[With the title “Objects 101” this originally appeared in The New Criterion for November 2011.]

One glass case had especially to be avoided. Inside it were two elaborately carved elephant tusks that I gathered were from the city of Benin, and while that itself could be explained to the children dragging along behind me, the ominous reddish-brown deposit that still clung to cracks in the ivory could not. So a detour was made around the walls of the Africa Room at the American Museum of Natural History. The children came from schools in Queens, the Bronx, and Harlem, and most spoke English. But talking about that particular exhibit would need a diplomatic finesse, and a happily managed dissimulation, far beyond the talents of a foreign student working as a guide in 1960.

What was really needed was a man like Neil MacGregor — Director of the British Museum since 2002, previously Director of the National Gallery in London, and a former editor of The Burlington Magazine. MacGregor is rightly admired for the firm stand he has taken on the Elgin Marbles, a treasure he plainly sees as being safer in Britain than in Greece. In the last year or so he has become well known for his BBC talks about a number of other items in his collection, later published as A History of the World in 100 Objects, where his easy manner and imaginative story-telling has allowed scores of previously silent objects to speak.

Give him a gold llama from Peru, and all you could want to know about the Incas comes packed into the next five pages. Give him some gold coins from Lydia in the time of Croesus and he tells us not only about their manufacture, but hints at our present financial discontents: “It was Croesus who gave the world its first reliable currency. The gold standard starts here. The consequence was great wealth.” Prompted by a Buddha from Gandhara, in Pakistan, circa 100-300 AD, he chats informatively about the kind of stone the image is made from, about the standard poses for the Buddha, and about the history of shrines in Gandhara — along with something he regards as “profoundly paradoxical”: that a “religion founded by an ascetic who spurned all comfort and riches, flourished thanks to the international trade in luxury goods.” The scope is wide; the writing clear; overall it’s a good read.

History and Identity

What interests me here however is something else — the profoundly paradoxical position of MacGregor himself. When resisting Greek calls for the return of the Elgin Marbles he is on record as saying that it is his museum’s duty to “preserve the universality of the marbles, and to protect them from being appropriated as a nationalistic political symbol.” They belong to mankind, they are part of the human heritage, and though modern Greeks may wish to regard them as an integral part of their national identity, the Greeks, alas, must be seen as the deluded victims of an unfortunate parochial obsession. Now this may be right, or it may be wrong, but the curious thing is that when MacGregor deals with a number of other museum items in his possession he invariably treats them as representing the enduring national “identities” of this or that cultural group that should be respected and preserved.

Moche pots from Peru tell him that “in the Americas, as all over the world… ignored histories are now being recovered to shape modern identities,” a process “that seems destined to acquire an ever greater political significance.” A Maya relief reminds him of the 1994 rising in Mexico of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation: “Today, the Maya are using their past to renegotiate their identity” and to regain “a central role in national life.” A colorful feathered helmet from Hawaii given to Captain Cook — here he incorporates comments by Nicholas Thomas on modern Hawaiian tribal aspirations — is “a symbol of what we lost” and might reasonably hope to regain. It represents “encouragement for our future… as we seek independence from the United States.” Elsewhere, Babatunde Lawal, a professor of art history, is invited to explain how a bronze Ife head inspires Nigerian artists to “energize their quest for identity in the global village…” You can only wonder what the Greeks will make of all this. Isn’t the Director of the British Museum playing with fire?

There are other problems. A distinguished authority on paint and canvas, he knows about carving too. The items in his book are mostly arranged chronologically over the last two million years, and among the earlier exhibits is a small 11,000-year-old carved object showing two reindeer swimming one behind the other. It’s not big — the piece of bone is only eight inches long. You and I might see it as something whittled on a rainy palaeolithic afternoon, a toy for the children perhaps, while waiting for nightfall and the usual famished bears. But in MacGregor’s view this would be sadly myopic. He draws attention to the male reindeer’s impressive antlers, the scrupulous naturalism of the genitals carved under its belly, the four little bumps on the female antler’s underside that, he says, “look just like teats.” As indeed they do. Using these and other illustrative features he then goes on to argue that this is “a masterpiece of Ice Age art… superbly observed… in execution as well as in conception a very complex work of art.” Indeed, it shows “all the qualities of precise observation and skilled execution that you would look for in any great artist.”

Extravagant appraisals

Now as whittling goes you’d have to say it’s not bad. And personally I like the palaeolithic — we’ve all seen gallery walls not half as pretty as the walls of Chauvet Cave. But here’s what bothers me: after extravagant language like this has been used to describe an ancient piece of fretted bone, how are we going to talk about Donatello and Co? Or take the example of music. There are people in Australia who uphold the virtues of the didgeridoo, an unprepossessing hollow log with a smallish bore. Earnest composers respectfully write passages for it in earnest chamber works. But again, if didgeridoos were really the equivalent of other wind instruments, and their gloomy eructations were written about in a way that exhausts the vocabulary of musical esteem, what is there left to say about Mozart’s horn concertos? Does Neil MacGregor actually believe that Donatello, and what used to be daringly called primitive art, are in some way culturally equivalent? Is that where the argument is leading?

There’s a million-year-old palaeolithic handaxe from Tanzania, and we are told that “not only human beings but also human culture” began in Africa. As a beginning this has its anthropological place. But the reiteration of what becomes a wearing mantra seems odd, as is the statement that “every one of us is part of a huge African diaspora — we all have Africa in our DNA and all our culture began there”. All our culture? Surely the thing about human culture is not how it began in the Stone Age; it is how it flourished afterward in several high civilizations around the world. On the whole it seems to me a rather good thing that our ancestors did walk out of Africa 60,000 years ago (I’m certainly glad my family did, and one notes that sensible people continue to walk or run or swim or fly out of Africa if they possibly can) but it is what their descendants produced afterwards in Europe, India, China, America and elsewhere that is the truly significant human story.

It’s almost as if MacGregor believes that no visitor should have his feelings hurt. Or thinks that everyone should feel better afterwards, and that the British Museum will have failed in its therapeutic duty unless that outcome is secured. Mind you, I have to say I understand the attitude. It’s exactly why I made a strategic detour around that glass case in the American Museum of Natural History fifty years ago. Because the story behind it was pretty grim and you didn’t want to go there — not if you had to deal with waiting parents afterwards. But the cowardice of a student in 1960 is I feel less excusable in a widely admired museum administrator in 2010.

From Kenneth Clark to Neil MacGregor

Amid so much that enlightens — from Nineveh to Byzantium, from Easter Island to the fabled Old Silk Road — one small additional cavil. Although the Preface tells us that the 100 objects chosen will “try to address as many aspects of human experience as possible”, connubial sentiment somehow goes missing in this two-million year survey, though room is found for the delights pictured on the sides of the Warren Cup, and in a Hockney etching, and suggested by a minute, vaguely obscene 9000-year-old curiosity known as the Ain Sakhri Lovers Figurine. The author surprisingly describes this last as “one of the tenderest expressions of love that I know, comparable to the great kissing couples of Brancusi and Rodin,” though whether animals, vegetables, or minerals are here conjoined is hard to say. It may help to remember that at least since the triumph of Bloomsbury, Britain’s cultural elite has combined moral equivocation, patrician bohemianism, and an urbane complacency regarding the commercial world that pays its bills — not to mention the spendthrift economics, promoted by its most intellectually distinguished leader, that is destroying our fiscal arrangements today.

