This letter sent just before Christmas, to my pal Peter, a fellow member, many moons ago, of a resistance movement against petty academic tyranny.

Dear Peter,

Thanks for the card, and interesting musings.

As you well know, “the sleep of reason produces monsters” was a notion first advanced by Goya in the 1790’s – “La sueno de la Razon produce monstruos.” The online Wikipedia comment is as follows:

“The viewer might read this as a portrayal of what emerges when reason is suppressed and, therefore, as an espousal of Enlightenment ideals. However, it also can be interpreted as Goya's commitment to the creative process and the Romantic spirit—the unleashing of imagination, emotions, and even nightmares.”

Fair comment, I think you would agree. A growing appetite for the sublime, the exotic, and the scary is discernible in the 18^th century in both literature and the graphic arts. William Beckford, author of Vathek is a v. interesting forerunner, esp. in his Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents (written during a continental tour of 1781) where illusion and “reverie” figures as prominently as reality, and where the joys of leading “an Indian life amongst the wilds and mountains” are jumbled up with a more conventional appreciation of “that delightful classic region” i.e. Italy. When he went on the Grand Tour in pursuit of the picturesque he took with him in his retinue the watercolourist John Robert Cozens, son of Alexander – advocate of an unconventional technique of painting involving blots– and recipient of the letters. JRC, a particularly fine painter, who died young, is cited by Simon Schama as a case of gloomy genius to madness near allied, though I’m not sure I buy that theory. I think he may be, though, a case of painterly sensibility being channeled in a certain direction by a literary one, i.e. that of his patron, WB. JRC is wonderfully atmospheric, and maybe that’s a new thing in art – anticipating Constable’s interest in clouds, the Turnerian sublime and so on.

In letter 27 of Dreams Beckford offers some “Reflections on the Economy Politics and Fine Arts of Several European Nations”. What he says about the militarization of the German states may interest you, in the light of what you said about romanticism unleashing the reign of terror: “If I may be allowed a conjecture upon this occasion I should not hesitate to assign, as a principal one, the increase of infidelity and extreme dissolution of modern manners, caused by the Encyclopaedic philosophy.” …The philosophy, as it is called, of the Encyclopedie, has, doubtless, contributed abundantly to the relaxation of our old obligations, and the licentiousness of manners; so that the suspension of the sword over the head of civil society, has some appearance of being naturally introduced, in consequence of things being in such a state.” Not too fanciful to see this as anticipating the rise of Napoleon to power, and also perhaps the Hobbesian predisposition of the likes of de Maistre.

I know you’d agree that the “relaxation of old obligations” is only part of the explanation of the Terror. A more potent cause is the casual contempt for the lower orders (for all the men in velvet suits declaring that never in human history had there been such douceur de vie) that underlies the aristocratic privilege of the Ancien Regime. Dickens has a keen sense of that – I suspect he was confirmed in his view by Carlyle, who hammers away in the early chapters of The French Revolution on the theme of the misery and degradation of “that dark living Chaos of Ignorance and Hunger, five and twenty million strong.” For what it’s worth my feeling is that the Terror is explicable mainly in terms of a dehumanizing mind set, a chronic history of oppression, and by an understandable thirst for revenge on the part of the oppressed. Having been discounted as a different species by the aristocrats, it’s not surprising that when the world turned upside down those same aristocrats should be demonized in turn and strung up on lamp posts. Once that omnivorous and dispassionate machine, the guillotine, had been set in motion it set about devouring not solely those perceived to be impeding progress, but those, like Robespierre, who had stoked up the Terror in the first place.

Edward Gibbon, in some ways the embodiment of Enlightenment values, was, according to Lord Sheffield “at first… pleased with the prospect of the reform of inveterate abuses”. But he was no friend of what he regarded as democratical tyranny. He characterises the revolutionaries as by turns wild, eccentric, mischievous, extravagant, fickle, visionary, bogus, misguided, mad, despotic, sanguinary, uncivilized, ferocious and cannibalistic. None of that is consistent with Gibbonian rationality – though it’s worth noting that in Gibbonian rationality there is no place for “wild ideas of the rights and natural equality of man”. Or perhaps any such ideas in domesticated form either. This is the point at which romantic ideas and ideology begin to gain credibility. Would it be too much of a paradox to suggest that the sleep of Gibbonian reason produces the monster of human rights? Or that the emergence of human rights exposes the limitations of Gibbon’s moral compass?

