Theology: Problems of Noah's Flood

 It is incorrect to believe that it was only with Darwin's writings in the mid-19th century that people began to doubt the literal truth of the book of Genesis. Problems in this account had already perplexed scholars at least a century and a half.

   According to Archbishop Ussher's famous calculations, the world had been created in 4004 BC (see my earlier post) and Noah's great deluge in 2349 BC. Envisaging this presented no great problem as long as Christian knowledge of the world was limited to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, but once European ships had rounded the Cape of Good Hope to reach Indonesia and China and crossed the Atlantic to encounter the utterly alien civilisations of Mexico and Peru, doubts and speculations began to arise. How could these people have journeyed such a vast distance from Mount Ararat in such a limited time? Why were the animals, and even the plants, so different in these places? And to some Christians, it seemed somewhat unfair of God to have pkaced these people where it would have been physically impossible to hear the message of Christ until the arrival of the first missionaries in the 16th century! All these questions became even more perplexing after the discovery of Australia, with its Stone Age people and weird marsupials.

   Then there were the problems created by the new science of geology. Isaac Newton was greatly puzzled by the fact that the earth appeared to be very much older than was told in the Bible, and, as lifelong believer in the literal truth of the scriptures, spent a vast amount of time and ingenuity trying to reconcile Biblical accounts with his own discoveries in maths and physics. Then, from the end of the 17th century, the first discoveries of fossils began to attract attention. But why were the vast majority of these plainly marine molluscs? and if so, how did they often come to be found a long way from the sea, even high in mountains? Could Noah's flood have washed them up there? Some men decided they could not be the remains of living creatures at all, but mere "sports of nature": rocks that chanced to resemble living creatures. The problem became more acute when at then end of the 18th century Mary Anning discovered on the Dorset coast the skeletons of giant marine reptiles unlike any living creatures. Such beasts would obviously not need a place on the Ark; but why and when had they become extinct? And also, if the Flood had wiped out almost all the human race, why were no fossilised bones of humans ever found?

   One learned man, Dr Woodward, at the start of the 18th century, put forward the suggestion that the laws of physics had been temporarily suspended and the entire surface of the earth reduced to liquid, so that when it solidified again the heaviest objects had naturally sunk towards the bottom. Unsurprisingly, this novel theory failed to atttract much support.

   In fact, hardly anyone was prepared to abandon Newtonian physics and argue that God had spontaneously created huge quantities of water and then dematerialised it. No: the waters that covered the earth must have come from somewhere and then, later, gone somewhere. As later as the early 19thh century the Methodist theologian Adam Clarke was trying to find natural answers to where the water hadcome and gone. Or perhaps the continents had all sunk and then, soon afterwards, risen again? And if so, how had this been achieved? 

   These questions were never convincingly answered, but despite this, people still go in seach of the remains of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat.

    

Cricket

 The England women's cricket team in a happy mood after a clean sweep of victories against the West Indies in December 2022

Happy Christmas!

Politics/Philosophy: Jeremy Bentham and Utilitarianism

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the founder of the moral and political philosophy known as Utilitarianism, was born into what would nowadays be called an upper middleclass family. He was a precocious child, entering Westminster School at the age of seven and then Queen's College Oxford at twelve. He then qualified as a barrister, but never practised. He never married, and passed a long and comfortable life without any need to earn his living. 

He published little during his long life, but left many unfinished works, and was enormously influential through his wide circle of friends and correspondents, notable amongst whom was James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill. They were known as the "Philosophical Radicals", who in the early 19th century were able to campaign successfully for reform. Bentham spent a great deal of his time and money on trying to establish a model prison, designed like the spokes of a wheel raiating out from a central hub, which he called a "Panopticon". Bentham was a great coiner of words!

In 1776 Bentham published "A Fragment on Government". This was in the way of being a rebuttal of Sir William Blackstone's magisterial "Commentaries on the Laws of England", in which the great jurist had extolled the glories of Britain's "matchless constitution". Bentham argued that our constitution was far from being perfect, but on the contrary was often illogical, inefficient and prone to corruption. In 1789 he extended this critique in his "Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation". (Incidentally, the titles of these works suggest that Bentham intended them to be part of something far more extensive). Laws, he argued, must be precise, enforceable, and tending to promote "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" - the principle of Utility.

   Bentham was no respecter of tradition for its own sake, and  was immune to any sentiments of religious belief or patriotism. He dismissed the proclamation of the "Rights of Man" by the French revolutionaries as "Nonsense on stilts"; nor did he have any time for theories of a "Social Contract": he considered our sole guide to any assessment of right and wrong must be whether the matter in question tends to increase the general happiness. 

His approach  was entirely individualistic: we each of us try to maximise our pleasure and minimise our pain. These terms are self-defining: pleasure is experiences I like, pain is experiences I dislike. I am the only true judge of my own pain and pleasure, and it is futile for me to attempt to prescribe pleasures for someone else. Neither may I claim any priority in arguing that my claim to pleasure is superior to anyone else's. For argumenta not based on the principle of utility he coined the word "Deontological". Thus, for instance, in the debate over capital punishment, the argument that execution serves to deter would-be murderers is a utilitarian argument, whereas the argument that deliberately killing another human being is always wrong regardless of the circumstances is deontological (as is the counter-argument that murderers deserve execution because of the vileness of their crime)

Bentham's view of the arts has been debated ever since, under the heading of "Poetry versus pushpin" the latter being a trivial game played in pubs. Can we ever prove that reading great literature is in any sense "better" than playing trivial games? or that, today, watching a Shakespeare play is preferable to watching a TV soap opera? Bentham thought not: the purpose of both is to cause pleasure, and whichever gives me the greater pleasure has therefore fulfilled its purpose for me.