So is there anything new? Perhaps there is. When in 1970 Kenneth Clark put the Apollo of the Belvedere alongside an African mask that had belonged to Roger Fry, he felt able to say: “I don’t think that there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilization than the mask.” That was then. Today, when on pages 501 and 502 Neil MacGregor rates the significance of Michelangelo, Donatello and Cellini alongside a collection of bronze plaques from Benin, he manages to insinuate that the bronzes prove that in the 16^th century, “Europe and Africa were able to deal with each other on equal terms.” Ah yes, now that reminds me — about those tusks… Inquiry confirms that they too are from the ancient West African city of Benin. You may read about them in a 1903 book by H. Ling Roth with the title Great Benin: its Customs, Art, and Horrors. Not for the faint-hearted. And not perhaps what you’d want to build an identity around. But let the reader judge.

[This article first appeared in the Autumn 2007 issue of The American Interest with the title “Over There, Then: John Gunther’s Inside Europe”]

The War had started and Churchill had lots on his mind. But even in September 1939 he still had time for John Gunther. The much-travelled American journalist was one of the few outsiders who had been in Moscow on August 24th, the very day the Nazi-Soviet pact was announced, and Churchill wanted to hear how this stunning maneuver was received on Moscow’s streets.

What exactly Gunther told Churchill is unrecorded, but the words of the British leader were something Gunther remembered for years. “Russia,” Churchill murmured, brooding aloud about the Soviet Union, and rehearsing lines that would become famous in a more polished form, “was a mystery in a mystery in a mystery.”

* * *

The wartime meeting with Churchill was no fluke. During the 1930s and 1940s John Gunther’s Inside Europe had made him the most famous American newsman of them all. A friend of both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, Gunther threw parties at his home in New York for the likes of John Steinbeck, Salvador Dali, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—Inside Russia was dedicated to his good friend Greta Garbo.

He spent perhaps more time than was sensible with Walter Winchell and Elsa Maxwell in places like the Stork Club and Toots Shor’s and 21. But his books anatomising different continents—Inside Latin America, Inside Asia, Inside Africa, Inside Russia—were translated into ninety languages and sold millions of copies around the world.

Yet nothing else was as successful as his 1936 Inside Europe. It foreshadowed what the Nazis had in store. Much as Robert D. Kaplan today has been a Cassandra warning of the descent of entire Third World regions into anarchy, Gunther warned of the European forces leading inexorably to World War II.

Inside Europe

Inside Europe wasn’t a paperback. At the cheaper end of the British market in the 1930s books were selling for sixpence, but this was a whopping 500-page hardback retailing at 30 shillings, or sixty times that price.

That didn’t slow sales one bit. In its first year, 1936, Inside Europe sold 65,000 copies at about 1,000 copies a week, and continued to sell through 1937 at the same rate. By 1939 it had sold nearly 120,000 copies and continued to turn over through the Second World War. John Gunther was later told he was the best-selling American author of non-fiction in Britain since Mark Twain.

There were three reasons for this success, and the first was timing. Appearing first in January 1936 in London published by Hamish Hamilton, and later by Harper’s in the USA, Inside Europe provided a close literary echo, scene by scene and act by fateful act, of the international drama of the times. Running steadily through numerous updated impressions and editions, it climaxed in the “Peace Edition” of October 1938—the month when German troops marched into Czechoslovakia.

In the words of historian John Lukacs “1938 was Hitler’s year”. It saw the annexation of Austria, Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich, and the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Readers of Inside Europe’s October 1938 edition were able to follow these developments almost as they happened.

Not only were they given brilliant thumb-nail sketches of the Nazis in Germany (and a matchless photograph of Goering at a reception, an enormous bull draped with braid and medals confronting a frail and exquisite lady from Japan) but there were also incisive studies of the whole tragi-comic gallery in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in France, in Spain, in Italy, in the Balkans, in East Europe. Gunther also dealt ably with the United Kingdom itself, where, through May 1940, the struggle between Churchill and his domestic opponents had yet to play out.

As a portrait gallery the photographs are outstanding—with one striking exception. The shot of Stalin is a typical blurry Soviet retouch job, where the crude hand of some studio helot can be seen brushing the hair, brightening the eyes, and putting a smile on the despot’s face. All too lamentably, this pictorial failing also extends to the text in the last chapters about Stalin and the USSR—something we shall come to in due course.

The second reason for the book’s success was depth. Though Gunther’s later work was often based on visits of only days or weeks, Inside Europe drew on twelve years’ research and reporting from every European capital; on personally investigating Hitler’s Austrian background and personally witnessing events like the Reichstag fire trial; on continually sharing information with journalistic colleagues Dorothy Thompson, Vincent Sheean, H. R. Knickerbocker and William Shirer, and with literary acquaintances Sinclair Lewis and Rebecca West.

The high cost of Nazi hoodlums

The third reason for the book’s success was its style and tone. Gunther grew up in Chicago, cut his journalistic teeth at the Chicago Daily News before going to Europe, and enjoyed colorful muckraking journalism. During a trip back to the Chicago at the end of the 1920s he collaborated on a News article titled “The High Cost of Hoodlums” that appeared in the October 1929 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It told how you could have an enemy “bumped off” for as little as $50, though the rate for a newspaper man like himself might be as high a $1000. In Inside: the Biography of John Gunther (1992) Ken Cuthbertson wrote that:

Despite the fact that “The High Cost of Hoodlums” was written sixty years ago, it retains its vitality as a superb historical snapshot of the Chicago of 1929… It provided a highly readable behind-the-scenes look at how 600 hoodlums had succeeded in terrorizing Chicago’s three million citizens.

One way of looking at Inside Europe is to see it as “a highly readable behind-the-scenes look” about the even larger number of hoodlums who were already terrorizing Germany and would soon menace the continent. BBC producer Brian Miller described in 2001 how the “racy mixture of politics and Capitol Hill gossip” put together by Drew Pearson and Robert Allen in 1931, Washington Merry Go Round, successfully pioneered muckraking book journalism in the US.

Cass Canfield, president of Harper & Brothers in New York, thought the same approach might be tried on Europe’s dictators. He chose Gunther to write the book, and Gunther’s powerful style ensured that Inside Europe broke through the suffocating climate of active censorship and intimidation (“this fog of untruth, or else of censorship, which was really a kind of self-censorship”) that was depriving British readers of the facts about Hitler and the drift to war.

In Vienna since 1930, Gunther had several things going for him. First, he was fast and could meet deadlines. Second, according to Brian Miller, “he was not subject to conservative proprietorial censorship because both his publishers were liberally minded and inclined to let him write whatever he liked, provided it ‘took the lid off’ something.” Third, “he was not subject to censorship and intimidation by dictators themselves because he made quick raids into their territories and only wrote when safely back in England or the USA.”

Inside Europe was a huge commercial success that sold half a million copies and gave him political entrée everywhere. Not only Churchill welcomed him. Two years later in 1941 in Washington, after returning from Latin America, Sumner Welles called Gunther in to brief Roosevelt on the region. Welles had provided letters of introduction to a dozen national leaders, and now Gunther was supposed to report what he’d found: Hitler had boasted of building “a new Germany” in Brazil, and Nazi sympathizers were everywhere.

But Roosevelt appeared less receptive than Churchill, and Gunther hardly got a word in. Instead he was treated to a rambling 45-minute lecture on foreign affairs during which, Gunther later wrote, “I kept thinking that FDR looked like a caricature of himself, with the long jaw tilting upward, the V-shaped opening of the mouth when he laughed, the two long deep parentheses that closed the ends of his lips.”

