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Roger Sandall |
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Collapsing the Maya
Let’s take Jared Diamond by the horns.
He would like us to believe that the decline and fall of the Maya was a tragic loss, and a sadly overgrown sculpture in the jungle ornaments the cover of his book Collapse. But I don’t care if the Maya civilization did collapse. I don’t think we should shed a single retrospective tear. It might be interesting to know how or why it fell—whether from war or drought or disease or soil exhaustion—but I don’t much care about that either. Because quite frankly, as civilizations go, the Mayan civilization in Mexico didn’t amount to much. Now I know this is a shocking thing to say. Gallery owners in New York and elsewhere will cry out indignantly about the glories of Maya art. They will show you terra cotta figurines and fine reliefs and paintings and tell splendid tales of “kings” and “nobles” and such. In deference to this view we shall gladly concede that Maya art is not uninteresting. But it is sheer romantic fantasy to mourn the passing, around 900 AD, of an aristocracy of hypersensitive native aesthetes—though anthropologists and art critics have written reams of such stuff. Glamorous talk of “kings” and “lords” and “nobles” always sounds better than a realistic description of murderous and predatory chieftains with little but power, conquest, self-glorification, enslavement, and killing and torture on their minds. Yes: they wore spectacular feather head-dresses. Yes: they built sky-high piles of masonry. But their hands dripped blood—incessantly.
Alas for such speculations, this isn’t what happened at all. It is simply not the case that the Maya once lived in warm, loving, supportive communities, reciting nature poetry and drinking jasmine tea… and then somehow lost their way. Instead they were doing what bellicose tribal populations have always done—straining the carrying capacity of the land, warring with neighbours, and trying in grisly ways to appease their gods. * * * Who has not felt the pathos of ruins? Even a humble pioneer homestead with rusty pots lying in the grass, and a charred chimney still standing against the sky, makes you pause and wonder about the people who lived there once. Is it surprising that when the American John Stephens stumbled upon the ruins of Maya temples in Yucatan he should have been carried away?
“Here were the remains
From one point of view this is a natural response. But it is also a wholly aesthetic response—the response of a mind entirely untroubled by questionable social, economic, or political institutions, let alone simple humanity. Gazing upon the ruins Stephens conjures up in his imagination a world of “orators, warriors, and statesmen.”
“Captives were tortured in unpleasant ways depicted clearly on the monuments and murals (such as yanking fingers out of sockets, pulling out teeth, cutting off the lower jaw, trimming of the lips and fingertips, pulling out the fingernails, and driving a pin through the lips), culminating, sometimes years later, in the sacrifice of the captive in other equally unpleasant ways such as tying the captive up into a ball by binding the arms and legs together, then rolling the balled-up captive down the steep stone staircase of a temple.” * * * I suppose it all depends on what you expect a civilization to offer. The Maya, and the Aztecs too, offered barbarism plus pyramids. Personally I don’t think that’s enough. What we expect of any civilization worth the name is something that lifts us up, something elevating if not ennobling—something that looks beyond the endless cyclical violence of the barbaric past, however interesting its art may be.
Above all what we expect is a moral and philosophical perspective on human existence. The “examined life” as Socrates put it, with the fruit of this examination religiously incorporated and expressed. Egypt had this. India had this. China had this. But as far as we know the Maya did not. Of course you need to also have a developed form of writing to record evidence that life has been examined, thought about, and critically assayed. It is true the Maya had a rudimentary script, and efforts have been made to prove they also had what might loosely be called a philosophical interest in time. Wright comments that “using their advanced arithmetic in a calendar known as the Long Count, the Maya charted the mystery of time, recording astronomical events and running mythological calculations far into the past and future—sometimes over millions of years.” But my own impression is that however successful they were in “charting the mystery of time”, Maya calendrical calculations mainly reflected a mistaken devotion to astrology and numerology—and a more sterile dead-end it would be hard to find.
“If oxen or horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds.” As for maths, one Pythagoras is worth a million Mayan astrologers, while a single calculation by Eratosthenes is worth a wilderness of numerologists. What Pythagoras said about right-angled triangles led to the discovery of incommensurables. In Bertrand Russell’s words, his argument proved that, whatever unit of length we may adopt, there are lengths which bear no exact numerical relation to the unit, in the sense that there are no two integers m, n, such that m times the length in question is n times the unit. This convinced the Greek mathematicians that geometry must be established independently of arithmetic.
In the third century BC Eratosthenes used simple
instruments Then there’s drama. A serious civilization has to get beyond ritual, beyond charades and dressing up and sacred mumbo jumbo and human sacrifice. You have to see Mind at Work. And that is what the Greeks gave us too in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes. For sure, it all began with songs chanted in honor of Dionysus. But it didn’t get stuck there. See the first chapter of Allardyce Nicoll’s World Drama: from Aeschylus to Anouilh for details. * * * But over and above philosophy, science, and the arts, there must be an attempt to move politics beyond the turmoil of barbarian chiefs everlastingly contesting blood-soaked patches of ground. The civilization of the Maya never got past that in Yucatan. But in Greece, one thousand years before the Maya (and light-years before the Maya in terms of cultural development), an alternative and enlightened tradition of political thought and action, long in gestation, had already received its quintessential expression under Pericles. His oft-quoted speech in defence of Athens can never be quoted enough: Our political system does not compete with institutions which are elsewhere in force. We do not copy our neighbours, but try to be an example. Our administration favors the many instead of the few: that is why it is called democracy. The laws afford equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, but we do not ignore the claims of excellence. When a citizen distinguishes himself, then he will be called to serve the state, in preference to others, not as a matter of privilege but as a reward of merit; and poverty is no bar… The freedom we enjoy extends also to ordinary life; we are not suspicious of one another, and do not nag our neighbour if he chooses to go his own way. But this freedom does not make us lawless. We are taught to respect the magistrates and the laws, and never to forget that we must protect the injured. And we are also taught to observe those unwritten laws whose sanction lies only in the universal feeling of what is right. Our city is thrown open to the world; we never expel a foreigner. We are free to live exactly as we please, and yet we are always ready to face danger. We love beauty without indulging in fancies, and although we try to improve our intellect, this does not weaken our will.
