Quadrant March 2012 [http://www.quadrant.org.au/]

Mende Nazer

The movie I am Slave is as good as the book, from scenes of wild destruction as Arab horsemen seize 12-year-old Mende Nazer from her home in the Nuba Mountains, to the slave market in Khartoum, to her days of captivity in London. The story of a plucky young woman breaking away from years of Sudanese servitude to recreate herself as a free UK citizen is inspiring: we wish her well. It also provides a dramatic glimpse of one of the stranger fruits of British multiculturalism — a slave-trade bringing hundreds of captive African youngsters into the land of William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mende_Nazer)

This historic development is very odd. In fact it’s so odd it deserves the attention of someone who has thought long and hard about slavery, a person of broad culture and widely read, and ideally both a moral philosopher and of African background too. With such requirements it might seem hard to imagine anyone likely to qualify — hard even to know where to look. Yet there’s a man in the USA who exactly fills the bill: Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah. Born in London in 1954 before growing up in Ghana, Professor Appiah is a well-known Cambridge-educated figure who in the past has “published widely in African and African-American literary and cultural studies,” but is now, we are told, mainly concerned with “the philosophical foundations of liberalism” and “the connection between theory and practice in moral life.”

The Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Appiah is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations Democracy Fund, is currently Chair of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies, and even a cursory look at his long list of achievements reveals a serious mover and shaker in the U.S. liberal establishment today.  (http://appiah.net/biography/)

Slavery in theory and practice

Originally from Ghana, and now focused on “the connection between theory and practice in moral life”, could anyone be more suitable for bridging the world of surreptitiously smuggled African slave-children and higher academic thought? If anyone can explain to the Mende Nazers of the world what happened to them so violently and painfully in Africa, and why it is still happening to African children today, surely Kwame A. Appiah is the man. Though in the 2007 book Buying Freedom one soon discovers that the theory and practice of liberating slaves is no simple matter. Professor Appiah co-authored the Introduction, and his own essay toward the end — “What’s Wrong with Slavery?” — is one of a dozen contributions mainly concerned with the moral and economic perplexities of redeeming slaves by paying cash to slave-traders.

Those like Baroness Cox, in the UK, who forthrightly accept the practice, are opposed by others who claim that paying cash drives up the price of slaves, and increases slave-raiding. Paying cash should have that effect in theory, but whether it really does no-one is sure. Buying Freedom is a book with economic articles about the mathematics of “efficient competitive equilibrium,” on the one hand, and contributions from moral philosophers using words like “deontology” and “consequentialism” on the other. One might hope that despite all the fancy language there’s something here to help Africa’s slaves, but that is uncertain. Deontologically speaking, it seems we are duty bound to buy a slave’s freedom if we can; though some argue that this “commodifies” the human subject, while others point to a whole cascade of unfortunate unintended effects. A prudent man might keep his hands in his pockets and walk on by.

As for Appiah’s provocatively titled contribution, “What’s Wrong With Slavery?”, we learn that as a boy in Ghana he was at first told very little about the importance of slave trading to the traditional Asante (Ashanti) economy. Only later did he find that “the suppression of the slave trade began the period of Asante imperial decline, which was to end with final conquest by the British at the start of the twentieth century.” What he calls “the central moral questions” about liberating slaves are the author’s main concern, and he affirms that freedom comes first. But according to Appiah “freedom is not enough”. After the act of liberation we also have a duty to guarantee every freed slave respect, dignity, and both social- and self-esteem. While these are all good things, they seem to reflect wider political preoccupations than those of the ex-slaves themselves. You don’t read much of Mende Nazer’s story without realizing that her own priority was liberty — it’s right there in the title of the successful 2010 stage play about her life: “Slave: A Question of Freedom.”

*    *    *

After this Appiah goes off on a long divagation about the relative status of different kinds of Asante slaves. It seems there were five degrees of enslavement in the Asante Empire, hierarchy being the leading feature of a social milieu where minute grades of status make the Russian nomenklatura seem half-hearted. It’s not clear what Appiah thinks of this fact. Does he believe that ubiquitous bureaucratic order is the sign of an advanced and progressive state, and something to be proud of? Not all students of government administration feel this way. The world of the old-time Asante he describes is in fact a classical system of aristocratic rank and authority, in which everyone has a place and everyone is expected to keep it — a social order where what might be called “respect on demand” is vigorously enforced.

Appiah himself emphasizes that if you were lucky enough to be a Grade One Slave you couldn’t be sold, which is plainly good. Then he describes another degree in which the slave was really a kind of pawn — “but then a pawn was not strictly a possession either”, going on to claim that the relationship between slave and slave owner, though unequal, was better seen as “reciprocal” and that the slave had clear rights against his master. Only at the end of what reads like the usual anthropological apologia do we descend to the inglorious level of the Grade Four and Grade Five Slaves, Asante war captives and criminals whose fate was to be used for human sacrifice — though they might have to wait some weeks cooling their heels “until such time as it was deemed religiously auspicious to kill them.”

Human sacrifice

Latinate English prose is always useful for neutralising disagreeable facts, or veiling ugly realities, and the phrase “religiously auspicious” is a good example of this. In “What’s Wrong With Slavery?” Professor Appiah smoothly invites us to contemplate a world where sacrificial slaves uncomplainingly accept their fate as little more than a social convention. The scene portrayed is calm, formal, orderly, and safely ritualised. With a little imagination you might even be able to hear the victim imploring the executioner, “if His Majesty deems it religiously auspicious please take my head off now — delay is unnecessary.” Yet visitors to the region in days gone by (days as recent as the year 1900 in Appiah’s Ghana) suggest it wasn’t quite like that in the violent kingdoms of old West Africa, where capital punishment was a casual event and severed heads were part of the everyday scene.

In nearby Dahomey, in 1772, Robert Norris found the viceroy passing sentence on a woman who had accidentally started a fire in the market. “I requested that her life might be spared”, wrote Norris, and offered to purchase her as a slave. But the king had firmly made up his mind. Her head was to be “cut off and fixed upon a stake.” The victim’s small daughter ran up to her at this point, unaware of her mother’s situation, causing a brief diversion before the distressed woman was bludgeoned to death.

Also unmentioned by Professor Appiah are the disagreeable preliminaries Thomas Bowdich described. Bowdich was in the Asante kingdom for five months in 1817 and is usually regarded as a reliable, accurate, and racially unbiased observer. He was favourably impressed by much that he saw — the majestic deportment of the Asante king, the colour and magnificence of ceremonial life, the elegance of the women, and a style of dancing where “the man encircles the woman with a piece of silk…supports her round the waist, receives her elbows in the palms of his hands,” the two then performing “a variety of figures approximating, with the time and movement, very close to the waltz.”

Less attractive were the human sacrifices that immediately followed. “The drums announced the sacrifice of the victims… The executioners wrangled and struggled for the office: the nearest executioner snatched the sword from the others, the right hand of the victim was then lopped off, he was thrown down, and his head was sawed rather than cut off.” Bowdich writes of a typical victim en route to execution that “His hands were pinioned behind him, a knife was passed through his cheeks, to which his lips were noosed like the figure of 8; one ear was cut off and carried before him, the other hung to his head by a small bit of skin; there were several gashes in his back, and a knife thrust under each shoulder blade; he was led with a cord passed through his nose…the feeling this horrid barbarity excited must be imagined.”

Appiah’s quasi-ethnographic depiction of traditional Asante slavery, with sacrifices culturally authorised and occurring only when “religiously auspicious,” shows, some might say, a proper scholarly detachment. And perhaps it does. But it also displays the sort of empty legalism that mistakes rules for realities and forms for facts. When he tells us that reciprocity prevailed and that the luckier slaves even had “rights” against their owners, you would never guess that he is talking about a preliterate society without books, or writing, or written laws, or constitutional guarantees; a world with no independent judiciary, and no rational adversarial procedures for obtaining and testing evidence (though plunging the accused’s hand into boiling oil was thought a useful test); a world — if truth be told — perpetually subject to the whims and passions of powerful chiefs who ruled as much by terror as by consent. In the benign environment of Princeton it may seem plausible that the formal rights of West African slaves against their owners might actually have been enforceable. But you wouldn’t want to push your luck. My guess is that an Asante slave who stood on his rights would not be standing long.

“Moral revolutions” and slavery

According to the title of a recent book by the amiable Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal we live in The Age of Empathy, something he attributes to our warmly social hominid instincts. Also recently published is a book by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, arguing that the modern era has been one of moral progress accompanied by a steady decline in violence. It seems that what Norbert Elias called “the civilizing process” is nowadays on many minds, and Kwame A. Appiah’s 2010 book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, might be seen as broadly in the same vein. Taking an idiosyncratic view of moral and social progress, he sees national and social honour playing a key role in the outlawing of the duel, in the abandonment of Chinese foot-binding, in the abolition of slavery, and in the ongoing struggle by enlightened men and women in Islamic lands against the horror of “honour killings”. All these changes are what he calls “moral revolutions.”

Here we are only concerned with slavery and with Appiah’s treatment in Chapter Three, “Suppressing Atlantic Slavery” — a title that reveals a lot. Bear in mind that we’re dealing here with a persistent African problem, wondering what a prominent American liberal might usefully tell Mende Nazer about how and why she was enslaved in the 1990s. The judiciously inserted “Atlantic” however makes it clear that slavery as we find it in Africa today is not on the author’s agenda. With his gaze fixed firmly on the past, Professor Appiah is more comfortable writing about debates on abolition that took place in Westminster 200 years ago.

Nor does this moral philosopher feel obliged to comment on the inexplicably violent and cruel attitude to life and limb still found in many parts of the African continent, something as grossly visible in the atrocities of the Lord’s Resistance Army as in the sickening events shown in the 2008 French/Liberian docudrama Johnny Mad Dog. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/oct/22/johnny-mad-dog-review) Then when he defines slavery as “the subordination of one race by another”, entailing “the systematic subjection of black people to dishonour”, a self-serving assumption is exposed. It appears that the centuries-old enslavement of black people by black people, among the very West African societies he grew up in and presumably knows best — the same West African societies that started the “Atlantic” slave trade on its hideous course back in the 15^th century — will not be discussed. One might also ask why no moral questioning of slavery seems ever to have occurred spontaneously among the thinking members of West Africa’s aristocratic élite. But here the author is silent.

On not being dissed

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen is a curious book, hard to make sense of unless one radically changes the title. Appiah says he found the work of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend “fascinating” and that’s where he got the word revolution from. Lots of people have been fascinated by the word revolution — some still are — but it is not always appropriate, and is in this case downright misleading. The end of dueling, the end of foot-binding in China, the abolition of slavery, came from the incremental development of moral sentiments and legal reforms, as indeed is perfectly obvious from what Appiah writes about them himself. In fact the word revolution adds nothing but a false glamour to his argument. As for what we now see in Islamic lands regarding “honor killings”, the agonizingly slow process by which large male populations between Damascus and Kabul are reluctantly dissuaded from raping and murdering women they disapprove of — this is so far from being “revolutionary” that one wonders how any thoughtful man could use the term.

But it is the word “honour” that is most confusing here. Historically it often denoted noble sentiments rather than ignoble, acts and feelings toward the courageous end of the semantic spectrum. But right from the start it is clear that this is a book more about fear than about courage, more about chronic status anxiety than about positive and helpful beliefs, and that a better title might be Face-Saving: an Aspect of Moral Conduct — or more to the psychological point, The Importance of Not Being Dissed. In what appears to be a definitive statement on page 175 he writes, “Here, then, is the picture: Having honor means being entitled to respect. As a result, if you want to know whether a society has a concern with honor, look first to see whether people there think anyone has a right to be treated with respect.”

Anyone? This sounds a little strange. Surely most cultures treat most of their law-abiding members with respect? Dancing definitionally around his subject, with one step forward and two steps back, the author next finesses different kinds of respect and different forms of honour; but about all one can safely conclude is that when he writes “anyone has a right” what he really means is “everyone has a right” — an expansion intimating that respect, once a distinction freely accorded and freely received by free citizens, should in future become both indiscriminate and obligatory. It’s true that this presents the familiar prospect of an earthly paradise where all citizens are found to be equally valuable and equally loved. But whatever its transcendental merits (and we concede its religious appeal), as a secular ideal the right to indiscriminate respect makes no sociological sense whatever: it would produce an ethical landscape tending to anarchy.

Preventing anarchy is important. Indiscriminate respect is withheld in all known human societies for the very good reason that the distinction between good behavior and bad is the foundation of any permanent social order. Respect is accorded when deserved; esteem and dignity are won when socially acknowledged. That is how Mende Nazer’s Nuba in the Sudan normatively order their lives, as do hundreds of tribal peoples. That is also how modern civil society allows free individuals to autonomously win distinction — autonomy being a not insignificant theme in Appiah’s writing. But what our author is on about here is really something else, a kind of ethical overreach that extends the anxious concerns of modern identity politics from the collective to the individual, and is to be policed, one can only suppose, by the magistrates of a Guardian State. In the utopia he envisages we see the prospect of respect, dignity and esteem being incorporated into a set of universal legal entitlements enshrined as political rights.

Comparing the academic view with the ex-slave’s view is illuminating. A person of strong character and transparent integrity, and someone who has seen humanity at its worst, Mende Nazer doesn’t need the help of vigilantes from a Department of Social Ethics to claim respect on her behalf. In contrast, members of the academic elite excited by political grievance (in this case the dread possibility that somehow, somewhere, someone is not being treated with respect by someone else) assume that the state should intervene to realize their ambitions — for unless respect on demand is made mandatory how exactly is it to be achieved? In Professor Appiah’s case this preference seems reinforced by his connection with Ghana’s upper crust of high chiefs and grandly titled kings, an aristocratic world he feels comfortable with and whose approval is important to him. I can’t help wondering if he might have obtained a more realistic view of the ordinary human lot by spending some time, like Mende Nazer, as a slave.

“Morality is not enough”

The author of The Honor Code has written novels, and one way of trying to make sense of his book is to regard it as a highly digressive intellectual roman à thèse. The thesis is that “morality is not enough,” that honour is just as important in moral conduct as firm convictions about right and wrong, and that honour should in fact be preferred to both Christian commandments and Kantian imperatives. Appiah notes on page 181 that Kant himself said that honour “is not worthy of the highest respect, even where it happens to coincide with the common interest and with duty.” Appiah disagrees — but Kant is surely right. The main reason being that the psychological source of honour is inescapably atavistic, a part of our competitive biological nature shared with rutting stags and bellowing elephant seals. For that unhappy reason we find that throughout the animal kingdom it is invariably associated with bloodshed and aggression. A psychological aspect of defensive pride, it is often found with unmanageable levels of amour propre, and that’s why it erupts in violence nearly everywhere. In human affairs honour belongs today in the touchy, unstable, and tumultuous world of the “dissed”, resentfully looking for the respect they believe is their due.

We may agree that honour contains an emotional stimulus prompting men to act, and that it can be harnessed to moral goals. But it is also unavoidably relativistic (what is honourable for group X may be deeply dishonourable for groups Y and Z) and exactly what it prompts men to do can be very ugly indeed. The honour of a camorra boss in Naples may lead him to massacre an innocent family; the honour of an Islamic father may lead him to kill his own daughter; the honour of the Crips may require them to slaughter a bunch of rival Bloods at the smallest sign they’ve been dissed. From which the sensible conclusion is surely that honour is largely indifferent to moral conduct per se — other perhaps than the deeply ambiguous virtue of “solidarity” shared by tribes, sects, footballers, regiments, Mafiosi, and American street gangs. Indeed, one is bound to point out that the most conspicuous sociological example close at hand is in Los Angeles, where honour and a fierce determination not to be dissed leave the streets in some areas daily stained with gore. If you want to see the living social universe of honour, where “morality is not enough,” and where the passion for face-saving goes perpetually unassuaged, the territory of the Bloods and the Crips is where to look.

Not that Appiah is unaware of the conflict between a safe social morality and his theory. Far from it. Much of The Honor Code can be read as a perverse intellectual struggle between two schemes of moral guidance that he well knows are often opposed. Item: “Honour and morality are separate systems: they can be aligned… but they can easily pull in opposite directions”… Item: “…respect and esteem can be distributed by honour codes without any regard for morality…” Item: in Pakistan we are bound to “confront one of the dark sides of honour”. And so on. But although on one page he can be found freely admitting the paradoxes within his thesis he usually manages to ignore them on the next. An entire chapter on Islamic “honour killings” is presented, with gratuitously long novelistic sections about rape, violence, murder, and “murderous families”, all in the name of honour, without it seeming to be seriously understood, amidst all the confusion, that the implication of the very usage itself — “honour killings” — represents not only “the dark side” of the phenomenon, it tends to make an oxymoronic absurdity of the general argument.

How did Appiah’s moral revolutions really happen?

The phrasing of Appiah’s title — The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen — clearly implies universality. Honour is presented as a psychological constant in human affairs, and it follows from this that its unvarying action must also produce, universally, “moral revolutions” everywhere. Why doesn’t he pursue the implications of this view? Surely it is demeaning to the Rest (some might even say racist) to suggest that a universal process so necessary to the moral improvement of mankind failed to occur outside the West? Shouldn’t we also be looking for it in Teheran, in Tokyo, in Moscow, in Beijing? Not to mention West Africa too?

Yet the moral revolutions he writes about never began in any such places. And the reason is blindingly obvious to even a casual reader of his book. Despite colourful examples culled from a wide range of historical and literary sources, far and away the most powerful impulse driving the moral and legal reforms he discusses came from Western Europe, sometimes embodied in the historic teachings of the Catholic Church, sometimes prompted by the efforts of Christian missions in foreign lands, and invariably driven today by the challenging cultural example of the humanitarian tradition in Western Civilization as a whole. In this humane tradition honour killings are not acceptable. Although it seems he would rather die than admit that the West was ahead of the Rest, or give credit where credit is due, Appiah’s own pages present all the evidence we need.

The duel, he says, was preceded by something called “judicial combat”, a contest in which “gentlemen of the rank of squire and above could settle legal disputes by passage of arms.” The Church opposed this as early as the ninth century, in the person of Pope Nicholas I, and in 1563 the Council of Trent denounced “the detestable custom of duelling…” The author doesn’t push his argument about national or social honour being the real factor that brought the duel to an end (his last pages on the subject peter out with airy literary references to Disraeli, Yeats, and Evelyn Waugh). But surely an obvious question must be asked: isn’t it more likely that the sense of honour that so impresses this moral philosopher, and which is found so widely among the touchy and the dissed, has in fact served to perpetuate duelling — just as it perpetuates the grim world of homicidal affray among the Bloods and Crips in Los Angeles today?

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What about foot-binding? In deference to Chinese susceptibilities the author tries to make the most of whatever evidence exists of a native revolt against the practice. Because he declines to state outright that Western influence was the primary source of resistance to foot-binding, Appiah feels bound to try and find an explanation that flatters the moral insight and revolutionary potential of the Chinese people themselves. He points to the social role of an aroused late-19^th-century urban literati, and it is suggested that a 1828 novel by Li Ruzhen, Flowers in the Mirror, amounts to an early critique of foot-binding by a member of this class. Yet on the next page Appiah all-too-typically reverses direction, frankly admitting that “despite these early critics, the organized resistance begins only after the intrusions of the missionaries.”

Christian schools for girls began to be opened in the 1860s in many parts of the country. In Hangzhou, in the Yangtze River delta, the Church Mission opened a school for girls in 1867, which required “from the first,” as Mrs Archibald Little wrote, “that the feet of the girls should be unbound, and that they should not be compelled to marry against their own consent…” Similarly, when the Methodists opened a girl’s school in Beijing, they required all the girls to have their feet unbound.

Comment on the so-called moral revolution that abolished the slave trade is surely superfluous. The evangelical convictions of Wilberforce were fundamental, as were the activities of numerous other church groups, from the Quakers to Wesley’s Methodists to the Clapham Sect that devotedly fought to abolish the slave trade after 1750. But enough: from his own documentation it is amply clear that Appiah’s long-winded examination of honour as a source of his supposed “moral revolutions” is superfluous, distracting, and amounts to yet another artificial exercise. The more pages one turns the more obvious it becomes that whatever interest honour may have in the psychology of moral action, both as motive and consequence it exists on a decidedly lower plane than the ethical principles it may occasionally serve. As Kant understood very well.

Fine words not nearly enough

Of course it took more than the activities of church groups to abolish the slave trade. And more than the eloquence of parliamentarians and preachers. It took concerted military action on land and sea — though you won’t find much about that in Appiah’s account. The author of The Honor Code may have no taste for war, and have never held a gun in his hand, but he must know that the only reason West African slavery and human sacrifice were stamped out during the 19^th-century is that European colonial armies went in, conquered kingdoms incurably given to these practices, and brought them forcefully to an end.

Appiah makes occasional disapproving references to Sir Garnet Wolseley, and given his African background this is understandable. Wolseley was a soldier who didn’t mess about, and his 1874 campaign against King Kofi Kakari was ruthless in crushing the Asante armies, displacing the king, and burning the “charnel house” of the city of Kumasi to the ground. While General Wolseley strongly disapproved of slavery, he certainly didn’t march on Kumasi out of the pure goodness of his heart. As elsewhere in the region the military invasion of the Asante kingdom was meant to open it to trade with the coast, and to undercut such tribal peoples as the Itsekiri, “middlemen between the early European traders and the inhabitants of the hinterland”, a campaign that had gone on intermittently for many years. But you don’t need a degree in deontology to see that it helped the people of Ghana move on from sacrificial beheadings of slaves, however religiously auspicious, to entertainments of more general appeal.