How could a fully utilitarian adminstraion be achieved? At first Bentham seemed to place his hopes in some kind of benevolent despotism, but the logic of his arguments gradually drove him against this. Why, indeed, should a despot be concerned about anyone's happiness except his own? So increasingly Bentham was driven towards democracy as the best way forward.

Rigid utilitarianism was criticised at the  time and since. The Romantics raised a cry of "There must be more to life than this!", and Thomas Carlyle compared to a herd of pigs, who saw more pigswill as the sole indicator of good, and less pigswill as evil. Karl Marx saw the argument as invalid because different social classes had directly opposing interests: what benefited the capitalists was detrimental to the workers, and vice versa. Many thought "utility" was too often measured purely in financial terms, as in the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act with its setting-up of workhouses. More recently philosophers have postulated the notion of a machine capable of giving sensations of intense pleasure: presumably it would be in our interest to remain plugged into the machine all the time; but surely this would not be desirable on a broader basis?

   But if the principle of utility is not the best guide to right and wrong, then what is?   

Theology: dating the Creation

    James Ussher (1581-1656), the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh in Ireland, is famous for calculating, from intensive study of the Old Testament, that God had created the world in 4004 B.C. But how and why did he arrive at such a strange date?

   There are no dates of any kind in the Gospels and the New Testament. Obviously, only Mary and Joseph could know exactly when Jesus was born. It should have been possible for Luke, or Paul, or some other early Christian to discover a date for the Crucifixion ("The 17th year of the Emperor Tiberius", or something on those lines?), but they were not historians in any modern sense and such details did not interest them. 

  Attempts were made to calculate the date of Jesus's birth in the 3rd century, and the system of numbering years with which we are all familiar, whether as BC/ AD or more recently BCE/ CE, gradually became used throughout Western Europe. But as scolarship advanced, an awkward problem emerged.

   We all know the early chapters of St Matthew's Gospel with its story of the three kings at the Nativity. (Incidentally, Matthew never calls them kings, only "wise men from the East", nor does he say how many there were: it's only the fact that they give three gifts that leads people to think there must have been three of them). But before finding the baby Jesus, they meet King Herod, and there the problem lies, for in Roman dating Herod died in the equivalent of 4 BC!

  By the Early Modern period, it was realised that the date of the nativity had been miscalculated; but what to do? It was clearly impossible to change the whole system of dating: far simpler just to acknowledge the error. So when Archbishop Ussher calculated a date for the creation of the world, he estimated it as 4004 BC rather than the more convenient 4000. (It is also why, in the past century, certain evangelists predicted the end of the world in 1996 rather than 2000)

   It is a mistake to believe that it was only with Darwin in the mid-19th century that people began to question Ussher's dating. In fact, many had been puzzling over this for over 150 years. More about this on my next Blog entry.  

Wales: Saint Non

 

St Non was a Welsh princess who gave birth to a baby boy on this rugged coastline on the extreme south-west corner of Wales. 

The boy was baptised with the name of David by a local holy man, St Elvis, and grew up to be the patron saint of Wales: the enire peninsula of his birth, its cathedral and tiny city, are named after him.

In the Middle Ages, pilgrims would first visit St Non's chapel, with its nearby holy well, before walking to the cathedral. Little now remains of these coastal pilgrim sites

but the Victorians built a charming little chapel as a replacement

St Non does not appear in my Penguin Dictionary of Saints. 

Coronation Memories

 I was at primary school in 1952 when the King died, and I can remember how we all wrote in our books, "We are sad because our King George the Sixth is dead. Now Princess Elizabeth will be our new Queen." Then the next year there was the coronation. We did not have a television, so I watched it at a friend's house. I remember the street parties, and we were all given presents: in my case a mug and a die-cast metal model of the coronation coach and horses. I lost both these many years ago.  

Thought for the day: English freedom

"The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as the Members are elected; the people is enslaved, it is nothing. In the brief moments of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it.”

    Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “The Social Contract” (1762)

Travel: Tangier

 My first-ever visit to Africa was extremely short, but with such a surrealist element to it that it has remained in my memory ever since. I had signed up for a tour of southern Spain, to Granada, Cordova and Seville (all richly deserving of a visit, but that’s another story), but included in the tour was a boat journey across to Tangier for an overnight stay. We were under the guidance of Pedro, a middle-aged dyspeptic Spaniard with a very cynical and sarcastic attitude to Moroccans. He told us how essential it was to follow his instructions precisely. 

The first surprise came when he told us to collect our bags and prepare to disembark: the unexpected aspect of this being that the boat was clearly still some distance out from the harbour. But we obediently followed him to the exit doors, which were down in the belly of the ship, where all the luggage was stored. But he was quite right, because a seething mass soon built up behind us, pushing and shoving to get to the front. In these situations, the British tradition is to form an orderly queue and wait patiently, which mean we lose out to nations who don’t observe these niceties, but fortunately our party contained a number of strong-minded American matrons who fought off any interlopers. Then finally we docked and the doors opened. The crowd surged forwards and found – nothing but a yawning gulf! There was no gangplank! After we had teetered on the brink for what seemed like ages, a gangplank was finally put in place, only for a mob of hairy stevedores to charge up it and fight their way in amongst the passengers in order to get at the luggage. Eventually just ONE passport official appeared, and insisted on looking at every page of each person’s passport before he would let them off, presumably to check that no-one had been visiting Israel. Thanks to Pedro’s experience, we weren’t held up too long, but other less fortunate people were still disembarking four hours later. 