We do not look upon discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of political action, but as an indispensable preliminary to acting wisely. We believe that happiness is the fruit of freedom and freedom that of valor, and we do not shrink from the dangers of war. To sum up, I claim that Athens is the School of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian grows up to develop a happy versatility, a readiness for emergencies, and self-reliance. * * * The ripples of Greek civilization spread globally, and deserved to. There were no ripples from the Maya. No enlightenment. Nothing. Just art and masonry and the dried blood of long-dead sacrificial victims. That is not nearly enough. October 2005
StormI’ve seen the embattled winds hurtle together, Uprooting, tossing high and scattering The lush-eared crop; then the onrushing gale With black tornado carry off light stalk And flying stubble. Oft advances huge A host of waters in the sky, and clouds, Gathering from the sea, marshal the storm, Foul, dark with rain. Down pour the heavens sheer, In mighty flood sweeping away glad crops And labours of the ox. The ditches fill: Deep rivers rise in thundering spate: the seas Breathe and boom in the narrows. Jove himself, In blackest darkness of the storm-cloud, wields With flickering hand his bolt, at whose dread shock Earth trembles, wild things scurry, and stark fear Lays prostrate, nation-wide, the hearts of men. — Virgil, A farmer’s calendar, 40BC
At the art galleryIt’s a great collection—perhaps the finest display of Australian painting the country has. In Melbourne, at the National Gallery of Victoria, you can see examples of the late-19th-century work that fixed forever a vision of Australian pioneering life: Arthur Streeton’s landscapes, Tom Roberts’ Shearing the Rams, and Frederick McCubbin’s allegory of settlement, The Pioneer. These paintings are dazzlingly clear in style and meaning. Can’t the public view them in peace? Can’t visitors be assumed to be mature? Can’t the gallery let people think for themselves? Not in Melbourne, where the didactic impulse is overwhelming, and captive citizens receive uplifting instruction the moment they step in the door. McCubbin’s triptych shows a settler family arriving in the empty bush; carving out a homestead; and then a distraught widower beside the grave of his wife—while the city of Melbourne shines distantly in the background as a testament to settler endeavour. And the artist’s meaning is wholly unmysterious. In a 1904 diary entry McCubbin writes that “as I was walking to the top of the hill and went into the bush to look at the view (I found) a pioneer grave long overgrown. Now, as people walk into the bush, they can remember the pioneers that opened up the land”. For McCubbin, opening up the land and building cities were things to be proud of. But of course none of this will do. And McCubbin’s sentiments are downright embarrassing. In order to make the exhibition serve a politically correct purpose, the gallery curator, like some Soviet-era commissar, instructs his visitors how to “read” The Pioneer, suggesting inter alia that they ask “How and for what reasons was the land cleared and whose land was it? To what degree did early settlers understand the harsh eco system? How can we best balance agriculture and conservation in the future?” In short: brains washed here. * * * Elsewhere in the gallery are some early works showing encounters with native peoples. Two paintings by John Glover and Robert Dowling feature aborigines either individually in the landscape or as documentary representations of a clan. Glover presents something of an indigenous New World arcadia, and the Gallery commissariat hastens to explain that his vision was all a fantasy—“a world far removed from the reality” of the aboriginal experience of colonization. Robert Dowling, in contrast, offers a sympathetic if romanticized portrait of a Tasmanian aboriginal family. Its members seem both noble and stoical in the face of their encounter with the forces of colonial settlement; at worst the painting might be seen as romanticizing the noble savage. But no—things are far worse than that. Settlement involved violence. Ergo, paintings like this from the era of settlement involved violence. And presumably the luckless artist with his brush and palette was unknowingly engaged in violence too. Attached to Dowling’s portrait we read without comment the following quotation from the high priest of Orientalism: The act of representing others almost always involves violence of some sort to the subject as well as a contrast between the act of representing something and the calm exterior of the representation itself. Taken from an interview with Edward Said titled The Shadow of the West (1990), the quotation maintains that the very act of representation is an act of violence. But if so, isn’t the National Gallery of Victoria in a bit of a dilemma? Should taxpayer’s money be spent on wall after wall of representations, some large, some small, and some much better than others, that according to Said are essentially celebrations of violence—a macabre dancing on the graves of the dead? October 2005 Civilized medicineFifty men and women had just been blown to pieces on London’s underground, and television screens all over the world were covered with blood. In Australia, finding myself wheeled into hospital for surgery under images of the Virgin and Child, with portraits on the wall of the women who founded the Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of Mercy, I wondered why the ministry of Christ should contrast so violently with the sword of Islam. A week later I transferred to a Jewish hospital for rehabilitation. In the foyer there was a stained-glass mural of “medicine through the ages” that showed Hippocrates, the rabbi and physician Maimonedes, a tutorial class in Renaissance anatomy, and in its final panel the decoding of the human genome. Again, you couldn’t help thinking how lucky we are to belong to Judaeo-Christian civilization and not another. The anthropologically informed know (or at least should know) that religious systems ethically centered on universal peace and love, instead of territorial tribal defence and survival, are comparatively rare in human history. They will also know (or at least should know) how the iconography of Christianity, with its appeal to suffering and compassion (Calvary) and of maternal care (Mary and Jesus), differs from the fierce warlike totems of primitive cults. Looking back into the past we can be eternally grateful that both Christianity and Judaism provided intellectual frameworks loose enough, in the post-medieval epoch, to allow the emergence of a secular science that freed itself of priestly control, and went on to build the edifice of medical knowledge today. In the hospitals where I was fortunate enough to be treated, the ethical and technical strands of our civilization are powerfully intertwined. Not all peoples have been as lucky as we have been—or as unlucky as the Arabs have been. The edifice of western medicine is unique. We must all make sure its high standards are maintained. Multicultural staff An Australian hospital today is a multicultural affair. The national shortage of both nursing staff and doctors ensures that a relatively high proportion come from overseas. That this presents serious challenges for the maintenance of standards and the safety of patients is undeniable, and an extreme and disturbing example of what can happen (though much too idiosyncratic to be typical) is discussed this month in “Doctor Death” at SPIKED. But it also presents opportunities, and the Australian Medical Association may well be correct when it says that our hospitals couldn’t survive without large numbers of recruits from outside. Leading these seem to be nurses from Ireland: their bustling good humor and practicality make them welcome wherever they go. Others come from various parts of Asia, and the nurse I encountered who most embodied the old professional firm-but-friendly style was from Sri Lanka. She combined attractive British vocal noises with a disarming hint of Zsa Zsa Gabor, having somewhere acquired “dahlink” as a universal greeting. “How are you today dahlink?” “Have you had your medication dahlink?” “Have your bowels opened today dahlink?” Charming. Mention of the old nursing style reminds one that it required a certain distinctive personality—and a strong and uncompromising personality too. In the past, the successful nurse had a lot of no-nonsense assertiveness about her, while the Sisters and Matrons of yesteryear could not only silence their more obstreperous patients, they could discipline specialists too. It was just an impression, but it seemed to me that today’s Australian recruits had a personality profile more quiet, subdued, and humbly amenable—in other words predisposed to take bottom-of-the-social-ladder bedpan work without question or complaint. While their vocational commitment is beyond question, do they have the strength to impose themselves and endure? Medicine and civilization Is it right to invidiously contrast the Judaeo-Christian contribution to western civilization