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The Joker working the room
As superhero movies go, The Dark Knight is certainly the best of the bunch — although why Christian Bale’s perfectly normal voice had to descend to a guttural rasp every time he put on his bat helmet escapes me, and one must also assign a few demerit points to the filmmakers for portraying the Russian national ballet as a group of blond and unfeasibly pneumatic ski bunnies. But it’s entertaining and occasionally thoughtful, which is more than one can normally ask of the genre.
The late Heath Ledger, as widely proclaimed, is indeed the best actor in the film. His portrayal of the Joker is far less cartoonish than Jack Nicholson’s own go at it, and Ledger takes the character seriously, giving him a consistency, a style, and a realism wholly absent before. Read the rest of this entry »
It used to be said by security analysts, back in the days of the Cold War, that the Soviet Union, though benighted in so many other ways, managed to maintain a highly sophisticated and realistic view of the balance of power across the various geographies over which it was in contention with the United States. The Soviets looked at something they termed the “correlation of forces”, which was comprised of all things that determined relative power: public opinion, political allegiance, economic prosperity, class struggle, and military might. This holistic concept the analysts contrasted unfavourably with what they saw as a Western view too focused on counting tanks; if you wanted to get the full picture of what was going on in a country, in other words, it was often most useful to look at things through Soviet lenses.
In a not-so-strange parallel, it appears that John Bolton — the recess-appointed former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and permanent advocate of missileboat diplomacy — has emerged as a similarly accurate lens on the true direction of U.S. foreign policy. Read the rest of this entry »
For those of you interested in the rather big question of how concepts like East and West have evolved, and how such abstractions have influenced global history and continue to influence the politics of our day, Anthony Pagden’s Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East & West is very much worth reading. Here’s a snippet from my recent review of it in the Spectator:
There is much to admire about Pagden’s book. His breadth of knowledge across two and a half millennia of Western (and to a great extent Eastern) history is impressive, and he introduces the reader to a series of fascinating thinkers and travellers: Herodotus, Aelius Aristides, St. Augustine, Constantin-François Volney, John Stuart Mill. He also displays a clear-eyed awareness of how myths are created and sustained. The battle of Lepanto, in which the Venetians and Spanish defeated the Ottoman navy, ‘was hailed far and wide across Europe as a new Actium, a new Salamis,’ he writes. But ‘the analogies were, of course, entirely empty . . . The Spain of Philip II was hardly less despotic than the Ottoman Empire and in many respects was a good deal more so.’ As an intellectual history of Western views of the East, the book is exemplary.
Which is why it is so surprising to find Pagden’s frequently long stretches of good sense undermined by sweeping simplifications…
As you can tell from that last sentence, I do think that despite its many merits the book is far from flawless. In fact, its flaws are one of its most interesting attributes, as they reflect, I believe, the very mentality that leads inevitably to the division of the world into what we think of as a progressive West and a stagnant East.
Read the whole review and let me know if you agree — particularly if you’ve already read the book itself. And for an additional perspective on Pagden’s book, I’d recommend John Gray’s excellent and elegant analysis of it in the March issue of Literary Review.
Fished out of the river Rhone last fall, a bust of Julius Caesar dating from 46 BCE, two years before his death. Oh yes, his death: on that delicate yet never untimely subject let us attend to Brutus once again…
Romans, countrymen, and lovers! hear me for my
cause, and be silent, that you may hear: believe me
for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that
you may believe: censure me in your wisdom, and
awake your senses, that you may the better judge.
If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of
Caesar’s, to him I say, that Brutus’ love to Caesar
was no less than his. If then that friend demand
why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer:
– Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved
Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living and
die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live
all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him;
as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was
valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I
slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his
fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his
ambition. Who is here so base that would be a
bondman? If any, speak; for him have I offended.
Who is here so rude that would not be a Roman? If
any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so
vile that will not love his country? If any, speak;
for him have I offended. I pause for a reply.