There was more trouble a little while later, when a policeman asked to inspect the passports of one couple and promptly disappeared with them. Pedro was furious. “The next time a Moroccan policeman asks to see your passport”, he raged, “Tell him to push off! Tell him it is none of his business!” (Personally I wouldn’t like to try this tactic) It was Ramadan, which meant no Moroccans were allowed to eat or drink during the hours of daylight, though this did not apply to tourists. Drinking no water during August must be a serious trial. Shortly before the official nightfall, when it was actually still daylight, the streets emptied and all the shops closed in preparation for the evening meal. We were warned not to go outside, since only criminals would be out on the streets at this time. So I went back to my hotel room, which overlooked a number of flat-roofed homes. I watched them all lay out the food on tables on the roof, and then I suppose there was a broadcast over the radio to say that it was now officially night-time, because all the families suddenly started to eat at precisely the same moment. 

We were taken to Tetuan, a squalid little town where we saw people living in what appeared to be windowless cupboards opening onto the street. In the evening we were treated to a display of belly-dancing by a fat and unattractive woman, We had a local guide who took us round a tourist shop that dealt in sterling, and helped us bargain for goods. I found the bargaining custom very irritating. I watched one man in the party buy a leather purse, for which the asking price was £5, but was eventually beaten down to £2. Another tourist who was watching this transaction said, “I’d like one of those too”. The salesman promptly started at £5 again. I showed a passing interest in a rug, and was told the price was £80. I explained that since I only had £10 left, and he wasn’t going to let me have it for that, we should abandon the negotiations. He clearly thought I was a tough bargainer, and even when I left the shop he ran after me shouting, “Okay, £55!” I longed for British supermarkets and set prices. 

There was a bar on the boat which took us back to Spain. As soon as we pulled out of port, many of the Moroccans at once went to the bar and started boozing, thus not only breaking the Ramadan fast but also the laws against drinking alcohol. Pedro snorted with contempt. “They think they’re safe on a Spanish ship! It’ll be full of secret police! They’ll all be locked up when they go home!” All this was more than thirty years ago. No doubt things are different nowadays..

Wales: Ancient burial sites on Anglesey

 As the map below shows, the island of Anglesey is richly endowed with prehistoric sites.

We recently visited one of the best of these: Bryn Celli Ddu, in a field a few miles west of Menai Bridge, indicated on the map by an orange pointer.

   It is a burial chamber dating from the Neolithic period, about 4000 years ago. There is a mound with an entry at the eastern end,  

from which a short distance bent double brings you to the central chamber, where there is room for half a dozen people to stand upright.

The roof has been supported by concrete beams. There is what appears to be an upright monolith, but we were told it was actually a petrified tree trunk.

  Who built Bryn Celli Ddu and the other ancient constructions on Anglesey? Nobody knows.

Philosophy: "A Priori" Reasoning

 I saw on television the other day the Russian ambassador to the United Kingdom being interviewed concerning alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine. I was treated to a classic example of "a priori" reasoning from the ambassador: that is, deduction from first principles rather than from observed data. His fundamental premiss was that "Russian soldiers do not bomb civilians, nor do they loot, rape or murder; and it therefore follows that they have not committed such crimes in Ukraine, and that any evidence to the contrary must necessarily be fake." The logic of this argument is impeccable, but  it depends for its validity entirely on the truth of the premiss. The interviewer, by contrast, challenged the ambassador by citing evidence, some of which, he said, he had seen himself; and from this he put forward an inductive argument that war crimes had probably been committed. Not surprisingly, there was no meeting of minds.

Cricket: Bradman's last great innings.

 

 Don Bradman's 1948 touring team swept all before them, winning the first two test matches comfortably, with the third match drawn after interruptions by rain. In the fourth test, played at Headingley, Leeds, between 22nd and 27th of July, the England captain, Norman Yardley, had to attempt to force a win to stand a chance of squaring the series.

   The weather was fine throughout, and the pitch excellent for batting. The first three innings produced a high-scoring game; the scorecard at the start of the final day being as follows:-

   England (first innings): 496 (Washbrook 143, Edrich 111)

   Australia (first innings): 458 (Harvey 112, Loxton 93)

   England (second innings): 365 for 8

Yardley then declared the England innings closed, setting Australia to score 404 in a day's play, and hoping that his bowlers could extract some help from a worn pitch. The Australians would have had every incentive to bat defensively, but instead they decided to go for the runs!

  Jim Laker's off-spin, which was to prove lethal to Australian batsmen on later occasions, was ineffective, and the main threat appeared to come from Denis Compton bowling chinamen (left-arm, back-of-the-hand spinners). He took the first wicket to fall, bringing in Bradman to join Arthur Morris, the left-handed opening batsman. The two of them then decided to hit Compton out of the attack: several chances went down, and Compton was taken off, finishing the match with 1 for 82 off 15 overs. Yardley tried no fewer than seven bowlers, even including a few overs from Len Hutton. It was later suggested that if Yardley had held his nerve and England held their catches, Compton might have finished with figures in the region of 6 for 180 and England would have won. As it was, Bradman and Morris added 301 for the second wicket, including 171 between lunch and tea. With victory imminent, Bradman deliberately batted out an over so that the young Neil Harvey, playing in his first test, should have the honour of hitting the winning run.