A fascinating question, and one I’d like to know your views of, is why, unlike the French Revolution, the English Revolution of the 17^th century, while it had plenty of bloodshed, had no Terror – or at least nothing on the same scale. Was it because the populace never seized control in the same manner? Or because grassroots radicalism was snuffed out at an early stage? Or because the lower orders were less oppressed and alienated in the first place? Or was there less bloodshed simply because the revolution was carried out in the name of religion? Interesting, at any rate, that Gibbon attributes the downfall of the French monarchy to the crumbling of “the triple aristocracy of the church, the nobility and the parliaments”. He may not have had much time for the church himself, but he evidently thought it had a stabilizing and useful role to play in society at large – which is also what Beckford seems to intimate.

Let me know what you think. Meanwhile have a good Christmas, and a Happy New Year,

G.

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” So said Frederic Bastiat (1801-50), the French economist statesman and author, anticipating what a number of commentators seem to be saying about the way the world is currently organized. According to Alessio Rastani in a recent BBC interview “Governments don’t rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world.”

What is the ordinary citizen, unschooled in the complexities and duplicities of CDOs CDSs, and the rest of the economic alphabet soup to make of the apparent insolvency of banks throughout the Western world, and of the sovereign debt crisis? If the authorities and the experts appear to be frozen in the headlights of the oncoming train, what can he do to protect himself and his family? Stock up on pasta and tinned goods? Is that it?

Disagreeable though it may be, he surely has a duty to try and figure out for himself what has gone wrong, which, from the outside, would appear to be simple greed (or plundering in Bastiat’s terms) exacerbated by a failure of regulation on the one hand and on the other by the speed and complexity of electronic transactions in the market place. That some of this stuff is not exactly new will be familiar to students of history and literature. Those who are familiar with W.H. Auden’s poetry will know about his modern take on the fall of Rome:

Fantastic grow the evening gown

Agents of the fisc pursue

Absconding tax defaulters through

The sewers of provincial towns.

One wonders if that is where one is headed. Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now is (among other things) a cautionary tale about the hubris and self-destructiveness of a city of London financier. Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution traces with grim relish the path of greed, folly and financial mismanagement which led to the bonfire of vanities that was the Ancien Regime; he quotes Marquis Mirabeau – “Ah Madame, such Government by Blindman’s-buff, stumbling along too far, will end in the General Overturn (culbute generale).”

Whether there is to be another such “culbute generale” before the year is out remains to be seen. Exciteable commentators such as Max Keiser appear to think so – and for good measure Max thinks that the punishment for crimes against capital should be capital punishment. Mind you, he was in Paris when he said that, and perhaps got carried away…

These are certainly turbulent times for the market place, but, important though the market undoubtedly is, it does not, and never did, constitute the whole of human life and experience. That is why it is such a relief to get outside in the open air or stroll along a beach. Burying the head in the sand this may be. As may be burying your head in a book that reminds you in its low-key way of the attractions of the humdrum and the uneventful, of the world you remember – or think you remember – when you were younger. A book like William Trevor’s novel Love and Summer will do the trick, or even reading the opening lines of chapter 18:

The dog days of August came; Rathmoye was quiet. Small incidents occurred, were spoken of, forgotten. When there were races near by the bookies stayed at Number 4 – J.P. Ferris, Gangly McGregor from Clonmel. The priest of the parish catered for the faithful, heard sins confessed, gave absolution, offered the Host; the Church of Ireland’s skimpy congregation doggedly gathered for weekly worship. The tinker girls brought their babies to the streets from their wasteland caravans and tents. No crime of a serious nature had been committed in Rathmoye during the summer so far; none was now. In all, twenty-one infants had been born.

Let's raise a glass to Rathmoye.