with that of Islam? And especially Islam’s contribution to modern medicine? A recent book reviewed in the July 29 Times Literary Supplement has the title The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, its author arguing that “Islam and the West are historical twins whose resemblance did not cease when their paths diverged.” Intended perhaps more as a provocation than a serious thesis, it appears to lean heavily on what Jews and Christians and Muslims shared theologically and doctrinally 1500 years ago. I haven’t read the book, and I must say Islamo-Christian Civilization sounds unconvincing to me. But if we bear its argument in mind, perhaps there is something to be learnt from the curious history of Islamic medicine all the same. Today one of the most striking features of eastern dependence on western knowledge is the spectacle of thousands of nurses and doctors imported into the Gulf states over the last fifty years, simply because traditional Arab cultures have neither the educated personnel, nor the social foundation of sexual equality, nor the scientific knowledge, nor the political will to correct any of these deficiencies, which would enable them to independently provide the medical services that outsiders offer. Was it any different in the past? How old is this pattern of dependence? If there were original thinkers in the region hundreds of years ago, do we find a continuous scientific development from one thinker to the next? Can we see an evolving tradition of medical thought leading steadily to the present day? Or will the closed and dogmatic nature of Islamic culture mean that new thought, when it occurs, is not assimilated, is soon lost sight of, and is then forgotten? A light comes on in the darkness; goes out; and disappears. Medical knowledge as sacred text It seems that there have been variations on “western nurses in the Gulf states” for a very long time. Writing about the period before the 17th century, Bernard Lewis notes on the one hand that very few travellers went from East to West to learn, and on the other that very few eastern people had any knowledge of western languages. The movement of both people and ideas was therefore almost entirely from West to East, usually individuals belonging to members of religious minorities such as non-Catholic Christians, Greeks, or Armenians—groups the Ottoman Turks considered reliable: Minority doctors with Western training also played an increasing role in the practice of medicine. Arabic, Persian, and Turkish scientific writings of the period show some limited acquaintance with Western medicine and Western geography, both needed for practical reasons, but no awareness of Western history or culture. (Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? p37) The way Islam dealt with the new disease of syphilis was typical. It came to the attention of eastern scholars early on, and “was reported in a Persian medical work by an author who died in 1510.” So fixed, rigid, complete, and unchanging was the body of Islamic medical knowledge, however, that syphilis might never have been discussed at all had it not originated outside the Ottoman Empire. Because it was new, came from Europe, and was not already incorporated into a never-to-be-questioned sacred text, “it was therefore acceptable to translate European writings on the diagnosis and treatment of this disease.” A collection of writings on syphilis were translated and presented to the Sultan in 1655. Yet the book consisted entirely of 100-year-old European works. “Knowledge was something to be acquired, stored, if necessary bought, rather than grown or developed.” (Ibid. p39.) Little has changed. The circulation of the blood Then there’s the intriguing story of the circulation of the blood, and of a pioneering Syrian physician called Ibn al-Nafis. Lewis notes that the discovery of the circulation of the blood is “normally credited to the English physician William Harvey, whose epoch-making Essay on the Motion of the Heart and Blood was published in 1628 and transformed both the theory and practice of medicine.” (Ibid. p79.) Harvey’s discovery built on the earlier work of a Spanish physician, Michael Servetus, 1511-1553, whose discovery of the lesser or pulmonary circulation of the blood was published in 1553, the same year as his death. But the really interesting thing is that still earlier, as Lewis tells the story, a 13th-century Syrian physician named Ibn al-Nafis “set forth his theory of the circulation of the blood in terms very similar to those later used by Servetus and adopted by Harvey”. Lewis thinks it likely that Servetus knew of the Syrian’s work. So here was a striking innovation in medicine, in Syria, in the 13th century. What happened next? Ibn al-Nafis died childless at about the age of 80, leaving his estate and his library to a Cairo hospital. “His book and his theory remained unknown”, writes Bernard Lewis, “and had no effect on the practice of medicine.” (Ibid. p80.) By which Lewis means of course that it had no effect on the theory and practice of medicine in the Islamic world. Ibn al-Nafis may well have influenced Michael Servetus however. It is all very strange. This willing dependence on Western science and technique, this preparedness to beg, buy, borrow, or steal, combined with a stubborn resistance to social and political modernization, is a pattern going back hundreds of years. September 2005 Gibbon on LibertyGerald Vouga commented last month on the resounding “No” from both French and Dutch voters to the proposed EU constitution (“Imperial Dreams and Political Realities”). Individual citizens in each country will have had various motives for this rejection, and doubtless some were more creditable than others. Overall, however, the vote indicated the deep suspicion ordinary Europeans have for any further surrender of national sovereignty to a bunch of morally challenged bureaucrats in Brussels. It showed that most people in France and Holland feel their liberties can only be impaired. In light of this, it is interesting to read what one of our greatest historians had to say about the importance of national independence for keeping tyranny at bay. The division of Europe into a number of independent states, connected, however, with each other, by the general resemblance of religion, language, and manners, is productive of the most beneficial consequences to the liberty of mankind. A modern tyrant, who should find no resistance either in his own breast or in his people, would soon experience a gentle restraint from the example of his equals, the dread of present censure, the advice of his allies, and the apprehension of his enemies. The object of his displeasure, escaping from the narrow limits of his dominions, would easily obtain, in a happier climate, a secure refuge, a new fortune adequate to his merit, the freedom of complaint, and perhaps the means of revenge. But the empire of the Romans filled the world, and, when that empire fell into the hands of a single person, the world became a safe and dreary prison for his enemies… To resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776, Chapter 3 September 2005 Scandalized vituperationOutrage doesn’t bring out the best in us—certainly not our best language. We look around for suitable metaphors to match our indignation, and a whole vocabulary of beastliness is summoned up to describe whoever it is we feel bad about: he’s a worm, a toad, a carrion-eating hyaena… or at the very least a pig or an ox. In the zoological lists, reptilian figures of speech have a unique ability to make us shudder, but it takes literary talent to give these metaphors the development they deserve. After reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, the more conventional novelist E. M. Forster was extremely disturbed, and said so in a well-known series of lectures. Cyril Connolly commented as follows: Mr Forster, in his lectures on the novel, states perfectly the English attitude to Joyce, the bad bogy-man of letters. ‘Ulysses’, writes Forster, ‘is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make coarseness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.’ It is also an ‘epic of grubbiness and disillusion… a superfetation of fantasies, a monstrous coupling of reminiscences… in which smaller mythologies swarm and pullulate, like vermin between the scales of a poisonous snake’. ‘Indignation in literature’ adds Mr Forster, ‘never quite comes off’, and the passage I have quoted does little except to express the general attitude of English culture towards novelty, and to prove that the vocabulary of scandalized vituperation is drawn from the reptile house in every age. The Position of Joyce, 1929 September 2005
Portraits and people
How the sculpture came about is not widely known, but it seems to have all begun around 1341 BC. That’s when her royal husband Akhenaten went on an image-breaking orgy, destroyed countless sacred effigies of falcons, and jackals, and crocodiles, and announced that from then on men must worship one god only—the sun. The novelty of this religious upheaval was all very exciting; but afterwards the queen fell into a severe post-iconoclastic depression.