  The final scorecard read:-

Morris    c. Pollard b. Yardley         182

Hassett   c. & b. Compton                 17

Bradman       not out                        173 

Miller     lbw b. Cranston                  12

Harvey          not out                            4

Extras                                                 16                                                

Total     (for 3)                                  404    

Nothing like this could happen today, for a simple reason. When we examine the bowling figures, we discover that England contrived to bowl no fewer than 114 overs in less than a day's play! This shows that even when it must have been clear that England had no chance of winning the match, Yardley had made no attempt to thwart an Australian triumph by simply wasting time. The Australians were thus able to progress to victory without undue haste, scoring fewer than four runs an over. 

   The England bowlers must have bowled 20 overs an hour throughout the day. Why the do test teams nowadays struggle to bowl even 13 or 14 overs in an hour? That question remains unanswered, and it is clear that spectators in the past had far more activity to watch in a day's cricket.

Bradman's innings meant that his test match batting average now stood at over 100. But in the final test at the Oval, he was bowled second ball by Eric Hollies for a duck, thereby reducing his average to 99.94! Even so, this figure is unlikely ever to be surpassed: Bradman's record as the most productive batsman in the history of cricket looks secure. 

Toba: the Supervolcano

 Lake Toba is on the island of Sumatra, part of Indonesia. It is a very unusual lake: 100 km by 30 in area, with a large island in the middle, extremely deep, and with the steep slopes above containing large deposits of ash. Such a lake could not have been formed by normal geographical and geological forces, but is rather a huge hole blasted in the earth's crust. Deposits of similar volcanic ash have been found from Saudi Arabia to China, dating from about 75,000 years ago, and coinciding with massive quantities of sulphur dioxide found in ice cores in Greenland.

All of this points to an enormous volcanic explosion, with power equivalent to over 4,000 megatons, ten times the destructive power of the Tambora eruption in 1815, which resulted in a "year without a summer" and widespread famine in Europe and North America. The Toba eruption must have been by far the biggest in human history; perhaps one of the biggest ever. Perhaps 1,000 cubic kilometres of magma would have been released, in a column many miles high, with pyroclastic flows lasting two weeks or more, leaving a vast hole a kilometre deep. Any animal life within thousands of miles would have instantly choked. Enormous quantities of sulphur dioxide released into the atmosphere would have cut off the sunlight over much of the earth, leading to the death of plants and then of animals. Evidence of tiny molluscs in sea cores point to a fall in sea temperatures of 5 degrees. The eruption could thus have resulted in a thousand years of climate cooling; perhaps a mini-Ice Age. 

   The effects on the world's human population remains a matter of academic debate. At this time very few humans would have lived anywhere except in Africa and along the northern shores of the Indian Ocean. Scientists have long been aware of a genetic "bottleneck" around the time of the Toba eruption, suggesting very few people survived; but on the other hand, it has been suggested that the human population of Africa was not greatly affected by Toba. It is possible that the different so-called "races" of mankind resulted from just a few survivors remaining in small scattered communities, with consequent inbreeding. The biggest question, however, must be: could something as devastating as Toba happen again, and what would be its consequences? Is human civilisation merely something which has been able to develop in the interval between supervolcanic eruptions?   

The last man to be hanged in Shropshire: a true story

On the morning of October 8th, 1960, a horrific sight was found in a house on Westland Road, a respectable street in Shrewsbury. The owner of the house, Adeline Mary Smith, a widow aged 62, had been battered to death.

   A neighbour, George Riley, was arrested for the murder, and that evening he signed a confession at the police station. In it he stated that he had come home very drunk in the early hours of the morning and realising he had no money he decided to rob Mrs Smith. She woke, and he killed her with a blow. 

  Riley was an apprentice butcher, aged 21. He came from a respectable family, his father being a Cadet Corps instructor at Shrewsbury school; but he and his brothers had a bad reputation around the town, getting into fights and being banned from dancehalls. At his trial he attempted to withdraw the confession, but he was nonetheless convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Many local people,including the lady who first told me this story, believed George Riley was innocent. It was pointed out that, although there was a great deal of blood at the scene of the murder, none was found on Riley's person or on his clothing. Furthermore, nothing had been stolen; Mrs Smith's purse and money being found untouched in a drawer. Questions were asked in Parliament by opponents of the death penalty, but the Home Secretary, R. A. Butler, said that he was "satisfied that there was no miscarriage of justice and no need for an inquiry". But if Riley was innocent, why did he confess? Was he coerced into it by the police, who might have been prejudiced against him by his violent reputation? Or could he have been trying to shield someone; perhaps his brothers? 

  George Riley was hanged in Shrewsbury prison at 8 a.m. on February 9th 1961. There was a noisy demonstration by his supporters outside the prison. The case has remained controversial in Shropshire ever since.

   Shrewsbury prison today is a museum. The bust above the gateway is that of John Howard, the great prison reformer. The prison was built in 1793, after Howard's campaigns had made people aware of the squalid conditions and gross corruption existing in the older prisons. 

 

"They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:

 The whistles blow forlorn,

 And trains all night groan on the rail

 To men that die at morn."

 

(A. E. Housman: "A Shropshire Lad")

Halley's Comet 1066

 April 24th 1066, and Halley's Comet was visible in England, as recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry. It was seen as an omen of great portent. King Harold was quite right to be alarmed!

Theology/ Poetry: Dante's Limbo

 In Canto IV of the "Inferno", Dante and his guide the Roman poet Virgil have been taken across the River Acheron by Charon the ferryman and have enterd the first circle of Hell, known as "Limbo". Dante is surprised to find there no tormenting demons and only sighs of disappointment rather than screams of agony and despair. Virgil explains the nature of this particular circle. Only baptised Christians, Dante is told, could enter Paradise, and this obviously excludes all those born before the time of Christ (including, of course, Virgil himself), or those living in very remote parts of the world. To inflict torment on such people, when they have themselves lived virtuous lives, would be unjust, so they are spending eternity here. They sigh because they know that Paradise is forever beyond their reach.

