change too, but by then millions have got used to it and cling to it. That is the problem of the old “industrial state”. What we are living through is neither the end of bigness nor the beginning of individual empowerment by bigness. It is a transitional period, between one lot of bignesses and other sorts of bigness. And these new bignesses will be just as like to give rise to new Galbraithian delusions as the earlier ones were.
And let us also give credit where credit is still due. Those big old businesses got big in the first place by doing lots of empowering of the little guy. To put it in Reynolds-ese: the old big also did small.
Instapundit today links to Ralph Kinney Bennett’s charming article about the history of shaving equipment. Anyone who still – even after being subjected to the cry of “dentistry!” – doubts that modern comforts are really as comfortable as all that, really should read this hymn of praise to just what capitalism and its attendant attention to detail can do for human happiness. I mean, imagine having to shave with an uneven, hand-made cutting edge. Bleedin’ hell, as we English would say.
The heart of Bennett’s article is a short account of the life and works of – and this really was his name – King Camp Gillette. Gillette was a salesman, and his achievement was essentially to ask a question. What if, he asked, you could separate the bit of a razor that gets quickly blunted, and needs to be either sharpened or replaced, from the rest of it? Thus the disposable razor blade.
Like so many creative endeavours, the Gillette empire had another guy heavily involved, an engineer who actually made everything. But here there was a problem.
A grateful Gillette wanted to incorporate both his and Nickerson’s names into the company that was established. Nickerson felt his name sounded too much like what the new product was designed to avoid.
We are now deep into the age of three-bladed, four-bladed, and even, now, the five-bladed razor. But the first blade was the one that really made the difference.
Gillette himself, at any rate according to this, was himself some kind of socialist:
Gillette was part of a broad socialist movement in the USA in the 1890s, who wanted to use the profits from his safety razor to finance his beliefs in a new socialist system.
Which only goes to show that people who are clever at one thing are not necessarily so clever at other things.
I love this story:
Historians have found that Britain’s first Indian restaurant was opened in 1809, in the midst of the Napoleonic wars and during the period in which Austen set Pride and Prejudice.
The Hindoostane Coffee House was established by Sake Dean Mahomed, an Indian-born entrepreneur, as a purveyor of Oriental food of the “highest perfection” in Marylebone, London, which at the time was a residential district for the well-off.
In my area of Pimlico, central London, there is an Indian restaurant right near my flat (aaahhh!) – said to be one of the oldest in London, dating back to the 1950s. But it appears that this now-established feature of culinary life has been going on since the age of Nelson, Wellington and William Wordsworth. An early example, in fact, of culinary globalization. It is not, in fact, all that surprising, since the desire for eastern spices and foodstuffs was an important economic incentive behind much of global trade at that time.
I can imagine how this story is going to change all those costume dramas set in the early 19th Century: “Pray excuse me sir X, but I am in urgent need of a chicken korma.”
It seems many important building in Moscow may still be mined from WWII.
Indeed, the recollections of another NKVD officer only corroborate Krotov’s story. “On October 20, 1941, there was an order to place explosives beneath the most prominent objects in the capital,” Pavel Sudoplatov, once the head of the Central Staff of the Fighter Battalion of the NKVD, wrote in a memoir. According to Sudoplatov, the Bolshoi Theater and other buildings were on the list. They could be blown up only on very special orders, however, and only if occupied by Germany’s top leadership.
The German’s would have found Moscow nights to be rather more high energy affairs than expected… as they watched the last waltz at the Bolshoi.
If you have any interest at all in the history of classical music, then I warmly recommend this fascinating article by Jane Glover in last Friday’s Guardian (linked to yesterday by Arts & Letters Daily). I already know Jane Glover as an excellent conductor, and before writing this I played a CD of her conducting some of my very favourite Mozart symphonies. Wonderful. But, I had no idea until yesterday how much of a Mozart expert she is.
Her article, which doubles as a plug for her forthcoming book called Mozart’s Women, concentrates on Mozart’s wife Constanze.
Glover states the Constanze problem succinctly:
Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus brilliantly explores the confrontation between genius (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) and mediocrity (Antonio Salieri). But there is one person to whom his take on Mozart’s life does no favours at all: his wife Constanze. Portrayed as a vulgar, bubble-headed sex kitten, lacking any appreciation of her husband’s phenomenal gifts, Constanze shares and encourages only the immature aspects of Mozart’s personality.
What is more, in portraying Constanze like this, Shaffer only echoed contemporary gossip about her, now believed to be utterly without foundation, to the effect that she had no idea to whom and to what she was married.
But it turns out that Constanze was a hugely more formidable figure than that. She thoroughly appreciated her husband’s genius, and it was during their very happy marriage that Mozart wrote the vast majority of his finest works. Coming herself from a famous musical family, the Webers, she was in fact the ideal composer’s wife, assisting and inspiring in equal measure.
Even more important from the point of view of posterity is that after Mozart’s tragically early death – which most scholars now agree to have been accidental, despite how Peter Shaffer tells the story – Constanze did everything she could to ensure that Mozart’s music was made available to posterity. All who love Mozart’s music are in her debt.
The history of art is shot through with horror stories of lost masterpieces, of destroyed manuscripts, of mislaid musical scores, and nowadays, of things like destroyed tapes from the early days of television. That nothing like this happened to the wondrous creative output of Mozart is due to the industry of many people, not least to that of Constanze’s second husband, whom she got to know because they worked together to preserve and publish husband number one’s compositions. But pride of place in ensuring that Mozart remained for ever Mozart, so to speak, goes to his beloved Constanze.