With Walter Duranty in Moscow

When John Gunther headed for Europe in 1924 it was after a two-year spell with the Chicago Daily News working alongside Ben Hecht and Carl Sandburg. In London he met Dorothy Thompson, a strong influence and life-long friend, and had an affair with Rebecca West, nine years his senior, who opened doors for him in British literary circles. In London he also married his first wife Frances—the beginning of a stressful relationship that ended in 1944.

During those years he reported from Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Constantinople, and Moscow. It was in Moscow in 1928 that Gunther first met the New York Times representative Walter Duranty—in those days it seems everybody who went to Moscow did. Visiting Duranty’s apartment he reported,

When one dines with him in Moscow, an extremely pretty girl, smart in semi-evening frock, opens the door, shaking hands. She then disappears again, and late in the evening, asks Walter if he wants to get to work, she has finished the Izvestia proofs. Then they go to bed together. In the morning, she shines the shoes. Mistress, secretary, servant. An unholy trinity for you! Of course, by Moscow law, since they share the same residence, she’s his wife, too…

The pretty girl’s name was Katya, by whom Duranty later had a son. But the mild irregularity of the arrangement Gunther witnessed in Moscow was merely the tip of an iceberg. In Paris in the years before 1914, Duranty was a close friend of Aleister Crowley, a genuine madman fascinated by excretory functions, sexually aroused by blood and torture, and a “master” of the occult.

Duranty and Crowley shared the same woman, Jane Cheron, and all three of them were heavily into opium, sex, and black magic. Even when Duranty was escorting Gunther around Moscow in 1928 he remained in some sort of marital relation with Cheron, who was still in France. Did Gunther know any of this?

Perhaps he did and perhaps he didn’t care. Duranty, who had lost a foot in a railway accident and had a limp (the picture shows him not long after this event) was a famous raconteur and the pleasure of his company seems to have swept all doubts aside. In Stalin’s Apologist (1990) Sally J. Taylor tells how forty years later he and his wife visited Duranty where he was living in Orlando, Florida. Duranty came over to the motel where the Gunthers were staying, and according to Jane Gunther he was “enchanting, in his very best form.” They all stayed up until 4.00am, with Walter being “terribly funny, and very very wicked.” After Duranty left their motel, John turned to his wife and said, “Walter is just a scamp!”

But Duranty was not, alas, just a scamp. He was also a man many regarded then and now as a scoundrel. Not for nothing did Malcolm Muggeridge call him “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism,” or Joseph Alsop describe him as a “fashionable prostitute”, or Robert Conquest, later, call for every word he ever wrote about the Soviets and collectivization to be challenged again and again.

It’s possible that Duranty was in the pay of the Soviets, though another long-term New York Times correspondent, Harrison Salisbury, who looked into things during his own stay in Moscow, denied that Duranty was ever in the pay of anyone except the New York Times.”

Perhaps. Yet it’s inescapable that his immediate reward for doggedly covering up mass murder in the Ukraine was the indulgence of the regime, the tumultuous applause he received in the Waldorf-Astoria in 1933 for assisting America’s diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, and a call from Stalin four weeks after Duranty’s return to Moscow offering the unprecedented privilege of a second interview. Stalin’s words at the time, however accurately or inaccurately rendered by Duranty afterwards, were something he quoted with pride for the rest of his life:

You have done a good job in your reporting the USSR, though you are not a Marxist, because you try to tell the truth about our country and to understand it and to explain it to your readers. I might say that you bet on our horse to win when others thought it had no chance and I am sure you have not lost by it.

The literary culture of the time

All of this raises questions about the journalistic and literary culture of the time. How could someone from the world of Aleister Crowley and the Paris bohemian demi-monde be hired by the New York Times as its resident commentator in Moscow on Russia under Bolshevik rule? How did he become the best-read authority in the US on Stalin’s famous planned economy? Why was such a man invited to Washington in July 1932 to advise Roosevelt about Soviet gold production?

Whatever the answers to those question, it’s plain that Walter Duranty rubbed off on John Gunther. The reason seems to have had something to do with the fact that both Gunther and Duranty were the sort of men who would rather write anything than not write at all. More I suspect than is the case today, many journalists of Gunther’s time were novelists manqué. Only fiction was considered truly prestigious, and readable fiction was not about economic trends, voting patterns, or industrial production. Duranty periodically tried to write both novels and short stories, and in Hollywood, in the years of his decline in the 1940s, he teamed up with Mary Loos, a niece of the screenwriter Anita Loos, to crank out stories and scripts.

The same literary interests drove Gunther. He never stopped writing novels—The Red Pavilion, The Golden Fleece, The Lost City. Most of them sank without trace. Through Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson he knew dozens of novelists and yearned for literary recognition.

When success came, however, it was not for fiction but for his reportorial colossus Inside Europe (though he must have enjoyed a Popular Front gathering of the League of American Writers in 1938 when he was invited on stage, and dined with Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald).

When in 1935 Cass Canfield of Harper & Brothers approached him to write Inside Europe, Gunther turned him down—not once but twice. “In those days I was more interested in fiction than in journalism and my dreams were tied up in a long novel about Vienna that I hoped to write.” Only when offered the huge sum of $5000 did Gunther reluctantly accept. What’s interesting is that when he finally sat down to write, the approach was personal and novelistic almost as much as analytic and interpretive. Events in Europe were being shaped by a cast of extraordinary characters, Gunther believed, and Inside Europe would be about their beliefs, motives, and charisma.

To get under way he agreed to produce three articles, and “The three articles”, wrote Gunther, “turned out to be the three chief personality chapters in the book—Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.” What drove him was the need to show the force of their personalities and how they wielded power over other men. In a letter to Canfield he said that this approach “derives from something deeper in me than political conviction; it comes from the fact, for good or ill, I instinctively think of myself as a novelist.”

* * *

Inside Europe is still riveting. No-one who reads Gunther’s description of Hitler and his friends will easily forget it, whatever they may have read since World War II:

He reads almost nothing. He dislikes intellectuals. He has never been outside Germany since his youth in Austria and speaks no foreign language, except a few words of French. He is nearly oblivious of ordinary personal contacts. A colleague of mine travelled with him, in the same aeroplane, day after day, for two months during the 1932 electoral campaigns. Hitler never talked to a soul, not even to his secretaries, in the long hours in the air; never stirred; never smiled.

Gunther had also spent time in Bucharest and knew the ominous mixture of Ruritanian farce and fascist menace to be found in Rumania. Only two streets away from King Carol’s palace one could see well-dressed members of the Iron Guard lounging in a café, sipping Turkish coffee, and talking about revolution. Founded in 1927 the program of the Iron Guard, he wrote, “was a fanatic, obstreperous sub-Fascism on a strong nationalist and anti-Semitic basis. Its members trooped through the countryside, wore white costumes, carried burning crosses, impressed the ignorant peasantry, aroused the students in the towns.”

The portrayal of Stalin

So far so good. And it’s reasonably good for hundreds of pages. But then one comes to Stalin—and it’s pure undiluted Walter Duranty. Stalin has, we are told

“Guts. Durability. Physique. Patience. Tenacity. Concentration. If he has nerves, they are veins in rock. His perseverance, as Walter Duranty says, is ‘inhuman’. When candour suits his purpose, no man can be more candid. He has the courage to admit his errors, something few other dictators dare do. In his article ‘Dizzy from Success’ he was quite frank to admit that the collectivisation of the peasants had progressed too quickly.”