   To place this idea in context, the "12th century renaissance" had occurred a couple of generations before Dante's time, when educated Europeans had rediscovered the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, via translations from the Arabic in Moslem-ruled Spain, and had been enthralled by what they read. Attempts were made by Thomas Aquinas and others to reconcile Aristotle with Christianity. The poets of ancient Greece and Rome were also read and admired. It seemed impossible to someone like Dante that such great minds should suffer eternal torment for not being Christians when that was obviously an impossibility.

   Therefore, Dante creates for us in Limbo a kind of Elysian Fields, where he finds a vast array of figures from classical antiquity, ranging from Plato, Aristotle and Euclid, through Cicero and Julius Caesar to the Homer and the heroes on both sides of the Trojan War. He never appears to wonder whether such famous men could be considered virtuous in their own lives; he merely assumes it! 

   Interestingly enough, three famous Moslems are included: Avicenna and Averroes, philosophers from Spain, and Saladin. Such men obviously did have the opportunity of choosing Christianity, but The first two were responsible for introducing Aristotle's ideas to western Europe, whereas Saladin was admired for his chivalrous conduct in his wars against the crusaders. It is all rather illogical, but humane.

 

A plan of Hell. Limbo is the first circle at the top.

  The great poets and philosophers in Limbo.

Thought for the Day: Russian imperialism

"We don't want to fight, but by jingo if we do, 

We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too. 

We've fought the Bear before, and while we're Britons true, 

The Russians shall not have Constantinople!"

    (English music-hall song, from the Balkans crisis of 1878. For a modern version, replace "Constantinople" with "Kyiv") 

 British alarm at Russian expansionism goes back a long way. This cartoon from the late 18th century shows the Devil offering the Russian Empress Catherine the Great the cities of Warsaw and Constantinople. 

 It was Catherine who seized the Crimea, Odessa and neighbouring territories for Russia, which almost led to war with Britain. In this cartoon, Catherine strides from Russia towards Constantinople over the crowned heads of Europe, among whom is George III in red with his blue Garter ribbon.

As it happened, Catherine did grab Warsaw, when the kingdom of Poland was partitioned between the neighbouring powers. She never managed to take Constantinople, but the fact that she had two of her grandsons christened Constantine and Alexander gives a strong hint of her imperial ambitions..

 The war referred to in the song above was the Crimean War, fifty years later, when British and French forces, alamed at the apparent Russian threat to Turkey, captured and burnt the port of Sebastopol. The young Leo Tolstoy was there as a junior officer, and described the war in one of his earliest published writings. 

The odd thing about Catherine the Great was that she didn't have a single drop of Russian blood in her veins. She was a princess from a minor German state who was chosen as a suitable bride for Peter, the heir to the Russian throne. But when Peter eventually became Tsar in 1762 he proved so useless that after just a few months he was deposed and soon afterwards perished, presumably with official assistance. Catherine then ruled in his place for the next thirty years! 

 The great historian A. J. P. Taylor always maintained that ideologies played little or no part in actual political behaviour. During the height of the Cold War he argued that Soviet expansionism into the Baltic, the Black Sea and central Europe had nothing to do with any Communist beliefs, but was merely following in the tradition of Russian ambitions going back to Peter the Great and to Catherine. The behaviour of Vladimir Putin in rcent years would appear that Taylor could have been right!

History: Lviv-Lvov-Lwow-Lemberg

The city in eastern Ukraine, now known as Lviv, has had many different names during its history. At the end of the mediaeval era it formed part of the kingdom of Poland, when it was known as Lwow.

It was the centre of the territory then known as Galicia: a flat region dominated by the vast feudal estates of Polish landlords, worked by Ukrainian-speaking serfs, and with a large population of Jews, living in their isolated shtetls.

When at the 18th century, the kingdom of Poland was carved up between the surrounding powers of the kingdom of Prussia and the empires of Russia and Austria, the city was taken by the Austrians, and was renamed Lemberg. It was a thriving intellecual centre, but Galicia was a povertystriken region. Many thousands of Jews left, either emigrating to America, or to seek work in Vienna, where they aroused the alarm and hatred of the young Adolf Hitler. Austrian rule was on the whole benign when compared with the serfdom and anti-Jewish pogroms suffered by Galicia's neighbours over the border in Russia.

After the region was fought over in the First World War and suffered enormous damage, the ancient state of Poland was resurrected at the Treaty of Versailles: Galicia became part of it, and Lemberg reverted to its Polish name of Lwow. Although Poland was nominally a democratic republic, there was in fact gross discrimination against Ukrainians and Jews. But, once again, the people of the region could consider themselves fortunate when compared with those living in the Soviet Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands died of starvation in Stalin's collectivisation campaign and the entire leadership of the Ukrainiann Communist Party was shot in the great purge of 1937-8.

  In September 1939 Hitler launched his attack on Poland, and shortly afterwards Stalin took advantage of this to occupy Galicia. Lwow now became Lvov. Elections were held in which only candidates approved by the Kremlin were permitted to stand. Farms were collectivised and businesses taken over by the state. The NKVD, under Beria, arrested anyone likely to cause trouble, shooting or deporting to Siberia tens of thousands, amounting to between 10% or 20% of the entire population of the region.  