Or does Appiah think the famous customs of Old Ashanti should have been kept as a living museum of the past, pristine and untouched? Does he imagine that if the Christian missions had been kept out, if Sir Garnet Wolseley had never existed, and if a sufficiently determined Anthropological Preservation Society had opposed all change, then internal war, slave raiding, human sacrifice, and cannibalism, might have been kept busily and bloodily alive right on down to the present day — the Age of Empathy and the International Court of Justice in the Hague?

The “reluctant cannibal” and moral theory

Whether or not it’s true that “there are no jokes in Islam” (a line we believe apocryphally attributed to the Ayatollah Khomeini), there is certainly little humour in Appiah’s world of respect on demand, instant dignity, and state-ordained esteem. So let’s try and lighten things up. It seems to me that as moral philosophers the British comedians Michael Flanders and Donald Swann look pretty good alongside the Ivy League professor, and when they sing their song about the “reluctant cannibal” who independently decides that “eating people is wrong” they raise serious issues for Appiah’s moral theory.

Recall first his doctrine that “morality is not enough.” And that individual convictions about right and wrong won’t do. Contemplating our reluctant cannibal (let’s call him Jim) we see a man who on his own initiative stands flatly opposed to his anthropophagous fellows. They all think eating people is right and proper: the rump steaks are tasty, fried fingers are a local delicacy, while human goulash is a popular regional dish. But when they invite Jim round for dinner he pushes his plate away and pulls back from the table in disgust. Jim thinks differently, feels differently, and most important of all has radically different moral convictions.

His companions indignantly assure him that they have always eaten people and there’s nothing wrong with it. They warn him — to borrow Appiah’s own formulation — that by his wilfully eccentric behaviour he will be “systematically subjecting all anthropophagous people to dishonour.” With angry tears in their eyes they emphasize that eating people is not just desirable, it is a duty, and that refusing to do so will bring his family into the worst kind of disrepute. But Jim isn’t one of those who live in fear of being dissed; his self-esteem is secure; he takes it for granted that a rule against eating people is both good enough for him and good enough for everyone. He thinks “the only thing that deserves full respect is doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do” — as Appiah ridicules the Kantian procedure he disapproves. But such ridicule is wasted on Jim. The right thing to do is embodied in a simple rule: Don’t Eat People. Jim’s a Kantian through and through.

*    *    *

There must be a thousand books about Wilberforce and Granville Sharp, and whole libraries devoted to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. We don’t need more. What we need now — and which we cordially propose as Professor Appiah’s next project — is an explanation of why no spontaneous moral revolution against slavery ever happened in sub-Saharan Africa. It may be this will require setting aside our reverence for exotic cultures, restraining our admiration for West African bronzes, and curbing our enthusiasm for ways of life and being not our own. But diplomatic evasion can’t go on forever: looking African facts squarely in the face will have to be done sooner or later if we are to make sense of Mende Nazer’s world, and as we’ve already suggested, nobody is better qualified for the task than Professor Appiah himself.

It happens that in 1826 a British governor on the Gold Coast, Sir Charles MacCarthy, was defeated in battle by the Asante, who cut out his heart, ate it, and made his skull into a much admired drinking vessel for the king back in Kumasi. In the splendour of his royal court the Asante monarch is said to have been advised by many wise counsellors, but you can’t help wondering how wise this was. After decades of British debate about the slave trade in which the Asante themselves were heavily involved, and only seven years before Westminster voted to abolish slavery itself, was no-one thinking how news of this event would play in England, or how the honour of the Asante kingdom might take a hit? According to Appiah’s revolutionary scenario, in which pride plays a crucial part, the national shame of being associated with such a happening should have led sensitive Asante toward radical moral change, a course that might with encouragement have led to a Kumasi Anti-Slavery Convention — even to a Benin Bill of Rights. Some will say this was altogether too much to expect.  But didn’t anyone think that making a beer stein out of the governor’s head was in doubtful taste?

The comic possibilities are endless. Yet for people like Mende Nazer it’s no laughing matter. It is largely because no moral revolution against sundry insalubrious customs ever happened in Africa that more than 200 years after the British abolition of the slave trade Africa still practices slavery. As a result, what amounts to an uncivilizing process is now flourishing on Europe’s fringes. For that is what the modern slave trade represents — the trade that trapped a 12-year-old girl in the Sudan and has doomed hundreds more African youngsters from elsewhere. This also relates to Appiah’s respectful anthropological account of the several grades of domestic servitude and patriarchal subordination in traditional West African society, grades blandly euphemised by apologists as “our regional family culture,” and that all too easily collapse into subjection and brutality.

Books take time to write, and no doubt we shall have to wait a year or two. But we look forward to learning from Professor Appiah why there was no spontaneous African push for abolition. It will certainly be of interest to the hundreds of Mende Nazers smuggled as slaves from Africa into England today.

Note: This essay is an expanded version of “The Slave Girl and the Princeton Professor,” first posted here on 22 October 2011.

Sources

Link for play about Mende Nazer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWLBxvl_yss
Mende Nazer website: http://www.mendenazer.org/
Slave, by Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis. Perseus USA 2003
The History of Dahomy, by Archibald Dalzel. Frank Cass UK 1967 (1793)
Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, by T. Edward Bowdich. John Murray UK 1819
Buying Freedom, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martin Bunzel. Princeton USA 2007
The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Norton USA 2010
The Fall of the Asante Empire, by Robert B. Edgerton. The Free Press USA 1995

New ways of trying to understand the Middle East are being wheeled out almost every day. From Francis Fukuyama comes Praetorian Realism, an acknowledgment of Samuel Huntington’s scenario for imposing order on civil chaos in modernizing lands. (“Political Order in Egypt”, The American Interest, May/June 2011.) From Robert Springborg and Clement M. Henry comes Matrix Realism, similarly emphasizing the army’s role in the institutional arrangements of the Arab states. (“Army Guys”, The American Interest, May-June 2011.) In this expansive intellectual climate, with its growing range of options, perhaps there’s room for one more. Let’s call it Tribal Realism, the aim being to bring anthropological insights to bear on our political prospects abroad.

Tribal Realism should have a number of practical applications, but its immediate goal would be to vet Western political speeches carefully deleting all references to “the people” of Libya, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. It will then try to decompose this popular collective noun into its actual constituent parts. Admittedly, removing such a warmly democratic term as “the people” will make a sizeable hole in the prevailing rhetoric, exposing speech-writers for assorted presidents and prime ministers to a pressing need for workable replacements, but the benefits should outweigh the costs.

For one thing, it will expose the enemy too. From his Bedouin tent Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has said he wouldn’t dream of harming “his people” — let alone shooting and shelling them — and he undoubtedly means it. Correctly understood, however, Gaddafi’s people are, first, his family consisting of his wives and children; next, his clan; then, his tribe; and finally, by a no doubt deplorable process of geographical attenuation, those tiny insignificant figures in the direction of Benghazi who hardly count at all.

Once this meaning of “the people” of Libya is grasped, we will see that Gaddafi is telling the truth. In the Colonel’s ethical universe those who deserve his exclusive concern are the men and women he regards as kin: in contrast, that unruly rabble further east may legitimately be hunted down, wherever they’re hiding, and mercilessly killed. That is what desert chieftains have historically done when they could. That is what men like Gaddafi see it as their duty to do. And that is what his numerous dependents — “his people” — expect him to do.

We might reserve the role of resident Tribal Realist and vetter of speeches for Robin Fox, University Professor of Social Theory at Rutgers, and a man who has made the study of kinship, clans and the mental world of tribalism a lifetime speciality. His newest book, The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind (Harvard, 2011) is an exciting synthesis of earlier work like the anthropological classic Kinship and Marriage (1967) and his latest wide-ranging thoughts. In a way reminiscent of the breadth of Charles Hill’s recent masterpiece Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, Fox ranges from a discussion of the Ten Commandments to an analysis of the great warrior epics and Sophocles’ King Oedipus, from incest taboos and the myth of Isis and Osiris to the ambiguous nature of “human rights,” from the plot of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights to Karl Popper’s thoughts on the desirability of “open” rather than “closed” societies. But his most topical and provocative comments are found in a chapter entitled “The Kindness of Strangers: Tribalism and the Trials of Democracy.”

Unkind Strangers

Fox begins this chapter by describing New York Times columnist John Tierney’s bafflement, in September 2003, upon discovering that the lavish weddings regularly taking place in his Baghdad hotel were mostly marriages of first cousins who were the children of brothers. Questioned about this practice, the young people told Tierney, “Of course we marry a cousin. What would you have us do, marry a stranger? We cannot trust strangers.” That, as others might have told him, is what marrying in low-trust cultures lacking effective central authority often entails. After presenting a similar example from Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, Fox writes of a scene in David Lean’s 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia. A British agent tells the tribal chieftain Aouda that he should attack the Turks in Aqaba for the sake of “the Arabs.” “Who are these Arabs?” the chieftain asks. After reciting the names of some of the tribes he knows, Aouda demands to be told exactly what tribe “the Arabs” consist of that he should risk his men’s lives on their behalf. Fox comments, bringing all this to bear on Iraq today, “Thus some of the sheiks in Anbar province will ally with the Americans against al-Qaeda and its allies if it suits them. But their and Aouda’s sole concern is with their tribal advantage. This was Aouda’s highest moral imperative.”

Fox knows what Tierney and most other educated Americans apparently do not: that tribal communities are the default system of human social nature. Humanity evolved that way for millennia after leaving behind the hunting-and-gathering band stage of social life. Many of the world’s diverse societies have since moved on toward becoming modern states, but not all of them have. And even for those that have, the shadowy emotional residues of the distant past remain; we never lose anything in evolution but instead add new developments to older ones. That is Fox’s central idea and the theme running through The Tribal Imagination.

It is also a truth, he believes, that we ignore at our peril as we go stumbling about in strange far away places where tribes rule with an authority denied the more-or-less absent state. And the pride and latent violence of groups of mutually suspicious kindred must be the starting point, Fox says, for anyone venturing into this political landscape. Such men and women are not the free individual citizens of a recognized territorial jurisdiction; nor are they people with clearly defined and defensible legal rights vis-à-vis the state — whether in Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan.

This truth, Fox argues, sheds a harsh light on instances when our leaders make claims about human nature and the natural state of human society as justifications for political action, armed intervention included. These leaders, he suggests, simply refuse to understand the essentially tribal nature of the lands they hope to remake. They are reluctant to grasp that:

there is no ‘Iraqi People’. The phrase should be banned as misleading and purely rhetorical… What is not understood is that Iraq, like the other countries of the region, still stands at a level of social evolution where the family, clan, tribe and sect command major allegiance. The idea of the individual autonomous voter, necessary and commonplace in our own systems, is relatively foreign.

Numerous unforeseen events during the Iraq occupation have demonstrated the priority of tribal authority. When men came out and stole copper wire connecting hospitals to the electricity grid, indignant US soldiers tried to make the thieves see that their actions would hurt “the Iraqi People.” True to form, the thieves responded just as Aouda had a hundred years before. Who were these “Iraqi people,” they wanted to know, whose claims outranked the claims of their own needy relatives? The thieving clansmen felt no responsibility for some mythical collectivity called “the people” that, as far as they knew, didn’t include them, and that had been invented by foreigners without their approval. In contrast, they were absolutely bound to help their kin: those cousins who were also, in some cases, their own spouses.

To realistically understand the world of kinship obligations and tribal authority, Fox argues, one must first understand both history and social evolution. The domestication of homo sapiens and his living arrangements has been a very drawn-out affair, and requires a better grasp of tribal life than whatever the parents of a Baghdad bride or bridegroom might say to a passing journalist: namely, that strangers are not to be trusted, and that it is considered the only safe way of obtaining a virgin bride. While these passing remarks do tell us something, a deeper understanding of parallel-cousin marriage must be historical.

Fox writes that in the Middle East this institution probably originated in the desert-nomad stage of Semitic society when the patrilineal and patrilocal (descent through males, residence with the father) bands of Arab Bedouin wandered isolated in the desert, and when all other bands were potential enemies. They married within their own band, their own clan, their own tribe. Even among the settled Bedouin this was maintained, because it kept wealth and property inside the lineage. Outsiders were unmarriageable. This social arrangement represented a form of tribalism, moreover, that protected the individual “from the worst ravages of both neighbors and strangers. This includes the ravages of the predatory state organization that exists only for its own benefit and thrives on the plundering of its subjects.”

Social Evolutionist

Passionate, restless, curious, and intellectually driven, Robin Fox was born in 1934 in West Yorkshire. His soldier father was decorated for service in India on the North West Frontier, and the strong Empire, King, and Country sentiments of his parents helped make him some kind of conservative from an early age — the story is told in his autobiographical Participant Observer. This background may also have stimulated an interest in kinship well before settling into anthropology as a vocation. When contrasting social theories about incest taboos came up in conversation, most people he met at the time favored Freud over Westermarck, the late-19^th-century Swedish-speaking Finn and pioneer of social evolutionary thought. Fox adopted Westermarck’s theory because it was more commonsensical (a natural aversion underlined by a cultural rule) and because it put him squarely in opposition to the majority. Checking out the full range of theoretical solutions that had been suggested for the subject, he says it took him “only a few Popperian minutes to dump the lot.” It seemed self-evident even then that Westermarck was right, not Freud.

At the London School of Economics he joined the students’ Conservative Society at a time when Hayek was there, and Karl Popper, and Michael Oakeshott as well. In the 1950s the ethos of the LSE after Harold Laski still remained one of “determined, earnest, Fabian socialism.” As a student Fox hugely enjoyed being against all that. The year 1956 brought political distractions. He briefly found himself allied with the Left on Suez, chanting “No war in Egypt! Eden must go!” at a demonstration, and tangling with police. Soon after this fugitives from Hungary arrived, among them a student from some grey Institute for Marxism-Leninism, and Fox helped relocate him in England. The young man explained that his previous study had been “Proletarian Philosophy.” Asked what he wanted to do now he was in England he replied “Go to Oxford University.” Asked next what he wanted to study at Oxford he said “Bourgeois Philosophy.” No worries, thought his British interviewer, he’d do fine…

“God bless the USA! So large, so friendly, and so rich!” So sang the English poet W. H. Auden en route to California, and Robin Fox felt much the same way alighting in his own academic Promised Land. An ethnographic foray into New Mexico got him thinking about matrilocal marriage (where men moved in to live with their wives’ families) and he was pleased to meet members of an actual Fox clan in Cochiti. But maths was always a worry and when he attended a seminar on the componential analysis of Zuni kin terms, and was asked by the Chairman of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, Clyde Kluckhohn, if he would like to comment, he said “No. I didn’t understand a word of it.”

There was a silence, a collective gasp, then a spontaneous burst of laughter and a round of applause. No-one in the thirty-year history of the lecture series had ever made such an admission… You never said you didn’t understand: this was status death.

Even harder to understand than componential analysis was the American infatuation with anthropological “culture”. In America culture was king. There were presumably at least some Americans who understood Darwin’s remark “Origin of man now proved… He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke”, but they were thin on the ground at Harvard. There, understanding human behavior meant understanding the kaleidoscopic variety of cultural rules. Whole courses (whole degrees and entire careers) could be built around minutely interpreting exotic details of ritual, conduct, and belief. But as for taking seriously a systematic comparison of the social behavior man shares with his fellow primates, or the universals we share behind all the cultural dazzle, forget it.

Of course the anatomical evolution of all those apes was recognized and accepted: the shared skeletal elements were inescapable. But Fox noted that human social behavior, especially its more tribal aspects, was somehow exempted from this rubric. Anthropological “culture” was in the USA a sanctified, autonomous, and purely human invention. Out of the air (not the genes) a numinous cloud of symbols and meanings and shapes to be delightedly scrutinised according to this or that intellectual scheme. In contrast, Fox saw human society as biosocial, and human social behavior as indissolubly linked to the social behavior of our primate kin. Back in England for a while he got to know Desmond Morris (author of The Naked Ape and “a chubby, balding, ebullient, bright man — a kind of animated Humpty Dumpty”) who was curator of mammals at the London Zoo. Morris encouraged Fox to take on the whole topic of inbreeding/incest and its controls, both among mammals generally and in human society.

Then Fox met Tiger. Intellectually it was a marriage made in heaven. Lionel Tiger said that “male bonding” was a behavioural inheritance from the days when our early ancestors made the evolutionary transition to hunting. You had to have this bond to successfully hunt and fight; it was part of “the biological substrate of human behavior.” From the day of their meeting the two anthropological soul-mates hunted together, drank together, and sometimes wrote together. Their arrival at Rutgers after the department of anthropology was relaunched by Fox in 1967 planted fresh and challenging ideas in American academic soil, some of them for the first time. In 1970 The Imperial Animal, by Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, became an intriguing title in university catalogues.

Lévi-Strauss and Ernest Gellner

The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind is dedicated “to the memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) and Ernest Gellner (1925-1995). The Gellner dedication is to a man whose ideas about social and political evolution are broadly congruous with Fox’s own. The Lévi-Strauss dedication is more complicated, since the French sage’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship is dogmatically opposed to Fox’s evolutionary account, and indeed to any kind of historical explanation at all. On page 142 Lévi-Strauss forthrightly asserts that “We have been careful to eliminate all historical speculation, all research into origins, and all attempts to reconstruct a hypothetical order in which institutions succeeded one another.” Westermarck’s “familiarity” explanation for human incest avoidance was anathema to Lévi-Strauss: agreeing with Freud, he was convinced that we are all sexually attracted to close kin.

Lévi-Strauss went even further — he believed that Culture is to Nature as Rules are to Chaos. According to Lévi-Strauss the rules prohibiting incestuous relations were not only an “intrusion into nature”: by saying “no” to nature (in accord with his view that we are naturally sexually attracted to close kin and really want to say “yes”), they are foundational. For Lévi-Strauss incest taboos established the Nature/Culture distinction as not only basic but sacred.

But is animal behavior chaotic? Are there no regularities to be found among other primates that both anticipate and parallel our cultural rules, including the incest taboo? Fox thought there were, and his 1983 The Red Lamp of Incest became an authoritative study. He had by then already argued for some time that Lévi -Strauss confused rules with order. It was, he said, a re-run of an older muddle. “If you’re going to make that kind of mistake you are back to the old ‘law of nature’ and ‘law as edict’ confusion again.”

Chimps did not have rules. But they did have order — the regularities observed by primatologists. From a comprehensive 2008 study by Bernard Chapais (Primeval Kinship, described by Fox in The Tribal Imagination as “a brilliant recent account of incest avoidance, in-laws, and social origins”), it is clear that whatever Lévi -Strauss and his followers may have thought, Westermarck’s ideas have finally won the day. In some anomalous or pathological circumstances incest can occur (Egyptian royal marriage; enslavement in an Austrian cellar), but for most of humanity most of the time it doesn’t. Nor are legal edicts required. Sometimes discussed under the psychological rubric of “imprinting”, Westermarck’s theory suggested that close and prolonged childhood association led to spontaneous sexual aversion in adulthood. Fox agreed: “Familiarity did not only breed contempt, it did not breed at all.”

Back to the Baghdad Hotel

On this matter Lévi -Strauss was perverse, but his surpassing brilliance wins him the honor of being a dedicatee in The Tribal Imagination all the same. His exposition of the way human kinship rules work to ensure we marry out of the natal group powerfully stimulated Fox’s own interpretation. The distinguished member of the Académie Française was wrong to think there was no continuity between Nature and Culture. But he was right to emphasize an important difference between the behavioural routines of apes and men — a difference encapsulated by Fox as follows: while primates have kin, they do not have in-laws.

Unpacking this highly condensed formulation reveals a whole range of connected evolutionary phenomena: the dispersal of animal populations, the need for genetic variability, and the origin of language, the last enabling social structures to form in time and space among men and women who have never seen each other and in some cases never will. Other primates don’t do this, and here Lévi-Strauss was dead right. The uniquely human cultural fact that arose was something new: not (as he thought) the avoidance of incest — that was widespread among primates — but “the enduring relationship between natal kin separated by marriage but linked by kinship, by descent from a common ancestor…”

All mammals ensure genetic variability through population dispersal. Fox argues that this goes all the way back to “the emergence of self-replicating matter, and the crucial revolution that produced sex to replace cloning”. Sexual reproduction, plus dispersal, spontaneously produces the genetic variability natural selection needs to work on. If mammalian populations did not disperse, “close inbreeding resulted in a loss of such variability, hence mechanisms evolved to avoid it.” At the same time too great a dispersal — so great that separated bands lost contact with each other — meant that beneficial features might be lost. So it is that “organisms breed out to avoid losing variability, but not so far out that they dissipate genetic advantages.” Not too close, but not too far; that was the evolutionary Golden Rule.

Which brings us back to what was going on in that Baghdad hotel. In human terms, the Darwinian imperatives of dispersal, variability, and natural selection eventually produced a social world in which marriage with cousins was preferred. Historically, that’s how it has been in most traditional preindustrial societies until quite recently. And for Fox it is an integral part of the tribal default system of humanity everywhere.

Civilized men, tribal minds

The true originality of The Tribal Imagination lies in the author’s exploration of the historical and literary consequences of these facts. For the stories mankind tells itself about its own origins in creation myths repeatedly echo a primeval conflict between the bonds uniting kin, on the one hand, and the evolutionary need to marry out on the other — to divide the primal unity, to socially separate, to genetically disperse. Often the original bonded creators were brother and sister, like Osiris and Isis. “For the Egyptians, as for the Greeks and Teutons, a series of sibling marriages characterized the early history of the gods.” For ordinary mortals this was forbidden. But although brothers and sisters cannot marry (a near-universal human rule), their children not only can but often should. And in the commonly prescribed marriage of a brother’s daughter and sister’s son (more common than the Arab union of brother’s daughter and brother’s son) the centrifugal tendency of parents marrying “out” is balanced by the centripetal tendency of children marrying “in.”