- Julius Caesar (Act III, Scene II), by William Shakespeare
Worth reading this winter: This Republic of Suffering (Knopf, 342pp) Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust’s study of the changing nature of death at the time of the U.S. Civil War, and the ways in which such changes in turn helped to transform Americans’ relationship with their government. A graf from my San Francisco Chronicle review:
The displacement of death from its natural family context worked a strange social and civic alchemy. Average citizens who had never known the deceased began to show up at Confederate funerals; “the emergence of this impersonal connection with the dead, one independent of any direct ties of kin or friendship, was a critical evolution in the understanding of war’s carnage,” writes Faust. A soldier’s death was no longer solely a private tragedy, and the dead no longer belonged exclusively to their families. They had become the nation’s dead, too.
Benazir Bhutto in 2006 (Photo: Reuters/Toby Melville)
As world news organizations fall over themselves to provide broad-brush background and analysis on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, go read Tariq Ali’s recent LRB profile of and full-scale backgrounder on Bhutto; your investment in time will be repaid with greater comprehension. Example: A BBC piece today describes the 1996 murder of Benazir’s brother Murtaza curtly and with inoffensive vagueness. ”He won elections from exile in 1993 and became a provincial legislator, returning home soon afterwards, only to be shot dead under mysterious circumstances…” By comparison, here’s Ali on the same subject:
Some months later, in September 1996, as Murtaza and his entourage were returning home from a political meeting, they were ambushed, just outside their house, by some seventy armed policemen accompanied by four senior officers. A number of snipers were positioned in surrounding trees. The street lights had been switched off. Murtaza clearly understood what was happening and got out of his car with his hands raised; his bodyguards were instructed not to open fire. The police opened fire instead and seven men were killed, Murtaza among them. The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been carefully laid, but as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation - false entries in police logbooks, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated, the provincial PPP governor (regarded as untrustworthy) dispatched to a non-event in Egypt, a policeman killed who they feared might talk - made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister’s brother had been taken at a very high level.
… In an interview on an independent TV station just before the emergency was imposed [by President Pervez Musharraf], Benazir was asked to explain how it happened that her brother had bled to death outside his home while she was prime minister. She walked out of the studio. A sharp op-ed piece by [Murtaza's daughter] Fatima in the LA Times on 14 November elicited the following response: ‘My niece is angry with me.’ Well, yes.
Bhutto’s life story is a remarkable one, but it’s also complex and murky, and we should be on our guard against simplistic narratives (suiting Western media and politicians alike) of cosmopolitanism vs. fundamentalism and civilian vs. military rule. As with the hall of mirrors regime that Musharraf has constructed and continues to adapt to his needs, appearances rarely reflect reality.
Professor of theological ethics and director of the Martin Marty Center at U. Chicago’s divinity school, William Schweiker provides more historical background on the practice of waterboarding:
In the Inquisition, the practice was not drowning as such, but the threat of drowning, and the symbolic threat of baptism. The tortura del agua or toca entailed forcing the victim to ingest water poured into a cloth stuffed into the mouth in order to give the impression of drowning. Because of the wide symbolic meaning of “water” in the Christian and Jewish traditions (creation, the great flood, the parting of the Red Sea in the Exodus and drowning of the Egyptians (!), Christ’s walking on the water, and, centrally for Christians, baptism as a symbolic death that gives life), the practice takes on profound religious significance. Torture has many forms, but torture by water as it arose in the Roman Catholic and Protestant reformations seemingly drew some of its power and inspiration from theological convictions about repentance and salvation.
Schweiker’s column is worth reading in full, as he explores the unverbalized but plausible religious implications of the use of waterboarding by the U.S. government.
Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down), 1872, by Jean-Léon Gérôme
A recent essay in the London Review of Books (subscription required, alas) — on Death in Ancient Rome by Catharine Edwards and The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint by Emily Wilson – drew my attention to the following passage in St. Augustine’s Confessions (Book VI), which describes how his young and virtuous friend Alypius became corrupted by the sight of gladiatorial combat. Though the Roman aristocracy made a great show of drawing moral lessons from public displays of death, the line between philosophy and merely sadistic voyeurism was a thin one indeed:
Chapter 8. The Same When at Rome, Being Led by Others into the Amphitheatre, is Delighted with the Gladiatorial Games.
13. He, not relinquishing that worldly way which his parents had bewitched him to pursue, had gone before me to Rome, to study law, and there he was carried away in an extraordinary manner with an incredible eagerness after the gladiatorial shows. For, being utterly opposed to and detesting such spectacles, he was one day met by chance by various of his acquaintance and fellow-students returning from dinner, and they with a friendly violence drew him, vehemently objecting and resisting, into the amphitheatre, on a day of these cruel and deadly shows, he thus protesting: “Though you drag my body to that place, and there place me, can you force me to give my mind and lend my eyes to these shows? Thus shall I be absent while present, and so shall overcome both you and them.” They hearing this, dragged him on nevertheless, desirous, perchance, to see whether he could do as he said. When they had arrived thither, and had taken their places as they could, the whole place became excited with the inhuman sports. But he, shutting up the doors of his eyes, forbade his mind to roam abroad after such naughtiness; and would that he had shut his ears also! For, upon the fall of one in the fight, a mighty cry from the whole audience stirring him strongly, he, overcome by curiosity, and prepared as it were to despise and rise superior to it, no matter what it were, opened his eyes, and was struck with a deeper wound in his soul than the other, whom he desired to see, was in his body; and he fell more miserably than he on whose fall that mighty clamour was raised, which entered through his ears, and unlocked his eyes, to make way for the striking and beating down of his soul, which was bold rather than valiant hitherto; and so much the weaker in that it presumed on itself, which ought to have depended on You. For, directly he saw that blood, he therewith imbibed a sort of savageness; nor did he turn away, but fixed his eye, drinking in madness unconsciously, and was delighted with the guilty contest, and drunken with the bloody pastime. Nor was he now the same he came in, but was one of the throng he came unto, and a true companion of those who had brought him thither. Why need I say more? He looked, shouted, was excited, carried away with him the madness which would stimulate him to return, not only with those who first enticed him, but also before them, yea, and to draw in others. And from all this did Thou, with a most powerful and most merciful hand, pluck him, and taughtest him not to repose confidence in himself, but in You - but not till long after.
Alexander Hamilton, portrait by Daniel Huntington (1865)
American culture has long prided itself on defiant statements of liberty. “Live free or die”, runs the official motto of the state of New Hampshire. “Don’t tread on me”, warns the rattlesnake of the Gadsden Flag. According to this mythology, Americans are willing to sacrifice their lives before losing their cherished freedoms.
Alas, as the last several years have shown, Americans are all too ready to trade away their freedoms for a greater sense of physical safety — in this, of course, they are no better nor worse than the rest of us — and the greater the apprehended threat to their safety, the deeper they’ll nestle into the protective arms of the state.
As Carol Vanderveer Hamilton points out in an interesting essay posted on George Mason University’s History News Network, Alexander Hamilton sounded a prescient warning about this in Federalist No. 8:
Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.
Hamilton was talking about standing armies, and of the hostilities and despotisms that might ensue if the American confederacy collapsed into a collection of squabbling and independent states — predictions which formed part of his tenacious advocacy of a constitution that would bind the states together under a robust federal government. He also warns of the temptations of militarism, of undue deference shown to soldiers:
The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated above the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors.
Hamilton ends No. 8 on a hopeful note, yet one that would sadly prove mistaken:
If we are wise enough to preserve the Union we may for ages enjoy an advantage similar to that of an insulated situation. Europe is at a great distance from us. Her colonies in our vicinity will be likely to continue too much disproportioned in strength to be able to give us any dangerous annoyance. Extensive military establishments cannot, in this position, be necessary to our security.
