How to write and interpret history – Book review

Mark Day, The Philosophy of History: An Introduction (London: Continuum, 2008)

If this book has done nothing else, it has at least introduced me to the work of Paul Ricoeur.

But it has done more than this, by showing how questions of epistemology and hermeneutics have been discussed in the field of historiography.

This in turn is suggestive of ways in which hermeneutics and epistemology need to be considered within the field of theology. Indeed there are direct parallels or even areas of overlap within what Day writes.

If the writing is aimed at students of history, the ideas are nevertheless of much wider application.

In particular, I am interested in Day’s analysis of historiography as narrative, which links with Christian Salmon’s Storytelling and with the BBC series ‘The Tudors’, as well as tying up nicely with Ricoeur (and Rowan Williams?) with regard to theology.

The public good: just another 25,000 jobs or the gradual erosion of our society?

According to BBC News, local authorities may be looking to save money by cutting up to 25,000 jobs. Councils are keen to assure residents that job cuts will not affect so-called front-line services, but rather managerial and back-office posts.

This is far from comforting.

In a country where public services are already over-stretched and under-funded, these cuts will drop local provision below acceptable standards. There are already potholes in our streets, which are already dirty. Our parks are not well cared for. Teachers do not feel valued. Provision for the elderly, the homeless, and the mentally ill is already sketchy.

Even if local authorities are right, and the only jobs to go will be administrative, this means less support offered to front-line staff, less oversight, less quality control, slower responses to requests and complaints from the public, and less strategic planning. In short, cost-cutting exercises of this type will only sow the seeds of a larger disaster in the medium- to long term future.

So what can we do?

The last thing we should do is to continue ‘covering’ for our councils and central government – however good or bad or needy they are. Third sector voluntary agencies are excellent at noticing gaps in provision, or in providing something extra, different, or experimental. Their role is not to replace statutory provision. Neither should members of the public or local communities fill the gap, either through individual/voluntary action, nor through optional top-ups to public funds. Local service provision is the job of local government.

The second-to-last thing we should do is to sit tight. Doing nothing is what got our country into this state in the first place. So we cannot be silent, or passive. We must speak out!

Fortunately, systems still exist in the public sphere for exactly the kind of feedback I am envisaging.

1. Writing to local government organisations (city council and county council), protesting any cuts to their services – front-line or otherwise. We will not be fobbed off by the false distinction! Local government should be urged to petition central government, while we as citizens do the same.

2. National government has a responsibility to support local government, particularly in order to even out inequalities in the demographic make-up of each geographical area. This is exactly the kind of injustice that will be exaggerated under Conservative proposals (such as easyJet-style top-ups for optional services).

Where mechanisms for the fairer distribution of wealth already exist, they should be used. Where they do not exist, they should be created. If national government can bail out commerical banks, thus guaranteeing the wealth of senior executives and city brokers, why can’t it see council services as ‘too important to fail’, and bail them out too? If government fails to do this, it is sending the message that some rich people are more important than the ordinary citizens of this country.

Worse, it is saying that the fabric of our society is not worth saving. It is the end of society as such and the (re)introduction of a rabidly antisocial capitalist model. Therefore I will also write to my MP, saying precisely this.

3. Where are the political parties that stand for a fairer society, and the protection of essential services? They should be found, or created, and joined en masse!

4. What is the press doing to check the plans of Labour and Conservative MPs who would dismantle our local government services unchecked. I will therefore also write to the press.

5. Direct action? Any ideas?

Earth tones and a human scale – Book Review

Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey through Trees (London: Penguin, 2008; first publ. 2007)

At first this might seem like nothing more than a jumbled collection of essays about trees.

There are chapters about walnut, elm, and fruit trees, of course. But Deakin is also interested in the flora and fauna of forest ecosystems, as well as people who make their living from wood: whether traditional woodland crafts like charcoal burning and thatching, or more twenty-first century activities like tree-art and experimental eco-living.

From these excursions into the woods, we learn about the history and preservation of different varieties of tree and fruit in the UK, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. Yet strangely it only becomes obvious that this is a ‘journey’ when Deakin’s focus finally returns to Suffolk, where he lives, at the end of the book.

There is clearly a structural problem here. Perhaps this book could have been organised around geographical areas: ‘Australia’, ‘Kazakhstan’, ‘The New Forest’, etc. However, this would have forced Deakin to write more sustained narratives, without the benefit of his little journalistic twists or slightly sentimental summaries at the end of each chapter. It might be argued that the present chaotic structure better reflects the organic nature of wild woods, yet Deakin is mainly interested in the interplay between the organic and the human. Order emerging through and delighting in chaos – this would have been a more appropriate structure for his book.