"What is wrong, my queen and my beloved?
It’s the soothsayers, she answered. What sooths did they say? he inquired. They said the Nile would not rise, and it hasn’t. They said your chin would grow ever longer, and it has. They said that destroying the sacred images of our gods would be a disaster—and who knows? Perhaps it will be as they say." To this the king had no answer. Despite weeks of potent spells and incantations, the Nile remained sullenly in its bed. He knew he was no Adonis, and though large sums from the royal treasury had been spent, it was clear that Egypt’s most gifted cosmetic surgeons could do nothing to shorten his jaw. As for the new doctrine that there should be one god and one god only… it was obviously a huge gamble that might not pay off. The people liked their jackals, scarabs, and stuff. So he did what he had done in the past to lift the wilting spirits of his exquisite queen. He went out and bought her a spectacular hat, and a gorgeous gold necklace, and then he told the court sculptor to get some suitable limestone, and to sharpen his chisels, and prepare for work. The rest is history. * * * Artistic history anyway. And from a strictly formal standpoint it is notable that even by 1341 BC certain broad conventions for portrait busts were well established: head, neck, shoulders sometimes as far as the upper arms, after which the line cuts steeply in at right angles to the supporting pedestal. Earlier than Nefertiti, back in 2700 BC, there’s a head from Gizeh showing that at that date the rules were less clear: the fellow’s neck ends abruptly as if his head were chopped off.
In Roman antiquity you couldn’t be sure a man had even
lived if he left no portrait, while a Roman family could barely be said to
exist without a complete domestic gallery of sculptured likenesses.
Suetonius reveals the obscurity of Vespasian’s background by saying that the
Flavian house was “without family portraits”, though he added that this was
not necessarily a disgrace.
Rome was a real mess when Vespasian took over in 69 AD—civil war had laid waste the Capitol, buildings were shattered, rubbish was everywhere, lawless soldiers were on the loose, and Roman matrons were misbehaving with their slaves. We read that Vespasian “began the restoration of the Capitol in person, was the first to lend a hand in clearing away the debris, and carried some of it off in a basket on his own head.” He looks as if he had the right head for the job. Strong enough to be a solid plinth for a wobbling nation. His unrelaxed expression also suggests the right mind and character—the mouth firm, the lips pursed, the eyes direct and fearless. Vespasian was smart enough to have survived at Nero’s court, while at the same time, further afield, he displayed his soldierly talents by knocking sense into fractious malcontents all the way from Judaea to the Isle of Wight. As Emperor he resolved to restore order, and made a start by purging the Legions of their more useless troops. Suetonius: He let slip no opportunity of improving military discipline. When a young man reeking with perfumes came to thank him for the commission he had been given, Vespasian drew back his head in disgust, adding the stern reprimand: ‘I would rather you smelled of garlic.’
"Commodus was not, as he has been represented, a tiger born with an insatiate thirst of human blood and capable from infancy of the most inhuman actions. Nature had formed him of a weak rather than a wicked disposition. His simplicity and timidity rendered him the slave of his attendants, who gradually corrupted his mind. His cruelty, which at first obeyed the dictates of others, degenerated into habit and at length became the ruling passion of his soul." * * *
Sir Thomas also said some
Everything that portraiture may comprehend will be to him delectable to read or hear. And where the lively spirit, and that which is called the grace of the thing, is perfectly expressed, that thing will be more persuasive in a painting than in writing or speaking. Drawing was a vital part of the new cartographic understanding of the physical world: Experience we have in learning of geometry, astronomy, and cosmogrophy, called in English the description of the world. I dare affirm that a man shall more profit, in one week, by figures and charts, well and perfectly made, than he shall by only reading or hearing the rules of that science by the space of half a year at the least... In Sir Thomas (and also in Holbein) we find a prologue to Enlightenment. The purity of the realistic impulse to be found in Thutmose, the sculptor of Nefertiti, is here serving larger designs. These emphasise an objective attitude toward the world, and the kind of humane detachment regarding human folly that comes to full maturity in Shakespeare. Holbein’s engagement with his subject is entirely professional. And that includes Lady Margaret. * * * In contrast, Bernini’s bust of Costanza Bonarelli is deplorably unprofessional. Not artistically, of course, but Costanza was the wife of one of Bernini’s assistants, and not content with cuckolding her husband he proceeded to insult the poor man as well. Then when she turned her affections toward Bernini’s brother Luigi all hell broke loose, blood was spilled (some of it Costanza’s) and Pope Urban VIII stepped in before anyone got killed. He took it upon himself to advise Bernini to get married. The artist did so, his marriage in 1639 to Caterina Tezio lasted 34 years, and they had 11 children.