This is truly a gem. Stalin’s magnanimity is shown by his “frankness” in “admitting” that collectivisation had “progressed too quickly.” Gunther sums up the desperate suicidal resistance of the peasants in the following four sentences: “The peasants tried to revolt. The revolt might have brought the Soviet Union down. But it collapsed on the iron will of Stalin. The peasants killed their animals, then they killed themselves.”

Yes. John Gunther actually wrote that it wasn’t Stalin, or the Communist Party, or the NKVD, or the Red Army troops who seized their grain and herded them without food or water onto railway wagons and shot them if they resisted; they “killed themselves.”

Even so, Inside Europe was a major achievement. It brought to public notice the Empire of Evil that was about to expand and take over the whole of central Europe. It powerfully confirmed the Nazi menace Churchill had toiled for years to publicise. And Gunther’s Inside Europe played no small part in bringing US elite opinion out of the dangerous miasma of isolationism that prevailed.

That such a perceptive journalistic observer could be drawn into Duranty’s deceptions about the Soviets had no simple explanation. It may however be because one of Gunther’s strongest personal virtues, loyalty, here became also a vice. He could never bring himself to believe (or to even imagine) that however entertaining Duranty may have been down through the years, and however firmly he had stood by his side during the painfully protracted death of Gunther’s son, his old friend from the 1920s was also a thorough scoundrel whose writings about Stalin were full of lies.

The New Criterion, April 2011

All you see is a smudge — a white smudge if that makes sense — but the whole crowd knows what it means. The player has struck the ball well and cleanly and may continue to play. This is Hot Spot, a new high-tech way of getting more and better information for sporting decisions in the game of cricket. Cameras sense and measure the heat that comes from the thumps and bangs of play, and the spot is white because the computerized infrared image left by the ball is negative, white on a black or grey ground.

Time was when cricket umpiring relied on the human eye. Umpires standing at each end of a cricket pitch, 22 yards long, had to guess whether the ball had actually struck the bat, or the stumps, or the batsman’s leg, before giving a decision “out” or “not out”. But some umpires seemed to have worse eyes and ears than others and mistakes were made. This didn’t matter when the game was synonymous with the decorum of leisurely afternoon play on an English village green. But that was long ago. At international cricket matches today a hundred thousand fans produce constant uproar and it’s a matter of life and death — though some say it’s more important than that.

Adjudicating has assumed diplomatic importance, the very latest science is employed, a billion vicarious spectators on the Indian subcontinent hang breathlessly upon news about the score, and it’s hardly surprising that the four fallible eyes of the all-too-human umpires are now backed up by infrared cameras — with a third off-field umpire checking what the cameras show. The advent of all this technology has not been without debate. But most fans, I think, would agree that the decisions of even diligent umpires are affected by their states of mind, while infrared photography, on the other hand, provides the greater objectivity that international cricket now requires. It’s as simple as that.

Well, talk about luck! There’s hardly a name since the dawn of systematic human thought that goes unmentioned in their treatise, from Plato to Bruno Latour. But the funny thing is, the more you read of its 500 pages the more strange their project appears. Objectivity turns out to be a Bad Thing on the whole, while subjectivity is generally a Good Thing. What Daston and Galison call “mechanical objectivity” rudely arrived with photography in the 19^th century, and it makes both authors deeply unhappy. Among other things, they say, mechanical objectivity led to regrettable changes in the “scientific self.”

Anyway I marked a number of passages and sent them off to a pal of mine in Boggabilla. He knows his cricket, and better still he knows the difference between fact and fiction. This is what he sent back.

Harvard Man: It is one of the main messages of this book that epistemology and ethos are intertwined: mechanical objectivity, for example, is a way of being as well as a way of knowing. Specific forms of image-making sculpt and steady particular, historical forms of the scientific self. (4)

Boggabilla Man: I think I know what he means. Doug Smith’s way of being was cranky at the best of times — and if a photo-finish showed the wrong horse’s nose in front you’d see his epistemology unravel and he’d lose his ethos entirely. Especially with fifty bucks on the nag behind.

HM: There is a history of what one might call the nosology and etiology of error, upon which diagnosis and therapy depend. Subjectivity is not the same kind of epistemological ailment as the infirmities of the senses or the imposition of authority feared by earlier philosophers… (32)

BM: Well you might call it nosology — but why? Wally Jones was deaf, and the best therapy any of us found for this umpire was shouting. Objectively speaking it was a useful diagnostic procedure… Even philosophers should know there are times when authority must be imposed.

HM: In all cases it is fear that drives epistemology, including the definition of what counts as an epistemic vice or virtue. Conversely, science pursued without acute anxiety over the bare existence of its chosen objects and effects will be correspondingly free of epistemological preoccupations. (49)

BM: How true! Out there in the middle of the cricket field facing a bowler it’s fear, fear, fear and stress, stress, stress. There’s anxiety to burn. That’s why infrared smudges are not just epistemologically but medically virtuous. Again and again they’ve saved batsmen from heart attack.

HM: Current usage allows a too easy slide among senses of objectivity that are by turn ontological, epistemological, methodological, and moral… (51)

BM: Yair, maybe, but not in cricket. Any player will tell you they’re all of a piece and the easier the slide the better. Take Hot Spot for example. Infrared imagery shows us what is, tells us what we know, and suggests how to proceed. Morally, you’d have to say the results are all good.

HM: Today the scientific image has frankly and explicitly surrendered any residual claim to being a version of ‘seeing’ in a classical sense… the ideal of fidelity has been discarded… as it begins to shed its representational aspect altogether… (413-415)

BM: Gotta be joking! Haven’t seen a white flag myself. Just the opposite in fact. Don’t they watch cricket at Harvard? All those instant replays help you see the action more… How can I put it? — objectively. That’s how things look in Boggabilla.

Now, fairly obviously, scientists have used images in various ways for various purposes — analytic, experimental, and didactic. Monday’s anatomy lecturer might find an undoctored photograph suitable, while Tuesday’s might find an artistically colored version of the same image more to his purpose. But these straightforward practical choices assume enormous importance for Daston and Galison, who write of the “vaunted objectivity” of photography, find a dark significance under every bush, and with winks and nudges smile at the “icy impersonality” demanded by what they call the “scientific self.”

The Australian philosopher David Stove once described the characteristic tone of works like this as combining “flippancy and menace.” What these authors mostly menace is common sense — but flippancy abounds. Those who take scientific objectivity seriously are met with a continual fusillade of adjectival smirks and adverbial sneers. Scientists are mocked for their “near-fanatical efforts” to minimize unwanted effects. We are told that researchers unsatisfied by pencil drawings, and who look to cameras for help, discover “the ethical-epistemic consolations of the mechanical image.” The distinguished British mathematician and engineer Charles Babbage is described not simply as recommending mechanical records: he “rhapsodizes” about them.

Of course men who spend their lives studying snowflakes are self-evidently absurd. Objectivity portrays them as “an illustrious lineage” obsessed with trivia, while variations on the word “assiduous” insinuate a misplaced concern for facts and truth. The very category of photographic images on which the book’s aspersions fall most heavily is pejoratively defined (‘mechanical’) using the word as it has often been used in the past — the “rude mechanicals” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Swift’s facetious teletransportation in the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, Hazlitt’s remark during his comments on Chaucer that “versification is a thing in a great degree mechanical.” Backtracking and bet-hedging deepen the obfuscation: “To show that objectivity is neither an inevitable nor an eternal part of science passes no verdict on its validity.” How’s that again?