A related criticism is that Deakin manages – quite frustratingly – to be scientific about certain things and deeply unscientific about others. When it comes to Linnaean taxonomy or the evolutionary relationships between different sorts of Prunus, Deakin is right on the money. But there are subjects, such as accurate etymology and the detailed historical contexts of his subjects, about which he is not even curious.

The special strength of Deakin’s idiosyncratic approach is his love of nature in all its vibrant diversity. He works and inhabits his own patch of wood, and respects others who do the same. Deakin writes from within a ‘woodsy’ community, at once local to East Anglia and thoroughly international. ‘Alternative’ or ‘natural’ lifestyles, as Deakin experiences them, are highly appealing, not least because they leave room for individuality and working at a human scale and pace.

This approach verges in places on the gently political, as when he writes about ‘the pleasure, all too rare now in England, of eating food in its natural season and in its own place’ (p. 314), or sings the praises of a life freed from the Western tendency to commodify every thing and experience: ‘Their needs are immediate: food, the harvest work [...] air and exercise’ (p. 320).

The ‘historical’ Jesus? – Book Review

Bruce Chilton, Rabbi Jesus, An Intimate Biography: The Jewish Life and Teachings that Inspired Christianity (New York: Image/Doubleday, 2000)

At the core of Chilton’s study is a true observation. The Jewishness of Jesus has tended to be overlooked, or even deliberately obscured, throughout history.

From such a start, one might expect a critical historiographical survey, or a rigorous reexamination of the evidence.

Sadly this is not what Chilton gives us.

Instead, Rabbi Jesus is an ‘intimate’ biography, which seems to mean a consciously one-sided and impassioned account of Chilton’s own reconstruction of the life of Jesus.

Chilton’s account draws on historical research and archaeological excavations, some of which is no doubt accurate. However, it is treated in a haphazard and unscholarly fashion. Chilton favours the existence of a Galilean Bethlehem about which I had never heard, for example, and helpfully contextualises Herod and Pontius Pilate within the Mediterranean power politics of the time. But Chilton also relies on very old traditions, such as the early death of Joseph, and on apocryphal sources whose authenticity has been questioned since the early centuries of the common era.

There is therefore a lack of care in Chilton’s handling of sources. The same can be said of his translations from the Greek of the New Testament. Aiming for freshness, Chilton certainly conveys the strangeness of the text, without necessarily helping us to understand it better (the true aim of translation). Thus he renders the familiar phrase ‘the Son of Man’ as ‘one like a person’, on the basis that Jesus seems to have taken it from Daniel 7:13, where it refers to a creature that looks like a human being. Leaving aside the problematic nature of the word ‘person’ itself, as well as the fact that the phrase ’son of man’ occurs throughout Ezekiel and also in Daniel 8:17 (where it seems to be a circumlocution meaning ‘you the addressee, as a representative member of human society’), Chilton’s translation seems to suggest that Jesus was not really a human being, but only seemed to be one. Yet this is more or less the opposite of what Chilton means to say, given his view that Jesus was a human being who discovered himself as a son of God, just as all of us can.

On the basis of Daniel 7, Chilton develops the idea that Jesus’ teaching revolved around meditating on what he calls ‘the chariot’ (or God’s throne), although Jesus himself never used these terms.

On the plus side, Chilton emphasises the radical nature of Jesus’ shared meals and shows how much of his teaching revolves around a radical new understanding of purity (which he terms ‘Galilean’ because it bypasses the temple system policed by the Pharisees and Sadducees). Chilton therefore notes the ways in which Jesus himself supersedes the temple, following the author to the Hebrews but with a different spin.

Another plus is that, whatever its scholarly failings, Chilton’s account treats Jesus as a historically contingent human being, responding to political, economic, and cultural events. His reconstructed changes in the location and focus of Jesus’ teaching (Galilee, idealism, Jerusalem, militant radicalism, etc.) are intriguing but textually hard to prove.

I felt there was enough good in this book to make me wish it were better. Prediction: you may react strongly to the ‘intimate’ biography of Jesus!

The Loneliness of the Frequent Flier – Film Review

Up in the Air (Dir. Jason Reitman: USA, 2009)

For Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), flying is the most masturbatory of activities. This is why the film is quite emphatically not called ‘Come Fly with Me’.

Traveling is what Ryan Bingham does. 300+ days a year. Alone.