This is the original atom of kinship from which a wide range of marital, procreative, and residential patterns throughout the world derive. It is also a source of continually repeated tensions and conflicts that humanity dramatises in its myths, legends and art — conflicts originating in the one between the illegitimate primordial pair of brother and sister and the legitimate outsiders (those strangers always regarded with suspicion) as marriage partners. Fox’s analysis of literary narratives leads to conclusions that are often surprising: What was the true sin of Oedipus? (Was it really incest?) What was the real conflict in Thebes involving Antigone? (Was it really individual vs. state?) “How do the descendants of Adam through Seth foretell the problem of democracy in Iraq and question the Westermarck effect? Does the story of Lot and his daughters reflect a demographic problem in evolution?” These questions are answered in successive chapters — ‘Tribal Norms and Civilized Narratives,’ ‘Ancient themes in Modern Literature,’ and ‘Tribal Bonds in Warrior Epics.’

But it was in his powerful reinterpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone that Fox had earlier set out the problem we face today, when a dose of Tribal Realism is sorely needed — the problem of clashing systems of authority and allegiance: of kinship versus the state. In “The Virgin and the Godfather: Kinship Law versus State Law in Greek Tragedy and After” (Reproduction and Succession, 1989) he radically alters our usual understanding of the play. And he begins with a quotation about the clash of kinship and authority from his own book Kinship and Marriage that is worth reproducing here:

The war between kinship and authority is alive in legend. In story and fantasy kinship struggles against bureaucratic authority, whether of church or state. It undermines, it challenges, it disturbs. The Mafia constantly fascinates because ‘the family’ demands total loyalty and provides total security. When the state fails to protect, people look longingly at the certainty of kinship.

Fox regards the European habit of viewing society as a loose aggregate of autonomous individuals as a barrier to understanding. It prevents us seeing the truth of Ernest Gellner’s argument in Muslim Society that under Islam “the individual acts toward the state essentially through the mediation of his kin group.” It equally prevents us seeing that in Ancient Greece (meaning the Greece of legend that long preceded the reforms of Cleisthenes and the rationalistic speculations of Plato and Aristotle), both autonomous individuals and the state itself were problematic.

To illustrate the point, Fox contrasts Sophocles’ dramatization of the issues with the issues themselves. In the play, the figures of Antigone and Creon individuate what are essentially collective matters. As Greek drama increasingly emphasized character, and the merely histrionic, the theatrical roles of individuals became inflated. But this should not deceive us as to the political point and meaning of the enterprise overall. In Antigone, Fox argues, the leading roles of Antigone and Creon are synechdochic: they stand for issues much larger than themselves. In the case of Antigone it is the inescapable kinship obligation to bury her brother the dead Polynices; in the case of Creon it is his demand that the body instead be left exposed.

Those who see this as a conflict between a passionate individual conscience and the state, says Fox, mistake style for substance. What is at stake for Antigone are divinely ordained sacred claims of kinship, eternally linking her ancestors to the born and the unborn for generations to come. What is at stake for Creon is more like an arbitrary municipal ordinance issued by a local chief whose amour propre seems to be running out of control. Creon almost hysterically invokes his “will” as if this alone were a self-sufficient certificate of legitimacy. But is he even a bona fide ruler? Or are his actions those of the chiefly leader of an embryonic and still insecure state formation where he may indeed call himself a king, but is perhaps better seen as the apex of an unstable confederation of tribes? And doesn’t all this sound familiar? Not unlike, indeed, the code of pashtunwali standing against the pretensions of the Kabul Karzais.

[Originally in The American Interest, July/August 2011 www.The-American-Interest.com]

[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.

What’s with The Arabian Nights? How can we explain the lasting attraction of the mysteriously medieval East? The djinns? The camels? The metamorphoses? The alluring houris in dove-grey veils? Or could it be for some readers the vision of exquisitely delayed beheadings — so unlike the rude explosions of roadside bombs?

Whatever and however, in the 1820s young Benjamin Disraeli found The Arabian Nights an enchanting alternative to his life as a London law clerk — and he wanted out. Escaping from Swain, Stevens, Maples, Pearce and Hunt, and inspired by tales of Scheherazade, this dandified young man headed east where he dressed up as a pirate in “blood-red shirt, with silver studs as big as shillings,” and a sash stuffed with pistols and daggers. That was on a boat sailing from Malta to Corfu.

Then in 1839 Austen Henry Layard followed Disraeli’s example. With a travelling companion he too fled eastward, escaping both his uncle’s law office and his aunt’s literary salons. Only after crossing France and Italy, and reaching the shores of the Adriatic, did he feel able to fill his lungs and breathe freely at long last. In the company of another adventurer named Edward Ledwich Mitford, (Layard was 22, his companion Mitford 32) the two men planned to walk and ride all the way to India and Ceylon. But already as they rode along south of Trieste they could feel the grey burden of England lifting — and their spirits did too. Writing about it Layard told how delighted they were by the beauty of the Dalmation countryside in late summer, “and with the picturesque costumes of the peasantry, which seemed to increase in gorgeousness as we went south and approached the land of the Ottoman.”

Montenegro 1839 — a whiff of things to come

Austen Henry Layard, by William Brockedon

Their next stop was Montenegro. Layard tells in his Autobiography how they had received a letter from Montenegro’s leading chieftain, or Vladika, that “courteously invited” them not merely to visit but to stay with him in his palace at Cetinje. To ensure their safety the chief had sent horses and guards to escort his guests — “four savage but fine-looking fellows… presented themselves at our lodging. They each carried a long gun, and were armed to the teeth with pistols, yataghans, and knives.” These accoutrements added a spice of danger. Could they really be just ornamental? Or were they meant for serious use? But whatever the two young Englishmen made of this daunting arsenal they were entirely unprepared for what came into view at the palace. There “a circle of forty-five gory Turkish heads were stuck on poles, trophies from a battle the previous week.” For the last seven days they had been ripening outside the window of what became Layard’s sleeping quarters during his stay.

The Vladika (the combined prince-bishop of Montenegro) was a poet, and a man fond of learning and literature. He was delighted to find his English guests were too. It galled him that German newspapers had praised the courage of the King of Saxony, who had visited Montenegro in the course of a botanical excursion, for venturing into “the territory of a barbarous, sanguinary, and perfidious race”. This was simply untrue, he protested, pointing to a sign of his own civilized taste — the billiard table he had recently installed — but one fine day while he and Layard were chalking their cues they were interrupted by a clatter of hooves outside, with much shouting and firing of guns. Some Montenegrin warriors had been on a foray into Turkish territory and had returned with a present for their leader. Layard writes in his Autobiography:

They carried in a cloth, held up between them, several heads which they had severed from the bodies of their victims. Amongst these were those apparently of mere children. Covered with gore, they were a hideous and ghastly spectacle. They were duly deposited at the feet of the Prince, and then added to those which were already displayed…

Then and later Layard’s political sympathies were with the Turks. Russian despotism was the main enemy: the Sultan, however decadent his administration, deserved British help resisting it. This accorded with long-term British policy that saw the Ottoman Empire as a necessary bulwark against Russian expansion to the south. Yet the trophies on display outside the palace in Cetinje must surely have given pause — must have provided at least some sense of leaving behind not only the London law office he despised, but law itself; of having crossed a frontier separating civilization from the tribal past.

Not long ago Samuel P. Huntington pointed to the fault-lines dividing cultures, and on page 159 of his well-known book he provides a map of “The Eastern Boundary of Western Civilization”. Running southward from the Russian shores of the White Sea, it bisects a number of countries in Eastern Europe before passing through Montenegro to end in the Adriatic. Layard was on his way to Mosul in Mesopotamia, and the unearthing of the Assyrian remains of Nimrud and Nineveh that would be forever associated with his name. Both in antiquity, and in the 1840s, he would discover there a markedly cavalier attitude toward both human life and human heads — especially in the region we now call Iraq.

Enter The Arabian Nights

A paradox was becoming obvious. On the one hand picturesque peasants, colourful textiles, novel dishes to whet the appetite, followed by exciting music and dance. On the other, grisly customs and diabolical politics. For romantic aesthetes the discovery that in tribal societies the appealing and the appalling are often inseparable always comes as a disappointing surprise. In Layard’s case, one wonders how such an exceedingly cultured young Englishman understood so little — less indeed than ordinary German newspaper readers might expect to know in 1840 — about the ‘barbarous, sanguinary, and perfidious’ political customs east of Huntington’s line? In short, knew so little about lands, unlike his own, where life is cheap and where both civil and civilised law is thin on the ground.

His formal education had been patchy, and his childhood experience of various schools in England and on the continent had been miserable. Tri-lingual, in France he was tormented for being English; in England he was persecuted as a “frog”. He was only truly happy in Florence, where the family went for nine years hoping that a change in climate would restore the health of his asthmatic father Peter. It was in Italy that Peter Layard took his son to galleries where he learned to appreciate the Masters, and it was there the boy first read Shakespeare, Spenser, and Ben Jonson. But these proved of minor interest — he was spellbound by something else.

“The work in which I took the greatest delight,” he wrote, “was ‘The Arabian Nights’.” In their apartment within the Rucellai Palace, the Layard family home in Florence, “I was accustomed to spend hours stretched upon the floor, under a great gilded Florentine table, poring over this enchanting volume. My imagination became so much excited by it that I thought and dreamt of little else but ‘djinns’ and ‘ghouls’ and fairies and lovely princesses, until I believed in their existence…” Moreover, he adds, “My admiration for ‘The Arabian Nights’ has never left me. I can read them now (he was writing this late in life) with almost as much delight as I read them when a boy. They have had no little influence upon my life and career; for to them I attribute that love of travel and adventure which took me to the East, and led me to the discovery of the ruins of Nineveh.” [For more on his youth and boyhood see also Young Layard of Nineveh]

Layard’s sympathy for the Turkish cause was not unique. On the same voyage that found him sailing so splendidly dressed between Malta and Corfu, Benjamin Disraeli tried to help Turkey suppress a rebellion in Albania. His biographer Robert Blake tells us that the revolt was over before Disraeli was ready, but that he nevertheless went to Janina in north-western Greece “to congratulate Reshid Pasha, the Grand Vizier, who was in command of the Turkish army.” Disraeli was both a friend of Layard’s uncle Benjamin Austen, and a regular visitor to his aunt Sara’s salons. He wrote excitedly to Austen: “For a week, I was in a scene equal to anything in the Arabian Nights. Such processions, such dresses, such cortèges of horsemen, such caravans of camels!”

In Constantinople he found “the meanest merchant in the Bazaar looks like a Sultan in an Eastern fairy tale”, adding in another letter to Austen that “All here is very much like life in a pantomime or Eastern tale of enchantment, which I think very high praise.” In the opinion of Gordon Waterfield, author of the biographical Layard of Nineveh, Disraeli’s thrilling stories about his travels in the 1830s influenced Layard as much as the tales in the Arabian Nights itself: both encouraged romantic dreams of the East — an aesthetic vision that far outweighed any political misgivings.

Only a short time after the grim experience of Montenegro, having crossed into Turkish Albania and arrived at the city of Scutari (modern Shkodër), Layard was enthusing about the colourful life of an eastern bazaar. He was pleased to find that the dress and manners of European civilization “had scarcely penetrated into the realm of Islam” and that he felt he had at last passed into “a world of which I had dreamt from my earliest childhood.” Once more he sees the ferocious weaponry men habitually carry, not as a symptom of lawlessness, or the absence of civil society, but as largely decorative. In fact he treats it on much the same level as cuisine. In the bazaar he is delighted to encounter

The jaunty Albanian with his white fustanella and his long gun resplendent with coral and silver, his richly inlaid pistols and his silver-sheathed yataghan, the savoury messes in the cook’s shops… etc.

Layard in Bakhtiari Dress

From Constantinople he sent a letter to his Aunt Louisa that might have come from Disraeli himself: “With this place I am much delighted. It even exceeds any description I have seen. The imagination could not picture a site more beautiful as that occupied by Constantinople. In the hands of any other European Power it would have been the strongest city in the world; in the hands of the Turks it has become the most picturesque.” The costumes of the Dalmation peasantry are picturesque; the city of Constantinople is picturesque. It also became necessary for this fugitive from a London solicitor’s office to proclaim his new identity in a suitably picturesque way. Two of the most commonly reproduced portraits of Layard as a young man show him “in Albanian Dress”, by W. H. Phillips, and “in Bakhtiari dress”, a watercolour painted in Constantinople by Amadeo Preziosi in 1843.

From Jerusalem to Petra and back

At Antioch Layard had seen the springs associated with Daphne and the remains of what may have been the temple of Apollo. On the way to Aleppo he found reminders of Crusader days — churches, convents, and castles. In Jerusalem he was determined to see the strange rock-carved architecture of Petra, and explore the lands of Moab and Jerash. There was however a small problem: south of the Dead Sea the whole countryside was in disorder following an invasion by Egyptian armies under the famous Muhammad Ali Pasha. The British Vice Consul warned Layard that he’d be attacked and plundered by Bedouin who would strip him naked and leave him for dead. Upon hearing this the prudent Mitford declined to go: he would wait for his companion (assuming Layard survived) in the safety of Damascus.

At this stage Layard knew no Arabic, and the area where he was going was infested with Bedouin who lived by robbing and murdering anyone they could find on the roads. But none of this dimmed the glowing vision of the desert tribes he had acquired from the writings of the Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. According to Burckhardt the Bedouin lived in tents; they were people of virtuous simplicity and simple virtues; and their natural hospitality meant that a traveller could happily trust them with his life. Defying augury, Layard hired an interpreter and set off. Later he confessed:

I had romantic ideas about Bedouin hospitality and believed that if I trusted to it, and placed myself unreservedly in the power of the Bedouin tribes, trusting to their respect for their guests, I should incur no danger. I did not know that the Arab tribes who inhabit the country to the south and east of the Dead Sea differed much from the Bedouins of the desert, of whom I had read in the travels of Burckhardt, and that they fully deserved the evil reputation they had acquired in Jerusalem.

The consequence of placing himself unreservedly in the power of armed and dangerous brigands, however picturesquely dressed, was not what he hoped. After skirmishes with drawn swords, and confrontations at pistol-point, half-starved, exhausted, robbed of books, papers, medicines, his beautiful robe of Damascus silk and most of his clothes, wearing only an “Arab cloak, now almost in tatters and not worth taking,” he dragged himself into Damascus to meet the British Consul. Exactly what the Consul thought is unclear. But he kindly offered his countryman some tea.

On to Baghdad

Now somewhat less trusting, and a lot more wary, Layard next took the road to Mosul. “We rode during the whole day through a desert plain… constantly on the look-out for Bedouins…” Then in Mosul the future archaeologist came face to face with destiny. On the banks of the Tigris were the long-buried remains of Nineveh, the ancient city where he would make his name. Although it would be five long years before he was allowed to begin digging, and all he could see were vast enigmatic mounds, “I was deeply moved by their desolate and solitary grandeur”, he wrote, and spent a week in the area taking measurements and looking for inscriptions.

The dress, manners, and political institutions of European civilisation had scarcely penetrated into this Islamic realm at all — presumably a huge plus — but Layard was beginning to understand the limitations of Turkish rule. His lodgings were on the Mosul side of the Tigris. Nineveh was on the other. There had once been a bridge, but it had been swept away long ago, “and, under the careless and fatuous rule of the Turks, no attempt had been made to replace it.” It was also obvious that the consequences of Ottoman government were more serious than a mere indifference to roads and bridges. The town of Mosul was governed by “a Pasha of the old school, almost independent of any control… who could oppress the subjects of the Sultan under his rule, extort money from them, and reduce them to utter ruin and misery with impunity.”

But these imperfections seemed ignorable: at Mosul all the old childhood emotions and memories of books read under the gilded Florentine table came enjoyably flooding back. The approach to Baghdad by water as he floated down the Tigris delighted the senses. Beneath tall and graceful date palms “were clusters of orange, citron, and pomegranate trees, in the full blossom of spring. A gentle breeze wafted a delicious odour over the river, with the cooing of innumerable turtle-doves. The creaking of the water-wheels, worked by oxen, and the cries of the Arabs on the banks added life and animation to the scene. I thought that I had never seen anything so truly beautiful, and all my ‘Arabian Nights’ dreams were almost more than I realised.”

Yet where every prospect pleases man can be uncommonly vile. Layard had been warned of Arabs along the banks of the river that “would rob and plunder us if we ventured to land”. When somewhat surprisingly this did not happen, he soon found why — it was because a highly disagreeable penalty for robbery had been imposed by the previous Pasha. In Baghdad there had been a rule of uncompromising punitive terror. The Bedouin had been kept under control and the roads kept safe by “the horrible punishment of impalement.” There was a bridge of boats across the river, and the former governor, a man proud of his province and determined to defend the progress he had made from inveterate criminals, “was in the habit of placing them on stakes at the two ends of the bridge of boats, and on either side of it, as a warning to those who visited the city and had to pass between them.” A British resident in Baghdad, Dr. Ross, had recently seen four offenders thus exposed. Bear in mind this was 1840, not 1480.

Joining the Bakhtiari

In Baghdad Layard spent his days exploring Babylonian ruins, and looking at the fine collection of Arabic and Persian manuscripts in the library of Colonel Taylor, the Political Resident of the East India Company in Baghdad. But soon his mind turned toward the region of the southern Zagros mountains, a territory vigorously contested between the Bakhtiari tribe, who pretty much controlled things on the ground, and the Shah in Tehran who claimed sovereignty. To do this however meant dealing with the Persian governor of Isfahan, Manuchar Khan, a man who had recently shown he was not to be trifled with by building a tower out of 300 prisoners, mortared together like bricks, who all died slowly and hideously.

About this time Mitford decided that his travelling companion was incorrigible. If Layard was now going to defy Manuchar Khan and throw in his lot with the Bakhtiari — a tribe regarded by Tehran as “a race of robbers, treacherous, cruel, and bloodthirsty”, that Governor Manuchar Khan plainly intended to crush — then he wanted none of it. Edward Mitford now journeyed on to India alone, while Layard turned his mind to the months ahead. In a full-blooded romantic outburst he wrote to his uncle-solicitor back in London (on whom by the way he entirely depended for funds) that he was sick of the civilised and semi-civilised world and lived “happier under a black Bakhtiari tent with liberty of speech and action and nobody to depend on, no-one to flatter, certain that I shall have dinner tomorrow — for there is always bread and water — and without need of that source of all evil, money…”

In his memoir about these days Layard was however more calculating. He wrote that despite the bad reputation of the Bakhtiari “I was very hopeful and very confident that my good fortune would not desert me, and that by tact and prudence I should succeed in coming safely out of my adventure. I determined at the same time to conform in all things to the manners, habits, and customs of the people with whom I was about to mix, to avoid offending their religious feeling and prejudices, and to be especially careful not to do anything which might give them reason to suspect that I was a spy.”

His confidence was justified — he soon fluked his way into the patronage of a great and powerful Bakhtiari chieftain, Mehemet Taki Khan, a man able to command a force of 10,000 men. In the fortress of Kala Tul the Khan’s ten-year-old son lay dying of fever. He was at the point of death, and “the father appealed to me in the most heartrending terms, offering me gifts of horses and anything that I might desire if I would only save the life of his son.” Taking a huge chance Layard gave the patient some quinine.  Within hours the boy broke into “a violent perspiration”; by dawn he was on the way to recovery; after this Layard found himself welcomed into the most intimate areas of Bakhtiari domestic life, and even lodged in the residential inner sanctum or enderun (harem) itself.

No longer a solitary alien on the outside, perpetually having to explain himself and at risk of being murdered on the road, his position was suddenly reversed. Now he was on the inside, and tribal life looked increasingly like the warm and hospitable world he had fantasised about for so long. It is not impossible that in these days he may from time to time have been romantically involved with Bakhtiari women. They found him attractive, and he was certainly attracted to them. After saving her son’s life Layard tells us that the Khan’s wife “treated me with the affection of a mother”, while he described her sister Khanumi as the most beautiful woman in all the tribe: “Her features were of exquisite delicacy, her eyes were large, black and almond-shaped, her hair of the darkest hue; she was intelligent and lively.”

Urged by the Khan to convert to Islam and marry Khanumi, Layard resisted, though he told his aunt that the Bakhtiari custom of sigha interested him: it enabled a man “to marry for a period, however short — even for twenty-four hours — and which makes the contract for the time legal.” The marital arrangements of the Khan himself seemed ideal. He married and divorced monthly, enjoying a continual honeymoon. It is perhaps not entirely irrelevant that in the Arabian Nights, before Scheherazade found a beguiling way around it, the Sultan had married, enjoyed, and then calmly killed each of his ‘wives’ next day.

Lord Curzon described Layard’s account of life among the Bakhtiari as “one of the most romantic narratives of adventure ever penned.” He not only joined the tribe, he mastered their Persian dialect and participated in their lion hunts, their feuds, and their battles with Persian authority. This did not go unnoticed. Upon learning of Layard’s active participation in skirmishes with Persian troops, the Vizier in Tehran told the British Ambassador Sir John McNeill, who inquired after his whereabouts: “That man! Why, if I could catch him I’d hang him. He has been joining some rebel tribes and helping them.”

At the gates of Baghdad

Anyway it was tremendous fun living amidst forays, feuds, and death by the assassin’s hand, or sitting long into the small hours listening to stories told by men “constantly engaged in bloody quarrels arising out of questions of right of pasture and other such matters. When they were thus at war they ruthlessly pillaged and murdered each other. With them ‘the life of a man was as the life of a sheep,’ as the Persians say, and they would slay the one with as much unconcern as the other.” The excitement of life in the great chief’s fortress was all very well as long as Taki Khan was in control and the Persians were not. But it couldn’t last. Manuchar Khan was determined to break and punish the Bakhtiari, the clans sensed it, and before long their fealty weakened and the chief’s followers began to melt away.