I should perhaps add that readers willing to endure the lumbering irony of the authors’ prose may find the book not entirely without interest. Among its pages one glimpses a gladiolus from the Hortus Cliffortianus of Linnaeus, and something from Audubon, while elsewhere an illustration shows the famous French physiologist Claude Bernard at work. Also included is a plate of two emus from Voyages de découvertes aux Terres Australes (1807-1816) by the French naturalist François Péron. The original plate gives the whereabouts of these ostrich-like birds as “Nouvelle-Hollande”, the name for Australia bestowed by the 17^th century Dutch navigator Abel Tasman, and the one that Péron preferred. Somewhat impulsively Daston and Galison have translated “Nouvelle-Hollande” as “New Zealand”. Historically, there were as many emus in New Zealand as elephants in Kent — subjectively, objectively, whatever. Just an editorial slip I suppose.

It’s hard to know what to do about grown men and women at the highest levels of academic life who seriously believe that the ideal of fidelity in scientific representation has been discarded, or that modern technical imaging has surrendered any claim to be a truthful record of events, even when billions of sports fans all over the world know otherwise. It is fairly obvious that the authors’ “way of being”, not to mention their “way of knowing”, needs therapy: perhaps a visit to Boggabilla would help. Plus a sharp knock on the sconce with a cricket ball, faithfully rendered in ghostly black and white, showing exactly where the enlightening blow was struck.

Anthropological advisors on the above films included Nicolas Peterson, Jeremy Long, Stephen Wild, and Ken Hansen. Restrictions today apply to who may and who may not view particular films. Anyone wishing to see them should apply to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (AIATSIS), GPO Box 553, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia.

On a more trivial scale something similar happened recently to a review of mine. A discussion of Keith Windschuttle’s new book The Stolen Generations, appearing in the June 2010 issue of the highly esteemed New Criterion, it was sent for publication with the title “Stolen Children and Academic Lies”. I think it’s pretty clear from this who is being blamed and who are the sinners — the usual suspects in the universities. The lies objected to are academic; they have nothing to do with Aborigines.

Imagine my surprise when for some reason or other “Stolen Children and Academic Lies” was changed without notice to “Aboriginal sin?” What the folk at the New Criterion were thinking of when they came up with this I’ll never know. It flatly contradicts the moral point and meaning of the original title, and is gratuitously provocative as well. Anyway I feel that comment and correction are due: the word “sin” as here applied to Aboriginal conduct is as inappropriate as the word “stolen” used to describe the child removal program in Keith Windschuttle’s indispensable book.

The nature of frontier societies

All Australians know that Aborigines have been more sinned against than sinning. But in any case the concept of sin is here woefully out of place. The varied legislation involved in Australian child removal programs was designed for a frontier society where encroaching pastoralism and mining impinged on tribal life —especially on Aboriginal family life. And in case you haven’t heard or didn’t notice, frontier societies were amoral through and through.

True, missions and missionaries tried to offer a more inspiring human prospect. True, there were a handful of hard-working, caring pioneers living in orderly homesteads where books were read and a piano in the corner might sometimes be gathering dust. But these were islands of civility in the wilderness. For the period that concerns us, from roughly 1830 through to 1930 in northern Australia, and at various other times in New Zealand, in the American West, in South Africa, in Canada, and in parts of Brazil today, the men and women of these frontier societies were a very wild bunch indeed.

Drifters, drop-outs, escapees and petty-criminals on the run, adventurers, opportunists, loners, slaughter-house workers and hard-drinking miscellaneous toughs, along with all the rough-necks working sheep and cattle in godforsaken stretches of barren country, or prospecting for gold on patches of stony ground — these are the human types, often brutal and violent, that confronted the tribal world. Their enjoyments were drinking and whoring, and for many of them home life consisted merely of brothels and saloons. In New Zealand around 1820, before a better class of colonist arrived to settle the land and impose law and order, frontier society consisted of little but odoriferous whalers and sealers, grog-shops, and a ready supply of local prostitutes. In Australia, survival for the Aborigines meant dealing for long years with a kindred social milieu.

In this disreputable company who was free from sin? Is it any wonder that some indigenes became indistinguishable from their unsavory surroundings — that they became what they beheld? Is it any wonder that alarm was felt for children born into this world, or that governments considered it their responsibility to take children away for their own good? Is it any wonder, finally (in case this is what the New Criterion means by “Aboriginal sin”) that those coming from this background often do their utmost to conceal the fact, to lie about it, and pretend they were “stolen” when that was not the case?

Frontier society, in Australia as elsewhere, was a cruel and miserable place where vice proliferates and virtue is thin on the ground. The vocabulary of the Sunday school does not help us understand its denizens. Those who ignorantly imagine otherwise — or on the other hand fill their minds with fantasies about the cultural glories of tribal life, whether traditional, or in the tattered shanty-towns of the fringe-dwellers — should read what Windschuttle has to say in Chapter Four, “The Culture of the Camps”. It is a study of universal degradation. It is also an unsparing account of decades of child neglect and child abuse demanding action, and is the best antidote to the nonsensical myth that either racism or cultural genocide underlies the child removals which every state government felt compelled to undertake.

Welfare and mission staff on the frontier

Something might also be said about those who volunteered to staff the settlements where Aborigines gathered, finding refuge from the harsher world outside. Those of us who knew them fifty years ago (I was a documentary film-maker at the time) remember men and women with sundry minor failings, but they were invariably good people, doing their best in difficult circumstances according to their lights.

It is of course a crying shame that the modern academics who excoriate these men and women did not themselves volunteer to go into the tropics and work on behalf of the wretched and oppressed. Why didn’t they themselves choose careers in welfare work if they’re so keen to judge those who did? Plainly, the army of censorious professors have a purity of motive, a clarity of moral vision, and a depth of social compassion that is sorely needed in Australia’s north — today even more than in the past. Anyway, in the circumstances prevailing yesterday, those despised missionaries and settlement administrators did a lot to alleviate the misery and confusion of indigenes caught up in tumultuous change. Much more, it might be added, than any academic has ever done.

Finally, among the over-excited responses to the review of The Stolen Generations in The New Criterion was the indignant denial that the tale of the “stolen children” constitutes a “myth”. So here’s my own view of the matter. That children were removed from what were considered unsafe and unsatisfactory situations is a historical fact. That laws existed requiring their removal is a historical fact. That welfare staff acted to remove them, and sometimes with a degree of coercion, is a historical fact. That some removals succeeded in providing better lives, that some did not, and that some were abject failures, is a historical fact. For all those reasons the story of the policy embracing these activities is properly described, in plain English, as “child removal and its consequences.”

To describe these activities as driven by racism, let alone by motives of genocide, is the mythologizing of history by urban intellectuals who wantonly subject facts, and their description, to conspiratorial fantasies of evil and doom. The imaginative story of Australian “genocide” is only the latest of these. That is why the documented account of the child removal program by Keith Windschuttle is in my view historical, but wild talk of stolen children and genocide and planned extermination is not only myth, but a pernicious myth that betrays and incriminates thousands of ordinary Australian citizens, now dead, who cannot defend themselves.