Doomsday scenario. Was there ever a time in human history when there wasn’t a doomsday scenario? Persons of pensionable age, born either during or shortly after one of the most lethal wars in history, and brought up in the era of the Cold War era, will recall being chilled by the threat of Armageddon and spooked by the fear of nuclear holocaust. Just as now a younger generation is transfixed (chilled would clearly be the wrong word) by the prospect of climate change, global warming and environmental degradation.

These observations are thrown out not to discount the existence of impediments in the way of the human project, or to suggest that people are unduly susceptible to fancied dangers, but in order to put those anxieties in context. Man is a worrying animal. Woamn perhaps even more so. Whether they worry any more or less than members of the so-called brute creation is a moot point. Domestic animals and beasts of the field obviously have feelings, and can suffer stress and even communicable panic, but it’s not clear that they are subject to the same sort of chronic, existential worry that we do. Or many of us do.

Nowadays we don’t go in for animal fables as much as they used to, which is perhaps not entirely a bad thing – there is something patronizing in bestowing human attributes upon animals simply in order to illustrate and dramatise human ethics. Theriophily is a different matter - meditation on the apparent superiority of the non-human animal condition over that of the human species. Montaigne famously mused on the matter as he looked his cat in the eye, Swift noted that horses were devoid of hubris, and Walt Whitman wrote some memorable lines celebrating animals in general:

They do not sweat and whine about their condition;

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;

Not one is dissatisfied - not one is demented with the mania of owning things;

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago;

Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

Animals are evidently not the worrying kind, but worry seems to go with the territory of being human. Without it, indeed, our species would not have enjoyed the success and dominance that it does. Unless hazards, problems and impending catastrophes are conceived as likely to occur, then they are unlikely to be addressed. The number of human casualties on the roads is still pretty awful (3000 per annum in the UK?) but it pales into insignificance compared to the figures for rabbits, hedgehogs, foxes and badgers. Will they never learn? In fact some of these creatures do seem to learn from the adrenalin rush of escaping at the last moment, but learning from collective, transmitted experience as applied to a chronic, perceived hazard comes more readily to human beings than to those with four legs. Dogs occupy an intermediate position – some can be taught road safety (guide dogs being the outstanding example) – others are completely clueless.

Not quite sure where this argument is heading, but the initial pebble in the pond was an uneasy feeling of getting hooked on socio-economic worrying aka soothsaying and gloomsaying, particularly as expounded in highly articulate online forums such as Common Dreams, Information Clearing House, ZeroHedge etc etc, in intelligent blogs like that of David Malone (aka Golem XIV) and in quality newspapers such as the Guardian, a Saturday dose of which suffices, if not to give the proverbial aspirin a headache, then at least to keep the reader in low spirits for a week. And no, the self-serving whimsy of Simon Hoggart’s ostensibly humorous column only serves to confirm morosity, rather than dispel it.

That there is much to be gloomy about is not in doubt, and especially in the financial sphere. Global recession and a spiralling debt crisis, coupled with continuing population growth and finite resources, is not a happy scenario. But whether we are on the verge of a huge upheaval on the lines of the French Revolution - a kind of culbute generale, as the Marquis Mirabeau termed it – is open to question. Post quatorze juillet, revolutionary rhetoric is in favour at the moment; Polly Toynbee in Saturday’s Guardian writes “Rejoice! Bring on the tumbrils as another News Corporation head rolls.” Max Keiser (of the Keiser Report) is an engaging commentator on current woes, but perhaps got carried away by retrospective Francophilia when, interviewed in Paris the other day, he declared that the punishment for crimes against capital should be capital punishment! Calm down, Max! Actually, it’s not just greedy bankers – or banksters as they are now dubbed – that have an interest in maintaining the status quo, but an awful lot of people of more modest means. As for the 25 or so million “of haggard faces”, the starving peasants referred to by Carlyle in his classic study, they are absent from the present equation – at least as it affects the West.

The elephant in the room is what is to replace the current capitalist system, and all the admittedly deplorable fraud, racketeering, greed, hype, spin and media manipulation that have come to be associated with it. On va voir.

In conclusion, a couple of further quotes from Carlyle that provide food for thought:

1. It is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly.

2. The fool says in his heart, How shall not tomorrow be as yesterday; as all days, - which were once tomorrows? The wise man, looking on this France, moral, intellectual, economical, sees, ‘in short, all the symptoms he has ever met with in history’ – unabateable by soothing Edicts.