In a land where oaths were lightly given and lightly broken, Mehemet Taki Khan soon found himself beleaguered and on the run. As for Layard, confined by Manuchar Khan in the city of Shustar for helping the Bakhtiari, he boldly escaped and made his way back through parching deserts and fearful heat to Baghdad. Attacked and thrown from his horse by marauders of the Shammar tribe, Layard lost the disguise of his Arab keffiya (or cloth headdress) and was mistaken for a hated Osmanli.

“One of the Arabs cried out that I was a ‘Toork’, and a man who had dismounted drew a knife and endeavoured to kneel upon my chest. I struggled, thinking that he intended to cut my throat, and called out to one of the party who, mounted upon a fine mare, appeared to be a sheikh, that I was not a ‘Toork’ but an Englishman.” The sheikh relented, mistaking Layard for Dr. Ross of Baghdad, and again Layard

escaped with his life — but most of his clothing, his watch, compass, and his last few silver pieces were lost. When he reached Baghdad it was Damascus all over again. Lying alone at dawn in the dirt outside the city gates, waiting for them to open, clad in rags and with bare and bleeding feet, “overcome by fatigue and pain”, he was ignored by parties from the British Embassy who rode by without recognising him — nor did he hasten to make his presence known. But following behind them came Dr. Ross:

I called to him, and he turned towards me in the utmost surprise, scarcely believing his senses when he saw me without cover to my bare head, with naked feet, and in my tattered ‘abba’.

From Arabian Nights to Assyrian Horrors

Layard’s experiences along the Turko-Persian border made the young adventurer an authority on the geographical issues involved — when it was in his possession he put his compass to good use. This drew the notice of the British Ambassador in Constantinople, Sir Stratford Canning, who in 1842 made him an unpaid attaché at the Embassy. In 1845, after much hesitation, Canning allowed Layard to commence the excavations that led to the discovery of several long-buried palaces, including that of Sennacherib.

The subsequent achievements of Sir Austen Henry Layard, as he eventually became, were prodigious — excavating an enormous site, making remarkable drawings of the palace sculptures, mastering cuneiform, firmly responding to the continual obstruction of his work by venal and mendacious Pashas, transporting both the palace reliefs and two colossal stone bulls down the Tigris — all the while fighting off armed marauders who, both at the diggings and while rafting the reliefs downriver to Basra, were always waiting their chance.

Turning the yellowed leaves of his 1853 folio publication The Monuments of Nineveh, the dry and disintegrating leather of its old Morocco binding falling apart in one’s hands, one may learn from Layard’s drawings much about ancient Mesopotamia. Plates 8 and 9 show dates, apples, grapes and pomegranates being carried to a royal banquet, and groves of palms, and one can easily imagine a gentle breeze wafting the scent of citron across the river, for the noble Tigris ripples through many scenes. But soon the images become more sombre. Hundreds of prisoners, criminals, and naked slaves, harnessed by long ropes to sledges on which great stone bulls were being moved, are seen with overseers, their arms always threateningly upraised to lash and beat.

And then in Plate 21 something else catches the eye — as perhaps it was meant to by the Assyrian architect who placed it near the middle of a scene. The relief sculptures show Sennacherib’s destruction in 701 BC of the city of Lachish, in the Kingdom of Judah. We are presented with three captives impaled on stakes. There are also scenes of beheadings, and of government scribes counting piles of heads, and of prisoners being flayed alive. Today sensitive museum administrators are a little shy about this sort of thing, preferring to keep it out of sight, but Layard himself was unflinching. Some prisoners, he wrote,

had been condemned to the torture, and were already in the hands of the executioners. Two were stretched naked at full length on the ground, and whilst their limbs were held apart by pegs and cords they were being flayed alive. Beneath them were other unfortunate victims undergoing abominable punishments. The brains of one were apparently being beaten out with an iron mace, whilst an officer held him by the beard. A torturer was wrenching the tongue out of the mouth of a second wretch who had been pinioned to the ground. The bleeding heads of the slain were tied round the necks of the living who seemed reserved for still more barbarous tortures.

Today we can only wonder at the historical echoes across nearly 3,000 years. That civil society never developed in the region is an anthropological puzzle where culture, psychology, intransigent tribalism, military imperatives and religious belief, are probably all involved. It is also a political puzzle for which we are unlikely to find a solution anytime soon.

[The above is a variation of “Layard of Nineveh,” an article in the July/August 2010 issue of The American Interest. www.The-American-Interest.com]

Note: Substantial excerpts from Layard’s writings, mainly Early Adventures and Autobiography, are here: Young Layard of Nineveh. For a discussion of more recent regional issues, and the political influence of Lawrence of Arabia, see also Nihilism in the Middle East.

Reading
Blake, Robert. 1966. Disraeli. London, Eyre and Spottiswoode.
Larsen, Mogens Trolle. 1996. The Conquest of Assyria. London and New York, Routledge.
Layard, A. H. 1853. Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon… London, John Murray.
Layard, A. H. 1853. Monuments of Nineveh, V. 2. London, John Murray.
Layard, A. H. 1894. Early Adventures in Persia… London, John Murray.
Layard, A. H. 1903. Autobiography and Letters… London, John Murray.
Waterfield, Gordon. 1963. Layard of Nineveh. London, John Murray.

Reply to Comments

Lighten up guys! You might just be missing the point. Arabian Nights, Baghdad Days offers all-too-typical scenes from the human comedy — in this case the long-running farce of East meets West. Nice clean-living London law student reads a book of tall tales, ships out to Turkey so he can dress up and meet princesses and ride on magic carpets through the sky… Then crashes to earth and is lucky not to lose his head.

Shakespeare could have done something with it and given Will Kemp a role. Or Cervantes — Layard’s delusions are as crazy as Don Quixote’s. Or perhaps Voltaire: the naivete of young Austen Henry Layard reads like Candide among the Ottomans. Anyway the adventures described provide a hilarious metaphor for Western delusions about the historic cultures of the region — fantasies whose consequences, as we can see today in Iraq and Afghanistan, are sometimes not funny at all.

That’s what 99.9% of the article is about. Not some definition from Sociology 101. So imagine my surprise when I find the only items discussed are two words, “civil society”, occurring in the final paragraph. A speculation ruminatively tacked on the end.

Civil society (for me pretty much synonymous with civilized society) is the only social order that satisfies the hopes, values, and understandings of the modern mind. That is the broad subject under consideration. It does not exist in Iraq today and it never did. Sufi lodges and madrassas, like the local donkey market and a thriving carpet trade, just don’t cut it. Sorry. They all belong to an intensely parochial and limited world, whose freedoms, both mental and political, are crippled by local cultural constraints and enduring religious fixations that make it difficult for the region to move on.

But let’s begin at the evolutionary beginning… More simply and just by way of adumbration, in civil societies the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker count themselves lucky because after hundreds of years they’ve at last got out from under the feudal lord, the military caste with its blood-thirsty warriors, the raving mullah with his dogmas and constraints, the clan and the tribe with their xenophobic prohibitions and endless fighting; and last but not least, the political regime of “ruler takes all” with its Khans and Kings and Emperors.

That goes for the wives of the butcher and baker and candlestick-maker too. If the western butcher’s wife wants to take a course in accountancy she can — whatever her clan or tribe or priest or president might think. If the wife of the baker wants to get away from the oven and an offensive husband too, then civil law allows this, because opting out is protected; indeed, the freedom of individuals to achieve their destinies according to talent and opportunity — not according to ascribed features of tribe or skin color or sex or dynastic connection or prophetic affiliation (Shia, Sunni) — is an intrinsic feature of this historically novel and belatedly evolved social order.

“Old-fashioned” you say? Well, yes, I suppose the subject of civil society is that, since the puzzle why East is East and West is West — including why Oriental Despotism repels and why no thinking man or woman wants a bar of it — runs all the way back to Aristotle. And by the way, minds a lot more powerful than Edward Said’s have pondered the issues involved, from Adam Ferguson and Gibbon in the 18th century, to Marx (the Asiatic Mode of Production) and Sir Henry Maine (status vs. contract) in the 19^th century, to the summarizing discussion provided by Ernest Gellner at the close of the 20^th — Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals.

For Gellner, as for Aristotle, freedom is the crux of the matter and ultimately the point of it all: “Traditional man can sometimes escape the tyranny of kings, but only at the cost of falling under the tyranny of cousins, and of ritual.” Rephrased somewhat (RS): “tribal man must choose between the tyranny of despots, from Sargon to Saddam, or the straitjacket of kinship groups and the equally confining intellectual dogmas of priests.” The legislative framework of civil and secular modernity enables independent men and women to defy political autocrats, domestic tyrants, and religious dogmas, all at the same time — the admirable and courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali provides a heroic example.

What are the conditions for escaping these assorted tyrannies — an escape Mesopotamia never made? They are largely economic (just as Ayaan Hirsi Ali today could never have found a way out of her Somalian straight-jacket without alternative, non-tribal sources of financial support). The short answer describing a very long process is in Gellner’s words “perpetual and exponential growth”: in this process the commerce and production of free economic agents supersedes predation, replacing the exactions of warrior castes and the forced internal and external tribute of the state.

This alternative route to prosperity requires private property, along with civil law, and other legislative protections allowing wealth to accumulate or be used to best advantage by free citizens — not tribesmen or slaves or serfs or fanatically fierce sectarians murdering each other day after day. Without it, all you tend to get is the chronic instability of a three-cornered contest for power between the state, the tribes, and the sects, as Gellner says.

So what do I mean by civil and civilized society? In brief, a social order where citizens are guaranteed freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom of belief, freedom to pursue economic opportunities as they arise and to keep or use whatever capital accumulates as a result, freedom from obligatory state service — along with the separation of church and state, the right to think whatever you like without being blown up or having your head cut off, and government by the consent of the governed with appropriate electoral procedures.

It would be wonderful if you could find these desirable features shining out in Mesopotamia’s long and notable past. Perhaps here and there you can. But there was no Greek Enlightenment, or game-changing debate about the nature of justice, citizenship, and the duties of government. No Magna Carta. No Renaissance. No Reformation. No relief from religious obsessions, dating back to Ishtar and Asshur, with their persistent theocratic temptations. The political panorama of Mesopotamian history shows little but the dynastic rise and fall of despots and their vassals, rulers whose Ozymandian pretensions stretch from Sargon to Saddam with their armies and captives and slaves, shouting their conquests brazenly from stelae, proudly displaying their grisly triumphs in sculptured panels of military violence, enslavement, punishment, and submission. Shelley got it in one.

RS

The Roosevelt Indian Reservation in the Amazon rain forest is not a happy place. Last year the Cinta Larga Indians slaughtered 29 miners there, and in October the Brazilian who was trying to mediate the conflict was murdered at a cash machine. Neither of these events represented anything new. The reserve, located 2,100 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro, and named for Theodore Roosevelt when he visited Brazil in 1913, is also where a notorious massacre of Cinta Larga by rubber tappers took place in 1963; only one child in the village survived.

The immediate cause of the recent violence is not rubber but diamonds. The Roosevelt Indian Reservation may be sitting on one of the world’s largest deposits, and no one wants to leave it in the ground—neither the Indians, nor the itinerant diggers (garimpeiros), nor the government. But under present Brazilian law no one is free to begin digging. And this brings us to the deeper cause of murder and mayhem in the region.

Under Brazil’s constitution the country’s Indians are not full citizens. Instead they are legal minors, with the status of a protected species. This has one singular benefit for the Indians: the twelve Cinta Larga responsible for last year’s killing of 29 wildcat prospectors may enjoy immunity from prosecution and never face jail. But there is also a down side. As wards of the state, the Indians are denied the right to mine their own land.

As for outsiders, they must apply for permits to dig, and face endless bureaucratic delays that more often than not lead nowhere. The outcome is predictable. Frustrated in their own wishes, and hard-pressed by the impatient diggers, Indians make private deals, which then go sour—and the shooting starts.

At issue here is not just the law; the law is itself the product of an idea, or a set of ideas, that form its underlying assumptions. What should be done about endangered enclave societies situated in the midst of a modern nation? Can they, or their land, or their minerals be cut off and preserved, frozen in time, pristine and inviolate, forever? Or should they be?

The Figueiredo report

The massacre of the Cinta Larga in 1963 gave rise to a Brazilian state inquiry that became known as the Figueiredo Report (after the official in charge of the investigation). The inquiry was meant to find out about the shockingly grave deficiencies and abuses that were then being tolerated by the Indian Protection Service, including the use of individual Indians as slaves. Once it was completed, the old agency was closed down, and a new one created to replace it.

There the matter might have rested had not the London Sunday Times caught a whiff of scandal. The paper dispatched the travel writer Norman Lewis to Brazil; though he did not meet any Indians, he found all he needed in the Figueiredo Report. “By the descriptions of all who had seen them,” Lewis reported, “there were no more inoffensive and charming human beings on the planet than the forest Indians of Brazil.”

Having established a scene of primal innocence, Lewis proceeded to tell of the atrocities against the Cinta Larga, warning that they were being pushed to the brink of extinction and that there might not be a single Indian left by 1980. He concluded: “What a tragedy, what a reproach it will be for the human race if this is allowed to happen!” Reprinted all over the globe, his sensational article had profound and lasting effects.

The first of these effects was to enshrine a form of extreme protectionism, not only as a temporary means to an end–the human and cultural survival of the indigenous peoples of Brazil–but as an end in itself. Soon, all those working for Indian interests were of a single opinion: the only way to protect these tribal peoples was to create inviolable sanctuaries where they would “live their own lives preserving their own culture on their own land.”

The second effect was to galvanize a number of English explorers, writers, and anthropologists into setting up a permanent international lobby. The name of this flourishing body is Survival, self-described as “the world’s leading organization supporting tribal peoples.” Two men who have been associated with it from the outset are John Hemming and Robin Hanbury-Tenison.

Hemming, who served for two decades as the director of the Royal Geographical Society, has written a number of books about South America, among them an indispensable three-volume history of the impact of civilization on Brazil’s indigenous peoples–Red Gold, Amazon Frontier, and Die If You Must, the last installment of which appeared in 2003. Hanbury-Tenison, Hemming’s long-time friend, was also a founder of Survival and is today its president. Less well-known but also important is the documentary filmmaker Adrian Cowell, who has spoken up on behalf of the Amazonian Indians for nearly 50 years.

According to a recent article by Hemming in the British monthly Prospect, the campaign to ensure the survival of the Amazonian peoples appears to have succeeded. This is also the gist of the final chapter of Die If You Must, where he wrote:

The Indians will survive physically. Their populations have grown steadily since a nadir of near-extinction in the mid-20th century. Having fallen to little more than 100,000 in the 1950’s, they have more than tripled to some 350,000 and are generally rising fast.

The health of the Indians is basically good, Hemming reported in Die If You Must. The killers of yesteryear–measles, TB, pneumonia, cholera, and smallpox–are rare. Their land is also secure: “a remarkable 11 percent of the land-mass of Brazil is now reserved for Indians. The 587 indigenous areas total almost 105 million hectares–an area greater than France, Germany, and Benelux combined.” Environmentalist ideals and indigenous interests have apparently been reconciled: “From the air, [one reservation] now stands out as an immense rectangle of verdant vegetation framed by the dismal brown of arid ranch-lands.”

Explorers up the Amazon

It was in the 1950’s and 60’s that Hemming, Hanbury-Tenison, and Cowell, three young men from Oxford and Cambridge, launched themselves on the world. They were talented and energetic, they had good connections, and above all they shared a boyish taste for adventure. At Eton they probably read about Lawrence of Arabia; at Oxford, where Hemming and Hanbury-Tenison roomed together, they already knew that “exploring” was what they wanted to do most. They regarded the rain forests of Brazil as a natural field for their endeavors, and in no time they were paddling up the Amazon in canoes.

Adrian Cowell was a Cambridge man, and his precocity as an explorer makes an impressive tale in itself. As a student in 1954 he joined a university Trans-Africa Expedition. The following year he was in Asia. Then, as he relates in The Heart of the Forest (1961), “the Oxford and Cambridge Expedition to South America . . . brought me to the Amazon forest.” Thereafter he joined the Brazilian Centro Expedition, an enterprise associated with the creation of the new national capital of Brasilia. Its purpose was “to canoe down the Xingu River and burn an airstrip at the exact geographical center of Brazil.”

It was all tremendous fun and very romantic–a word that occurs spontaneously in the books of Hanbury-Tenison, who has written voluminously about his explorations and today runs a booking agency for exotic locations. Here, from his website, is a typical passage about adventuring in Afghanistan:

A sound like distant thunder made me look up at the rich blue cloudless sky before I turned to see twenty wild horsemen in turbans and flowing robes bearing down on me. They carried long-barreled rifles and had daggers in their belts. Beside their spirited horses loped large, hairy hounds. With their Genghis Khan moustaches and fine, aquiline noses they were almost caricatures of the bandits we had been warned about. I should have been frightened, but all I could think was that if I had to go I could not have found a more romantic end.

This tells us quite a bit about the attitude of all three men toward indigenous cultures. In light of it, Hanbury-Tenison must have been somewhat taken aback when, in 1971, he called on the anthropologist Margaret Mead at the Museum of Natural History in New York to tell her about Survival International (as Survival was then called), and she gave him a piece of her mind. Mead at the age of seventy was a very different person from the idealistic young woman who had visited Samoa in 1926. By 1971, she was fiercely unromantic, and the spectacle of yet another young Oxford “explorer” embarking on yet another “expedition up the Amazon” must have set her teeth on edge. With sturdy good sense she tried to talk him out of his fantasies.

In his 1973 book A Question of Survival, Hanbury-Tenison describes this “small, beady-eyed dumpling of a lady who sailed into the attack as I came through the door”:

The main point that annoyed [Mead] was the concept, unstated by me, that primitive peoples were any better off as they were. She said she was “maddened by antibiotic-ridden idealists who wouldn’t stand three weeks in the jungle” . . . and the whole “noble savage” concept almost made her foam at the mouth. “All primitive peoples,” she said, “lead miserable, unhappy, cruel lives, most of which are spent trying to kill each other.” The reason they lived in the unpleasant places they did, like the middle of the Brazilian jungle, was that nobody else would.

There was much talk in those days of the pharmaceutical benefits of rain forests, and Hanbury-Tenison and his friends were sure that the Amazon was about to make a huge contribution to the world’s health. (This was a little before the discovery of the supposed wonders of jojoba oil.) But Mead was having none of it:

She said that to protect [the Indians] on the grounds that they could be useful to us or contribute anything was nonsense. “No primitive person has ever contributed anything, or ever will,” she said. She had no time for suggestions of medical knowledge or the value of jungle lore.

The only grounds on which Mead relented were broadly humanitarian. For one thing, the Indians’ “art, culture, dancing, music, etc. was pleasant and attractive and their grandchildren might thank us for trying to preserve or at best record it now that we have the proper technical means–tape and film–for doing so.” For another thing, “it was bad for the world to let these people die, and the effort to prevent their extermination was good for mankind even if it failed.”

For the rest, however, Mead vehemently denied that the Indians

had any special reasons for being protected, as she denied any advantage of one race over another. She also claimed emphatically that they all wanted one thing only, and that was to have as many material possessions and comforts as possible. Those still running away in the jungle were the ones who had encountered the most unpleasant savagery from Europeans, and even though they might be having no contact now, if they could possibly get hold of any aluminum pots they would use them.

A history of atrocity

Although faithfully recorded by Hanbury-Tenison, Mead’s argument was as lost on him in 1971 as it is lost on legions of like-minded people today who mouth the slogans of multiculturalism. What Mead herself failed to grasp was that, naive though he may have sounded, Hanbury-Tenison and his friends had been radicalized, and they were never going to accept her bleak view of the tribal world. It was not that they had been reading Marx; instead, they had been reading Norman Lewis’s digest of the worst parts of the Figuereido Report, including Figuereido’s judgment that “the Indians [had] suffered tortures similar to those of Treblinka and Dachau.”

Torture, indeed, was too tame a word for what had taken place. In 1963 there had been massacres of the Cinta Larga tribe in Rondonia. One gunman’s taped testimony describes how an employee of a rubber company named Chico Luis

gave the chief a burst with his tommy gun to make sure, and after that he let the rest of them have it. . . . [A]ll the other guys had to do was finish off anyone still showing signs of life. . . . [T]here was a young Indian girl they didn’t shoot, with a kid of about five in one hand, yelling his head off. . . . Chico shot the kid through the head with his .45 and then grabbed hold of the woman–who by the way was very pretty. “Be reasonable,” I said, “why do you have to kill her?” In my view it was a waste. “What’s wrong with giving her to the boys? They haven’t set eyes on a woman for six weeks. Or we could give her as a present to de Brito. [their boss]”

But Chico would not listen:

He tied the Indian girl up and hung her head downward from a tree, legs apart, and chopped her in half right down the middle with his machete. Almost with a single chop I’d say. The village was like a slaughterhouse. He calmed down after he’d cut the woman up, and told us to burn down all the huts and throw the bodies into the river

This is unbearable: but it is not essentially different from what had happened to many Indians in Latin America after 1492. The lawless frontier was for centuries a refuge for loners, criminals, and violent psychopaths who had nothing to lose and could act with impunity. Those who went searching for El Dorado in the 1540’s behaved like packs of ravening wolves, seizing food from the same Indian villagers whom they then enslaved as porters, and who were tortured or killed when they failed to cooperate. As one soon learns from Hemming’s three-volume work, this sort of thing has had a very long history indeed.

