douglass carmichael: literature

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 21:40:06 GMT

Some similarities to the politics of today

newyorker.com/printable/?critics/041213crbo_books

HOLY SMOKE

by JOAN ACOCELLA

What were the Crusades really about?

Issue of 2004-12-13

According to many modern historians, what triggered the Crusades was not an external cause but an internal one: a campaign, beginning with Pope Gregory VII, in the late eleventh century, to reform the Church. This was a two-pronged effort. One goal was to stamp out immorality: get the priests to stop marrying, stop selling ecclesiastical offices, live by their vows. A second, and probably more important, objective was to strengthen the Papacy. In religion as in politics, Europeans of that period had little respect for centralized authority. The Pope’s sovereignty was disputed not just by secular rulers but within the Church. When Urban II, Gregory’s successor, was elected, in 1088, it took him six years to get a rival, German candidate out of the Lateran Palace. (He finally had to bribe him.) This is not to speak of the fact that the Pope had no control over the Eastern churches, the dioceses of the Balkan peninsula, Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine. Most of these territories were under the jurisdiction of the Byzantine Empire and hence of the Greek Orthodox Church, which, to Rome’s abiding fury, had broken with the Western Church in 1054. The Vatican wanted to get mightier and holier, and Urban II took on the job.

In 1095, he went on a tour of France, and one afternoon in Clermont he gave a sermon calling on Christians to journey to the East and reclaim the Holy Land. “A race absolutely alien to God,” he said, was defiling Christian altars, raping Christian women, tying Christian men to posts and using them for archery practice. None of this was true, but it had the desired effect. First, as the postcolonial theorists would say, it “otherized” the Muslims. Second, it gave the European nobles a cause that could distract them from warring with their neighbors—a more or less daily occupation of knights in that period—and unite them, for a holy purpose. In the months that followed, at convocations across Europe, between sixty thousand and a hundred thousand people came forward and knelt to “take the Cross.”

Thus was launched the crusading movement, whose high tide lasted for two centuries. As time went on, a “crusade” no longer meant just a march against the Muslim infidel. Any perceived enemy of the Church—the Wends, in Germany (pagans); the Cathars, in southern France (heretics)—could be the target of a crusade. But the Crusades against Islam were the model, and the two most interesting were the first (1095-99) and the fourth (1202-04). The First Crusade is important because, apart from being first, it was successful, at least in the Church’s terms: the men recruited by Urban did capture Jerusalem, together with other rich territories in the East, and in consequence—because those lands had to be defended—they made the later Crusades to the East necessary. The Fourth Crusade is famous for the opposite reason. In Christian terms, it was the least successful—indeed, a scandal. The Crusaders never got to Jerusalem; instead, they attacked Christian cities, notably Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which they effectively destroyed. They thus shifted the center of Christian civilization from East to West, and permanently altered the history of the world.

And

Then Urban, in preaching the First Crusade, offered [the knights] a solution. He called upon them to kill, and told them that on this occasion it was not a sin—indeed, that it would win them remission of past sins. By the Fourth Crusade, participants were guaranteed absolution of all confessed transgressions—in other words, a ticket straight to paradise. The arrangement that Urban offered to the men of the First Crusade is less clear, but they were promised “eternal rewards.” So it was two in one: the knights could go on slaughtering people and get to Heaven thereby. That was “positive violence,” and, according to Asbridge and Phillips, it was the motor of the Crusades.

Concluding

And if I have noticed certain resemblances between the Crusades and the war in Iraq—the exaggeration of the threat, to get the war going; the enormous financial cost to the attacking country; the mixture of idealistic and commercial motives; the surprise of finding that the liberated may not thank you, indeed, may attack you—Asbridge and Phillips have surely also noted the parallels. They are silent on the subject, but in the resulting void, and with the constant emphasis on the religious motive, there is a strong suggestion, intentional or not, that we should consider whether today, too, there might be such a thing as positive violence.

My long term goal is to make it clear that the humanities have much to offer in the understanding o current policies. The following quotes are from Disraeli's novel Conningsby. Written (I think 1844) when young as a novel about the reform of parlaimanet, it became the guide when D became prime minister many years later. The novel is available on line at

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7412

and for the Oxforn Hist of Ebglish lit on Disraeli see

http://www.bartleby.com/223/1103.html

The chief members of this official confederacy were men distinguished by none of the conspicuous qualities of statesmen. They had none of the divine gifts that govern senates and guide councils. They were not orators; they were not men of deep thought or happy resource, or of penetrative and sagacious minds. Their political ken was essentially
dull and contracted. They expended some energy in obtaining a defective, blundering acquaintance with foreign affairs; they knew as little of the real state of their own country as savages of an approaching eclipse. This factious league had shuffled themselves into power by clinging to the skirts of a great minister, the last of Tory statesmen, but who, in the unparalleled and confounding emergencies of his latter years, had been forced, unfortunately for England, to relinquish Toryism. His successors inherited all his errors without the latent genius, which in him might have still rallied and extricated him from the consequences of his disasters. His successors did not merely inherit his errors; they exaggerated, they caricatured them. They rode into power on a springtide of all the rampant prejudices and rancorous passions of their time. From the King to the boor their policy was a mere pandering to public ignorance. Impudently usurping the name of that party of which nationality, and therefore universality, is the essence, these pseudo- Tories made Exclusion the principle of their political constitution, and Restriction the genius of their commercial code.