   But the nightmare was only beginning, because in June 1941 Hitler launched his war on Russia. Lviv fell to the Germans just eight days into the campaign. Behind the fornt-line troops came the Einsatzgruppen, who were instructed to comb through the conquered territories and shoot all Jews and Communist agents. By September the slaughter had been extended from killing Jewish men to killing the women and children too. At first, many Ukrainians welcomed the invaders, and Alfred Rosenberg, who was placed in charge of the occupied territories, wanted to build up a collaborationist movement, but Hitler was only interested in turning Ukraine into a vast plantation worked by slave labour. It cannot be denied that some Ukrainians, along with Russians,Lithuanians and others, asssited in the Holocaust: they were known as "Hiwis"; helpers. Many of the most brutal guards at the death camps were not Germans, but recruited from the various nationalities in the Soviet Union.

   What was left of Lviv was reoccupied by the Red Army late in the war, and in the redrawing of frontiers after the war it was incorporated into the Soviet Union: the first time in the city's history that it had been ruled from Moscow. Armed resistance to the Russians continued in some regions until the early 1950s, as Ukraine was subjected to the ruthless administration of two of Stalin's leading hitmen: Khrushchev and Kaganovich. Ironically enough, both were born in Ukraine, though Khrushchev was an ethnic Russian from the Donbass and Kaganovich was Jewish. One oddity of the postwar settlement was that both Ukraine and Belarus were given their own votes at the United Nations. There was no instance of either voting against the Soviet line.

   As with the rest of the Soviet Union, Ukraine drifted into slow decline during the Brezhnev years. Throughout this tedious era, many of the levers of power remained in the hands of the survivors of the old Khrushchev/ Kaganovich Ukraine group: they were known as the "Dnieper Mafia". 

   When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it was no accident that the drive for an independent Ukraine came from Lviv rather that Kyiv.

Political Philosophy: Hobbes's "Leviathan"

 Thomas Hobbes (1588-1697) was a philosopher and mathematician. He spent much of his life in the service of the Great Cavendish family, but was also for a while tutor in mathematics to the Prince of Wales. He also travelled in Europe, and met many of the great intellectual leaders of his day, including Descartes, Galileo and Francis Bacon.

   He was the author of several books in both Latin and English, but is best known for “Leviathan” (1651), where he argues for a social contract leading to absolutist government. The book is long and not easy to read, even when rendered into modern English, so here I am attempting a very short summary of the argument.

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Men are more or less equal as individuals. We are governed by our passions, which lead us to seek liberty and advantage for ourselves and domination over others, and we are in consequence always in competition with each other. Without the restraining power of a sovereign power to impose external restraint, we live in a perpetual war of all against all, civilisation cannot develop, and life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. The only “right” in this "state of nature" is the right to benefit ourselves in any way that seems advantageous.

As well as seeking to benefit ourselves, we are motivated by fear, especially of death, and by the desire for security for our persons and possessions. In the war of all against all, security can never be guaranteed. Ultimately, people realise come to realise this and in order to achieve wellbeing come together to form a Social Contract.

The Social Contract consists of the people agreeing to create a Sovereign, to which they surrender the rights existing in the State of Nature. By this, the people cease to be just a crowd, and become instead a Commonwealth of citizens.

 The Sovereign may be an individual or an institution (e.g. a Parliament), but in any case must have absolute authority; for if sovereignty is divided, natural ambition will mean there is bound to be constitutional conflict. (Hobbes had seen how the conflict between King and Parliament had led to civil war, and he would have read how, in the first century B.C., the Roman republican constitution, with all its checks and balances, had led to anarchy, which was only solved with the creation of an Empire under Augustus).

The Sovereign enacts laws. These laws are the sole guide to what is right and wrong, just and unjust. No-one can claim the right to break the law with impunity. The Sovereign has full rights over our private property, and even over our lives; for if we claim the right to follow our consciences against the decrees of the law, this is no more than conceding that anyone can do whatever they like. (Hobbes denounced the claims of the Papacy to universal sovereignty, and the actions of the Popes under Elizabeth, ordering English Catholics to rise up and depose the Queen).

The Sovereign cannot be charged with breaking the social contract, for who could judge in such a case? Once again, the question would have to be “decided by the sword”.

Although no law can be unjust, laws may be unwise, if the people deeply resent having to obey them. This outcome must be avoided.

However, if the Sovereign has been overthrown and lost all power, there is no longer any obligation to obey the deposed Sovereign (By this argument Hobbes justified his submission to Cromwell in the civil wars)

All men are subject to God; but atheists, disbelieving in God, have no reason to obey God’s laws.   

The anarchic war of all against all is seen today in the relationships between states, where a State of Nature still prevails. Everything is determined by force or fraud: all states attempt to grab whatever they can because there is no international sovereign power to enforce obedience to laws. (Hobbes could have argued for a United Nations sovereign authority, with sufficient powers to enforce peace, but he did not go this far!)

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Hobbes is very modern in a number of ways. He ignored the questions about Natural Law and absolute standards of right and wrong which had preoccupied mediaeval thinkers; and neither did he have anything to say about hereditary monarchy or the Divine Right of Kings. His book was therefore denounced by all sides in his day, and he was accused of atheism and republicanism.

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Questions from Hobbes:-

Was there ever an actual social contract as a historical event, or do we live under a “virtual” social contract? – i.e. it is as if we have promised to obey the government, and in return the government protects our lives and property against criminals at home and foes abroad.

In any case, even if there was an actual social contract some time in the past, why should it bind us here and now? Does the social contract need to be constantly renewed?