Colonial nations fashion their heroes from the timber at hand, much of it twisted and full of knots. Australia, for example, invites its citizens to admire an unappealing Irish bandit named Ned Kelly. But the Kellys smell sweet alongside Brazil’s much romanticized bandeirantes. What are often referred to as expeditions of “pathfinders” from Sao Paulo into the interior in the first half of the 17th century were mostly slave raids aimed at catching, chaining, and marching back to the coast as many Indians as a group of well-armed and ruthless men could seize.

To be sure, there was sometimes a genuinely exploratory aspect to such forays. In Red Gold, Hemming offers a balanced account of this phase of Brazilian expansion inland, and fairly describes the ordeals of the bandeirantes themselves. Since slave-raiding was a central feature of traditional Indian culture, too, the journeys engaged whites, Indians, and those of mixed ancestry (mamelucos) in a common enterprise:

The Indians contributed their forest skills and geographical knowledge. They soon grasped the purpose of the mission and became expert enslavers of other natives. Although brutalized and worked hard by the captains of the bandeiras, the Indians probably enjoyed service on them. It was quite normal for Tupi warriors to make long marches through the forests to attack enemy tribes.

In the course of his own periodic visits to Brazil, Adrian Cowell seems to have come rather closer to the realities of Amazonian Indian life than either Hanbury-Tenison or Hemming. Although aware of the horrors long endured by Indians at the hands of slavers, settlers, and frontier psychopaths, he was also more prepared to face up to the grimmer aspects of the native cultures themselves, and to the horrors Indians had long inflicted on each other.

In The Heart of the Forest (1961), Cowell writes in idyllic prose of the partnership he formed with an Indian hunter, carrying his friend’s gun and studying his craft, teaching himself to decoy wildfowl by imitating their calls. But he also reports how, in 1958 on the Xingu River, there were continual killings of itinerant Brazilian rubber tappers (seringueiros) by Indians, and of Indians by seringueiros. A Juruna Indian told him how

first we lived lower down the Xingu and worked for the seringueiros, but they killed many [Indians] with rifles. So we came up here past the great rapids and lived till the seringueiros say they are friends and gave us rifles. So we went downriver again and worked for the seringueiros till they killed more Juruna. Then we killed many seringueiros and came back here and killed Trumai and Kamayura Indians. Then the Txukahamae tribe came and killed almost all of us so that we are only twelve now.

The Villas-Boas brothers

That is the way things were and always had been. And this, too, was a seemingly ineradicable aspect of the culture that Cowell thought worthy of being saved. Back in 1967, he had joined the brothers Claudio and Orlando Villas-Boas in an attempt to contact and “pacify” the elusive Kreen-Akrore. But violence in the camp was making it hard to manage a community where different tribal groups had been brought together for their own safety. The captions on a page of photographs in Cowell’s 1973 book, The Tribe that Hides from Man, read like the list of casualties on some exotic war memorial: “Above. Javaritu, a Trumai killed by Tapiokap. Above. Pionim, a Kayabi, killed Tapiokap to avenge his brother-in-law.” And so on.

Much has been written about the endeavor of the Villas-Boas brothers to establish the Xingu Indian refuge and entice the tribal remnants of the Kayabi or Txikao or Suya to join it. A passage from The Tribe that Hides from Man offers a glimpse into the thought processes of Claudio, a “Marxist philosopher” in the Latin American manner:

Look around this camp and you will see Indians are more loving than we are. But the expression of their love is confined to the limits of this society. They cut a hole in the wilderness to contain their family, but outside this camp is the jungle where they kill meat for food, kill bamboo for arrows, kill bushes for leaves for their beds. Killing is the essence of forest existence, and if you stopped it, the forest and the Indian would die. Within the Indian mind there is a complete division between the duties within the group and the absence of duty in the land of killing outside.

At one time, Claudio suggested that Indians should feel free to kill white seringueiros or any other uninvited marauders who came into the Xingu Park. While warning them of the inevitable costs of this practice as a permanent way of life, he understood that, according to the tribal code, revenge killing was natural, habitual, and inevitable.

Nor was this the only aspect of Amazonian Indian culture that was hard to reconcile with modern life. Strict rules of seclusion were found among all the upper-Xingu tribes. Women were subjected to draconian punishments for violations of taboo. In a British television documentary from the 1970’s, a young Mehinacu woman was asked what would happen if she were to glimpse, even accidentally, the sacred flutes played by the men. She would be gang-raped, she replied, smiling sadly as if in recognition that in the genteel world of her white interviewer, such sexual punishments—culturally authorized, approved, indeed mandatory—were unthinkable.

Horrors that had to go

Hemming’s account of Amazonian life is hard on the efforts of Christian missionaries, and especially hard on the Jesuits (“fanatical missionaries intent on replacing native society and beliefs with their own Christian model”). One line of grudging appreciation will be followed by the word “but” and ten lines of disparagement. As his impressive study proceeds from volume to volume, he becomes ever more severe, his language becomes more tendentious, and an austere secularism dictates his judgment of religious matters. In his recent article in Prospect, he approves only of the politically radical priests who began to appear in the 1960’s–“trained anthropologists who did not try to undermine indigenous beliefs and ceased to be aggressive proselytizers”–but his view of Catholic missionary activity before that point is mainly negative.

But what exactly were the religious authorities to do when they first arrived from Portugal and had to deal, for example, with the Tupinamba? Did they not have a clear obligation both to undermine and to prohibit certain indigenous beliefs? In modern times, we have seen the rise of whole political cultures gripped by pathology, with hideous consequences; so, too, sick ethnic cultures evolved historically in the tribal world. Few quite so sick as the Tupinamba have been recorded before or since.

They loved human flesh. Prestige and power centered on the ritual slaughtering of prisoners. In an account prepared by Alfred Métraux for the Smithsonian’s Handbook of South American Indians (1948), we read that the killing and eating of these prisoners (who were fattened for the purpose) “were joyful events which provided these Indians with the opportunity for merrymaking, aesthetic displays, and other emotional outlets.” Métraux then describes what took place at a cannibal feast after the victim’s skull was shattered:

Old women rushed to drink the warm blood, and children were invited to dip their hands in it. Mothers would smear their nipples with blood so that even babies could have a taste of it. The body, cut into quarters, was roasted on a barbecue, and the old women, who were the most eager for human flesh, licked the grease running along the sticks. Some portions, reputed to be delicacies or sacred, such as the fingers of the grease around the liver or heart, were allotted to distinguished guests.

That Portuguese settlers in the 16th century did not cope very well with this aspect of the Indian tribal world is probably true. That the missionaries who came after them did not handle the situation as they might have done is also likely. But if they had been around at the time, would John Hemming, or Robin Hanbury-Tenison, or Adrian Cowell, or the entire staff of Survival have done much better? Would any of us?

“All primitive peoples,” Margaret Mead had said to her young Oxford visitor, “lead miserable, unhappy, cruel lives, most of which are spent trying to kill each other.” She was overdoing it, but she had a point–a point largely lost sight of in today’s systematic sentimentalizing of the Stone Age.

The Indian prospect

Of course, as we have seen, Mead also acknowledged that certain aspects of Indian culture—“their art, culture, dancing, music, etc.”—deserved to survive, for the enjoyment of the people themselves and for the admiration of humanity as a whole. That, indeed, is more or less what has happened today in the Xingu Park and places like it elsewhere. On display in such places is a pacified, defanged, and somewhat feminized version of Amazonian culture, of the kind that middle-class travellers from the West like to see: a theatrical world where dressing-up in feathered regalia, and ritual ceremonies, and communal dancing never stop.

Hemming, who welcomes the prospect of self-determination, claims that “modern indigenous policy seeks to empower tribes to manage their own affairs.” Yet both self-determination and empowerment imply literacy and modern education; and here the picture is less clear. Officially, the children are learning to read and write, and in the last chapter of Die If You Must—a chapter with the title “Present and Future”—Hemming makes three rather perfunctory references to schooling. But at the same time, he strongly implies that in his vision of the future it does not matter whether the children learn to read and write or not, because others will be there to do things for them.

Who are these others? According to Hemming, the external political affairs of the Indians on the Xingu reserve are “supported by a remarkable contingent of 33 non-government organizations, a tireless band of missionaries, anthropologists, well-wishers, journalists, doctors, and lawyers, both in Brazil and abroad.” As for their internal welfare, that is served by a “resident tribe of whites, composed of social scientists, doctors, teachers, nurses, biologists, and agronomists from all parts of Brazil.” With friends like these, who needs self-determination?

What Hemming is describing is the fruit of the inviolable-sanctuary approach to cultural survival. This rests on what might be called fortress theory, and has two cardinal principles: that “culture” and “people” and “land” should be seen as indivisible, and that they can be kept this way forever in a suitably constructed territorial redoubt. Whatever is happening in the world around them, ethnic cultures should as far as possible be preserved unchanged. With the help of an army of administrative personnel, custodially responsible for seeing to it that they go on wanting the same things they have always wanted, their cultural heritage will be kept alive. Social change is bad—at least as it affects these picturesque tribal peoples—and should be stopped.

Among the Xingu Park Indians, it is in fact safe to say that the older generation remains strongly attached to its remote lands, and intends to go on living there, hunting animals and gathering fruits. But what do younger Indians want to do with their lives? If there is one thing we have learned from modern history, it is that individuals often outgrow their ethnic cultures, find life in a fortress claustrophobic, and choose to move on. In contrast to museum exhibits, real human beings have a way of developing ideas and ambitions and desires–including for aluminum pots–beyond the ken of conservators. Fortress theory, multicultural “essentialism,” and the enduring cult of the noble savage are the enemies of those ambitions and human desires.

In the final paragraph of Die If You Must, Hemming wonders uneasily whether the pessimists might have the last laugh after all–whether the Amazon’s “beautiful, ancient, and intricate cultures will be maintained only artificially as curiosities for tourists, researchers, or politically correct enthusiasts.” That is quite possible. But it is not the only undesirable eventuality.

Preserving ancient cultural patterns is laudable, but it is not enough. No society in history has ever stood still, and however beautiful, and ancient, and intricate ancient cultures may be, it is wrong to lock people up inside them and throw away the key. Uprooting the dishonest and patronizing cult of the noble savage is the work of generations; but as far as today’s Amazonian Indians are concerned, the main priority must surely be to ensure that those among them who do not want to play the obliging role of historical curiosities, endlessly dressing up for visitors whose expectations they feel bound to fulfil, are able to find something else to do in the modern world–on the reservation or off it. In that quest we can only wish them well.

At first glance our two authors could hardly be more unlike. Judging from his new book Beauty, Roger Scruton’s idea of a pleasing view would probably be the Wiltshire countryside circa 1750 — a scene like that on his website banner, with perhaps some red-coated riders, left, and a fox, courant, hurrying into a copse. Turning next to Denis Dutton’s Darwinian The Art Instinct, and in sharp contrast, a congenially paintable vista for that author might be Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, circa 1,000,000 BC, with Stone Age hunters chasing antelope over Africa’s green hills.

Yet for all this I expect that across a wide range of cultural artefacts and activities their tastes would chime. They each believe in the best that has been written, painted, or composed, and they know what it is. Both of them grieve to see entire traditions of thought and work being dishonored and trashed. “A determination to shock or puzzle has sent much recent art down a wrong path,” Dutton writes in his Introduction. “A Darwinian aesthetics can restore the vital place of beauty, skill, and pleasure as high artistic values.” High artistic values are exactly what Scruton would also like to see restored and it’s encouraging to see two such thoughtful books about art appear within weeks of each other.

Though perhaps this conjunction is not so surprising after all, because the place of the arts in society, and the general condition of the arts, have long been seen as a gauge of civilised morale. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy pioneered this critical tradition in the 19th century — but we’ve come a long way since then. Once confined to the bohemian margins, artists and their adversarial values have in the last century moved steadily closer to the center, while increasing their political clout, a development that drew the worried attention of such distinguished commentators as Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Jacques Barzun.

In The Use and Abuse of Art Barzun observed that the “invidious, resentful relation of art to life has become general and unremitting.” Characterizing “the sensibility of the sixties” and its typical creative works Daniel Bell wrote of its “violence and cruelty” and of “an anti-cognitive and anti-intellectual mood” that has hardly diminished since, something that also concerns Scruton and Dutton today. When Irving Kristol wrote that abandoning the constraints of the Protestant ethic caused “virtue to lose her loveliness”, who would have thought that “loveliness” (by which we mean the entire ethically ambiguous realm of the aesthetic) would soon assume the virtue that virtue itself had lost? Sceptics wondered whether the triumph of the aesthetic represented the moral defeat of the bourgeoisie.

That is doubtless an exaggeration — but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Both the books in question have more positive and elevating themes and purposes. About our ideas on beauty, and why we like what we like, they are primarily philosophical, and seek to explain and defend the place of cultural refinement in a life well lived — and Dutton might say in any life worth living. His Darwinian argument is that music and literature and much else are deeply rooted in human nature itself. This in turn raises questions about sources and origins. Where do we find the earliest signs of aesthetic sensibility? Is it in a primordial appreciation of nature? Can Africa’s Omo Valley be really where it all began?

Landscape and universals

Yorkshire Dales, photo: Geoff Lund

You don’t travel far with either author before the question is raised whether trees and rivers and hills are universally appealing. For most ordinary men and women (though varying with levels of articulacy) this could range from a hushed “look at that!” to my own excited reaction not long ago. Driving one morning around a curve in a country road I saw a sunlit view — rolling hills, low light, willows by a stream — and “God that’s beautiful!” burst unbidden from my lips. There may have been sheep and cows too. Not a very original expostulation you will say, but the question is this: was it as spontaneously unmeditated as it seemed to me at the time? While the words “instant” and “instinct” sound similar, do they here mean much the same thing?

Dutton would unequivocally answer “yes” and give his reasons. Evolutionary psychology (or EP) suggests that landscape preferences are deeply ancient and originated in Palaeolithic times, and that critical judgements about suitable real estate started way back then. However “disinterested” the appreciation of beauty either is or should be, according to Immanuel Kant, a beautiful Pleistocene landscape was always a matter of lively ancestral concern, and it was valued for straightforward down-to-earth reasons: available water, fertility, and abundant game. According to The Art Instinct the deep source of my excitement as those sunlit hills came into view was a primordial pattern of instinctive response. What’s surprising, however, is that with rather more equivocation Roger Scruton seems to agree.

According to the author of Beauty, Immanuel Kant also thought our response to nature was spontaneous and unstudied, and it’s not hard to see what he meant. Standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon you are at once struck dumb with wonder. Views of nature please us immediately and without concepts said Kant — and speaking for myself I’d have to say that’s how I felt on that morning drive. Unaware what was coming, and attending to nothing but a winding road, I was immediately riveted by the view, and my reaction was as unconceptualized as only passive visual sensation on the threshold of attention can be. Kant also maintained that “the primary exercise of judgement is in the appreciation of nature”, a statement glossed by Scruton when he adds that “a faculty that is directed towards natural beauty therefore has a real chance of being common to all human beings, issuing judgements with a universal force.”

Now unless I’m mistaken this tells us that a sense of “natural beauty” is “universal” and shared by “all human beings” — pretty much a matter of human nature you’d think, or what Kant himself called a sensus communis. In the course of his discussion Scruton twice refers to “our species”, and when mankind as a species is invoked can the universalities of origins, sources, evolution, genes, homo sapiens, Darwin, the lot, be far behind? Our mastery over nature converted the primaeval world “into a safe and common home for our species” Scruton writes on page 61. Then on page 65, elaborating on the contrast between the ‘free’ beauties of nature and the ‘dependent’ beauties of art, he tells us that “there is something plausible in the idea that the contemplation of nature is both distinctive of our species and common to its members…”

If the contemplative appreciation of nature is distinctive of our species perhaps it is also instinctive in our species: doesn’t this take us close to the evolutionary view? Dutton and Scruton start out from very different premises, to be sure, yet aren’t they talking about much the same thing?

The failings of EP

But no — Scruton won’t have any of that. Agreeing with an Australian philosopher, the late David Stove, he dismisses evolutionary psychology as “Darwinian fairytales”. As for The Art Instinct, although it receives bibliographical mention at the back of Scruton’s book, neither the work nor its argument is engaged directly (both titles appeared in 2009, The Art Instinct a little before Beauty). Instead, two other proponents of evolutionary psychology, Ellen Dissanayake and Geoffrey Miller (whose contributions are described in Dutton’s book) are made to represent evolutionary aesthetics overall.

Both thinkers however are too idiosyncratic to fill this role, and might be seen as easy game. In Homo Aestheticus and elsewhere Dissanayake had proposed that art arises from the human need to decoratively “make special” our ceremonies and religious rites. Making special by means of ornamental art supposedly encourages group cohesion, thereby conferring a collective advantage. Scruton allows that the theory has something to be said for it, but says it “falls critically short of explaining what is distinctive of the aesthetic”. Again, in The Mating Mind Geoffrey Miller pushes Darwinian fitness theory further perhaps than is entirely safe: like the peacock’s tail, both beauty and art itself are lumped in with all the other phenomena of sexual selection and reproduction. Not unreasonably, Scruton comments that “Even if the peacock’s tail and the Art of Fugue have a common ancestry, the appreciation elicited by the one is of a completely different kind from the appreciation directed at the other.”(p37)

Whatever evolutionary psychology may say, or evolutionists like Denis Dutton might think (so Roger Scruton argues), it is man’s good fortune to have been divinely touched with rationality, for “it is the very capacity for reasoning that distinguishes us from the rest of nature.” Reasoning about things we know and have experienced enables us to make the fine discriminations required in aesthetic judgement; reasoning allows us to enter into the mind of the artist and understand his intentions — what the poet was driving at, what the painter meant. After which on page 38 Scruton sweeps the whole Darwinian argument aside:

“As things stand, the evolutionary psychology of beauty offers a picture of the human being and human society with the aesthetic element deprived of its specific intentionality, and dissolved in vague generalities that overlook the peculiar place of aesthetic judgement in the life of the rational agent.”

The evolutionist’s response

So that’s that. But is it also “how things stand” with Denis Dutton? Within his Darwinian scheme of explanation, does a painter or poet know what he’s doing, mean what he says, and can we understand his intentions ourselves? The Art Instinct has in fact a lot to say about intention and intentionality, and it is neither vaporous nor vague.

Bison, Chauvet Cave

Fitness theory — the signs of vigor and male prowess that brilliant tail feathers and menacing antlers and fighting ability show — is important in Dutton’s argument, and it places conscious intention and visibly displayed individual achievement at the center of evolutionary aesthetics. Whoever drew the highly distinctive images of bears, bison, rhinoceros and lions at Chauvet Cave about 32,000 years ago knew exactly what he was doing, and must have been greatly admired for his skill. Moreover, Dutton’s thinking about Palaeolithic origins in the past is informed by research among tribes-people in the present. Evidence of self-conscious artistic intention is something he encountered doing fieldwork in New Guinea villages, where “the work of individual dancers, poets, and carvers is a focus of fascinated attention”.

From Scruton’s comment above you might think that evolutionary psychology had as one of its aims (or anyway one of its effects) an anthropological “abandonment of the author function”, a denial of individual agency, a view of abstract historical process without individual influence or meaning, of predetermining forces that supervene and displace the writer’s mind. Not so says Dutton — quite the reverse. It is in novels, poetry, and drama that individual demonstrations of superior skill, style, and imaginative intelligence provide some of evolution’s most persuasive indicators:

We admire clarity, accuracy, and relevance in realistic, descriptive uses of language and regard these qualities as showing that a speaker possesses desirable intellectual qualities. Fictional creations — stories, jokes, and ornamented speech, such as poetry — are similarly judged.

Behind every act of speaking, descriptive or artistic, looms the idea of the fitness test. Human beings are continuously judging their fellows in terms of the cleverness or banality of their language use.

Skilled employment of a large vocabulary, complicated grammatical constructions, wit, surprise, stylishness, coherence, and lucidity all have bearing on how we assess other human beings. Intentionally artistic uses of language are particularly liable to assessment in terms of what they reveal about the character of a speaker or writer.

Listing twelve “signal characteristics of art considered as a universal, cross-cultural category,” Dutton emphasizes the universal admiration for individual skill and virtuosity; the way relatively static traditional styles are the measure against which individual innovations are tested, registered, and adopted for mainstream performance; the role of novelty and creativity as “the locus of individuality or genius in art, referring to that aspect of art that is not governed by rules or routines”; and the potential for “expressive individuality” wherever tired conventions produce boring work for weary audiences.

Rhinos, Chauvet Cave

As for the common argument that artistic individuality is a “Western construct” (a post-modern claim, and certainly not Scruton’s), drawing again on his field experience Dutton declares this to be false: “individual talent and expressive personality is respected in New Guinea as elsewhere.” So standing back a little we can see that the supposedly contradictory propositions about universality and individuality are not so incompatible after all. Yes: on the one hand a universal “art instinct” is the biological foundation of music, painting, and literature. Yes: on the other hand, the particularity of individual genius is indispensable for climbing art’s highest peaks. What’s not to like?

Sex and beauty according to Scruton

No account of beauty would be complete without the effect of sexual attraction upon our judgement of personal appearance, and since Roger Scruton has already written much on this matter it was to be expected that he would also have something to say in his latest book. Kantian ethics demand that individuals be treated as ends, not means: in his discussion of feminine beauty it becomes important for Scruton to explain how a disinterested aesthetic admiration for the nude can be distinguished from mere lubricity.

One view of sex suggests that the machinery of reproduction is a divine joke, sent by God to perplex us when we should be just getting on with our lives. This is the comic view. Another and more tragic understanding is that the theatre of sexual desire exists for the enactment of spiritually uplifting moral drama — a serious matter that should be discussed by philosophers (some of them bachelors like Kant) suffering all the pains of restraint. Sometimes they are trying to restrain homosexual impulses, like Socrates. Sometimes their impulses are heterosexual, like Saint Augustine’s. One way or the other it’s no laughing matter.