In the language of this defunct school of statesmen, a practical man is a man who practises the blunders of his predecessors.
an internal trade supported by swarming millions whom manufacturers and inclosure-bills summoned into existence; above all, the
supreme control obtained by man over mechanic power, these are some of the causes of that rapid advance of material civilisation in England, to which the annals of the world can afford no parallel. But there was no proportionate advance in our moral civilisation. In the hurry-skurry of money-making, men-making, and machine-making, we had altogether outgrown, not the spirit, but the organisation, of our institutions.
because they were called upon, for the first time, to perform the functions of government. Like all weak men, they had recourse to what they called strong measures. They determined to put down the multitude. They thought they were
imitating Mr. Pitt, because they mistook disorganisation for sedition.
we can boast no remarkable superiority either in political justice or in political economy. One must attribute this degeneracy, therefore, to the long war and our insular position, acting upon men naturally of inferior abilities, and unfortunately, in addition, of illiterate habits.

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 01:22:06 GMT

Highly recommend

Pasted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/books/review/19ROTHL.html?pagewanted=print&;position=>

September 19, 2004

ESSAY

The Story Behind 'The Plot Against America'

By PHILIP ROTH

hilip Roth's new novel, ''The Plot Against America,'' which will be published by Houghton Mifflin next month, imagines an America in which the 1940 presidential election resulted not in a third term for Franklin D. Roosevelt but in a victory for a Republican ticket headed by Charles A. Lindbergh. The Book Review asked Roth to write an essay about his new book and how he came to write it.

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 06:00:57 GMT

Looking at contemporary history, a look back can help. Here we have a vie of a rising middle class that stood for moderation, about 1700. We in the US, in 2004, are moving in the opposite direction.

from the magnificent 18 vol history of english lit, on line

http://www.bartleby.com/219/0201.html

STEELE and Addison are writers of talent who rose almost to genius because they intuitively collaborated with the spirit of their age. They came to London at a time when, quite apart from politics, society was divided into two classes, apparently so irreconcilable that they seemed like two nations. On the one side was the remnant of the old order, which still cherished the renascence ideals of self-assertion and irresponsibility and had regained prominence at the restoration. They followed the old fashion of ostentation and self-abandonment, fighting duels on points of honour, vying with each other in quips and raillery, posing as atheists and jeering at sacred things, love-making with extravagant odes and compliments, applauding immoral plays, while the more violent, the “gulls” and “roarers,” roamed through the town in search of victims to outrage or assault. The women, in these higher circles, read and thought of little but erotic French romances, wore false eyebrows and patches, painted themselves, gesticulated with their fans and eyes, intrigued in politics and passed the time in dalliance. But, on the other hand, the citizens of London, who, since Tudor times, had stood aloof from culture and corruption, were now no longer the unconsidered masses. Each new expansion of trade gave them a fresh hold on society, while the civil war, which had decimated or ruined the nobility, conferred on the middle class a political importance of which their fathers had never dreamt. As a rule, members of the citizen class who have risen in the social scale intermarry with the aristocracy and imitate the manners, and especially the vices, of the class into which they enter. But, in the great political revolution of the seventeenth century, merchants and traders had triumphed through their moral character even more than by their material prosperity. The time had come when England was weary of all the medieval fanaticism, brutality and prejudice which had risen to the surface in the civil war, and it was the citizen class, apart from the zealots on both sides, which had first upheld moderation.

Wed, 14 Jul 2004 16:57:39 GMT

I've been slowly going through the extraordinary experience of reading the core eighteenth and nineteenth century English novels. I just finished Middlemarch and have to say, these books are an education about how life can be experienced, not just that experience, but approaches that work in the newest of circumstances. Part of it is the play of empathy and discernment into one's own and other people's character, and the ethical commitment to do so in the presence of very good manners.

The story ends with

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Lear

Sat, 31 Jan 2004 21:22:19 GMT

Lear's rousing summons to Cordelia, regardless of their fallen state. "So we'll live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues / Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too, / Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out; / And take upon's the mystery of things, / As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, / In a wall'd prison, packs and sets of great ones / That ebb and flow by the moon."