Some thoughts on silence. Allegedly it is golden. Carlyle quotes the Swiss inscription that reads Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden, which he prefers to gloss as Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity. Carlyle evidently did not take on board Blaise Pascal’s remark which suggests that eternal silence is scary rather than golden: “Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.”

Moreover there are circumstances in which silence plays a role that is far from golden, as when, for instance, information is deliberately withheld for the purposes of misleading or deceiving. Silence is perhaps the most economical way of being economical with the truth, a useful tool in the locker of those who for whatever reason would prefer not to tell it as it is. Better, indeed, to say nothing than to say something which one might later regret. This is a thought that had evidently occurred to General Franco, the Spanish dictator, who had a great many things to keep quiet about. According to Giles Tremlett, in the chapter entitled “Looking for the Generalissimo” in his book Ghosts of Spain (2006), “the Caudillo was… an expert at silence. ‘One is the master of what one does not say, and the slave of what one does’, he once warned his self designated successor-to-be, the then prince Juan Carlos. This was the opposite of another, much older, Spanish theory on silence. Alonso de Ercilla, in a heroic sixteenth-century depiction of the Chilean natives’ resistance to the Spanish conquistadores, La Araucana, noted the tactical usefulness of silence but added: ‘There is nothing more difficult, if you look closely, than discovering a necio, a fool, if he keeps his quiet.’

It’s not clear to me that these observations are opposed, though the perspectives admittedly are: Franco is advocating silence as policy, whereas Alonso de Ercilla is considering the matter from the point of view of what the silence might signify. And, regrettably, what silence sometimes signifies is that matters are not up for discussion, and that things are not as they should be. The openness and accountability that are supposedly valued in democratic societies are more compatible with speech than silence.

Having said that, there are, and especially for those who participated in them, painful areas of human experience, which it is probably best to be silent about. Are we really honouring Daddy when we ask him to tell us what he did in the war, for instance? What those in authority required – and indeed require him – to do was more than likely some variation of what Ambrose Bierce described as beating out another gentleman’s brains with the butt of his rifle. Admittedly Bierce did not keep silent about the things he had witnessed, and it is not incumbent on the reader to be silent either, after he has gotten over the shock of reading “What I Saw of Shiloh”.

“This humble edifice, centrally situated in the heart of a solitude, and conveniently accessible to the supersylvan crow, had been christened Shiloh Chapel, whence the name of the battle. The fact of a Christian church - assuming it to have been a Christian church – giving name to a wholesale cutting of Christian throats by Christian hands need not be dwelt on here; the frequency of its recurrence in the history of our species has somewhat abated the moral interest that would otherwise attach to it.”

Another interesting trip to Spain, driving south from Santander, and visiting the site of the battle known to the Brits as Salamanca, but to the Spanish as Arapiles, that being the name of the little village to the south east of Salamanca near the two rocky hills that figured so prominently in the engagement. There is now a small information centre devoted to the battle that is well worth a visit.

On the way back to Santander another historical diversion – to the little town of Medellin in Estremadura, birthplace of Hernan Cortes the conquistador of Mexico, the story of whose exploits can be read on Wikipedia. The suggestion that Cortes was a bit of a bandido in the manner of Pizarro (who was born up the road in Trujillo) was not well received at the tourist office. The story goes that Cortes massacred thousands of unarmed Aztec nobility at Tenochtitlan. Whether the Spaniards were any more cruel, exploitative and ruthless than their Anglo-Saxon equivalents, and whether there is indeed something amounting to a black legend, or leyenda negra misrepresenting the situation and perpetuating a gringo cultural calumny is an interesting question. Clearly there were conflicting perspectives even at the time, as reflected in the Valladolid debate of 1550-51 between the humanistically inclined Bartolome de las Casas (author of the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies) and Juan Gines de Sepulveda – who was of the opinion that native peoples were natural slaves.