Venus of Urbino, Uffizi Gallery

In Sexual Desire Roger Scruton devotes over 400 pages to this topic. In Beauty it receives 41 pages out of 197, over a fifth of the whole, where he tells us how to adopt a suitably contemplative attitude toward naked women in art and life. It is not clear to me how useful this is. He tells us that the Venus of Urbino — “that most provocative of Titian’s female nudes” — is to be sharply distinguished from Manet’s Olympia, the author’s judgement being that “the hand on the thigh of Manet’s Olympia is not the hand that Titian paints, schooled in innocent caresses and resting with a fairy touch: it is a raw, tough hand that deals in money, that grips far more readily than it strokes…”  As Scruton strains to distinguish the kind of work he approves as reflecting “conjugal passion” (Titian) from what he disapproves as incipiently pornographic (Manet), drawing on the bachelor sage of 18th century Königsberg to adjudicate (Immanuel Kant), we enter the philosophical zone of subjects that are not objects, objects that would prefer to be subjects, and subjects that are not really objects despite being treated as if they were — like Manet’s model for Olympia. But this is more for adepts and cognoscenti.

Scruton also regards the historic distinction between “fantasy” and “imagination” as important. “True art appeals to the imagination,” he writes, “whereas effects elicit fantasy. Imaginary things are pondered, fantasies are acted out. Both fantasy and imagination concern unrealities; but while the unrealities of fantasy penetrate and pollute our world, those of the imagination exist in a world of their own, in which we wander freely and in a condition of sympathetic detachment.” This is all very well — and not unpersuasive — until one looks at the author’s humorless discussion of Titian’s Venus of Urbino. In contrast to Botticelli’s Venus, Scruton observes, with Titian’s Venus we are no longer in heaven but in a down-to-earth realm of

“domestic safety and conjugal passion… She reclines among her drapes in full confidence of her personal right to them, immersed in a life that is larger, deeper, more inscrutable than the moment alone. Her body is revealed to us, but she does not show it to us — she is not as a rule conscious of being watched, save perhaps by a dog or a cupid whose calm unembarrassability merely emphasizes the fact that voyeurs cannot trouble her peace of mind, which is also a peace of body. She is not in a state of excitement…

Myrina Aphrodite, Pergamon Museum

What is this? Fantasy or imagination? Who knows? Though it does bring to mind Mrs Patrick Campbell’s thrust at her unmanageably loquacious vegetarian friend Bernard Shaw: “some day you’ll eat a pork chop Georgie, and then God help all women.”

No doubt some useful distinction between the healthily erotic and a sick lubricity can be made, as Scruton tries to do — the contemporary curse of pornography is real enough. And no doubt Kant’s distinction between means and ends helps us understand what has happened. I do feel however that if all this is of such grave moral concern to Scruton, then one would like to see him turn his attention away from the temptations of reclining nudes. The serene dignity of partially draped standing figures, exemplified by the Hellenistic Venus de Milo and the Myrina Aphrodite, remind us that antiquity did some things rather better.

Sex and beauty, the evolutionary view

The ordinary reader might easily feel there is little to be said here. Whatever the humorist James Thurber may have been thinking of when he asked plaintively “Is Sex Necessary?”, sex is certainly needed for evolution. After all, evolution is about reproduction, reproduction is about sex, and Darwin’s thoughts about sexual selection by mate choice are the starting point for any consideration of why some features of human anatomy and some shapes are preferred to others. Here the peacock’s tail returns in all its glory: any specimen strong enough to provide the walking squawking platform for such an extravagant display proclaims its biological fitness to peahens for miles around. And it has been confirmed experimentally that the better peacocks with the better tails have the better genes.

Natural selection is slow, passive, and excludes the unfit. Sexual selection is by comparison fast, active, and both includes and unites the fit. For anyone interested in what human fitness looks like there are well-known studies of waist-to-hip ratios showing what is required for female attractiveness. “Healthy premenopausal women will have a ratio of .67 to .80” writes Dutton, “hardly an hourglass, but possibly a Coke bottle; this body shape is regarded as “feminine’ and attractive by men.” We are told that there are sound statistical reasons for regarding this ratio as biologically adaptive, “as women who display a waist-to-hip ratio on the .7 or .8 range are significantly more fertile than women closer to the healthy male ratio of around .9.”

Yet the curious thing about modern evolutionary aesthetics is that this attention to physique is only the start. One could almost argue that it takes off from the point where Roger Scruton falters — perplexed by moral issues, and whether he should allow Olympia, clothed or unclothed, into his living room. Instead, evolutionary aesthetics concentrates on the remarkable creative attributes of artists and the dazzling achievements of conscious artistry. Not Olympia, but Manet the artist, is the focus of concern; and not the real-life Victorine Meurent, who modelled for Manet’s painting, but the innovative skills of painters who have historically portrayed at least as many women with their clothes on as off. That, I feel fairly sure, is true of Manet.

While anatomical excellence is fundamental, human mental development and the emergence of language brought a whole new range of attractive intellectual features, all convertible into art. Minds were expanding, and artistic virtuosity not only gave access to our minds, it enhanced our attractiveness too. Gorgeous paintings gradually came to supplement gorgeous anatomy; sharp wit and sharp dialog supplemented physical prowess. Muscly warrior castes may have thought such developments effete, distracting, and incomprehensible, but in evolutionary terms they were no less effective in determining mate choice.

Dutton writes: “Grammar, syntax, word choice, appropriateness, coherence, relevance, speed of response, wit, rhythm, ability to toy with words, and originality all play a part. Taken together, these skills and qualities of mind constitute eloquence, and the admiration of eloquence is solidly on the list of human universals.” So it is that from a foundation of words, and intelligence, and with the operation of sexual selection, the manifold glories of story telling and literary enchantment eventually grew — from tribal tales about hunting bears to the Odyssey, to Shakespeare, to Tolstoy and Thomas Mann.

Minimal beauty and the sense of order

A photograph in Beauty shows a place setting at a dinner table. A folded napkin, tied neatly with a bow, sits on a plate alongside a knife and fork, with wine glasses ready nearby and lighted candles in the background. A suspicion that this heralds a chapter on etiquette soon proves mistaken (though I look forward to neat little bows on our domestic napkins in future). The accompanying discussion is among the more interesting features of Scruton’s book, and it underlines two things. First, that an elementary sense of visual order lies at the foundation of the pictorial arts; second, that when the author writes of civilization providing “a safe and common home for our species”, this is the sort of home he has in mind. His species is cultural rather than zoological, and much of it can be found within a leisurely day’s ride of what Englishmen call the Home Counties, not too far from London.

“There is an aesthetic minimalism exemplified by laying the table, tidying your room, designing a web-site” Scruton writes, and however remote in scale and significance these are from the maximalism of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Beethoven’s Ninth, in each case we want things to “look right”. Perhaps it is unnecessary to be reminded of this amidst the welter of magazines dealing with house and home and the plethora of newspaper supplements about “design”, especially when more and more people call themselves “designers”. But because he feels that the more mundane features of modern life also belong in a general theory of beauty, Scruton usefully reminds us that “a nice pair of shoes or a tasteful piece of wrapping paper” are more important to many people’s daily lives than the great works of art that may, if we are lucky, fill our leisure hours. They both confirm and express “our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility.” (p12)

His ability to say helpful things about shoes and wrapping paper shows the practical turn of mind that is one of Scruton’s assets. His chapter on “Everyday Beauty” also treats gardens, distinguishing their aesthetic enjoyment from the open spaces of landscape. Kant had argued that unlike works of art landscapes “owe their appeal not to symmetry, unity, and form, but to an openness, grandeur and world-like expansiveness, in which it is we and not they that are contained.” In contrast, writes Scruton, gardens are extensions of the human world that mediate “between the built environment and the world of nature.” Gardens have been made and enjoyed for human purposes in every civilization. Does this make them also aesthetic universals?  Perhaps there’s a case for such a view:

This attempt to match our surroundings to ourselves and ourselves to our surroundings is arguably a human universal. And it suggests that the judgement of beauty is not just an optional addition to the repertoire of human judgements, but the unavoidable consequence of taking life seriously, and becoming truly conscious of our affairs. (p82)

But what is true of politics and economics is also true of aesthetics. A tension exists between the claims of the collective and the claims of the individual; between the communal requirements of cultural tradition and the personal ambitions of artists. A small town with an established architectural style that has grown and matured over centuries may not appreciate the egoistic audacities of Frank Gehry or Sir Norman Foster. The residential community may want something that fits in, that does not stand out; something where age-old patterns are honoured, not violated; a design in which the humble harmonies that make a house a home should be preserved. In brief, it may not want a big glass-walled egg in the town square.

The aesthetics of everyday life lead ineluctably to the place of consensus and tradition. Scruton places a high value on collective agreement whenever settled understandings of hearth and home are threatened by a spirit of “tear down and start again” — regardless of whose hearths and homes are pulverised. He argues the conservative case for a civilized life that consists, fundamentally, in providing congenial homes for people of taste in a social order “that does nothing to disturb our perceptions but which radiates a simple message of calm sociability.”(p92) His eloquence on behalf of this ideal is moving, but seems perhaps a mite too bland. It needs a dash of bitters — the sort of thing provided by Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Whatever it does for the modern economy, and it plainly does a great deal, conspicuous consumption also “disturbs our perceptions” and does nothing at all for “calm sociability”. Some awareness of this is perhaps implied by the following contrast:

Our discussion implies that aesthetic judgement can be exercised in two contrasting ways: to fit in and to stand out.

Fitting in or standing out (and in the arts is there now a more popular way of standing out than being outrageous?), passively conforming or seeking attention, unconsciously accepting conventions or actively “making special”, these psychological alternatives have all sorts of implications — or they do for a Darwinian approach to art. Although he might be loath to admit it, Scruton’s thoughts on such matters as novelty vs. tradition relate to cognitive evolution, and to our organized understanding of the world around us. This begins with the perception of patterns, and their interpretation, and the way living organisms respond to regularity and order.

Cognitive evolution

It is over thirty years since E. H. Gombrich’s book The Sense of Order: a Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, where he advocated “an evolutionist view of the mind”. Such a view, he wrote, “has become inescapable since the days of Darwin”, adding that it is “thanks to the researches of ethologists during the last few decades that more is known about inborn reactions for which animals are undoubtedly ‘programmed’ than even Darwin could have surmised.” His particular interest was how perceived regularities in the natural world (of light, sound, heat and cold, pressure, physical resistance) enable ‘cognitive maps’ to be built up — systems of “coordinates on which meaningful objects can be plotted.” Such maps were essential to survival; they enabled living things to orient themselves in space; and he set out to connect the resulting “sense of order” with a theory of decorative design.

What did this order consist of? Amidst the blooming buzzing confusion of the sensory flux organisms detect patterns — patterns in time and intensity, in duration and force. The simple association of mere pleasure and pain might lead to valuing one pattern over another — but how did primitive organisms think? You might say the amoeba “developed a hypothesis” about the danger of approaching too close to something hot. Or you might say it “told itself a story” about the danger of hot things. Anyway the neurological rudiments of thought have been there, along with elementary representations, for millions of years. As James Hurford writes in his 2007 The Origins of Meaning, a natural evolutionary approach means “that mental representations of things and events in the world came before any corresponding expressions in language; the mental representations were phylogenetically prior to words and sentences.”

When referential language eventually came along, words and concepts multiplied to manage the patterns (Gombrich drew on information theory to explicate avian behavior: the signal to noise ratio of the peacock’s tail enabled it to cut through the surrounding redundancy). With pattern recognition came an embryonic aesthetic sense: “In both space and time, in sight and sound,” writes Brian Boyd, “we sense beauty in ‘the rule of order over randomness, of pattern over chaos’.” Before long Homo sapiens got the idea that playfully imaginative story-telling was even more fun than description, and you could have horses with wings (Greece), serpents with feathery plumes (Mexico), or priapic heroes that travelled underground (Australia). After that the arts really took off. On page fifteen of Boyd’s 2009 On the Origin of Stories he writes that “We can define art as cognitive play with pattern.” This is universal among the higher mammals, he says, adding that play itself

evolved through the advantages of flexibility; the amount of play in a species correlates with its flexibility of action. Behaviors like escape and pursuit, attack and defense, and social give-and-take can make life-or death differences.

But it is “attention” and the incessant demand for attention by art and artists that Boyd emphasizes perhaps most of all. “Art dies without attention”, he writes, adding twenty pages later that “attention provides the selective mechanism of art. If a work of art fails to earn attention, it dies.” All of us seek attention, we are told, as a mark of acceptance, respect, and status; primatological studies show that “the more dominant a primate, the more attention others direct toward him or her”; and he then pursues this topic through an analysis of one of the most famous epic narratives of all time, the Odyssey. Asking rhetorically what Homer’s work can offer us after two thousand five hundred years, he answers that “it can stress the importance of attention itself… a sine qua non of all art. Art can affect minds over time because it so compulsively engages out attention.”

Art’s importunity appears to Boyd unproblematic, perhaps because he sees it in such heartily positive terms. Something else he approves are communal benefits both at human and pre-human levels. We learn that chimpanzees celebrate community through excited cries or matching movements and “derive a rich emotional response from harmonizing attention among themselves through pattern and rhythm, chant and dance,” while historian William McNeill “recalls the ‘sense of pervasive well-being’ that he experienced in the army drill yard in 1941 — ‘a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.’” The implication being that a thorough-going incorporation into collective life is essential for everyone, that attention-getting is a social necessity in life as in art, and that ever-expanding creativity of every kind is desirable. As he writes on page 123, “For us, artistic creativity offers a good in itself.”

From making special to making vile

While walking today I saw a sticker saying “Art makes me feel unsafe.” I wonder who wrote it and why? Can it be that some art today is indeed unsafe and has a genuinely menacing purpose and character? In which case does evolutionary aesthetics throw light on the matter? As we saw at the beginning, although they differ in various ways both Roger Scruton and Denis Dutton are equally dismayed by the contemporary trashing of high culture. In his Introduction Dutton complains that “a determination to shock or puzzle has sent much art down a wrong path”, and he plainly feels uncomfortable with some modern trends. Scruton’s misgivings go deeper, and as an example of what he fears he describes a Berlin production by Calixto Bieito of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail) set in a Berlin brothel…

with Selim as pimp, and Konstanze one of the prostitutes. Even during the most tender music, the stage was littered with couples copulating, and every excuse for violence, with or without a sexual climax, was taken. At one point a prostitute is gratuitously tortured, and her nipples bloodily and realistically severed before she is killed. The words and the music speak of love and compassion, but their message is drowned out by the loudly orchestrated scenes of murder and narcissistic sex that litter the stage.

As Scruton adds, this “flight from beauty” into sordid sadistic ugliness can be found in many aspects of contemporary culture. There is a self-conscious “desire to spoil beauty in acts of aesthetic iconoclasm.” Desecration is his word for it, and he argues that for a certain kind of nihilistic mind “desecration is a kind of defence against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things our lives are judged and in order to escape that judgement we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us.”

While I am not religious I tend to agree. And I regret to say that evolutionary aesthetics appears to offer little defence against such nihilism. As the inquiries of critics like Irving Kristol and Jacques Barzun suggested years ago, the purely egoistic activities of attention seeking and making special, and the hyper-individualistic drive for supreme distinction, increasingly take place in a moral void. Ellen Dissanayake writes (Homo Aestheticus, page 59) that “specialness may be strangeness, outrageousness, or extravagance” (my emphasis). So it seems that however outrageous it is, it’s still art, and the sacralizing of making special is fully compatible with the desecration of making vile. Having implied that attention-getting creativity is a good in itself (virtually the summum bonum) Brian Boyd adds correctly that “Evolution does not aim at creativity. It aims at nothing.”

For his part Denis Dutton looks critically at modernism and says its assumption that “culture can give us a taste for just anything at all” is false. In other words, we have a kind of built-in moral resistance to the runaway pathologies now visible in the arts. I am very glad to hear this, and I hope it is true, because if it’s not, then Calixto Bieito and the film director Lars Von Trier represent the future — the Showbiz incarnation of that sick outrageousness that infects the entertainment industry today. And if that happens I suspect art will make us feel unsafer still. It needn’t, and it shouldn’t, but it may.

Note: Although the argument remains the same, the text presented here is slightly longer than that appearing in The American last October.

It had been just an ordinary day at the office, metaphysically speaking, but it looked like ending with a bang. In a sunlit grove at the foot of the Acropolis, Plato was showing Aristotle something he’d found on the web:

I am one of them, the early adopters. I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto since the beginning… Grand Theft Auto III brought a level of immersion, a depth of play never before seen in videogames. Other games allow you to play God or a hero but GTA III came the closest to letting you play something far more basic and far more strange. It let you, in a way, play a person — an aberrant criminal killer of a person but a person nevertheless… You wanted to spend weeks building up a business or collecting a dandy wardrobe or raking in millions through gambling and robbery? Go for it.

What makes the GTA games so deliriously fun and so successful (beyond the genius of their mechanics and execution) is that you’re not playing reluctant heroes — you’re playing some straight-up thugs. No Name (aka Claude) from GTA III starts out a bank robber and all around amoral dude, and his quest for vengeance doesn’t exactly reform his character. And what about Tommy Vercetti? Tommy is a cold-blooded hitman coke dealer and you win the game by slaying your enemies and taking over Vice City’s underworld, not by recanting your evil ways.

CJ in San Andreas, the first black lead, starts the game out trying to put his gang back on top before being sucked into the machinations of a crooked cop. In other words, these were not your mom and dad’s action heroes. These dudes were straight bad. With Tommy or CJ as your moral compass, running folks over and robbing prostitutes (sometimes killing them in order to scoop their money) didn’t seem like too big a stretch… [Novelist Junot Diaz reviewing Grand Theft Auto IV last June in the Wall Street Journal.]

Fear not, it’s just Showbiz

Aristotle

Aristotle looked concerned but not alarmed. He was an early adopter himself, he told Plato, adding that his well-known remarks about theatre were not meant to legitimate coke dealing or running folks over or robbing vulnerable women. Nothing nasty like that. Theatre had a noble heritage, and would doubtless survive the deliriously fun straight-up thugs of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Plato said nothing — but his face said “told you so”. It was now more than 2,300 years since he warned about the likely effects of Showbiz Athenian style; by 2009, with millions of youngsters playing straight bad dudes as virtual criminals in a world of virtual crime, the new entertainment confirmed his prediction; this could be long-range forecasting’s greatest coup.

And perhaps he’s right, or partly right anyway: but to come to the point of our argument, do Plato’s views in The Republic have anything to tell us about Showbiz today? About games like Grand Theft Auto IV, or movies like The Dark Knight, and the moral universe these puerile pyrotechnic shoot-’em-ups endlessly come from? Or perhaps more immediately the movie Anti-Christ and its director Lars Von Trier, a man (if Charlotte Gainsbourg is to be believed, and I think she should be) who is plainly deeply disturbed. Who first identified theatrical outrageousness as the classical artistic faiblesse?

Plato’s teaching

Plato

Used judiciously and with a suitably grim humour I think Plato can be a help. On the one hand he suggests that the issues raised by the relation of Showbiz to the rest of society have changed little over more than two thousand years. On the other, that the myriad effects of high-tech modern illusionism, both social and political, should not be too casually brushed aside.

Plato’s disquiet starts with the idea of ‘mimesis’. Is it a good thing or a bad? The term translates as copying, imitation, mimicry, and impersonation — things known or done indirectly and at second hand — with overtones of dishonesty and inauthenticity. And for Plato (unlike Aristotle later) those moral overtones were more important than anything else.

He had come to believe that in the hands of the Showbiz set, given their priorities, the effects of mimesis were generally bad. Trust and truth are the foundations of what we today call civil society; they require stable identities from week to week and year to year; but if actors are professionally required to be all things to all men, how can one believe what they say? And how could anyone think that thespians (from the figures onstage at Epidaurus to Lars Von Trier’s cast today), were appropriate guides to things that really count?

He tackled this issue in three places in The Republic, Books Two, Three, and Ten, where his subject is the training of moral character — especially the education of a trustworthy, truthful, and responsible governing class. But the emphasis differs in each place. In the earlier parts of The Republic his concern is mainly with the message being imparted in the schools; in Book Ten it is more the ignorance and superficial character of the typical messenger (painter, poet, or actor) that arouses his indignation.

In ancient Greece dramatic recitation was an essential part of Greek education, and this involved acting roles and representing characters before other children. Moreover, if some of Eric A. Havelock’s argument in Preface to Plato is accepted, in those days most Greeks were still semi-literate at best, and in an oral culture continual recitation was how information was remembered and passed on: the works of Hesiod and Homer amounted to encyclopaedias, in poetic form, of all that the Hellenic peoples had learnt and known and done. Such recitations were quasi-theatrical performances, rhetorically embellished, for audiences who listened because most of them could not read.

Imitation and the moral life

Plato thought the characters presented should be exemplary, and that boys should model themselves on “men of courage, self-control, independence, and religious principle.” And because first impressions are important, he believed that dramatic impersonations of rogues and scoundrels could be dangerous for both actors and audiences.

Schoolchildren “must no more act a mean part than do a mean action or any other kind of wrong. For we soon reap the fruits of literature in life, and prolonged indulgence in any form of literature leaves its mark on the moral nature of a man, affecting not only the mind but physical poise and intonation.” (Book Three, 395, H.D.P. Lee translation)

This being the case, the curriculum in Athenian schools was downright scandalous. Those with little more than a gift for the gab had undue influence. Myths were being treated as matters of fact; drunken and violent gods were held up for emulation; all educational discourse was cast in poetic and histrionic forms. This was pernicious because “Children cannot distinguish between what is allegory and what isn’t, and opinions formed at that age are usually difficult to eradicate or change; it is important that the first stories they hear shall aim at producing the right moral effect.” (Book Two, 378).