Here I feel Mr Jones has allowed himself to be carried away—Bernini’s muse has become his own. And if this is the arousing effect “the stony dead” can have on a man after nearly 400 years you can see what Costanza’s husband was up against. But perhaps Jones is onto something: she does have an air of anxious interruption, she’s fidgety, very much alive… there’s a feeling this pose won’t last long. * * *
Not everyone liked
But the reasons Sir Joshua gives for his
August 2005
Science and the GreeksAcademics cringe at the words truth and certainty. They believe that truth and certainty aren’t possible because philosophers have shown that neither empirical nor deductive knowledge can be made error free. But in the case of a finite number of discrete entities, such as the chemical elements or the human genes, certainty is an appropriate word. And in any event, our knowledge of atoms and genes is as certain as our knowledge of tables and chairs, and a lot more certain than our knowledge of human behavior. — Alan Cromer How nice to find a good book about science. And by a scientist too—not a philosopher of science, or a historian of science, or some enemy of science trying to denigrate what he cannot understand. Just a man who spent a lifetime teaching physics, and who ruminated on the fundamental nature of his subject. Alan Cromer’s 1993 Uncommon Sense has been around for over ten years, and a Scandinavian correspondent put me onto it when she was struck by the similarity of the title to Lewis Wolpert’s 1992 The Unnatural Nature of Science. Here were two men (Wolpert is a distinguished embryologist) entirely at one in their conviction that whatever it is, and however it might be described, science is not just trained and organized common sense, as Darwin’s colleague T. H. Huxley thought, or “rooted in the whole apparatus of common sense thought” as Alfred North Whitehead similarly claimed. Anti-science Both books are written in response to the anti-scientific animus of our times. And both try to explain this hostility. There are quite a few suggestions put forward, from the seemingly incurable human attraction to the occult, to the childhood psychology of egocentrism (pointed to by Piaget) which makes it hard to distinguish between internal and external causation, to the lack of thinking skills needed to tell “the fanciful claims of astrology from the extraordinary claims of astronomy.” Again, the sheer novelty of a subject which “isn’t about the meaning of words, but about things in themselves”, makes it alarming to all those for whom true education is the interpretive study of words and meanings in books. It’s surprising how new science is—post-Galileo, and only really taking off in the 18th century. Both Cromer and Wolpert point out that homo sapiens has today much the same cortical equipment he’s had for the 100,000 years, and that for the human brain to have given rise to science is a strange development. In Cromer’s words, “whatever evolution was after, it certainly wasn’t science.” Wolpert says similarly that “our brains have been selected to help us survive in a complex environment”, but that scientific ideas played no role in this process. Instead evolution was after pure and simple survival—and favored mechanical things that helped it like axes, and spears, and bows and arrows. But axes and spears are technology—something far older than science (in fact millions of years old if we include the Old Stone Age), and they involve no science whatever. They were the product of natural commonsensical tinkering, whereas, says Wolpert, there’s very little that is “natural” about scientific thought. Scientific ideas are, with rare exceptions, counter-intuitive: they cannot be acquired by simple inspection of phenomena and are often outside everyday experience. Secondly, doing science requires a conscious awareness of the pitfalls of ‘natural’ thinking. For common sense is prone to error when applied to problems requiring rigorous and quantitative thinking; lay theories are highly unreliable. Unnatural thinking Both authors are firmly of the view that science began in Greece. Wolpert points to Aristotle as a man who clearly understood that science is an “unnatural mode of thought”. When Pythagoras came up with a theorem about the diagonal of a square being a multiple of the square root of 2, who could have imagined—who, that is, in the commonsense world of apples and oranges or sticks and stones—that the result is not a whole number but has as many figures after 1.4142… as you care to count? Aristotle had this to say: In some ways, the effect of achieving understanding is to reverse completely our initial attitude of mind. For everyone starts (as we have said) by being perplexed by some fact or other: for instance… the fact that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with the side. Anyone who has not yet seen why the side and the diagonal have no common unit regards this as quite extraordinary. But one ends up in the opposite frame of mind… for nothing would so much flabbergast a mathematician as if the diagonal and side of a square were to become commensurable. (Metaphysics, Book One, Chapter 2) As Aristotle turns this over in his mind we can see him distinguishing at least four things: (1) An “initial attitude of mind” that is non-scientific or pre-scientific. (2) An intellectual process employing mathematics that “achieves” an understanding impossible without it. (3) The fact that scientific/mathematical understanding may entail the “complete reversal” of the assumptions of common sense. (4) The surprise of the naïve and untrained mind at learning truths it finds “extraordinary”. Maths is not my province, but let me conclude with Wolpert’s own ever-so-slightly flabbergasted observation: It is one of the most unnatural features of science that the abstract language of mathematics should provide such a powerful tool for describing the behavior of systems both inanimate, as in physics, and living, as in biology. Why the world should conform to mathematical descriptions is a deep question. Whatever the answer, it is astonishing. The concept of objectivity Both Cromer and Wolpert argue that the value of objectivity and the very concept of objectivity itself are fundamental to the scientific outlook. Subjectivity, in the form of inductive hunches, and clues, and natural human interests, often provides a stimulus in the first stages of enquiry. A concern for the health of sailors on long voyages at sea; a feeling that there’s a causal connection underlying long-term cycles of drought or flood; a suspicion that more than ordinary combustion is the source of solar fire—the range of interests and intuitions providing questions for science to answer is infinite. But in Wolpert’s words, “being objective is crucial in science when it comes to judging whether subjective views are correct or not. One has to be prepared to change one’s views in the face of evidence, objective information.” One may have all sorts of hunches: but only science will lead to a correct explanation of scurvy, or of El Niño, or of nuclear fusion inside the sun. For his part Cromer agrees with Jacques Monod that objectivity is “the most powerful idea ever to have emerged” in human consciousness. If objectivity is so unusual, historically speaking, and humanity is largely irrational and driven by egocentric feelings, emotions, and moods, how did science ever develop in the first place? “With difficulty”, writes Cromer dryly, going on to emphasize that it wasn’t the “natural unfolding” of some human potential, but “the peculiar invention of a particular culture in a particular time.” The Greek achievement And he has no doubt which culture it was. But how and why did science originate in Greece? Both authors say there were peculiar features of Greek life that favored science, though ultimately they each accept that it was something of a freak or a fluke. Cromer first points to the Greek public assembly where rival points of view were debated, and regards debates themselves, governed by rules of presentation and then by the collective assessment of evidence, as very important. In addition to this there was “a maritime economy that prevented isolation and parochialism. Third was the existence of a widespread Greek-speaking world around which travellers and scholars could wander. Fourth was the existence of an independent merchant class that could hire its own teachers.” One might think that Cromer would have little time for the myths and legends of classical literature. In fact he thinks Homer made a helpful contribution: “Fifth was the Iliad and the Odyssey, literary masterpieces that are themselves the epitome of liberal rational thinking. Sixth was a literary religion not dominated by priests. And seventh was the persistence of these factors for 1,000 years.” Yet when all is said and done, the intellectual flowering that produced Aristotle, Euclid, and Archimedes remains almost inexplicable. That science is everywhere so hard for non-scientists to understand confirms Cromer’s suspicion that “it is something outside the mainstream of human development, perhaps a fluke.” Wolpert offers a quotation from Einstein pointing to the same conclusion. Asked why it was that science arose only once, and in Greece, where it was confined to a tiny