Given his overriding emphasis on ensuring the ratification of the constitution, there may have been an element of political misdirection in such predictions. Hamilton, after all, was no radical democrat or libertarian, but a man aristocratic in temperament and hard-headed in policy — see my National Post essay on his embrace by modern “national greatness” conservatives – a supporter of a powerful federal government and a sophisticated financial system, who would ultimately become an advocate, ironically, of one of the things that Federalist No. 8 opposed: a standing army.
George Santayana wasn’t thinking of history but of the progress of human consciousness when he wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (From volume 1 of The Life of Reason, 1905) Nevertheless, his striking phrase was taken up by generations of enthusiasts as a justification for the study of history, its implicit promise (under this new interpretation) being that historical awareness would help modern societies avoid making the “mistakes” committed by earlier societies. And in our own times, when a world war between the major powers might easily kill one or two hundred million people, such a promise has been especially appealing.
Yet wars have continued to start and sputter out following their own merry agendas, and it seems that no amount of liberal arts graduates has been able to protect us from our own worst foreign policy instincts. Worse, it turns out that historical memory has not enlightened but rather befuddled us. Every foreign policy challenge is now presented to us by savvy governments and narrative-addicted media as one in which the approved policy is fully justified by a powerful historical analogy. Negotiating with Iran is like appeasing Hitler at Munich. Fighting Sunni insurgents is like fighting the Viet Cong (if you’re opposed to the war), or like fighting Malayan guerrillas (if you support the war). September 11, 2001 is like December 7, 1941. Conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson is a master of this technique: in his recent and deceptively-titled book A War Like No Other, he manages to compare the Peloponnesian War to no less than four modern conflicts (see my review here).
In this context, a recent article by political scientist Dominic Tierney is worth reading. Published in this past summer’s edition of the Journal of Cold War Studies, Tierney’s piece examines the role that moral analogies (as opposed to merely strategic analogies) played in President Kennedy’s decision-making during the Cuban missile crisis, particularly the Pearl Harbor analogy. When the crisis began, the president’s military advisors pushed hard for a surprise air attack on the missile installations, with Robert Kennedy advocating an invasion to take care of the Cuban problem once and for all: “just get into it, and get it over with.” After the second meeting, Deputy CIA Director General Marshall Carter raised Pearl Harbor for the first time, not as a moral argument but as a warning against the logic of escalation. “this comin’ in there on Pearl Harbor [with a surprise attack] just frightens the hell out of me as to what goes beyond… You go in there with a surprise attack; you put out all the missiles. This isn’t the end; this is the beginning, I think.”
By the next day, however, Pearl Harbor had turned into a moral analogy. CIA Director John McCone opposed a surprise air strike by arguing that “the United States should not act without warning and thus be forced to live with a ‘Pearl Harbor indictment’ for the indefinite future.” This use of the analogy recurred again and again during the next few days of discussion, not in any sophisticated or analytical way, writes Tierney, but as a moral reference point of deceit and evil - it was, after all, the date that would live in infamy. Under Secretary of State George Ball finally defined the problem as one of national identity: “I think that a course of action where we strike without warning is like Pearl Harbor. . . . It’s . . . it’s the kind of conduct that’s such that one might expect of the Soviet Union. It is not conduct that one expects of the United States.”
Like other Americans of their generation, both John and Robert Kennedy had been profoundly affected by Pearl Harbor, and the analogy, Tierney argues, not only influenced the president’s ultimate decision to rule out a surprise attack, but even caused Robert Kennedy to change “from being a hawk to a dove”. Having forsworn the element of surprise, the committee soon realized that a naval blockade was the only realistic remaining option. (Fiercely opposing this idea, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay unsuccessfully lobbed an analogy of his own - Munich - into the debate.)