The theory of ideas

Things get more complicated in Book Ten. Metaphysics looms, along with his celebrated Theory of Ideas. This is hardly the place to summarise Plato’s philosophy, but to see where mimesis fits into the picture at least three elements should be understood. Ultimate reality resided in the “forms” — invisible, impenetrable except to God and largely unknowable by man, yet primary and fundamental. Second came visible life and tangible artefacts, copies of the forms. Third and finally came artistic representations — copies of copies.

This trinity can also be seen as a moral continuum from truth to falsehood (or, more theologically, from divinity to damnation), with thespian mimicry coming last. As Plato’s alter-ego Socrates puts it, “the artist’s representation stands at a third remove from reality.” And for those dedicated to truth that was not good enough. (Book Ten, 597)

Added to this was the importance of calm and reason — not unhinged romantic emotion — in public affairs. Our aggressive drives and sexual longings belong to the animal level of human existence: their restraint and management is the foundation of civilized life. But the arts invariably appeal to the less rational part of human nature, and working oneself up into an emotional state over nothing was something actors did every day. Furthermore (and think now of the lonely player of video games or the solitary surfer on the web) it is when a man is without the social constraint of company that he is most likely to give way to his worst impulses, and in these circumstances he may “say or do things he would be ashamed to let other people hear or see.” (Book Ten, 604)

Outrageousness and audiences

Again, Plato shows a keen understanding of why the arts favour outrageousness — and comes up with a Showbiz perennial. It had not escaped his notice that playwrights avoid mundane scenes showing ordinary people and ordinary life. For who would come to watch them? The trouble being that calm reasonableness is not dramatic.

What the box office needed at Epidaurus, as it needs in movies today, are characters that are unstable, impulsive, and violent. Thus Oedipus. Thus Hamlet. Thus the figures in Anti-Christ. But not your local butcher or baker or candlestick-maker working away at his trade. “If a playwright wants to build a popular reputation”, wrote Plato, (Book Ten, 605) “he will consciously devise dramas with characters that are unstable and irritable.” That way lies fame and fortune.

So what about Aristotle? Didn’t he also give mimesis a central place? He did, but with a very different emphasis. Aristotle was a critic rather than a moralist; an observer, not an advocate; a man who saw his scientific task as finding out how the devices, forms, structures, and mechanisms of poetry, music, and theatre work — without dwelling too much on political ideals, social effects, or moral consequences.

The imitative instinct

He was pretty laid back about mimesis. In Chapter Four of On the Art of Poetry he writes that “The instinct for imitation is inherent in man from his earliest days; he differs from other animals in that he is the most imitative of creatures, and he learns his earliest lessons by imitation. Also inborn is the instinct to enjoy works of imitation.”

That audiences might model their conduct on what they saw in the theater, or find pleasure in the vicarious company of madmen and ruffians, left Aristotle unfazed. He didn’t think in pedagogic terms. He didn’t ask that impersonations be exemplary. The characters to be found on the stage came in all sizes, shapes, and moral condition — good, bad, and indifferent — and by and large he was content that this was so.

Or anyway that’s how Aristotle felt until Grand Theft Auto IV. Despite appearances it had left him a bit rattled. Plato noticed this and teased him about the golden mean. As they strolled together through the dusk he remarked that his young friend was inclined to think “moderation in all things” would take care of evil. But it wouldn’t. Not with unbridled hedonism wrecking the lives of young and old.

Are some actions evil in themselves?

Aristotle calmly responded that he had covered this in The Nicomachean Ethics where, in Book Two, Chapter Six, he wrote that “the choice of a mean is not possible in every action; some actions are evil in themselves” — and as for the pleasure principle, in human affairs it was always necessary to take happiness (eudaimonia) into account.

That is why the pleasures of mimesis on the stage should be accepted. Of course theatrical mimicry involved lots of clever deception. But, he added, lightly touching the Master’s elbow, accepting the pleasure principle in art was one thing — justifying ‘noble lies’ to deceive the public was something else. Think where that had led!

Sometimes their disagreements, however intellectually fertile, were wearying: it occurred to Aristotle that Plato had become a bit of a killjoy and he wondered what the old man would be demanding next. Universal surveillance? Better to remember Pericles’ speech to the Athenians in 431 BC:

The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty.

But here we shall leave them, debating long into the Athenian night an issue that is still with us today — is Showbiz a cause or an effect of the decline of civility in private and public life, and who should we blame, and what should we do?

Comment

Mimesis and Grand Theft Auto

We are all familiar enough with the perennial debate about whether identifying with nasty characters in literature (a) encourages nasty behaviour or (b) discourages it by providing sufficient outlet for impulses which are otherwise likely to result in nasty behaviour. GTA (and the technology associated with it) takes mimesis and empathetic identification a step further, which, paradoxically, might seem to strengthen both sides of the debate.

Much of course depends on the psyche of the person doing the identifying. While Plato had an exaggerated fear of the first possibility, Aristotle was (as Roger mentions) much more relaxed about mimesis as such, though his discussions of it relate to highly socialised genres such as tragedy and comedy. Thus the tragic effect requires the mimesis of suitable people; the spectator of tragedy could not identify with a thoroughly evil person. But would Aristotle have approved of the genre (rather than the technology as such) to which GTA belongs? It is scarcely conceivable that he would have, though we have no ancient approximations to such a genre. The mimesis of which he approved in tragedy was designed to stimulate very basic emotions (pity and fear), but to stimulate them in very sophisticated and controlled ways.

Perhaps the shows in the Roman amphitheatre provide an interesting kind of contrasting parallel to GTA. We might see them as taking modern reality TV a step further (as in The Running Man). Instead of merely humiliating people, why not kill them? The Roman shows and reality TV however approach the mimesis from, as it were, the opposite end. In GTA the ‘art work’ itself remains securely in the realm of the aesthetic or the virtual, but the spectator moves from the more imaginatively detached, though still empathetic, attitude one brings to conventional art to enter, as it were, the art work itself as its hero, though only in an imaginative, aesthetic or virtual sense.

But in the Roman arena the spectator retains the conventional distinctness or separation from the ‘art work’ (though of course ready and able to identify imaginatively and sadomasochistically with the performers), while the ‘art work’ itself shifts so that it no longer merely imitates reality; the slaughter really occurs. The relevant ancient philosopher here is the Stoic Seneca who, like Plato, was anxious about the effects of bad examples taken from art or from being in bad company about which, having been Nero’s tutor, he was something of an expert. He warns against attending the games because of the sort of people you rub shoulders with and the demoralising effects of the spectacle itself:

Nothing is so damaging to good character as the habit of lounging at the games; for it is then that vice steals subtly upon one through the avenue of pleasure….I mean that I come home more greedy, more ambitious, more voluptuous, and even more cruel and inhuman – because I have been among human beings.
(Seneca, Letter 7, Loeb translation).

Stuart Lawrence, Classical Studies, Massey University

A sense of danger is a wonderful thing.  Like Darwin said, don’t leave home without it. A sense of danger — or at the very least a prudential wariness in unknown territory — warns you of the bear in the cave, the croc in the creek, the shark beyond the breakers. Most ocean-going yachtsmen find it useful too. A sailor who doesn’t understand the grim warning “worse things happen at sea” could sail into serious trouble round Cape Horn.

That’s why Jessica Watson’s voyage is interesting. Will something happen to her? Tens of thousands are following her blog as Ella’s Pink Lady, a sturdy Sparkman and Stephens 34 sponsored by Ella Baché, heads down across the Pacific to the Southern Ocean.

Jessica Watson

Jessica’s plainly a nice kid and having a great time — but is she well-advised? When New Zealand-born mum Julie said on television that sailing around Cape Horn was no more dangerous than crossing the street (or did she say that crossing the street was more dangerous?) you began to wonder. Is there something in the water? Or is it just the Antipodal Mind?

Few of us think clearly when badgered by hostile interviewers, and that might have had something to do with it. But it’s an unusual claim, especially when the sailor is a 16-year-old girl, not strongly built, who indeed looks more of a child. In contrast to mum Julie, others with rather more sailing experience show more respect. After surviving a tumultuous night off Tierra del Fuego among the breaking seas and invisible rocks known as “the Milky Way”, Joshua Slocum wrote in 1898:

“Hail and sleet in the fierce squalls cut my flesh till the blood trickled over my face; but what of that? It was daylight, and the sloop was in the midst of the Milky Way of the sea, which is northwest of Cape Horn, and it was the white breakers of a huge sea over sunken rocks which had threatened to engulf her through the night.

It was Fury Island I had sighted and steered for, and what a panorama was before me now and all around! It was not the time to complain of a broken skin. What could I do but fill away among the breakers and find a channel between them, now that it was day?

Since she had escaped the rocks through the night, surely she would find her way by daylight. This was the greatest sea adventure of my life. God knows how my vessel escaped.”

“The greatest sea adventure of my life.” That was Captain Joshua Slocum’s measured judgment, aged 52, after 30 years of wrecks, strandings, dismastings, and many storms in all the seven seas. At Cape Horn, having eventually found smooth water among the islands near Cockburn Channel, he climbed the mast to survey the wild scene astern:

The great naturalist Darwin (wrote Slocum in Sailing Alone Around the World) looked over this seascape from the deck of the Beagle, and wrote in his journal, ‘any landsman seeing the Milky Way would have nightmares for a week.’ He might have added, ‘or seaman’ as well.

Then there’s Sir Francis Chichester. Both a solo flier in the 1930s and a solo round-the-world sailor in 1966-67, he wrote that the thought of Cape Horn “not only frightened me, but I think it would be fair to say that it terrified me. The accounts of the storms there are, quite simply, terrifying… I told myself for a long time that anyone who tried to round the Horn in a small yacht must be crazy. Of the eight yachts I knew to have attempted it, (this was back in 1966, RS) six had been capsized or somersaulted, before, during, or after the passage…”

Not a picnic. Not like crossing the road.

Joshua Slocum, 1844–1909

Just to get our bearings, now that solo circumnavigation has become a record-book contest for teenagers, let’s remember what Captain Joshua Slocum achieved over one hundred years ago. Since that time there have been hundreds of ocean sailors and many narratives, yet both his voyage and his book remain unique. In the introduction to a 1948 edition Arthur Ransome wrote that

Sailing Alone Around the World is one of the immortal books. Joshua Slocum was the first man to sail round the world in a small boat with none but himself as captain, mate and crew. Other men may repeat the feat. No other man can be the first. Captain Slocum’s place in history is as secure as Adam’s.

Captain Joshua Slocum

Briefly told, Slocum was born in Nova Scotia, his formal education ended when he was ten, and after running away from home at the age of 16 he lived almost entirely at sea. Along with boat-building, sailing was his world. Other lives and vocations he explored through the library he carried with him when, as a ship’s master on full-rigged ships, he had room for books. (See Note at end of this essay for the books in his library.) Later in life, on his round-the-world voyage, when he found that in calm weather his boat Spray would keep on its course with the helm lashed, he told how he spent his time. It was not taken up at the wheel:

“No man, I think, could stand or sit and steer a vessel round the world. I did better than that; for I sat and read my books, mended my clothes, or cooked my meals and ate them in peace. I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so I made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”

Virginia Slocum

A notable aspect of Slocum’s life at sea is that after being given command of the barque Washington, in 1869, his wife Virginia always travelled with him, bearing several children to whom she taught their lessons as the family sailed along. Husband and wife were close; after Virginia’s early death in Buenos Aires in 1884 he took a long time to get over it. One of his sons wrote that “Father’s days were done with the passing of mother. They were pals…” Another son said that “When she died, father never recovered. He was like a ship with a broken rudder.”

The next decade was one of decline. But ten years later he had recovered enough to make that legendary solo voyage in a fishing smack found near New Bedford. Though the Spray was old, and propped up in a farmer’s field, he decided to rebuild it himself (“My ax felled a stout oak-tree near by for a keel… and the much-esteemed stem-piece was from the butt of the smartest kind of pasture oak.”). Then, aged 52, he set off alone to circumnavigate the globe — with no engine, no generator, no electricity, no self-steering mechanism or autopilot, no radio, no refrigerator, no GPS, no roller-furling sails, no sponsors, and a $1.50 tin clock for a chronometer. It is said he departed with only $1.80 in cash; though he profitably traded miscellaneous goods along the way.

Sail Plan, Spray

While most sailors now go west to east, taking advantage of the prevailing winds, Joshua Slocum sailed east to west — the hard way round Cape Horn. How was his prodigious circumnavigation achieved? As Richard Henderson writes in Singlehanded Sailing, “The success of his voyage was largely due to masterful seamanship. He learned to read the weather, maneuver his clumsy craft in tight places, handle her heavy gear, claw to windward when necessary, ride to a sea anchor, lie to or run off in heavy weather, and balance his boat so that she would sail for days with the helm unattended.” And, we might add, by being alert to danger every minute he was afloat.

Not asleep or dreaming.

Jessica and Jesse: Living the Dream

Whether Jessica Watson was awake, asleep, or just dreaming when her boat Ella’s Pink Lady collided with a container ship just before she set off round the world is unclear. It happened at night, and there are claims and counter-claims. But the romantic rhetoric of dreaming is everywhere in the writings of modern teenage record-breakers. At her website there’s “a big thanks to our sponsors for making Jessica’s dream come true.” Elsewhere she “hopes to inspire everyone with a dream in their heart”, a sentiment fervently endorsed by her fans: “Go Jessica, live the dream!” they cry again and again.

Ella’s Pink Lady leaves Sydney

She also acknowledges the inspiration of Jesse Martin, the young Australian who rounded the world in 1999 – 2000, and whose record at age 17 she hopes to shatter. Martin may be a somewhat indifferent sailor, but you can’t take away from him the fact that he set out, broke the age record sailing an identical S & S 34 to Jessica’s, and wrote a book about it. It must be said here and now, however, that one record of Martin’s is unlikely to be broken for many years. His writings contain more windy nonsense about ‘dreaming’ and ‘living the dream’ than all history has recorded hitherto. Even a well-known American dreamer gets into the act on a prefatory page:

“I encourage you to continue to set high goals for yourself and to continue to pursue your dreams. You can do anything that your imagination, effort, and talent will let you achieve. Best wishes. Sincerely, Bill Clinton.”

With Jesse and Jessica we reach the end of the road pioneered by Joshua Slocum. Teenage circumnavigations are now increasingly Showbiz — part of the theatrical-histrionic-industrial complex (aka the media). How far this will be true of Jessica’s trip remains to be seen. But with Jesse Martin’s 2002 world-wide adventure cruise on the schooner Kijana, the spin-off from his circumnavigation, it was made fully explicit. For this project the globe was seen as a vast movie set, a sequence of colorful painted backgrounds where a cast of characters — some amateur and some professional — were supposed to enact defined and scripted “adventures”, the “natives” changing from place to place but really being just exotic décor.

Unpacking the word “Showbiz” may help us see what has happened. Looking back a hundred years to Slocum, you see a tough and secure identity doing something no other man had done. Solo round-the-world sailing began with a resourceful, self-sufficient, hardworking and humorous New Englander, not Leonardo DiCaprio. Taking things semantically, first Captain Joshua Slocum did the “business”; then through writing and lecturing he put himself and his remarkable achievement on “show”. With Jesse and Jessica this order is reversed. First, negotiations are carried out with all sorts of sponsors who know exactly what sort of “show” they require. Then Jesse and Jessica go out to do the “business” — if they can. This is called reality television.

Kijana, Schooner

Sailing solo around the world made Jesse Martin a celebrity. But what to do next? How about a bigger dream, with a huge white photogenic schooner, media deals, and an American publisher talking up another book, most of it directly inspired by Showbiz itself — a movie in fact. In his account of this ill-fated project in Kijana, the Real Story, (Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2005, Kijana being the name of the boat) Jesse’s mission statement tells how the new voyage will be a three-year-long “adventure” with “tropical jungles, exotic ports, sparse deserts and wild natives”. After leaving Australia he’d head “straight for Papua New Guinea; then on to Indonesia, India and Africa, where the crew would leave the boat on the coast of Tanzania and cross the continent by land while another crew would sail our boat around to meet us on the other side. I wanted to ride camels across the Serengeti Plain, then raft down the Congo River to meet the boat on the Atlantic coast.” (Kijana, the Real Story, 12-13)

The Amazon, the Caribbean, and the Galapagos Islands would follow, in a thirteen-part series with corporate backing pitched at the youth market. And before long everything fell into place. In 2002, with his best friend and his brother on a $285,000 boat christened Kijana, plus two young women chosen for their looks and their music, Jesse sailed off “to find and film paradise” — first making for Maya Bay in Thailand. Maya Bay was “one of the places I dreamed of visiting, and the location of the Leonardo DiCaprio film The Beach”, a movie  that “portrayed the image of paradise we were searching for.” It may have been inspiring at the time, but as a film The Beach lies somewhere between a ClubBohème wet dream and a vision of hippie apocalypse, where an exclusive group of swinging singles find “paradise” on an unmarked island in the Gulf of Thailand — until bullets start flying.

What on earth can one say? First, Jesse’s paradise is a collage of tropical getaway brochures, distant echoes of old South Sea adventure stories, plus Leonard DeCaprio and Virginie Ledoyen making out under the palms. That’s for starters.  Muddled into the dream is an anthropological fantasy that tribal peoples who live in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and the Pacific, not to mention Africa and South America too, are waiting in their native simplicity to cater to western bohofolk in big yachts with nothing better to do.

It’s unresistingly puerile — but that itself raises serious questions. Is it also a vision shared more generally Downunder? Considering the youthful author’s loosely bohemian background it would be foolish to expect much in the way of historical or cultural understanding. But If you took a surgical slice of his brain might it represent a cross-section of ‘enlightened’ Australian middle-class attitudes as a whole? I suspect it would. And that it reflects widespread regional delusions.

The Antipodal Mind

The attitude toward danger we find in Jessica Watson’s bold yachting venture is suggestive. East of the Indian Ocean, south of Indonesia, and washing indistinctly out into the Pacific, something appears to have gone missing from the Darwinian survival kit. Both in Australia and New Zealand — traditionally known as the “Antipodes” — there’s a feeling that while nasty things happen in the rest of the world, they’ll never happen here to us. The Antipodal Mind assumes that because we’re sincerely multicultural and opposed to war and have busy academic Peace Centers busily doing whatever Peace Centers do — we’ll be safe.

Prompted by the tourist industry, there has also been a sentimental tendency to glamorise people, places and activities once thought unglamorous and risky to visit. From the security of the Antipodes unstable Pacific micro-states are regularly shown as a benign mixture of palms, lagoons, and adorable brown children with beguiling eyes, places where handsome yachts and giant cruise ships lie peacefully at anchor.

Under the rubric of romantic primitivism large numbers of antipodal bien-pensants convinced themselves that even the most violent tribal societies were rather fun — and were certainly colorful and exciting. Disneyfication added another element. Where primitivist fantasy denies there is anything to fear from tribalism, romantic puerility presents us with the intellectual and educational understanding of a child. It’s as if everything the West has painfully learnt about the Third World in the last fifty years has been ignored, occluded, or erased.  Is it because of this lethal mix of sentimentalism, incuriosity, and raw ignorance that tourists go year after year to places where there’s a reasonable chance of being blown to bits?

What do outsiders make of it? I think it can be confidently said that you won’t find these delusions in the lands northwest of here, where most Asians see such attitudes as a mental affliction of farang. Living amongst upheavals and riots, floods and famines, political corruption and political despotism, desperately crowded cities and civil wars that have decimated whole populations, Asians matter-of-factly know danger for what it is (part of daily life), and are inclined to regard those who by a freak of geography have been shielded from such things as fools in a fool’s paradise. Like birds on Pacific Islands that have no predators — rather like New Zealand kiwis indeed — their sense of self-preservation seems underdeveloped. Cape Horn? Not to worry. Like crossing the street.

But let’s cut to the chase: only people living at the end of the earth, safely surrounded by deep water, get to think about danger this way. And from this perspective that comment on the negligible dangers of Cape Horn is a characteristic expression of the Antipodal Mind. It complacently assumes that the GPS will function flawlessly; that navigation will need neither sextant nor log tables; that weather forecasts will reliably get through; and that the vulnerable vane/oar/linkages of the self-steering gear at the stern will never be swept away. Plus of course that a secure radio link will enable encouraging daily conversations between Team Watson and Jessica, providing an invisible supportive web of world-wide contacts that give “solo sailing” a rather different meaning than it used to have. No problemo. No danger. Just a breeze.

Worse things do happen at sea

Yet even a casual landlubberly inquiry shows malfunctions and mishaps all the time. True, September’s UK Yachting Monthly starts with the usual ingratiating images of yachts in palm-fringed lagoons, but the very next page has lightning melting a VHF aerial on a mast. That means the end of radio contact: not good. Nearby a Bronze Medal is being awarded to a Scottish lifeboat man. He had rescued two Swedes from a boat that had been knocked down twice in a Force 9 gale with 20-foot waves — and the rescue depended entirely on the radio working as it should. Elsewhere there’s a woman climbing out of a yacht wrecked in Mexico. Somehow the autopilot had spontaneously gone from ‘auto’ to ‘standby’; because there was no power no warning sounded; disaster swiftly followed.