élite, and then persisted only in the West, Einstein replied: The development of Western science has been based on two great achievements, the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility of finding out causal relationships by systematic experiment (at the Renaissance). In my opinion one need not be astonished that the Chinese sages did not make these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all. Cromer has more to say about the Chinese sages, and why, given the social world in which they lived, they could never have got very far; but we shall return to these matters at a later date. August 2005 Clan politics and backward landsDespite the London bombings, and despite the toll of dead, we all know the difference between the nuisance of terrorism and the menace of total political meltdown. In Ukraine, last November, there were for a time three “presidents”. The army was lining up behind one of them, the Security Service was backing another, and Russia’s President Putin was sticking his nose in too. Almost anything could have happened. Adrian Karatnycky’s “Ukraine’s Orange Revolution” in the March/April Foreign Affairs is a gripping account of what took place. The entire episode illustrates the political backwardness of this struggling country. But can these events, which included the attempted poison-murder of the ultimately successful candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, also be read more positively? Karytnycky thinks so—but I wonder. Do they indicate, as he believes, that a responsible middle class now exists in sufficient numbers to influence things for the better? Or are the underlying problems far more intractable, and deeply a part of traditional pre-modern cultures more generally? For years throughout the Soviet era we witnessed the comedy of mock “elections” in which the winning party regularly got about 98% of the vote. Nothing more startlingly illustrated the primeval political mentality of the Soviets. One can imagine the smiling arguments that went on among the Party directorate as to whether the opposition should be allowed 2% of the vote, or only 1.5%. But who cared? Everywhere in the Soviet world so-called “elections” took place as if the outside world wasn’t looking, mainly because in one-party states the “electorate” could do absolutely nothing about it. Not surprisingly, Ukrainians expected something better last year. So when Mr Yanukovich was declared to be getting 92% of the vote in the eastern Donetsk it was all too obvious what was going on—Grand Vote Theft on a huge scale. Karatnycky reports that according to the non-partisan Committee of Voters of Ukraine, which had 10,000 monitors on the ground, no less that “85,000 local government officials helped perpetrate the fraud, and at least 2.8 million ballots were rigged in favor of Yanukovich. Clans and corruption But why? How in this new and open era could such a brazen political hijack possibly succeed? And how could so many officials be involved? These questions lead to a conspicuous feature of Ukrainian political life—the primitivism of a society strongly built around clans, with loyalty to clan outweighing other loyalties and responsibilities, especially in the eastern part of the country. I emphasize the clan system first, because all over the world people are talking about “corruption” as if it is something to be considered by itself and on its own. For example, we are told over and over that Africa’s leaders are “corrupt”. In ethnic affairs in various other places, from Canada to New Zealand and Australia, the same accusation is made—and it’s often true as far as it goes. But if critical analysis ceases with the charge that there’s “corruption at the top” or that there are “corrupt elites”, and that nepotism is rampant, we are not going to make much progress understanding the problem—let alone dealing with it. It is certainly true that corruption went right to the top in Ukraine: in 2000, President Kuchma’s former bodyguard leaked hundreds of hours of transcripts of his private conversations. Karatnycky writes that “On the tapes, Kuchma is heard dispensing favors, paying massive kickbacks, and conspiring to suppress his opponents—making it clear that the president sat at the head of a vast criminal system.” Now it would be wrong to suggest that this “criminal system” was coextensive in the strictest sense with the “clan system”. Yet it is obvious from Karatnycky’s discussion that the clan system, with its strong territorial connections (Kiev, Donetsk, Transcarpathia), was certainly the social and political foundation of the criminal system he describes. In this milieu, as in Africa, corruption is not something between A and B, occurring in private and alone. Nor is it something between one oligarch and one sub-oligarchic client. Nor can it be dealt with simply by condemning or even removing the individuals involved. It involves vast extended “families” of beneficiaries, and almost equally vast armies of enforcers, all of them determined to protect what westerners may call “ill-gotten gains”, but which clan members see as perfectly legitimate claims. After describing how a number of “oligarchic clans” came to dominate Ukrainian politics in the early 1990s, Karatnycky writes: Each interest group established its own political party in parliament. The Kiev clan ran the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine. The Donetsk oligarchs created the Party of Regions, the ranks of which included a local governor who later became prime minister: Yanukovich. The Dnipropetrovsk group created and backed the Labor Party. For a decade after 1989 everything ran smoothly. Prominent clan members divided the spoils of privatisation among themselves—steel mills worth billions were got for a few million; energy companies sold for a song; while the manipulative control of taxation, by inspections and fines enforced by what are in effect state-supported standover men, was used by rival clans to harass or force out of business their opponents. Then toward the end of the 1990s the criminal/clan/oligarchic system began to unravel, with other Big Men growing powerful enough to threaten President Kuchma, and the nasty murder of an investigative journalist being traceable to Kuchma himself. New man, old culture We know the upshot. A new election produced a new “clean” leader in Mr Yushchenko—a man whose persistence in the face of his own attempted murder and the disfiguring sickness of dioxin poisoning, concerted harassment throughout the campaign including denial of landing rights to his aircraft, constant denigration in the media controlled by his opponent, road barriers plus an attempt to cause a fatal accident by forcing his car into a ditch, amounts to heroism on a truly Churchillian scale. His triumph was magnificent. No-one can take that away. But it might be timely to stand back a little and recognise that this has been the easy part. For it is surely true that the structure of Ukraine’s clan-dominated society remains much the same as before. This means first of all that many Ukrainians, especially in the east, do not expect to earn a livelihood as autonomous citizens independently creating wealth; they hope to enjoy the spoils of office by using whatever pressure and influence their “family” connections allow. Secondly, it means that whatever entrepreneurial activity takes place will have to be within the severely constraining framework of the clan system. Mr Karatnycky talks in his first paragraph, as optimistic Americans often talk, about “the rise of a powerful civic movement”, about “a skilled political opposition group”, and about the “determined middle class” that resisted the Kuchma regime. And he reports that The Yushchenko camp has stated its gratitude for the long-term efforts of the U.S. Agency for International Development to support free media, the rule of law, civil society, and civic election monitoring there. But exactly what laws will be imposed by those who rule? Will they allow a hair-dresser to set up on the corner and ply her trade? Will a man be able to build a delicatessen nearby? Will another man be able to set up a timber yard, or an automotive repair shop, and will they be able to obtain the secure title to their properties they need in order to safeguard their investments? Or will they be everlastingly shadowed by one clan or another, and subject to obstruction, harassment, standover men, extortionists, all of them connected with this mob or that and making up the law as they go? One would like to know. It’s the culture, stupid As we said before, the clan problem is not confined to the Ukraine. Far from it. It’s a common problem in traditional, pre-modern cultures, and is of course conspicuous in Africa. And wherever it is found, corruption and nepotism—or what is called corruption by all media commentators, and by many others who should perhaps think more deeply—is routinely associated with it. Something else we see is that the journalists who point this out often strongly imply that the removal of someone at the top, or of some small and corrupt clique, is all that is needed to produce a thriving modern democracy. Such people may even imply that “regime change” induced by guillotine or firing squad recommends itself as an attractive quick fix. The outpouring of