As we know, the blockade policy led to a happy ending. But Tierney points out that there was only a weak logical relationship between the nature of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the proposed surprise attack on Cuba, and the analogy that linked the two. Dean Acheson, who criticized the analogy at the time, summarized his own arguments in 1969:
[A]t Pearl Harbor the Japanese without provocation or warning attacked our fleet thousands of miles from their shores. In the present situation, the Soviet Union had installed ninety miles from our coast - while denying they were doing so - offensive weapons that were capable of lethal injury to the United States. This they were doing a hundred and forty years after the warning given in [the Monroe Doctrine]. . . . How much warning was necessary to avoid the stigma of “Pearl Harbor in reverse”?
Analogies are tremendously powerful tools. Used carefully, they can aid in comprehension, stimulate fruitful comparative analysis, and generate innovative ideas. But they are seldom used carefully - almost never, by politicians - and so cry out for a particularly high degree of skepticism from listeners. If we can’t get out of the habit of taking analogies at face value, those who can remember the past and wilfully misapply it to the present shall inherit the earth. What’s left of it, anyway.
“Pardon me,” a newcomer asked Rubin, “what is your name?”“Lev Grigorich”
“Are you an engineer too?”
“No, I’m not an engineer, I’m a philologist.”
“Philologist? They even keep philologists here?”
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
Ah, when an average day’s roundup of intelligentsia would almost always yield a philologist or two amongst the catch! Not so today. Philologists are as rare as hen’s teeth; if one does turn up in the system, the government’s policy is one of immediate release. It’s a question of maintaining the breeding population, you see.
But seriously, where have all the philologists gone? I ask not because I grew up in a world filled with philologists, and now notice their absence. I’ve never met a philologist, not once in my life; I haven’t spotted one across a campus; haven’t heard one on the radio nor seen one on TV. From the day I was born, I’ve lived in an effectively philologist-free environment.
Over the years, however, I’ve stumbled across evidence that such people did exist, and that, in fact, their numbers were not insignificant when compared to other academic professions. For one thing, they frequently turned up as characters in literary novels usually written by (or about) continental Europeans. For another, famous people who one had been brought up to think of as philosophers turned out on later inspection to be philologists. Nietzsche a philosopher? Wrong.
In fact, as I recently discovered from a review in the Times Literary Supplement (of Joep Leerssen’s National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History), philologists were once considered rather hip:
In 1848, the year of revolutions, a “National Assembly” was convened at Frankfurt, to discuss unification of the German lands, civil rights and a constitution for a future Reich. The strangest thing about the assembly was its seating plan. Delegates were placed in a semi-circle facing the Speaker, but there was one seat in the centre of the semi-circle, directly opposite the Speaker, set apart from all the others. It was reserved for Jacob Grimm. Can one imagine a British durbar to decide the future of the Empire, deliberately and symbolically centred on a professor of linguistics, also known as a collector of fairy tales? But Grimm was not a mere linguist, he was a Philolog, and by 1848, as Joep Leerssen points out in his exceptionally wide-ranging study, philology was a combination of linguistics, literary history and cultural anthropology with the prestige of a hard science and the popular appeal of The Lord of the Rings. Grimm was there to speak, not for the nation, for there was no German nation, but for an imaginary Deutschland which he had very largely created in an unmatched though repeatedly imitated feat of “cultural consciousness-raising”.
More prosaically — when they were not creating nations out of thin air — what philologists generally did was to study historical texts, and by painstaking linguistic and contextual analysis, to discover the authoritative original text (or Ur-text), now cleaned of centuries of copyist errors, translator distortions, and the fabrications of forgers. This, of course, was a tremendously useful service for historians, who now no longer had to decide to accept or reject as a whole the documentary evidence they required to write history. In The Historian’s Craft, medieval historian Marc Bloch described the importance of the change:
True progress began on the day when, as Volney put it, doubt became an “examiner”; or in other words, when there had gradually been worked out objective rules which permitted the separation of truth from falsehood. The Jesuit Papebroeck, in whom the reading of The Lives of the Saints had instilled a profound mistrust of the entire heritage of the early Middle Ages, considered all Merovingian charters which had been preserved in the monasteries to be forgeries. No, replied Mabillon. There are unquestionably some charters which have been retouched, some which have been interpolated, and some which have been forged in their entirety. There are also some which are authentic, and this is how it is possible to distinguish the bad from the good. That year, 1681, the year of the publication of the De Re Diplomatica, was truly a great one in the history of the human mind, for the criticism of the documents of archives was definitely established.
