History

I’ve just finished reading Brian Cowan’s _The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the English Coffee House_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Brian%20Cowan%20social%20life%20of%20coffee&PID=29956, Amazon) which I really enjoyed a lot (thanks to Rick Perlstein for the recommendation). Its structure is a little unwieldy – the first part is an essay in the history of consumption, the second a semi-related exercise in intellectual and social history – but it really lays out a very strong historical case for something that I’ve suspected and presumed was true, but haven’t seen treated systematically. The typical academic view of the coffeehouse has claimed it as the herald and avatar of a far reaching civil society of intelligent discourse. London coffeehouses have been depicted as the empirical manifestation of Jurgen Habermas’s “public sphere,” a space in which individuals could come together to discuss art and politics, free from both economic pressures and the oversight of the state. They’ve been portrayed as sites of rational and civilized argument. Cowan provides compelling evidence that this view is, to be blunt, romanticized bosh.
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I went to see “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460989/ last night, and thoroughly enjoyed it. There are at least three Timberites better qualified than I to judge of the historical accuracy of the film, so I won’t comment on that. There did seem to be points of universal interest though. A group of farm-boys with a semi-theocratic ideology successfully holding off the high-tech army of a modern industrialized power next door seems to be a theme that gets repeated in other times and places. And the way in which a revolutionary nationalist movement divides into warring factions in when faced with a pragmatic compromise of its maximal goals has some parallels with the Palestinian story. An unexpected pleasure was the close physical resemblance between pompous landowner Sir John Hamilton (played by Roger Allam) and Christopher Hitchens. Recommended.

You should go now to the NYT Magazine and click on the “Lives” photo-essay. A photographer made a project of hunting up many of the original “Freedom Riders” from 1961 and pairing pictures taken of them today with their mugshots. The first pair of images is of a woman named Helen Singleton. Her mugshot shows a strange and wonderful facial expression: ineffable, justified self-satisfaction. When we think of someone being “pleased with themselves” it usually means we think they are being stuck-up or irritating. Mrs. Singleton looks pleased with herself in that picture, and it is anything but irritating. I wonder what the Jackson police photographer thought about that cocked eyebrow and that smile?

Recently I was explaining to a French friend the arguments we have in English over whether to call people “suicide bombers”, or “suicide murderers”, or “martyrdom bombers”, or even (for Fox fans) “homicide bombers”. “What do you call them in French?” I asked. She smiled somewhat apologetically and said: “Oh, we just call them kamikazes.” I was intrigued by the analogy, and recently Freeman Dyson has argued for it explicitly in the New York Review of Books.
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My last Plato bleg was a success, so I’m going to try another. Everyone has read Euthyphro, so you remember that the dad allegedly killed the guy who allegedly killed the other guy. And so Euthyphro is prosecuting him for murder. And so here we are, on the steps of the King Archon’s court. Fair enough. But it happened on Naxos. So why is it being tried in Athens? Obviously Euthyphro and his dad are Athenian citizens who happen to own land on Naxos. I can see various possibilities. If it happened at the height of Athenian imperial power – say, at the time that Naxos attempted to withdraw from the Delian league and got stomped for it by the Athenians – I would presume the Athenians had at some point asserted extraterritorial legal jurisidiction at least in cases involving its citizens. But the trial of Socrates happens in 399 BC, a few years after the restoration of democracy. Athens is hardly the empire it was. So why does its court have extraterritorial authority in cases concerning people who die of exposure in ditches on Naxos? (If you commenters know the answer, I will be impressed.)

I’m writing up a set of explanatory notes to go with Plato’s Republic, Book I. And I find myself unable to fact-check something I found on wikipedia – namely, Cephalus, the old guy we meet right at the beginning, is “an elderly arms manufacturer.” Arms manufacturer? How do we know? And how much do we know? Ship-building, sword-making, what? It would be interesting to know more for a couple reasons. First, it casts Socrates’ whole ‘would you give a madman his weapons back?’ question in a slightly more personal light. Selling weapons to madmen – hey, a deal’s a deal – is the modern complaint about arms dealers, after all. Also, it is ironic that, in just a few years, the war will be lost and Cephalus will have his fortune seized by the Thirty Tyrants; his son Polemarchus will be dead, executed. (This whole war business is a double-edged sword. Profitable, but tricky to handle safely.)

Can any intrepid classicists get me a source for the Cephalus-as-arms-manufacturer fact?

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I’ll be at “Firedoglake”:http://www.firedoglake.com/ on Sunday, leading the discussion in the second part of their Rick Perlstein book club. If you’ve read my “previous post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/16/the-wager-won-by-losing/ on the topic, you’ll have some idea of what I’m going to say, although I hope to expand my argument, and also respond to “Brad DeLong’s critique”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/05/losing_by_losin.html. It should be a fun discussion – Rick himself will be participating in comments. I’ve said before that us more wonkish types need to be talking more to the netroots people – I’m hoping that this will be a good opportunity to help build that conversation.