Is there such a thing as authority, as distinct from power? Power in the political sense means the ability to get people to obey commands, but authority means the right to issue those commands, with an obligation on the citizens to obey them. A follower of Hobbes might argue that claims to authority are no more than propaganda to persuade the deluded citizens to obey: in reality there is only power, which might or might not be strong enough to enforce obedience.

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Footnote:

For the "state of nature", see my previous post

In Britain ever since the Middle Ages, it has been accepted that the highest sovereign authority is “The King in Parliament”. An Act of Parliament can confiscate private property, sentence someone to death, change the succession to the throne, postpone or cancel elections, etc. In the USA, the Founding Fathers copied the Roman system of checks and balances, and sovereignty would appear to reside in the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court.

Political Philosophy: Possessive Individualism; the State of Nature; the Social Contract

 After the Renaissance came the “Scientific Revolution” of the 17^th century and then the “Enlightenment” of the 18^th. Philosophers increasingly based their speculations not on our relationship with God, but on human nature. What are we like, and what motivates our behaviour?

   The picture that emerged was that we are autonomous individuals, ambitious, perhaps a bit selfish, thinking first and foremost of our own material wellbeing, then of our family and friends, then of the wider community and so on outwards, like the rings of an archery target, with ever-diminishing commitment. Furthermore, because there aren’t enough material goods around to satisfy everyone’s wants, we are all in competition with each other for what we can get. This philosophy has been called POSSESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM.

How to keep this individualistic competitiveness under control in a peaceful society?

 

The discovery of America. (This is a particular idea of mine)

Unlike the Spanish explorers, who found the great cities of the Aztecs and the Incas, the British, French and Dutch, landing much further north, found only Stone Age hunter-gatherer tribes, without metals, written language, permanent towns, agriculture or any government beyond the tribal level. Nothing had prepared them for this! There was nothing like it in the Bible, or in what they knew of ancient Greece and Rome, or of Islamic civilization. They began to ask themselves searching questions: Did our remote ancestors live like this? Yes, probably. If so, why don’t we live like that any more? How and why did civilization arise in some parts of the world but not in others?

   The North American tribes were believed to be living in a STATE OF NATURE, before civilisation and government had been invented. But at some stage, our ancestors must have got together and agreed to change things. There must have been a SOCIAL CONTRACT: an agreement to live together under some form of government. Why? Because they believed they would be better off as a result. All the philosophers agreed that life in civilized society was better, with the sole exception of Rousseau, who maintained that civilization was all wrong and the N. American tribes, still living in a state of nature, were much healthier, freer and happier than us! 

 

Questions

Is Possessive Individualism actually correct as an assessment of the human personality?

Hegel was perhaps the first philosopher to point out that people in the past didn’t necessarily think like us. He saw history as a series of giant steps upward, determined by these changes in human consciousness.

Marx believed that human nature was determined by economic circumstances. The vast economic expansion from the end of the Middle Ages created capitalism, and Possessive Individualism was a state of consciousness appropriate to capitalist society. After the coming of Communism, human consciousness would change again, towards co-operation rather than competition.

Mill believed that P.I. was an innate part of human nature, and because of this, Communism was unlikely to succeed.

Darwin’s ideas on evolution, particularly the notion of “Survival of the fittest” were interpreted by some to lead to “Social Darwinism”, where it was argued that it was not only inevitable, but beneficial, that the weak should be exterminated, thereby creating more room for the strong and successful. This led to the ideologies of Imperialism and Fascism.

Prince Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, thought that P.I. was a natural philosophy for Britain: a small overcrowded island with inadequate natural resources for its population. Russia, by contrast, had almost limitless natural resources, but with a harsh climate and only a small population, where success could only be achieved by co-operation, not P.I.  

Hitler dismissed P.I. as “Jewish philosophy”! This was how Jews behaved! He believed Germans had a superior ideology, based on mutual trust, comradeship and patriotism.

Vladimir Putin presumably sees P.I. as a clear sign of Western decadencen and that he stands for an older and more moral code: the service of Holy Mother Russia

An animal behaviourist would argue that the whole concept has been grossly exaggerated. Humans are essentially herd-animals, like chimpanzees or sheep, not solitaries like tigers or bears. By instinct and desire, most of us prefer to live as part of a group, and this means (especially since the development of human speech) that we both need to and want to get on well with our immediate neighbours       

 

Writers on the idea of a Social contract include:-

Thomas Hobbes: “Leviathan”, 1651

John Locke: “Two Treatises of Government”: written in the late 1670s but not published until after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688

Thomas Jefferson and others: “The American Declaration of Independence”, 1776. 

 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “The Social Contract”, 1762. Rousseau’s Social Contract is quite different from the others.

We have already discussed Jefferson: we shall be examining these other writers over the next few meetings

Thought for the day

 I first visited the Soviet Union, as it then was, back in 1973. In those days it was still possible for some people to believe that Communism might be the way of the future. When I returned in 1984, things had changed: it was obvious that the USSR was a pretty crap country, falling way behind the West and led by a bunch of toothless geriatrics who somehow believed themselves to be Marxist revolutionaries. Today, things have changed again. Russia is still a crap country, but nowadays run by thieves, gangsters and ex-KGB thugs.

Stories: Blogs

 They followed each other's blogs and social media entries, though they had never met and did not even correspond directly. Their works were completely different: he wrote little stories, fantasies for the most part, whereas she wrote about the small incidents of her daily life, in a wry and amusing fashion. He deduced from these that she was a university graduate, young and unmarried, who worked in a college library where there were plenty of old books. She had no idea who he might be, or how old he was. 