Given how important this function is to the writing of accurate history, one should not be surprised to know that the profession has not, in fact, vanished. But — and this quite apart from philologists’ newfound and almost Hobbit-like ability to vanish into the background — it has begun to change. Rather than searching for an individual and authoritative Ur-text, some philologists have recently argued for an acceptance of the essential mobility of certain texts (particularly medieval ones), insofar as such texts have been continually and intentionally re-written, their meanings linked not to any original intent but more to the moment of their performance. This approach is sometimes referred to as the New Philology, and the key book here is Bernard Cerquiglini’s Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (1989) (published in 1999 by Johns Hopkins as In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology).
There’s no cause for worry, then. Philologists do still exist, and the species seems to be evolving at a healthy pace. But good luck catching one.
We moderns have a habit of assuming that major historical transitions are often painless and always unidirectional, with the forces of “progress” clearly identified and arrayed against the forces of “reaction”. The printing press, for example, is universally acknowledged to be a Good Thing in history, while its failed opponents are dismissed as a dour set of anti-intellectual clerics in the Catholic Church. Yet as Jacob Burckhardt pointed out in his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, the reaction against the printing press also sprang from some of the most literate and urbane people in Europe, including the bibliophile and pro-Humanist Pope Nicholas V. In founding the Vatican Library, Nicholas sent agents to scour the monasteries and palaces of Europe for classical and religious manuscripts, collecting 1,500 volumes in total. Where originals could not be obtained, cardinals and princes commissioned copyists — the Florentine librarian Vespasiano da Bisticci assembled a team of twenty-five to copy two hundred books for Cosimo de’ Medici’s Laurentian Library. And the books thus produced, writes Burckhardt, were works of art:
The handwriting was that beautiful modern Italian which was already in use in the preceding century, and which makes the sight of one of the books of that time a pleasure. Pope Nicholas V, Poggio, Gianozzo Manetti, Niccolo Niccoli, and other distinguished scholars, themselves wrote a beautiful hand, and desired and tolerated none other. The decorative adjuncts, even when miniatures formed no part of them, were full of taste, as may be seen especially in the Laurentian manuscripts, with the light and graceful scrolls which begin and end the lines. The material used to write on, when the work was ordered by great or wealthy people, was always parchment; the binding, both in the Vatican and at Urbino, was a uniform crimson velvet with silver clasps. Where there was so much care to show honour to the contents of a book by the beauty of its outward form, it is intelligible that the sudden appearance of printed books was greeted at first with anything but favour. Federigo of Urbino ‘would have been ashamed to own a printed book.’
Nicholas V’s relationship with books was both personal and aesthetic. According to 19th-century German historian George Voigt, “It was his greatest joy to walk about his library arranging the books and glancing through their pages, admiring the handsome bindings, and taking pleasure in contemplating his own arms stamped on those that had been dedicated to him, and dwelling in thought on the gratitude that future generations of scholars would entertain towards their benefactor. Thus he is to be seen depicted in one of the halls of the Vatican library, employed in settling his books.”
In the most obvious sense, what this depicts is the attitude of an elite who were able to afford the commissioning of such beautiful volumes, while the masses wallowed in illiteracy. But in another sense, which should not be forgotten, it depicts a love of learning and a reverence toward books – a reverence encompassing both their literary and their physical natures. So while we have gained immeasurably and indisputably from the diffusion of literature enabled by the printing press, we have also altered our relationship to books. Perhaps that too has been generally for the better, but surely not completely so. In their easy availability and their cheapness, how precious do our books seem now?