recent commentary on Africa has brought a great deal of this sort of thing. In an article in the British Spectator for June 25, 2005 Aidan Hartley tells “How African leaders spend our money”. It’s a funny and biting survey of the Wabenzi and their taste for big and expensive cars, arguing that aid hasn’t worked, and quoting a Merrill Lynch report which estimates that 100,000 Africans own $380 billion (most of it siphoned from international aid) while 300 million others live on 50 pence a day. Hartley concludes that “The West needs to help Africans get better leaders before it increases aid.” But how exactly would you “help” Africans to do that? Would regime change do it? An entertaining Max Boot tirade in the LA Times for July 7, 2005 goes further. Ridiculing the rock-and-roll activities of Live-8, and claiming that in Africa what Bob Geldof himself has called "corruption and thuggery" is the main problem, he ends with the following politics-by-numbers suggestion: “Use the G-8's jillions 2 hire mercenaries 4 the overthrow of the 6 most thuggish regimes in Africa. That would do more to help ordinary Africans than any number of musical extravaganzas.” Ordinary Africans, we are to understand from this, have quite different values from the men at the top. In the Wall Street Journal for July 5, 2005 an economically more responsible contribution from Moeletsi Mbeki (a brother of South African president Thabo Mbeki), a man who is by no means an ordinary African and who is at the University of Witwatersrand, writes that “at the root of Africa's problems are ruling political elites that have squandered the continent's wealth and choked its productivity over the last 40 years.” In the case of each of these writers, the main thing you have to do is remove a dictator, overthrow a regime, or displace and neutralise a sinister “ruling political elite”… Then everything will be just fine. So you remove the corrupt leader—what then? But let us try a little thought experiment. Let us remove Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, and any of a dozen others you care to name. Let us then see what happens next as we start with what is optimistically called a “clean slate.” Assuming you’re not going to install an outsider, who shall be appointed and where do you find him? If he or she is going to simply be a member of the same tribe and clan-based cultural milieu that produced the original despot, working in the same context of ambiguous and unenforceable law, and gravely imperfect or rudimentary political institutions, how are you to get a replacement with better ideas about politics, economics, and social life? Why is it assumed that the mere decapitation of a political body will in itself bring improvement? Are the political genes that made the body utterly different from the political genes that made the head —if you will pardon the metaphor? “Regime change” is a splendid phrase; but it looks rather less splendid if it means that you must be prepared to appoint, staff, direct, and manage each new regime yourself—all of this while under fire. Then there’s that word “corruption”. Of course I use it myself to describe the conduct of certain political leaders, in Africa and elsewhere. But at the same time I also realise it is a moralistic term that assumes certain norms regarding business practice and truly belongs in a western context. In brief, it belongs in prosperous countries where politicians, business leaders, public figures, and notables of one kind or another, are not supposed to enrich themselves by means of bribes and kickbacks. But what if this kind of enrichment is expected? One doesn’t have to be a moral relativist to see the inappropriateness of the word “corruption” in certain contexts. Is it appropriate to use it in a scornfully moralistic tone of Africa (or of the Ukraine for that matter) where bribes, kickbacks, under-the-table payments, ‘sweeteners’ and so on, are all part of the normal way in which the wealth of society is distributed. In such places they are payments made to those with power and influence for services rendered. That is how “blat” was used in the strange, quasi-feudal, pre-modern society of Soviet Russia—and that is how it is doubtless used in much of Russia today. What we call corruption is simply daily life: it’s the culture, stupid! It also seems to me unhelpful to classify such payments as part of the “informal economy” as economists are inclined to do. Both those who are forced to offer bribes, and those who demand them, simply assume that that is how life is lived, and that is how things get done if they are going to be done at all. Call it formal, informal, whatever. It is in short “the culture”—the ubiquitous culture of backward dysfunctional lands lacking all effective social, political, and economic institutions. In other words it is part of a comprehensive pattern of values, expectations, conduct and consequences that have always made the traditional world go round. Does this mean that I take a relaxed view of such behavior, or condone it in the modern world? Not at all. In America, Australia, and New Zealand 99% of the people are literate, are entirely westernised, and the law on corruption is known and accepted. Nor in such places is poverty an incentive to corruption. The ethnic minority in these countries who try to exploit remnant traditions of clan and tribe for their own advantage, and act corruptly within this or that government bureaucracy (their usual means of access to large cash funds), deserve to be vigorously prosecuted and appropriately punished. But where 99% of the people live under quite different conditions, where lawlessness prevails and the judicial system is a joke; where poverty is universal; and where the provision of basic services to one’s farm or house or office may take years of effort and countless bribes to countless officials—plainly a rather different attitude is required. Social evolution and remnant traditions In the early world—once upon a time, in some remote sociological Eden—All was One and All was Unity. Political power, economic activity, religious belief, social mores, and the definitions of good and evil and true and false by which we live, were all facets of a compound unity bound together by relations of kith and kin—the kinship of family, clan, and tribe. If the tribe said evil was good, then it was good; if the tribe said black was white, then black was white. And if the chief or priest of the tribe said evil was good, or black was white, no-one dared say him nay. For westerners that world is irrevocably past, and has been since the Renaissance; and to yearn for it today, as many anthropologists urge us to, is just silly. Modernity means that politics, economics, religious belief, social mores, and what each of us call good and evil are all separated; and this differentiation is a defining feature of modern life. We do not allow clan leaders to define right and wrong. We do not allow chiefs to determine justice. We do not allow priests to define scientific truth and falsehood. And we do not allow clan leaders, chiefs, or priests to run our economic affairs. In political life, and in American judicial practice, this differentiation is most familiar in terms of the separation of powers. But throughout much of the rest of the world, remnant shreds and patches of traditional cultural patterns persist, as they do throughout Africa, and in parts of Asia, and as they still do even on the periphery of the West itself in Ukraine and other Slavic nations. In such places political, economic, and judicial authority may be strongly influenced by clan affiliation. In Africa, where modernity has never really taken root, this fact virtually defines the human world, and it is surely sensible for the West to adopt policies that take account of this fact. One practical consequence is that we should stop pretending that although there are evil men at the top, everyone else is like you and me. They are not. Nor are they evil. Many are perfectly nice people to visit, to share a beer with, or to dance with to the intoxicating rhythms of local bands. But it is equally true that they necessarily think pretty much the same way as the men at the top think, and whatever they may say in private, they will behave the same way if put in a position of leadership, because they will experience just the same clan- and family-based cultural pressures and constraints. Another consequence we must face up to concerns aid, for the expectation of beneficial effects in such societies is bound to be disappointed. Whatever Blair and Bush say at Gleneagles, only the infinitely rich, the entirely blind, and the pathologically optimistic will say it makes sense to persist in voluntarily throwing billions of good money after bad. As numerous pessimists have argued year after year, it is the economic equivalent of pouring water straight onto desert sands. But it’s not water—it’s your money and mine. Following on from this is the even more serious matter of vaguely military fantasizing to be found among people like Max Boot, Aidan Hartley, and Moeletsi Mbeki—about forcefully removing despots, annihilating cliques, neutralising elites, etc. Much blood and treasure may be lost trying to do this, as in Iraq today, but the outcome is doubtful. Only where most people are