Jayant Mukundray Patel, medical miscreant sans pareil, has at last been found guilty of serious crime. And in the Brisbane Supreme Court on July 1st 2010 he received his penalty. For the manslaughter of Mervyn John Morris, James Edward Phillips, and Geradus Wilhelmus Gosewinus Kemps, and for causing grievous bodily harm to Ian Rodney Vowles, Justice John Byrne sentenced him to seven years in jail.

Addressing Patel, Justice Byrne said that “In view of the verdicts of the jury, there is no denying the gravity of your offence and your repeated serious disregard for the welfare of the four patients.” The judge added that Patel’s fatal operations “might easily have been avoided. Had you sought a second opinion on whether to proceed, the indications are that another surgeon would have advised against them all.”

But Justice Byrne was much too kind. Patel’s psychopathic eagerness to wield the knife had been known well before he arrived in Australia. And a second opinion was something he never required. At the Kaiser Permanente Hospital, in Oregon, where after several years of malpractice his surgical cases were reviewed (three had died, while a fourth lost gastrointestinal function after Patel performed a colostomy backward) “Medical staff alleged that he would often turn up, even on his days off, and perform surgery on patients that were not even his responsibility. In some cases this surgery was not even required, and caused serious injuries or death to the patient.”

For his depredations in Brisbane the prosecution asked a minimum of ten years. Given that the death toll for which Patel appears responsible may have been between 80 and 90 men and women (in the course of two years’ surgical mayhem) many think this was too short. And the prospect of his now being released on parole after only 3½ years is for some surviving victims downright disturbing.

But Australians are a generous and forgiving people. Mrs Judy Kemps, who lost her husband Geradus Kemps, said the main priority was a conviction. “That guilty verdict is what I really wanted. The jury did a good thorough job, sitting there all those weeks listening to the case.” According to a report in the Brisbane Times Mrs Kemps went on to add that “even if Patel was released after three and a half years she would not be concerned.” Anyway, the whole grisly story of Patel’s career as a medical mutilator is here: Doctor Death in Bundaberg.

This they signally failed to do. Instead, they systematically obstructed investigations into criminal activity within their jurisdiction, and blatantly intervened to assist Patel escape justice, providing him with a free flight back to America.

Three representative members of the administrative bureaucracy at Bundaberg Base Hospital appeared as witnesses before an inquiry in 2005 — The Director of Services, the District Health Manager, and a third responsible for the nursing staff. Samples of their testimony are presented at the conclusion of Doctor Death in Bundaberg as Appendices A, B, and C.

Reader’s opinions will no doubt be varied and various. My own view is that it would be difficult to find a lower caliber of personnel: intellectually limited, with unconvincing credentials, devoid of any sense of responsibility, and morally impaired. Devotees of nationalized medicine with its armies of nondescript officials should perhaps be careful what they wish for. You wouldn’t trust a sick dog with Appendices A, B, and C. Ultimately, alas, and regardless of rogue medicos like Jayant Patel, bureaucratic personnel like these always ruin such schemes. Read the full story here: Doctor Death in Bundaberg.

It was a day when every book repels, when each title brings a sense of ennui. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution? I don’t think so: out of Mexico always the same thing. The Second Plane? No Martin we’ll give that a miss. What remains to be discovered: mapping the secrets of the universe, the origins of life, and the future of the human race? Not just now Sir John.

Then I had a bright idea — why not poetry? So reaching up I took down from my shelves an old Penguin with the following title: The Centuries’ Poetry: an anthology compiled by Denys Kilham Roberts. Volume 4, Hood to Hardy.

Denys Kilham Roberts

As one may see from the portrait Penguin Books conveniently provide of Mr Roberts, who was born in Cornwall in 1903 and died in 1976, there’s something about him less than reassuring. He looks directly and solemnly into the camera (does the clenched hand on which he rests his chin cover an old scar, or is that how you looked thoughtful in the 1940s?).

His expression suggests a dark or even tragic view of life, with distinct intimations of mortality, and perhaps that should have been a warning. Yet nothing prepared me for the catalog of suffering, misfortune, woes miscellaneous and woes particular, graves, cemeteries, and dismally prefigured endings that readers have to cope with here. More than half Mr Roberts’ poets seem more than half in love with easeful death.

The very first page (it is page 13) has a poem by Thomas Hood about autumn. Remember Keats? Remember those mists and mellow fruitfulness and swollen gourds and nice plump hazel shells? Rather jolly, no? I think so. Brings to mind peasants merrily treading a measure on the winnowing floor. In Keats, autumn rounds out the best summer any living bee can remember, with honey oozing out of the comb.

But now listen to Thomas Hood:

I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn…

Forlorn! The very word is like a knell. If there’s anything that defines the tone of this lugubrious literary regiment that’s it. In Autumn, Hood mourns the passing of summer, the vanished flowers, the fallen leaves, the swallows that have flown. All that remains is teary and sunless, shadowy, fearful, and bare. Forlorn indeed!

But here the autumn Melancholy dwells,
And sighs her tearful spells
Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain.
Alone, alone,
Upon a mossy stone…

There is enough of sorrowing, and quite
Enough of bitter fruits the earth doth bear,
Enough of chilly droppings for her bowl;
Enough of fear and shadowy despair,
To frame her cloudy prison for the soul!

Sorry Tom, and I don’t want to interrupt, but what’s all this about earth’s “bitter fruits” and bowls full of “chilly droppings”? I don’t know what Hood had for breakfast the day he wrote this, but chances are it was porridge. Made from oats. Good stuff for feeding horses and poets, and part of the harvest a bountiful earth provides.

Talk about gratitude.

But enough of fear and shadowy despair and enough of Hood. Moving along to page 24 we find “Is Love a Fancy?”, a sonnet by Hartley Coleridge. The eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hartley seems to have had problems with the bottle (he was once dismissed for ‘intemperance’) and more trouble with women.

“Is love a fancy or a feeling?” he brightly asks, but if you think this is going to be about lovers in the springtime, the only pretty ringtime, when birds do sing, hey ding a ding ding — forget it. Barely half way through we’ve got pensive gloom hovering o’er a tomb; suicide gets into the final couplet; and in his last line he describes Hope morosely as “a spectre in a ruin bare”. And with Hope in that condition, can Death be far behind?

Draping a funereal coverlet over Thomas Lovell Beddoes and “Death’s Jest-Book”, pages 27–29 — Bare as Death’s shoulder… For the King of the grave… Our nest is queen Cleopatra’s skull… — (Beddoes’ voice sounds like a crow cawing over a cadaver) we come on page 33 to the jollifications of Edgar Allan Poe:

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne (he tells us, describing some lost city in the sea)
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.

There doesn’t seem to be any particular reason, moral, political, or religious, that the city has fallen, with its time-eaten shrines and palaces and towers. But Poe likes the idea of fallen things, dying things, decomposition and desuetude: he sniffs the historical wind and it smells of decay; he imagines long-forgotten sculptured ivy and stone flowers and sees disintegration with a sickly joy — all of it under the vast inescapable doom wheeled in for his conclusion:

While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

Will it fall on us? Devour us? Kill us with its monstrous gaze? Or is it just another pointless example of Poe’s Gothic fantasizing? Of course few poets except Poe have only one song to sing. Poor sick Poe. But I suppose it must be said in the editor’s favour that when on page 36 Mr Roberts comes to John Clare, he does wait a little before trying to make one’s day worse (with a contribution by Clare from the Northampton County Asylum).