As the plot unfolds, we learn about Bingham’s patented philosophy for travelling light.

And we see how that philosophy is gradually called into question by the people he allows to get close to him.

This is a touching story of change through human contact and a little honest reflection. Look out for the scene in which Clooney praises St Louis airport!

The biggest pyramid scheme of them all – Art Review

‘What’s in it for me?’
by New Display Strategies
17 February – 27 March 2010
Seventeen gallery, Kingsland Rd. London E2 8AA

Beneath a pyramid structure, a video traces the exploitation of the masses in the creation of such prestige icons as Versailles, skyscrapers, and – of course – the pyramids. We hear a quote from the Chicago Tribune that compares such decadent architecture with eating nothing but cake, and we are reminded of the words of Marie Antoinette to this effect.

Behind us is another pyramid structure displaying… cakes. And pretty decadent cakes at that!

A third and final element in the show is another video which apes a Calvin Klein advert. Various ‘artists’ in jeans pose for the camera, while the offscreen voice of the photographer asks them slightly uncomfortable and inappropriate questions. “So, you’re an artist [...] Have you shown internationally? [...] Do you ever make love in a show? etc.

This show runs until 27 March and is highly recommended.

Passivity and violence – Film Review

Il Conformista (Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy/France/Federal Republic of Germany, 1970)

Chameleon-like, Marcello Clerici (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) bends, shifts, and changes to comply with the will of whoever he is with at the time: whether it be his fiancée, his mother, members of the Fascist movement, or even – through a flashback – the man who once tried to seduce him when he was a boy…

Unable to resolve the tensions created by his weakness, Clerici resorts to violence. Or rather, he relies on the violence of other people whom he passively watches as they act on his behalf. Thus he shoots the would-be pederast in his flashback, asks a fellow Fascist activist to deal with the problem of his mother’s lover, and watches as his old philosophy teacher Professor Quadri (the man whom Clerici himself had been sent to eliminate) is ambushed and shot, along with Anna Quadri, for whom Clerici had begun to develop feelings.

We find ourselves confronted with a passive hero, whose only solution is to his own problems is to call upon the violence of others. See Shakespeare’s Hamlet or the novel Endlich Stille for similarly violent passive heroes, and 1979 for one whose violence is turned inwards. on himself

Bertolucci’s screenplay is based on the 1951 novel The Conformist by Alberto Moravia. The film was shown at BFI Southbank on 13 February 2010.

Unsung European hero? – Book Review

Martin H. Jung, Philipp Melanchthon und seine Zeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010)

Philipp Melanchthon is not well known, even in Germany. Jung acknowledges this entertainingly in his opening chapter, disarming a possible argument about the irrelevance of his subject head-on with a number of straightforward arguments. Melanchthon’s life is among the best-documented of the sixteenth century, for one thing. A noted Humanist scholar, Melanchthon was responsible for shaping the German Church as well as the modern university. Far from being a specifically German figure, Melanchthon can justifiably be called ‘Europe’s teacher’; Jung includes England in the long list of countries within Melanchthon’s sphere of influence, but neglects to mention that subsequent developments have made Lutheranism an important force in North America too. What is more, Melanchthon clearly anticipated many ecumenical advances that have only come about in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, making him up-to-date and widely relevant. This book is timed to coincide with the 450th anniversary of Melanchthon’s death in 2010.

Jung retells the standard Protestant version of the Reformation story, but with a number of twists. The first of these is to break up the narrative into short, quasi-thematic sections, which he introduces with a snappy segue to enhance the pace and drama of the story (think Da Vinci Code in the hands of a competent popular historian). The purpose is not to provide another sweeping account of the period, although Jung does take the time to debunk the worst of the Luther legends (revealing Melanchthon’s role in the creation of the story in which Luther nails his 95 Theses to the Church door, for example). It is just as well that Jung does not attempt such a retelling, which has in any case been recently undertaken so successfully in the form of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s scholarly history Reformation: Europe’s House Divided. Jung, on the other hand, is a popularising and occasionally pedantic historian. He uses traditional historiography and terminology uncritically, misses opportunities to analyse his data or to quote specific examples from Melanchthon’s writing, and he does not indicate his sources with any clarity. His real achievement in this book is to make Melanchthon visible – and legible – in the history of the Reformation.