   Because of this lack of contact, they built up  imaginary pictures of each other. She saw him as a would-be warrior against the forces of darkness; he saw her engaged in a quiet but unsuccessful search for love. And both were right.
   They might have appeared to be opposites, but in the sight of God they were no more than opposite sides of the same coin: they complemented each other, and together formed a Unity; for in their different ways they were searching for the same thing, which so many philosophers and mystics sought:  the Absolute; the ultimate single Whole that is truth and love and everything.

Wales/ England: St. Winifred

This is part of the shrine of St. Winifred in Shrewsbury Abbey. Readers of the Cadfael novels will recall the story of how St. Winifred's remains were (supposedly) brought from North Wales to Shrewsbury in 1137 and became a major pilgrimage centre. A "Guild of Saint Winefride" was founded in 1487, and revived in 1987.

 The shrine was demolished when the abbey was dissolved in 1540, and this fragment was discovered in a local garden in 1933. 

   The legend of St. Winifred tells that she was the daughter of a Welsh prince, and early in her life was vowed to a life of chastity. A local prince, by name Cradoc, was so infuriated when she repulsed his advances that he struck off her head with his sword. Fortunately her uncle Saint Beuno was nearby: he promptly placed her head back on her shoulders, and she lived. A fountain of  pure water sprang up where this miracle occurred, and became the pilgrimage centre of Holywell. The wicked Prince Cradoc fell dead. Later, Winifred travelled on a pilgrimage to Rome, and became the prioress of a community of nuns at Gwytherin, where she was buried. 

  St. Winifred's bones were dispersed and mostly lost, though one of her finger-bones turned up in Rome, from where it was returned to Holywell in 1852. 

   Holywell, in north Wales, survived the Reformation, and people still come to bathe in the healing waters.

Philosophy: St Thomas Aquinas and Natural Law

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74: canonised in1323) was the most famous of the mediaeval catholic philosophers.

He came from an Italian noble family; became a Dominican friar (against the wishes of his father); studied in Paris; taught & wrote extensively. Greatly admired Aristotle, and his grand overall scheme was to reconcile Aristotle with Christianity. His books are therefore full of quotations from the Bible and from Augustine & the other Christian Fathers, as well as from Aristotle & any of the other Greek & Roman books which had survived; all treated rather uncritically.

   Aquinas followed Aristotle in his division of types of government as monarchy/ tyranny, aristocracy/ oligarchy etc, but with important changes. Thus, he defined a monarch as a ruler who holds power legitimately and governs justly, whereas a tyrant holds power by violence and governs unjustly; hence, there can never be a bad monarch or a good tyrant. He saw monarchy as the best form of government and tyranny the worst. Because men in power were likely to quarrel, causing divided counsels, it follows that aristocracy is less good than monarchy and oligarchy less bad than tyranny.

   Using Augustine and other authorities, Aquinas attempted to set the parameters for a “just war”. It must be waged by a legitimate authority, it must be in a just cause, such as self-defence or to right an obvious wrong, and it must be conducted without unnecessary suffering, especially to non-combatants. He argued that too much violence can invalidate even a just war, and warned monarchs that military glory should not be their principal aim.

 

Aquinas’s most important contribution to political thought was the idea of Natural Law; a complex idea. He divided law into three categories: God’s law governs the world and is by definition always right: Human law; the laws which governments enact, and which may be just or unjust; and in between these in Natural Law. This is the human perception of God’s law; a universal code of right and wrong, by which human laws should be judged. But, as a consequence of the so-called "Reniassance of the 12th century, educated man like Aquinas became acquained with the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and also of Islamic ideas, and he was aware that these pagans had a code of right and wrong similar to ours. How could this be possible? Aquinas was driven to a radical conclusion: although only Christians can have full knowledge of God’s law, God in his mercy has enabled us to discover Natural Law reason alone.

Aquinas proceeded to postulate, under Natural Law, much of what nowadays would be covered by the concept of human rights. Thus, he would argue, it cannot possibly be in accordance with Natural Law that innocent people should be punished for crimes that they had not committed, whereas on the other hand Natural Law surely says that we should be entitled to enjoy the fruits of our labour. Under Natural Law, all things should be held in common for the benefit of all; private property, especially of land, is purely a matter of human law.  Slavery too has no foundation in Natural Law. This leads him to some interesting conclusions, especially concerning resistance to oppressive and unjust governments.

Natural Law has been debated ever since. John Locke, who in the 17^th century first postulated the concept of Human Rights, derives them from Natural Law, and the American Declaration of Independence speaks of men as being “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”. The most famous example of Natural Law at work in the 20^th century came in the trials of the Nazi leaders, where it was laid down that obeying the orders of the government was no defence for evil deeds. Whenever we say that a regulation is “unfair” or “unjust” we are postulating some concept of Natural Law! 

 

A debate concerning Boris Johnson

(This is an exchange conducted on Facebook between myself and a former colleague, Dr. David Gwyn)

Peter Shilston: Are not Boris Johnson's travails in 2021-22 an example, in the finest traditions of classical Greek tragedy, of hubris being inevitably followed by nemesis?

 David Gwyn: Yes they are, but he's not Agamemnon and neither is he Oedipus. He's a character from Attic comedy dragging his unfeasibly large phallus with him without being particularly funny; and so far as the tragedy goes, his hamartia is neither a flaw in an otherwise noble character nor a random error, but a course of action undertaken for the wrong reasons and with consequences disastrous for the rest of us. It's as if the city of Thebes was punished AFTER Oedipus's actions are discovered while the motherf*cker in question goes off with the lotus-eaters.