Before that ordeal, however, we are allowed a thrush singing hymns to sunrise, warping the moss to form a nest, laying eggs like heath-bells gilt with dew. Or there’s First Sight of Spring with its hazel blooms in threads of crimson and the yet-to-arrive whitethorn leaves. Or the squirrel sputtering up the powdered oak:

With tail cocked o’er his head, and ears erect,
Startled to hear the woodman’s understroke;
And with the courage which his fears collect,
He hisses fierce half malice and half glee,
Leaping from branch to branch about the tree,
In winter’s foliage, moss and lichens, deckt.

That reminds me — I must find out some time the right way to pronounce “lichens”. Like, or litch? Still a bit vague about that. Anyway, with Clare’s poem there’s none of that skull beneath the skin business where breastless creatures lean backward with lipless grins, or the rest of Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service about death by water or the sprouting of the corpse that was planted last year in the garden or dead men’s bones in the rat’s alley or white leopards that have fed to satiety on legs and liver and that which had been contained in the hollow round of my skull.

Poor sick poets. Plato knew a thing or two. Too self-regarding. Too many words and not enough Dinge an sich. Anyway I’ve done with reading. Done with poets. Today I was walking over a headland where swifts swoop and a small downy-breasted hawk hung in the wind’s updraft. Saw a whale steaming along too.

“Nah, only make things worse”. My mate reckoned it would mostly stimulate inflation, and weaken the currency too. He’d been reading a book that was full of bad economic news. “If I found a million dollars I’d put it under my bed.”

Now I think this is crazy. Like other beachcombers I read the newspapers and know that capitalism is on the rocks and the solution is obvious: spend money, as much as you can on anything at all — the other day Paul Krugman said Obama should just come up with a figure and then add 50 percent and spend, spend, spend. Free money will free up the free market. Stands to reason.

“Nah, it’s been tried. Won’t work. Read this.” My beachcombing pal took his book and pointed to something written by FDR’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, over 70 years ago:

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it doesn’t work… We have never made good on our promises… After eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… and an enormous debt to boot!

That had to be wrong. Wasn’t Morgenthau the guy who said German industry should be levelled and the country turned into cow pastures? In 1944? Anyway that was a long time ago and economists are heaps smarter now. Right? How about Japan in the 1990s I asked.

“Japan? Gotta be joking!”

Shifting to a more comfortable rock, suitable for a more expansive exegesis, my learned friend said that between 1989 and 1992 the Nikkei dropped from 40,000 to 15,000, that real estate prices dropped 80 percent from 1991 to 1998, that the Bank of Japan and the Japanese government did all they could to prop up prices and bad debt.

Interest rates were pushed to zero, trillions of yen were spent on public works, zombie companies had billions thrown at them to prevent them going bust, and the government launched no fewer than ten stimulus packages totalling over 100 trillion yen. None of it worked. Japan’s depression lasted nearly two decades.

“But what about the Fed!” I cried, for surely the Federal Reserve is an economic rock, placed there to protect all beachcombers against adversity and guide us toward the promised land.

“The what? Gimme a break!” As he saw it the Fed was the greatest culprit of all by messing with interest rates. First of all the Federal Reserve Bank has nothing to do with capitalism and is not a free-market institution at all. It exists to politically interfere with the natural price of money. Left to itself the interest rate has a useful role: it coordinates production across time. But it can only do this if it’s allowed to freely move up and down. According to my beachcombing friend the Fed’s intervention constantly mismatches market forces.

As for the Fed being chartered to protect the interests of ordinary beachcombers, he laughed in my face. The Federal Reserve Act, he said, was actually drafted by a cabal of bankers at a private meeting on Jekyll Island, Georgia, in 1910, to entrench the special privileges of the banking industry at the expense of everyone else. When it became law in 1913, he said, it was “special interest legislation masquerading as a public-spirited measure”. Much better to let banks fail than have a privileged banker’s bank like the Fed using tax revenue to protect bankers from their own follies. Why should the guy in the corner store be the only one forced to fail?

And there’s no such thing as easy credit. What’s easy credit during politically engineered booms is hard cheese when cometh the bust. And for some it’s worse than that. Leveraging’s really cantileveraging, like an unbalanced crane on the edge of El Capitan swinging further and further out into space… til down it crashes to the valley floor.

I’d had enough. It was time to leave. No more bad news for me. But on pages 74-75 of his little book I did find this. It’s called “The Austrian Theory” and may perhaps be of interest.

1. Interest rates come down in two ways. Either the public saves more and they come down spontaneously, or the central bank artificially forces them down.
2. Businessmen respond to lower rates by starting new projects. The projects they start tend to be interest-rate sensitive — big projects like mining, construction, etc.
3. If the interest rate is lower because of natural causes — increased saving for example — then the market works smoothly. Those savings provide the wherewithal for new investment projects that can be seen all the way to completion.
4. If the interest rate is lower because of the political manipulations of a central bank — then these projects cannot all be completed. This is because the necessary resources to do so have not been saved by the public. Investors have been misled into forms of production they cannot sustain.
5. Imagine a builder who thinks he has 20 percent more bricks than he really has. And 20 percent more bricks than he can pay for. That inaccurate brick count will have dire consequences: the house will be bigger than it should be, and the longer he goes on building without realizing the real situation the worse the final reckoning will be.
6. The economy is like the home builder. Forcing interest rates lower than the free market would have set them makes us act as if there are more saved resources than really exist. Some of our new investment is malinvestment — investment that makes no sense in the light of reality.
7. That’s what has happened. Politically imposed low rates misdirected huge resources into home construction. It was unsustainable. There were only so many $900,000 homes that the public, which had been saving very little, was able to buy.
8. The sooner this chronic monetary manipulation comes to an end the sooner the malinvestment can be shaken out, and misallocated resources directed into sustainable lines. And the longer we try propping things up and bailing things out the worse the bust will be. For everyone.

[The title of the book my beachcombing friend Rafe passed along is Meltdown: a free-market look at why the stock market collapsed, the economy tanked, and government bailouts will make things worse, Regnery, 2009. Its publishers have done us all a service, and I hope its author, Thomas E. Woods Jr, will forgive me for pilfering his text.]

Three quotations from Meltdown

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

The special privileges granted to Fannie and Freddie have distorted the housing market by allowing them to attract capital they could not attract under pure market conditions. As a result, capital is diverted from its most productive use into housing. This reduces the efficacy of the entire market and thus reduces the standard of living of all Americans.

Despite the long-term damage to the economy inflicted by the government’s interference in the housing market, the government’s policy of diverting capital to other uses creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever.

When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss. These losses will be greater than they would have otherwise been had government policy not actively encouraged overinvestment in housing. (16)

Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, September 10, 2003.

“We need more regulation!”

Financial “deregulation” has often been blamed for the economic meltdown, with then Senator Barack Obama late in the 2008 campaign ceaselessly condemning the Bush administration’s alleged drive to “strip away regulation”.

But lenders in the housing market were doing exactly what the federal government and its central bank wanted them to do. Saying that more government oversight was needed misses the point. More and riskier loans are what the government wanted.