As for the “sex kitten” stuff, I cannot believe that, musically speaking, this did any harm either. On the contrary, even the smallest acquaintance with Mozart’s music – especially his operas – suggests quite the opposite.
The EU Referendum blog links to this fascinating article about the engineering history, so to speak, of New Orleans, referring in particular to this paragraph:
The lower Mississippi is in no way a natural river anymore. A law instituted in 1724 by a French colonial governor, whose name was Perrier, of all things, demanded that early homeowners in New Orleans raise the low natural levees upon which they all built. Three year later, Perrier declared the little city floodproof.
So there you have it. Do not blame Bush. Blame France.
Not really. The situation is a deal more complex than that. But it does seem to be true that once they decided on living lower than the Mississippi River, they found that the methods they chose to protect themselves from it only served to make it rise ever higher into the air, and themselves to sink lower and lower.
Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of comment out there in dead-tree media and the electronic versions about religion and its relation vis a vis the state at the moment. (Full disclosure: I am a lapsed Anglican Christian who read a lot of David Hume, much to the annoyance of my old vicar, no doubt). There is a bracing essay in the Spectator this week about the nonsense spouted in the usual places about “moderate” Islam.
The blog Positive Liberty, which has become a group blog like this one – has an excellent piece looking at the religious, or in some cases, decidely lukewarm religious, views of the U.S. Founding Fathers. These men, to varying degrees, were acutely conscious of the dangers of religious fundamentalism, having seen within their lifetimes the human price of it. As we think about the dangers posed by Islam in our own time, the insights of Madison, Adams, Jefferson et al are needed more than ever. The linked-to article is fairly long but worth sitting back and sipping on a coffee for a good read, I think.
It is in my view essential for the west’s future that the benefits of separating what is God’s from what is Cesear’s is made as loudly and as often as possible. Muslims must be made abundantly aware of this point for if they do not, the consequences could be dire. Maybe because of the role played by the Church of England in our post-Reformation history, we don’t have the tradition, as in the States, of keeping a beady eye on the blurring of the edges of temporal and spiritual. Cynics have of course argued that nationalising Christianity via the CoE has helped the cause of fuzzy agnosticism and atheism more than the complete works of the Englightenment. Well, maybe. It may have as much to do with the relative openness of British society, our ironical sense of humour (religious enthusiasm has often struck the Brits as slightly silly or unhinged, ripe for Monty Python treatment) and desire not to give offence.
I fear that sense of humour is going to be tested for the remainder of my lifetime.
I know this post is not ‘on topic’ in these days of Islam casting its shadow over the Western society but it is tonight I am watching Doctor Zhivago.
I remember reading the book by Boris Pasternak in 1980s, as a teenager. I got only about 70% of it because I was too young. Despite the fact that I was living in deep communism. I guess that was the reason I understood even that much of the story, at the tender age of 14… Never mind the love story – it is the backdrop that interests me. The Russian Revolution of 1918.
The film shows the destraction of an individual, educated and sensitive, a doctor and a poet. Not a perfect human being by far, who loved his country and saw it and his life rent apart by a brutal change, his loved ones in danger and all he treasured destroyed.
Let me relay some snippets that I found memorable.
Zhivago’s house in Moscow has been taken over by the local Soviet run by two sour-faced comrades. They tell him, reproachfully, that there is room for 13 families there. He says: In that case, this is a better arrangement. More just…
Doctor Yuri Zhivago was a member of the Russian intelligentsia and believed that there was a need for reform of the country. At the start, he saw the Communist Party as performing a deep operation cutting out a cancerous tumour. Today he probably would be reading the Guardian or the New York Times calling himself a progressive. A bleeding heart liberal, perhaps. But Pasternak puts the Zhivago character through the reality of a dystopia coming true.
There is a conversation between Doctor Zhivago and Strelnikov, a commander of the Red Guard of legendary reputation, the scourge of the country.
Strelnikov: Are you the poet? I used to admire poetry, it’s so personal, the flight of affections and humanity. Personal life is dead in Russia. I can see how you could hate me.
Zhivago: The fact I hate you, does not mean I want to kill you.
And later in the same conversation:
Zhivago: You burnt the wrong village.
Strelnikov [agitated]: A village is burnt, the point is made.
Yes, I remember the stern self-righteousness (or more accurately a psychotic moral high-ground), the fragile power that many experienced until they were the next batch to be devoured by the monstrous system. The glorious Party, the Workers, the Justice, Equality and the Better Tomorrow… airbrush the Gulags and you have the Guardianistas…
And then there is the nihilism of the ‘revolutionaries’.
Tonya’s (Zhivago’s wife) father: They shot the czar and all his family… [exclaims] What’s it for?
Zhivago: To show that there is no going back…
A young boy is found dying in the field after the attack of the partisans who kidnapped Zhivago for his medical expertise. The boy dies while Zhivago looks sadly on unable to save him. A partisan says:
It does not matter.
Zhivago: Did you ever have any children?
Partisan: I once had a wife and four children. None of this matters.
Zhivago: What matters, commander?
Partisan: Tell me, I have forgotten.
Towards the end of the film, Zhivago’s brother says of Lara, his lover:
She vanished and died somewhere in one of the labour camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid…
Watching the film reminds me of what an unqualified and unchecked evil the Soviet Revolution and communism was. Horrific in its suppression of the individual, ruthless in its ritual extinguishing of the human spirit and freedom, terrifying in its imposition of the most toxic variety of dystopia, arrogant in its denial of reality and brutal in the execution of those who dared even breathe against it. Evil, pure evil that will never be fully understood by those who have not experienced it.
Yeah, I should have gone out on Saturday night…
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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