More from Roy

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 17:36:03 GMT

from Roy's The God of Small Things

(under globalizing pressures) They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly. It was a time when uncles became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals. It was a time when the unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible really happened. pg 31.

World Bank..

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 22:21:18 GMT

Documentation from fiction..

From the God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

"Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans. Most of the fish had died. The ones that survived suffered from fin-rot and had broken out in boils."

The Bank would loan money so that it would go, through local bureucracies, to the richest farmers who would buy fertilizer and buy out the poorer. It could be shown that income went up on average by a factor of three, but of course the average is skewed by the new income of the richest, and the fact that food prices had gone up by more than a factor of three (mostly because local crops were replaced by export crops for dollars) did not get into the reports.

Thu, 27 Nov 2003 04:45:58 GMT

From Coetzee's lives of animals.

“Sultan (Kohler's Chimpanzee) is alone in his pen. He is hungry: the food that used to arrive regularly has unaccountably ceased coming.

“The man who used to feed him and has now stopped feeding him stretches a wire over the pen three meters above ground level, and hangs a bunch of bananas from it. Into the pen he drags three wooden crates. Then he disappears, closing the gate behind him, though he is still somewhere in the vicinity, since one can smell him.

“Sultan knows: Now one is supposed to think. That is what the bananas up there are about. The bananas are there to make one think, to spur one to the limits of one's thinking. But what must one think? One thinks: Why is he starving me? One thinks: What have I done? Why has he stopped liking me? One thinks: Why does he not want these crates any more? But none of these is the right thought. Even a more complicated thought—for instance: What is wrong with him, what misconception does he have of me, that leads him to believe it is easier for me to reach a banana hanging from a wire than to pick up a banana from the floor?—is wrong. The right thought to think is: How does one use the crates to reach the bananas?

“Sultan drags the crates under the bananas, piles them one on top of the other, climbs the tower he has built, and pulls down the bananas. He thinks: Now will he stop punishing me?

“The answer is: No. The next day the man hangs a fresh bunch of bananas from the wire but also fills the crates with stones so that they are too heavy to be dragged. One is not supposed to think: Why has he filled the crates with stones? One is supposed to think: How does one use the crates to get the bananas despite the fact that they are filled with stones?

“One is beginning to see how the man's mind works.

Stepenson's Quicksilver

Mon, 20 Oct 2003 06:18:54 GMT

I've started reading Stephenson's Quicksilver, a novel of the 1650's to 1720's, focus on the scientific characters as if they were in charachters in a science graduate school today. It has its charm but seems to avoid the full social implications of the rise of science and political power, and the weird thinking of a real mechanist like Hobbes. But it has promise. Here is an interesting quote from a review.

This may become a theme of Stephenson's next book, due out in April, for the alchemy of commerce is not unrelated to the alchemy that became science. Both transform object into number; both succeed only if the principles governing transformation can be established; both led to new worlds. It is no accident that a national currency crisis in the 1690s led to Newton's overseeing the manufacture of England's coinage and becoming master of the Mint.

.Since I am interested in the common beliefs that allow science and commerce to commingle, and the reduction of the world to number is one important strand (see Poovey, The History of the Modern Fact, and Mirowski, Machine Dreams: How Economics became a Cyborg Science), the book is helpful, if limited. To my ear the two histories just listed are better stories than Quicksilver.

Stephenson's new novel...

Sat, 11 Oct 2003 22:24:50 GMT

From Stephenson's new Quicksilver- BOOK ONE

'Should I study mathematics? Euclidean or Cartesian? Newtonian or Leibnizian calculus? Or should I go the empirical route? Will it be dissecting animals then, or classifying weeds, or making strange matters in crucibles? Rolling balls down inclined planes? Sporting with electricity and magnets?' Against that, what's in my shack here to interest them?" - p 38

This was the range available in 1713. The human, the social, the poetic, moved to the background.

In the interstices created by the European wars among Catholics and Protestants, free cities and relatively free men were able to move about. In the flow the opportunity was to use mechanical knowledge to gain prestige and income. So the knowledge that was valued was that kind. So we get a line like ..

"Wilkins let slip that, if it was an actual called Greshamn's College where he and a few of his old Oxford cronies were teaching Natural Philosophy directly, without years and years of tedious Classical nincompoopery as prerequisite."

Understanding the society, such as could be learned by reading the classics, like Caesar's Gallic Wars, was not "useful". The new knowledge was experienced as in the realm of freedom, whereas in truth it was a freedom created by the unusual social circumstances of free capital and career. The social conditioning of opportunity was not seen, just as my father thought that paying taxes was robbery and he did not see that it was the society and its infrastructure that let him earn his income.