well-educated, literate, and already largely westernised (as they appear to be in Ukraine) and represent, in Adrian Karatnycky’s words, a clear electoral majority favoring “free media, the rule of law, civil society, and civic election monitoring”, does there seem to be a better than even chance of success. August 2005 General Evans and His FateAn army man without troops is a sad sight. A civilian without military training who yearns for command is even sadder. Perhaps that is what makes the enterprise of General Evans so admirable: putting both these handicaps aside, and defying history, the President of the International Crisis Group is now proposing a major campaign in the Sudan. Born the son of a tram-driver, General Gareth John Evans spent most of his career in the Australian Labor Party, where he was soon noted for his adventurous spirit. In the 1980s he became Attorney-General, and it was then—due doubtless to a small misunderstanding about his title—that he first showed signs of military ambition. Disturbed by what he saw as the secessionist tendencies of the Tasmanians, he arranged to have the Royal Australian Air Force monitor their rebellious activities from the air. This led to his being nicknamed “Biggles”. A master tactician at a time when his party needed all the help it could get, he first wooed and then bedded the leader of a rival party, persuading her to defect to his own. At the time this was regarded as both a personal and political coup. Such conquests eventually persuaded him that Australia was too small a field for his endeavors. One continent was not enough. If the world was to benefit from his gladiatorial gifts they required more scope—and in Darfur’s boundless sands he has at last found an arena. On June 6th 2005, in The Wall Street Journal, he asked that “a battalion group (infantry plus support elements) should be deployed in each of the eight sectors, along with a ninth battalion in reserve, 700 to 1,000 military observers, 1,500 to 2,000 civilian police, and 1,000 headquarters and other staff. After all, with Darfur we are talking about an area the size of France of Texas with a population of some six million; well over two million of them already have been forced out of their homes.” It is understood that General Evans is in the capable hands of some military outfitters, and that once he is battle-ready he will be leaving for the front. * * * The New Class is indeed a problem—and General Evans is a typical representative. For fifty years or more Australian universities have been overproducing leftist intellectuals—men and women for whom, alas, there is less and less public demand. In arts, this demi-educated campus spillage went into journalism, the media, or incestuously back into the ranks of the academy itself. In law and government, where many students joined the Labor Club and acquired a deep aversion to making things, selling things, or doing anything useful, the majority wound up in politics. There they regulated the makers and sellers, scolded those who did useful things, and told people what they should buy. Above all the New Class saw itself as the custodian of ideals in a world which otherwise had no serious ideals at all; and it has for several decades been feeding on a heady mix of notions—some ecological, some redistributive, some aiming at perpetual peace in our time—all more or less visionary and out of touch. The General’s pronouncements on Sudan embody this state of mind. The notion that troops from the African Union can do anything much to improve the situation in Darfur is pure hallucination. The accompanying idea that backs this up—that if the AU fails, then NATO should “provide and lead the additional troops in the numbers and time frame required”—is even more absurd. In fact, by the time the reader finishes his Wall Street Journal article it’s obvious that Evans himself knows how unrealistic his proposals are, for he feebly concludes with talk about “African and European sensitivities”, with doubts about the adequacy of “small multination battle groups”, and with an entirely appropriate pessimism about Europe’s willingness to act. Yet even more striking is the General’s complete incomprehension of the problem. Despite his bold talk about battalions and battle groups, the strife in Sudan is not something that has a military solution. Whole decades of ethnic, tribal, and religious animosity among dozens of different groups underlie the continual raids and reprisals going on, scattered over an enormous and unmanageable region, and it is quite likely that if regiments of European soldiers were sent into the middle of this they would be shot at by everyone. As much for target practice as anything else. * * * |
Even
Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress (2004) seems to agree.
His disdainful view of civilization is not one I share, and is designed to
serve a familiar agenda. He tells us for example that between the 8th
and the 10th century AD, as things went wrong in Mayaland, and
then got a whole lot worse, that the Maya solution “was higher pyramids,
more power to the kings, harder work for the masses, more foreign wars. In
modern terms, the Maya elite became extremists, or ultra-conservatives,
squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.” 
of
Yet if
he’d rashly “called back into life” some of the people painted on the wall
he could have got a surprise. He might have found they weren’t so much
“gazing in sadness” as contorted with pain. On page 172 Diamond tells us
that “archaeologists for a long time believed the ancient Maya to be gentle
and peaceful people.” (Although why archaeologists should have held this
belief, beyond their customary wishful thinking, he doesn’t explain.) “We
now know that Maya warfare was intense, chronic, and unresolvable…” and that
the sadness Stephens detected long ago was due to some very nasty customs
indeed:
What
I look for in a civilization is Mind at Work. That’s what we find in ancient
Greece when Heraclitus maintained that everything changes, and
Parmenides retorted that nothing changes. A serious religion with a
seriously uplifting ethic is also welcome: failing that, as among the
Greeks, let’s have a serious freethinker like Xenophanes, who wondered why
the faithful always imagine that their gods look like themselves:
and elementary geometry to measure the earth’s diameter. He came up with a
figure of 7,850 miles—about fifty miles short of the truth. In connection
with Greek science we might also mention Democritus, who once cried: “I
would rather find a single causal law than be king of Persia!”
To
admit one’s poverty is no disgrace with us; but we consider it disgraceful
not to make an effort to avoid it. An Athenian citizen does not neglect
public affairs when attending to his private business… We consider a man who
takes no interest in the state not as harmless, but as useless; and although
only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.
said
Akhenaten.
And
he revoked the commission too. Compare the tough realism of the man in
Vespasian’s portrait
Around
1530 Hans Holbein the Younger made these studies of Lady Margaret and Sir
Thomas Elyot, using black and colored chalks on a pink paper. Sir Thomas
himself wrote a pioneering book on health, and is famous for a quotation
about wildfowl: “Fesaunt excedeth all fowles in sweetnesse and holsomeness,
and is equall to capon in nourishynge.” Perhaps. I have not eaten pheasant,
but did once try to eat a sage grouse in Wyoming. Fiercely muscular, it
tasted more like sage than grouse.
sensible
things
A
spritely note by Jonathan Jones in 
this
liveliness. At about the age of 18 or so Bernini produced the dazzling
Apollo and Daphne, caught at the instant Daphne’s limbs were turning into a
laurel tree, with her skin becoming bark and leaves sprouting in places from
her upraised hands. But grave men like Sir Joshua Reynolds complained that
what Bernini was trying to do in stone was better done with paint. There was
talk about “truth to materials”, and about the theatre being a better place
for dramatic events and emotions to be expressed through art. The attitude
seemed to be that if God had meant stone to be used this way he would not
have made it in blocks.
Sir
Joshua looked at the face of Bernini’s David, tensed as he prepares to use
his sling, and found much to censure: “As in Invention, so likewise in
Expression, care must be taken not to run into particularities. Those
expressions alone should be given to the figures which their respective
situations generally produce.” He has a point of course. We don’t want
Nefertiti looking like that. Or the Lady Margaret. Or even Costanza. For
Nefertiti especially we want the timeless serenity of eternal aesthetic
grace.
dislike of “particularities” brings us to something a little different, and
not quite so defensible. He’s concerned about social status. Top people
should be represented looking like top people—dignified, wise, strong,
handsome, kindly, and not to be messed with impertinently by the lower
orders. Sir Joshua, a man who made it is his business to get on with top
people, painted an awful lot of them looking this way. But I’d happily trade
a hundred of those respectful portraits of 18th century
aristocrats for just one copy—for just a decent print—of Hogarth’s Shrimp
Girl. I