It emerges that Melanchthon’s role has been downplayed, even in some of the best-known episodes of the Reformation. We learn of his vast correspondence with friends and associates, as well as with such opposed figures as Erasmus and Calvin. His academic abilities are emphasised too, as Jung reveals that Melanchthon’s Wittenberg lectures were consistently better attended than Luther’s. Melanchthon played such a significant role in Luther’s famous translation of the Bible that Jung proposes re-baptising it the ‘Luther-Melanchthon Bible’, but Melanchthon’s grandeur was such that his abilities as a linguist were recognised on all sides of the confessional divide. Even his dogmatics – subtly different and more nuanced than Luther’s – and his theological method have exercised a long-lasting and unrecognised influence.

Never a monk or a priest, Melanchthon was simply and straightforwardly an academic. Yet it is as a mediator that Melanchthon really comes into his own. Much more ready to compromise than most of his contemporaries, Melanchthon appears as a cultivated and patient peace-maker. Indeed, Melanchthon helped to engineer what still counts as the longest period of peace in German history (1552-1618).

In his position on secondary issues (‘adiaphora’), Melanchthon took a stand against fundamentalism. Perhaps this openness of mind explains why he was so sought-out as a correspondent and conversation partner, and why his drafts of statements negotiated at Augsburg and Worms have been retained and successfully used in recent ecumenical discussions.

In keeping with contemporary biographical practice, Jung uncovers little-known aspects of Melanchthon’s private life: his unsuccessful marriage, for instance, or his depression, suicidal tendencies, and sense of impotency in the face of stronger personalities (such as Luther’s). The importance of dreams and portents for Melanchthon’s political and theological decision-making is also surprising.

Finally, Jung brings Melanchthon up to date with chapters on his treatment of Jews and Muslims. Only a discussion of his sexual ethics and attitude towards women are missing. In fact, Melanchthon was surprisingly experimental in his willingness to rethink his views on marriage, in one case advising (secret) bigamy and in another, divorce. The former advice he later came to regret, while the latter, inspired by the unhappy marriage of his daughter and perhaps also by his own. (Melanchthon felt ‘under the thumb’ both at home and at work, where he lived in Luther’s shadow and very much submitted to his influence. These sad marital and professional situations were never resolved.)

Melanchthon’s avant-garde views with regard to marriage and ecumenical relations do not prepare us for his more naive treatment of Jews and Muslims (although Jung hastens to point out how personable he was with individual Jews, and generous in what he wrote about Islam). Also in his reluctance to accept the Copernican revolution, Melanchthon shows himself to be a true child of his times.

Social Criticism at the Theatre (Play Review)

Joe Orton, ‘The Good and Faithful Servant’

Black comedy is what Orton is famous for, and this play has its fair share of dark humour. It also succeeds as a social satire on two counts.

First, it reveals the hypocrisy of each generation’s criticism of the next, especially in the area of sexual morality.

Secondly, it reveals the gradual co-opting of every aspect of people’s lives by a corporation. Perhaps the best candidate for the title ‘good and faithful servant’ is the HR manager of the firm, who oversees literally everything from birth to death. She replaces the priest as pastoral adviser, while all the time promoting the needs of the company.

The other good and faithful servants in the play are the employees who give their working lives to the firm. A faulty toaster that administers dangerous electric shocks and a clock that runs backwards are a poor reward for fifty years of service and a work-related injury. Worse still, the firm’s employees are dehumanized, not recognized or remembered, and alienated from one another by the sheer scale of the enterprise.

It is by no means clear why anyone would want to work there in the first place, yet the retired employee is tireless in encouraging his lazy but pliable grandson to sign up.

Naturally, the firm depicted is paternalist in the old-fashioned way. Labour has not yet been outsourced to the developing world. The company offers a job for life. There is a benevolent fund and in-house childcare provision. Things are, if anything, worse today!

Whatever one might think of the recent production at the Corpus Christi Playroom (short scenes interspersed with appropriate music from the Sixties), the text certainly stands up to criticism and is itself a powerful critique of the corporate world and its co-opting of our humanity.

Thoreau and company – Film Review

There is something tempting about the purity of a hermit’s life. But I suspect that there is a difference between embracing the solitude and running away from other people.

If silence and isolation stimulate the whole person, it will be a generative experience; opening them to God, themself, and their neighbour (there are always neighbours, even in the wilderness).

If, on the other hand, one flees the company other people in order to rely solely on one’s own resources, one might find the wilderness to be a barren place.

I propose that the solitude of Jesus, and Thomas Merton, and the desert fathers and mothers, and also of Thoreau, is of the first variety.

The solitude of ‘Into the Wild’ and ‘The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy’ may draw its inspiration from Thoreau and company, but in both of these films the main character falls into the trap of solipsism.