Fashionable opinion everywhere, especially throughout the government sector, cheered as traditional lending practices were abandoned and riskier ones adopted — why, the American dream is being extended to more and more people! (29)

Symptoms, causes, and the war on reality

The fall of stock prices is not the cause of problems in the economy. Stock prices are merely a reflection of the economy’s condition. Artificially inflating them treats the symptom rather than the cause… The fact is financial bubbles need to burst, so that the inflated prices of the assets involved can fall to their market price…

Nor are falling house prices the problem. They are the market’s way of correcting the distortions produced by unleashing the Fed’s credit spigot.

Yet here we have the federal government, which claims to want to make housing more affordable… endorsing a policy of maintaining bubble prices in the real estate market. Whatever happened to the goal of affordable housing? Can a stream of rational thought be found amid all this convoluted nonsense? (57)

Zimbabwe is not a happy place. The killing never ends (it only pauses) and the prevailing ethic is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Morgan Tsvangirai looks like a man who has better ideas than Robert Mugabe. But because he’d rather live than die he abandoned a dangerous election that might have seen a general massacre of his followers.

As for an eye for an eye—in 1982 Mugabe, a Shona, warned his enemies of the Ndebele tribe (also known as Matabele):

Some of the measures we shall take are measures that will be extra-legal. An eye for an eye and an ear for an ear may not be adequate in our circumstances. We might very well demand two ears for one ear and two eyes for one eye.

Following Ismail Kadare, we might call this an explicit blinding order. Or official permit. A recipe for ruin.

Civil war in Africa

Anyway Mugabe is adamant he’d rather have civil war than yield to parliament. In fact he rather likes war, and has boasted that he “has a degree in violence.” War, and nothing remotely resembling parliamentary compromise, has been his theme for years. In 2000 he said “the Movement for Democratic Change will never form the government of this country, never, ever, not in my lifetime or even after I die.”

At a party conference in December 2001 he declared “What we are now headed for is real war, a total war. We should move like a military machine,” adding a warning for Morgan Tsvangirai: “Death to the tea boy!”

Pessimists foresee a possible genocide by Mugabe’s mainly Shona supporters against Tsvangirai’s Ndebele-based Movement for Democratic Change (in earlier pogroms against the Ndebele during the 1980s some 10,000 to 20,000 are said to have died). And of course Zimbabwe is not alone. In other parts of the world too, intransigently hostile groups reject any mechanism for reconciling their differences, achieving unity, and moving on. An eye for an eye rules.

Why is this?

The Athenian breakthrough

2,500 years ago the Greek city states were continually at each other’s throats. Each behaved toward the others in a solidary way solely concerned with its own members and its own cause.

Then Athens made a breakthrough. A number of thinkers arose—poets, artists, and legislators—who looked at larger matters than tribal self-interest and asked questions about the general nature of justice and injustice, good and evil, war and peace.

Perhaps the most astonishing of them all was Aeschylus. A poet and dramatist who knew about war and killing at first hand, he fought against Darius and the Persians at Marathon in 490BC and against Xerxes’ assault on Athens in 480BC.

He’d seen the cruelty of man-to-man combat and felt the pain of watching his comrades die. A raging thirst for retributive vengeance would have been only natural. An eye for an eye. But that’s not what happened. Instead, in the year 458BC, he wrote a memorable trilogy dramatizing humanity’s need to bring cycles of bloodshed to an end.

Agamemnon and Troy

It took the form of allegory. And like most Greek dramas of the time its characters were drawn from myth and legend— especially Homer’s story of Agamemnon and the fall of Troy.

The background story was this. Before sailing across the Aegean to attack Troy, Agamemnon’s fleet had been held up for months by unfavourable winds. A god warned that only if Agamemnon made an offering and sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia would the weather improve and carry his ships across.

And lo! After cutting his daughter’s throat the wind picks up, he sails for Troy, spends ten years away—and returns (with new girlfriend Cassandra) to face his wife Clytemnestra. After a decade grieving for Iphigenia it was now Clytemnestra’s turn.

And it’s at this point in the story that Aeschylus begins a trilogy where against all likelihood the fateful alternating violence of a traditional feud leads finally to judicial process, to the hearing of evidence, to the authority of legal judgment, and to at least the beginnings of inter-tribal peace.

The trilogy

The first play, Agamemnon, shows Clytemnestra luring her long lost husband into the palace where she stabs him to death in his bath, gloating afterwards over the bloodstained sheets and windings.

For this act of vengeance she in turn must die, and in the second play, The Libation Bearers, her own son Orestes kills his mother for killing his father. Now the Furies pursue him, hounding him to his doom in Hades, and it seems that his own fate is sealed…

But it isn’t. Because in the third play of the trilogy, The Eumenides, Aeschylus brings in the goddess Pallas Athena to adjudicate. She fears that if this sort of thing goes on and on — exactly as it does today in Zimbabwe and elsewhere today — then the suffering will never cease.

She speaks of the frightening prospect of civil war. No-one wants that. Speaking as the goddess of wisdom Pallas Athena says enough is enough: at her court in Athens she will listen to rival arguments in what she calls “the first murder trial”, after which the aggrieved parties must abide by her decision. From that day on law and judicial process replaces vengeance. Juries replace Furies. It all ends with the pacification of the Furies themselves, who are turned from agents of the underworld into models of good citizenship… and Orestes lives.

From Draco to Cleisthenes

This poetic interpretation generalises a long evolutionary process by which Athenian law developed from the days of Draco (who was draconian), to the reforms of Solon (who was wise, and made a first attempt to deal with Athenian tribalism) to the reforms of Cleisthenes (who made a second attempt, and sought to establish equality before the law regardless of descent or heredity).

But the point is this: the Athenians saw an internal political problem that had to be fixed. And they proceeded to fix it constitutionally in ways that were a lesson for mankind. There had to be established procedures for reconciling sharply opposed interests within the state, and for preventing blood feuds getting out of control. Otherwise there’d be civil war and unending anarchy.

Why is it so hard to get this message accepted today in places like Zimbabwe? In Sri Lanka? In the Balkans? In the Middle East? If somebody still has her number, would they please call Pallas Athena again.

The concept of human rights goes back some two hundred years, but it reached its greatest glory in the second half of the 1970s. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had just been exiled from his country, and his striking figure adorned with a beard and handcuffs, hypnotized Western intellectuals sick with a longing for the great destiny that had been denied them.

It was only thanks to him that they started to believe, after a fifty-year delay, that in communist Russia there were concentration camps; even progressive people were now ready to admit that imprisoning someone for his opinions was not just…

Thanks to Solzhenitsyn human rights once again found their place in the vocabulary of our times; I don’t know a single politician who doesn’t mention ten times a day ‘the fight for human rights’ or ‘violations of human rights.’ But the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity, the more in loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone toward everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights.

The world has become man’s right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for friendship the right to friendship, the desire to exceed the speed limit the right to exceed the speed limit, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book the right to publish a book, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street. (Immortality, 1990)

Kundera’s cynicism is understandable. But it would be unfortunate if the excesses of human rights campaigners blinded us to the grim realities their doctrine originally sought to combat. Today I read in the newspaper about a 15-year-old Indian rape victim in the state of Madhya Pradesh. A dalit (untouchable), she had been burned alive for identifying her upper-caste Rajput assailant.

There are alas cultural systems that cannot cure their own ills, and India presents a prime example. Contra Kundera, the content in this case is all too hideously real. The simple truth is that for most dalit caste creates a hell on earth of unimaginable injustice. In places like India a transcendent ideal of human rights, above and independent of the national culture, is a beacon that keeps the hope of social and political improvement alive.