I’m reading Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality [amazon]. It’s a pretty ok little intro, suitable for undergrads; but kinda pricey for what it – a slim paperback, several years old (though I guess there’s a new edition.) Anyway, here’s a passage that raised my eyebrow: [click to continue…]

Via Norm, a very interesting article by Max Hastings, arguing that if Britain had been invaded by the Nazis the British would have behaved much as the French did:

Most of France’s “haves” collaborated not willingly, but in the face of perceived necessity. The bourgeois classes allowed their view to be determined by law-and-order arguments, which possess even greater force in war than in peace. Sabotage provoked murderous reprisals upon the innocent. Surely, people said, it is in the interests of the community that we behave in such a way as to be spared killings and confiscations, when daily existence is harsh enough already.

Resistance, confined to a small minority until 1944, was dominated by what middle-class people would categorise as “the awkward squad”: teachers and unionists (many of them leftists), young mavericks, communist activists, journalists, peasants: in short, little people.

All this, I think, would have applied equally in a German-occupied Britain.

Hastings commends Eden’s statement, when asked to comment on the behaviour of the French during the war, that “It would be impertinent for any country that has never suffered occupation to pass judgment on one that did.” We’d all do well to reflect on that brilliantly diplomatic, and true, comment. Hastings concludes that

Némirovsky’s great novel paints a portrait of a society that did not conduct itself with conspicuous courage or honour. I am doubtful, however, that we would have done much better.

I can think of only one piece of counter-evidence, which I can’t link to because my googling skills aren’t up to it, but I undertsand that as soon as the war began the British government started to train a secret domestic guerrilla army in preparation for invasion, comprised of conscription-age men who were (because of their age) regarded throughout the war (and until the end of the 50-year embargo on the confidential records) as conscientious objectors. But this is slim evidence (made even slimmer by my inability to cite it: did I dream that I heard a Radio 4 documentary about them?)

Talking of Eden, I recently read Kenneth Harris’s wonderful biography of Attlee (prompted by being fascinated by the role Attlee plays in Five Days in London: May 1940).

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In Rolling Stone, Princeton historian “Sean Wilentz makes the case”:http://www.rollingstone.com/news/profile/story/9961300/the_worst_president_in_history for judging George W. Bush the worst President in US history:

bq. The president came to office calling himself “a uniter, not a divider” and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious — much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen,” Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.

Via reader Joe, Ben and Jerry’s have done more than Winston Churchill ever did; they’ve “apologized”:http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12425491/ for the “Black and Tans”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/04/04/and-how-will-they-be-marketing-this-in-ireland/.

bq. DUBLIN – Ice cream makers Ben & Jerry’s have apologized for causing offense by calling a new flavor “Black & Tan” — the nickname of a notoriously violent British militia that operated during Ireland’s war of independence. The ice cream, available only in the United States, is based on an ale and stout drink of the same name. “Any reference on our part to the British Army unit was absolutely unintentional and no ill-will was ever intended,” said a Ben & Jerry’s spokesman. “Ben & Jerry’s was built on the philosophies of peace and love,” he added.

The peculiar British tendency that is the “decent Left” numbers among its sacred texts Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism. One of the most prominent Eustonian thinkers, the columnist Nick Cohen, has even mentioned Berman’s book as the reason for his own epiphany. But is it any good? Over at Aaronovitch Watch the Cous Cous Kid has been directing his attention to Berman’s work and noticing that the accounts Berman gives of other people’s ideas, of religion, and of historical events, ought to have impressed Cohen somewhat less than they did.

CCKs’ review is split into seven parts, so the easiest way to read his text is just to visit the site and scroll down. But for archive purposes, I also give the links to each part below.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

“Rick Perlstein”:http://rickperlstein.org/ finally has a proper web page. Much goodness, including his classic “Unfucking the Donkey”:http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0531,perlstein,66378,2.html . Aaron Swartz, who put the page together, has also put up a mirror of Lingua Franca‘s old web page – archives are “here”:http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/archives/.

Here in the UK we’re all being entertained/informed by “BBC4’s 1973 week”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/features/seventies1.shtml . Back in 1973 (I was 14/15) I remember my Dad telling me to pay close attention to the news one day and that people in the future would say it was a big year, a year when everything changed. He was right about that. So far there have been excellent documentaries about the “Poulson Affair”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poulson (1972-4), one about Derek “Red Robbo” Robinson and a fantastic 1973 episode of Panorama with Alistair Burnett where a nurse, a car worker, a “businessman” and a merchant banker are asked what they think about their relative salaries. (Everyone accepting that one of the government’s jobs was to decide fair pay relativities). Naturally, nearly everyone said the nurse should earn most and the merchant banker least. The distance between then and now was also brought home to me by the remark that in 1973 everyone knew the names of the top union leaders. Today almost nobody does. The pervasiveness of the sense of national crisis was well brought out by clips from Blue Peter where Valerie Singleton and John Noakes explained to children facing power cuts to surround candles with earth to make them safer and to interleave the bedding of elderly relatives with newspaper too keep them warm. Revolution (or a military coup) seemed just around the corner ….