Apart from the history, some kitesurfing enjoyed – though not as much as one would have liked, due to prevalence of the dreaded howling levante which (so Rafael assured me at the churreria) scrambles people’s brains by agitating the hairs on their head. Extraordinary how the storks seemed to cope, though, or rather those untidy looking nests they build on exposed roofs and telegraph poles. How come the most ferocious blasts don’t dislodge them?

Kiting in strong offshore levante winds is not for the faint hearted. On 14^th April watched Cesar Portas, the Spanish champion doing huge leaps on the Atlantic side of Punta Europa, along with Jo Castillas and the Brazilian Bruna Kajiya. Impressive stuff. Worth checking out the videos of these guys on Facebook.

Spanish studies didn’t advance as well as they might, due to having left dictionary at home. However, some little bits of colloquial Spanish taken on board, such as puto jefe and puto amo, epithets applied by the Barcelona coach, Pep Guardiola, to his Real Madrid counterpart, Jose Mourinho. In fact, the terms aren’t as offensive as they sound, and simply denote controlling personalities, as in the fairly neutral phrase “Ni Mourinho ni Guardiola. El puto jefe, el puto amo del derby, del futbol mundial, del universo, es Lionel Messi.” This (not surprisingly) from the Lionel Messi website.

To conclude on a sad note – learned of the untimely death of the Australian kiter Peter Toft – of a heart attack, apparently, aged only 46. Peter was a nice guy. Condolences to his family and friends.

If Ralph Waldo Emerson is to be believed, it’s not just the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse we should be worried about, i.e. Conquest, War, Famine and Death, but another one – not mentioned in the Apocrypha, namely Things.

The horseman serves the horse

The neat-herd serves the neat,

The merchant serves the purse,

The eater serves his meat;

Tis the day of the chattel

Web to weave, and corn to grind,

Things are in the saddle

And ride mankind.

There are two laws discrete

Not reconciled.

Law for man and law for thing;

The last builds town and fleet,

But it runs wild

And doth the man unking.

The lines are from Emerson’s Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing – a poem not much read these days. But – and especially for those who live in consumerist societies - the lines about things being in the saddle and riding mankind are – arresting and thought-provoking. Which is no doubt why they are quoted from time to time in educated conversation – though rarely with certitude about the source.

The idea that human beings have forfeited their freedom in pursuit of unworthy materialistic goals is to be found in the writings of other Americans of that era. A dominant theme in the writings of Emerson’s friend, Henry David Thoreau, is that the conditions of life in rural New England are not conducive either to human happiness or human goodness. With its advocacy of austere self sufficiency Thoreau’s Walden is a text that has resonance in a world in which the condition of economic stringency, if not servitude, seems set to be the new norm for so many people. But Thoreau’s take on it is unexpected and may indeed be unwelcome inasmuch as he holds the view that people – or at least his fellow townsmen of Concord - are largely to blame for their own economic and existential misfortunes. Those “serfs of the soil” as he calls them, live lives of quiet desperation, crushed by a kind of economic slavery they have brought on themselves. “It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.”

In spite of the fact that the popular press is quick to give anarchism a bad name, there is much to be admired in the stance of the American Transcendentalists who, far from being advocates of mindless violence and wanton destruction, were simply advocating a better way of life than that lived by people in general, a life (as Thoreau puts it) of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust. The fact that those values are so rarely celebrated in modern culture doesn’t mean that they have been altogether superseded, or that they are not there. They cannot, however, be said to figure prominently in public spaces. Which is a pity but no doubt it was ever thus.

Other bits of Emerson’s ode to Channing are a bit more problematical, e.g. the following:

The over-God

Who marries Right to Might,

Who peoples, unpeoples,

He who exterminates

Races by stronger races,

Black by white faces,

Knows to bring honey

Out of the lion,

Grafts gentlest scion

On Pirate and Turk.

This sounds uncomfortably like an anticipatory vindication of the doctrine which was later to cause so much grief for those perceived as lesser breeds, i.e. eugenics. On the face of it it sounds like a casual and offhand kind of racism – but then that was how they tended to talk about race in those days. And for the record it must be noted that at the time of the American Civil War Emerson was clear and consistent in his opposition to slavery. “The South calls slavery an institution…. I call it destitution…. Emancipation is the demand of civilization."