Sir Francis Chichester at work

Sir Francis Chichester’s Gipsy Moth Circles the World is full of this sort of thing. The book seems at times one long grumble, a catalog of mishaps and an exhausting litany of complaint. One day some broken glass cut the man’s bare feet and made him cross. But what did he expect, from an unsecured bottle of whiskey, except shattered fragments everywhere when the boat turned upside-down in the Tasman Sea? The pervasive tone of exasperation makes Gipsy Moth Circles the World a hard read compared to Joshua Slocum’s good-humored and humorous Sailing Alone Around the World (1898). All the same, the picky relentlessness of Chichester’s detail shows clearly what young sailors like Jessica, with more modern gear and more stable boats, still have to face.

If he isn’t fixing a valve in the motor’s exhaust that is letting in water, he’s trying to get an electric bilge pump working or secure a slipping self-steering vane. When he isn’t fixing the brake on the propeller, he’ll be spending a whole morning bleeding the engine’s fuel system, fuel pump, priming pump, and filter. There are so many things to do that he provides readers with the maintenance list he made out, 71 items long, as an agenda. These are the first ten tasks it contains:

Check water tank connections
Secure cockpit locker hasp
Fix preventer to galley drawers
Try self-steering vane without extra lead
Freshen nip of tiller lines to self-steering
Check engine water level
Stow burgee stick
Rig tiller tackle to cabin
Try more slack on self-steering oar
More solid cockpit repair to keep deck water out

Chichester fixing self-steering gear

The other day Jessica reported using goo to fix persistent deck or cockpit leaks. Then on Nov 9th she said she was doing some jobs she’d put off because of “bouncy” seas, and was working on her own maintenance list, including “a really good check over for chafe and wear.” On November 16th she gave “the little Yanmar engine a full polish up and scrubbed out the bilges.” There seems to be a notion among teenagers that polishing an engine makes it run better. Jesse Martin also describes cleaning the outside of an engine, giving it a pat, and being pleased by the way it subsequently performed. This is evidently considered maintenance. But Jessica’s daily blog is endearing, with plenty about dolphins, while baking cupcakes was a huge turn-on for the fans.

“Wow!!!!! Love those cupcakes…” wrote Rob of Ingleburn, “You are truly an inspiration to everyone. Keep doing what you are doing. You are wonderful.”

Captain Joshua Slocum also cooked at sea. Feeling in need of fortification after Cape Horn he fried some buns. As sturdy in their construction as the Spray itself, one of them still sat on the mantel of his home back in Massachusetts some years later. So perhaps the two matelots have an unexpected affinity. Anyway Jessica’s okay. There’s a lot of what is best in the Antipodal character about her — ‘let’s give it a go’ combined with a jaunty attitude and an optimistic will to succeed. We wish her well. Luckily the middle of the ocean has been serene so far and the Pacific well-behaved — almost a danger-free zone. Slocum once knew a ship’s master who took a benignly complacent view of the Pacific Ocean and claimed that its perils had been much exaggerated. Then a hurricane nearly blew his ship out of the water. After that, wrote Slocum, he was a changed man. Maybe that will happen to Jessica too. Maybe not. We shall see.

Congratulations Jessica! Well done and welcome home — Sydney May 15 2010.

Sailing Alone Around the World

By Joshua Slocum

Chapter One

A blue-nose ancestry with Yankee proclivities – Youthful fondness for the sea – Master of the ship Northern Light – Loss of the Aquidneck – Return home from Brazil in the canoe Liberdade – The gift of a “ship” – The rebuilding of the Spray – Conundrums in regard to finance and calking – The launching of the Spray.

In the fair land of Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other. On the northern slope of the range grows the hardy spruce-tree, well adapted for ship-timbers, of which many vessels of all classes have been built. The people of this coast, hardy, robust, and strong, are disposed to compete in the world’s commerce, and it is nothing against the master mariner if the birth-place mentioned on his certificate be Nova Scotia. I was born in a cold spot, on coldest North Mountain, on a cold February 20, though I am a citizen of the United States — a naturalized Yankee, if it may be said that Nova Scotians are not Yankees in the truest sense of the word.

Joshua Slocum aged about 39

On both sides my family were sailors; and if any Slocum should be found not seafaring, he will show at least an inclination to whittle models of boats and contemplate voyages. My father was the sort of man who, if wrecked on a desolate island, would  find his way home, if he had a jack-knife and could find a tree. He was a good judge of a boat, but the old clay farm which some calamity made his was an anchor to him. He was not afraid of a capful of wind, and he never took a back seat at a camp-meeting or a good, old-fashioned revival.

As for myself, the wonderful sea charmed me from the first. At the age of eight I had already been afloat along with other boys on the bay, with chances greatly in favor of being drowned. When a lad I filled the important post of cook on a fishing-schooner; but I was not long in the galley, for the crew mutinied at the appearance of my first duff, and “chucked me out” before I had a chance to shine as a culinary artist. The next step toward the goal of happiness found me before the mast in a full-rigged ship bound on a foreign voyage. Thus I came “over the bows,” and not in through the cabin windows, to the command of a ship.

The Northern Light

My best command was that of the magnificent ship Northern Light, of which I was part-owner. I had a right to be proud of her, for at that time — in the eighties — she was the finest American sailing-vessel afloat. Afterward I owned and sailed the Aquidneck, a little bark which of all man’s handiwork seemed to me the nearest to perfection of beauty, and which in speed, when the wind blew, asked no favors of steamers. I had been nearly twenty years a shipmaster when I quit her deck on the coast of Brazil, where she was wrecked. My home voyage to New York with my family was made in the canoe Liberdade, without accident.

My voyages were all foreign. I sailed as freighter and trader principally to China, Australia, and Japan, and among the Spice Islands. Mine was not the sort of life to make one long to coil up one’s ropes on land, the customs and ways of which I had finally almost forgotten. And so when times for freighters got bad, as at last they did, and I tried to quit the sea, what was there for an old sailor to do? I was born in the breezes, and I had studied the sea as perhaps few men have studied it, neglecting all else.

Next in attractiveness, after seafaring, came ship-building. I longed to be master in both professions, and in a small way, in time, I accomplished my desire. From the decks of stout ships in the worst gales I had made calculations as to the size and sort of ship safest for all weather and all seas. Thus the voyage which I am now to narrate was a natural outcome not only of my love of adventure, but of my lifelong experience.

*    *    *

One midwinter day of 1892, in Boston, where I had been cast up from the old ocean, so to speak, a year or two before, I was cogitating whether I should apply for a command, and again eat my bread and butter on the sea, or go to work at the shipyard, when I met an old acquaintance, a whaling-captain, who said: “Come to Fairhaven and I’ll give you a ship. But,” he added, “she wants some repairs.”

The captain’s terms, when fully explained, were more than satisfactory to me. They included all the assistance I would require to fit the craft for sea. I was only too glad to accept, for I had already found that I could not obtain work in the shipyard without first paying fifty dollars to a society, and as for a ship to command — there were not enough ships to go round. Nearly all our tall vessels had been cut down for coal-barges, and were being ignominiously towed by the nose from port to port, while many worthy captains addressed themselves to Sailor’s Snug Harbor.

The next day I landed at Fairhaven, opposite New Bedford, and found that my friend had something of a joke on me. For seven years the joke had been on him. The “ship” proved to be a very antiquated sloop called the Spray, which the neighbours declared had been built in the year 1. She was affectionately propped up in a field, some distance from salt water, and was covered with canvas.

The people of Fairhaven, I hardly need say, are thrifty and observant. For seven years they had asked, “I wonder what Captain Eben Pierce is going to do with the old Spray?” The day I appeared there was a buzz at the gossip exchange: at last some one had come and was actually at work on the old Spray. “Breaking her up, I s’pose?” “No; going to rebuild her.” Great was the amazement. “Will it pay?” was the question which for a year or more I answered by declaring that I would make it pay.

Lines of Spray

My ax felled a stout oak-tree near by for a keel, and Farmer Howard, for a small sum of money, hauled in this and enough timbers for the frame of the new vessel. I rigged a steam-box and a pot for a boiler. The timbers for ribs, being straight saplings, were dressed and steamed till supple, and then bent over a log, where they were secured till set. Something tangible appeared every day to show for my labor, and the neighbours made the work sociable.

It was a great day in the Spray shipyard when her new stem was set up and fastened to the new keel. Whaling-captains came from far to survey it. With one voice they pronounced it “A1”, and in their opinion “fit to smash ice.” The oldest captain shook my hand warmly when the breast-hooks were put in, declaring that he could see no reason why the Spray should not “cut in bow-head” yet off the coast of Greenland.

The much-esteemed stem-piece was from the butt of the smartest kind of a pasture oak. It afterward split a coral patch in two at the Keeling Islands, and did not receive a blemish. Better timber for a ship than pasture white oak never grew. The breast-hooks, as well as all the ribs, were of this wood, and were steamed and bent into shape as required. It was hard upon March when I began to work in earnest; the weather was cold; still, there were plenty of inspectors to back me with advice. When a whaling-captain hove in sight I just rested on my adz awhile and “gammed” with him.

New Bedford, the home of whaling-captains, is connected with Fairhaven by a bridge, and the walking is good. They never “worked along up” to the shipyard too often for me. It was the charming tales about arctic whaling that inspired me to put a double set of breast-hooks in the Spray, that she might shunt ice.

*    *    *

The seasons came quickly while I worked. Hardly were the ribs of the sloop up before apple-trees were in bloom. Then the daisies and the cherries came soon after. Close by the place where the old Spray had now dissolved rested the ashes of John Cook, a revered Pilgrim father. So the new Spray rose from hallowed ground. From the deck of the new craft I could put out my hand and pick cherries that grew over the little grave. The planks for the new vessel, which I soon came to put on, were of Georgia pine an inch and a half thick.

The operation of putting them on was tedious, but, when on, the calking was easy. The outward edges stood slightly open to receive the calking, but the inner edges were so close that I could not see daylight between them. All the butts were fastened by through bolts, with screw-nuts tightening them to the timbers, so that there would be no complaint from them. Many bolts with screw-nuts were used in other parts of the construction, in all about a thousand. It was my purpose to make my vessel stout and strong.

Now, it is a law in Lloyd’s that the Jane repaired all out of the old until she is entirely new is still the Jane. The Spray changed her being so gradually that it was hard to say at what point the old died or the new took birth, and it was no matter. The bulwarks I built up of white-oak stanchions fourteen inches high, and covered with seven-eighth-inch white pine. These stanchions, mortised through a two-inch covering board, I calked with thin cedar wedges. They have remained perfectly tight ever since.

The deck I made of one-and-a-half-inch by three-inch white pine spiked to beams, six by six inches, of yellow or Georgia pine, placed three feet apart. The deck-inclosures were one over the aperture of the main hatch, six feet by six, for a cooking-galley, and a trunk farther aft, about ten feet by twelve, for a cabin. Both of these rose about three feet above the deck, and were sunk sufficiently into the hold to afford head-room. In the spaces along the sides of the cabin, under the deck, I arranged a berth to sleep in, and shelves for small storage, not forgetting a place for the medicine-chest. In the midship hold, that is, the space between cabin and galley, under the deck, was room for provision of water, salt beef, etc., ample for many months.

The hull of my vessel being now put together as strongly as wood and iron could make her, and the various rooms partitioned off, I set about “calking ship.” Grave fears were entertained by some that at this point I should fail. I myself gave some thought to the advisability of a “professional calker.” The very first blow I struck on the cotton with the calking iron, which I thought was right, many others thought was wrong. “It’ll crawl!” cried a man from Marion, passing with a basket of clams on his back. “It’ll crawl!” cried another from West Island, when he saw me driving cotton into the seams.

“It’ll crawl!”

Bruno simply wagged his tail. Even Mr. Ben J——, a noted authority on whaling-ships, whose mind, however, was said to totter, asked rather confidently if I did not think “it would crawl.” “How fast will it crawl?” cried my old captain friend, who had been towed by many a lively sperm-whale. “Tell us how fast,” cried he, “that we may get into port in time.” However, I drove a thread of oakum on top of the cotton, as from the first I intended to do. And Bruno again wagged his tail. The cotton never “crawled.”

When the calking was finished, two coats of copper paint were slapped on the bottom, two of white lead on the topsides and bulwarks. The rudder was then shipped and painted, and on the following day the Spray was launched. As she rode at her ancient, rust-eaten anchor, she sat on the water like a swan.

The Spray’s dimensions were, when finished, thirty-six feet nine inches long, over all, fourteen feet two inches wide, and four feet two inches deep in the hold, her tonnage being nine tons net and twelve and seventy-one hundredths tons gross. Then the mast, a smart New Hampshire spruce, was fitted, and likewise all the small appurtenances necessary for a short cruise. Sails were bent, and away she flew with my friend Captain Pierce and me, across Buzzard’s Bay on a trial-trip — all right.

The only thing that now worried my friends along the beach was “Will she pay?” The cost of my new vessel was $553.62 for materials, and thirteen months of my own labor. I was several months more than that at Fairhaven, for I got work now and then on an occasional whale-ship fitting farther down the harbor, and that kept me the overtime.

Note: The strength of Slocum’s prose speaks for itself. It needs no critical gloss. Nonetheless it is of interest that Van Wyck Brooks called Sailing Alone Around the World a “nautical equivalent” of Thoreau’s Walden. Brooks edited an anthology of classic New England literature in 1962, A New England Reader. He included the Strait of Magellan chapters from Sailing Alone Around the World alongside Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Dana, and Prescott.

It may also be of interest to list some of the books Joshua Slocum took with him to read at sea:

Darwin’s The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Newcomb’s Popular Astronomy, Todd’s Total Eclipses of the Sun, Bates’s The Naturalist on the Amazons, Macaulay’s History of England, Trevelyan’s Life of Macaulay, Washington Irving’s Life of Columbus, Boswell’s Johnson, Don Quixote, Life on the Mississippi, one or more titles by Robert Louis Stevenson, a set of Shakespeare, and in ‘the poet’s corner’, as he called it, works of Lamb, Moore, Burns, Tennyson, and Longfellow. (Above information courtesy of the works of Walter Magnes Teller.)

Quadrant, January-February 2007

Where are the sheiks of yesteryear, riding romantically over the dunes? Not in Australia. Here a burly Egyptian with an ugly turn of phrase recently set new records for ungallantry. Scantily clad Australian women, complained Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, go around like “exposed meat” inviting rape.

Of course we all made a huge uproar. Unbelievable! Who asked his opinion anyway? The sheik calls himself a Mufti and thinks he represents Islam Down Under. But the man’s a brute who plainly hates western culture, who may have channelled funds to Hezbollah, and on top this he’s a security risk too. Go home sheik, go home!

This said, maybe he had a point all the same. It does seem nowadays that you can’t go to the newsagent to buy a paper, or the supermarket to buy a loaf of bread, without being surrounded by acres of glossy magazine erotica and exciting flesh. Not all of us would call it exposed meat, perhaps, but whatever it’s called it’s there—much of it little short of pornography.

To be honest, it seems to me that what the sheik was complaining about is a process that has gone on so long, and has now gone so far, that it has become the water we swim in and the air we breathe: a sexually heightened moral environment far removed from most normal human cultures in the past, where once forbidden instincts, thoughts, and desires, along with grossly exhibitionistic behaviour, are now increasingly treated as routine.

What has happened? Has a moral tsunami left our middle classes in ruins? What has been the corrupting role we ourselves have played in this state of affairs—every one of us that is, from the trash merchants at the bottom, to our most celebrated writers and artists at the top? Last December Kay Hymowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal how when “Britney Spears jauntily revealed her waxed nether-regions to waiting photographers as she exited her limo,” this made her “the Internet smash of the season.” Hymowitz then underlined the naivete of the exhibitionism involved—the taken-for-granted security of the celebrity world where Britney Spears and Paris Hilton live:

They underestimate the magnetic force field created by intimate sexual information and violate the logic of privacy that should be all the more compelling in a media-driven age.”

The sheik and his followers live within that force field—as do we all. Recently too the papers have been filled with scandalised reports of paedophilia in a surprising variety of milieus, sometimes at high political levels. A cultural complaisance regarding men who like boys is not uncommon in the Middle East, particularly among the Bedouin, a fact that is doubtless well known to the sheik. But our subject today is not the comparatively innocent behavior of desert tribesmen; it is the more knowing depravity of modern decadence. What has made us this way?

Art and innocence

A hundred years ago the German author Thomas Mann made an interesting comment. Thinking about morality and its relation to the world of art, he wrote in his novella Tonio Kröger that “as the kingdom of art increases, that of health and innocence declines.” Many artists are estranged from life, he said, pursue goals hostile to life, and work continually to destroy the bourgeois world.

Destroying the bourgeoisie was on many people’s minds at the time. Thoughts of bloody revolution were in the air. Mann however suggested that this would be wasted effort. Given time, and left to itself, capitalism would be more easily debauched than overthrown—destroyed by the values of the artistic bohemia it admired.

Artists were exciting. Artists were sexually free. Above all art redeemed the bourgeoisie from the greedy sin of acquisitiveness. As Jacques Barzun has argued, it wasn’t long before art became a new religion, writers were revered as prophets, and as part of this understanding the bourgeoisie came to believe that the creators of fine literature and beautiful music also had beautiful souls.

This was nonsense. The so-called artist’s ‘gift’, wrote Thomas Mann in 1903, has dark roots in a poisoned psyche. “It is a very dubious affair and rests upon extremely sinister foundations.” The world should know that most artists today are sick in mind and spirit, a danger to decent people and heedless of the damage they cause. Plumbers and carpenters and other tradesmen are reliable friends. But artists are not. And because he understood this so clearly, the eponymous Tonio Kröger (the character of a writer in the book who speaks for Mann himself) was embarrassed to find complete strangers sending him letters of praise:

…I positively blush at the thought of how these good people would freeze up if they were to get a look behind the scenes. What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes…”

Literature is not a calling, it is a curse, believe me! It begins by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people; there is a gulf of ironic sensibility, of knowledge, scepticism, disagreement, between you and the others; it grows deeper and deeper, you realize that you are alone; and from then on any rapprochement is simply hopeless! What a fate!

The rise of the paederaesthetic

If art increases as innocence declines, is it a matter of cause and effect? In that case Mann would seem to be supporting Rousseau’s view in the First Discourse that literature and the arts are actually making the world worse. It certainly sounds like that. In Mann’s view the writer stands in permanent moral opposition, sceptical and ironic and relentlessly gnawing away. Worse still: having found a role in Art he may have lost a useful role in Life. The sense of being set apart in an alien moral universe is overwhelming:

You can disguise yourself, you can dress up like an attaché or a lieutenant; you hardly need to give a glance or speak a word before everyone knows you are not a human being, but something else: something queer, different, inimical.

Sexually inimical too—or sexually perhaps most of all. “Is an artist a male, anyhow? Ask the females! It seems to me we artists are all of us something like those unsexed papal singers. We sing like angels; but…” Here Kröger/Mann breaks off. Perhaps from weariness or boredom. Perhaps also because the angelic songs of yearning can hardly be named for what they are. Readers of Death in Venice will however take his meaning. In that story the ageing writer Aschenbach lusts after the youth Tadzio, and the ironic sensibility so ably described, the scepticism, the irony, the extreme narcissism, is combined with the mysterious obsessions of the paedophile—such obsessions being those of the author himself.

Thomas Mann was a towering figure, intellectually in touch with the major currents of thought in his time, and to try and reduce him to his erotic interests would be ridiculous. His diaries for 1933 and 1934 reveal an observer whose understanding of European realities was second to none. Under the Nazis, he wrote, the Germans were becoming a “wretched, isolated, demented people, misled by a wild, stupid band of adventurers whom they take for mythical heroes.” In his entry for December 15, 1933, Mann reported Max Planck’s meeting with the Führer:

Planck had requested a personal interview with Hitler regarding anti-Semitic dismissals of professors. He was subjected to a three-quarter-hour harangue, after which he returned home completely crushed.

He said it was like listening to an old peasant woman gabbling on about mathematics, the man’s low-level, ill-educated reliance on obsessive ideas; more hopeless than anything the illustrious scientist and thinker had ever heard in his entire life.

Two worlds coming together as the result of the one’s rise to power: a man from the world of knowledge, erudition, and disciplined thought is forced to listen to the arrogant, dogmatic expectorations of a revolting dilettante, after which he can only bow and take his leave.

Stephen Spender wrote of the diaries that “Thomas Mann is a monumental figure of our time. Reading these journals one feels that this monument is made of very hard, resistant, almost cruel material: but under the surface there is a human being who, together with Freud, was the greatest human being this century.”

Under the surface, too, unmentioned by Spender, was a pederastic interest that pervades his work and accurately reflects his inclinations. There is far more to his stories than that, and we should also note that he appears to have spent most of his life in chaste frustration. But with their adored ‘Hermes’ (and their slighted and ridiculous women) the tales he spun probably helped to disinhibit, to condone, and to legitimise predatory behaviour that mothers with children can only regard with dread.

Vladimir Nabokov once joked that if Lolitahad been about a man and a boy he would have had no American publishing problems—and that this was considered a joking matter is almost as revealing as anything else to do with the book. It would of course be ludicrous to suggest a direct connection between the works of these authors and what is now going on in the media and the streets. The self-conscious complexities of literary style alone would exclude all but the most determined reader from the experiences Mann and Nabokov publicise.

Still, there it is, an unbudgeable fact of literary history: two of the most distinguished writers of the 20^th century, the most relentlessly cerebral and self-conscious writers, and the most academically admired and studied writers with whole shelves of earnest research devoted to their books, gave what I shall call “paederaesthetics”—the world of belief and feeling embodied in erotically idealised juveniles frankly treated as sexual prey—an important place. A widely used Simon & Schuster reader’s guide for college students from 1995 tells us that

Lolita, with its murder, paedophilia, sadism, masochism, and even hint of incest, clearly struck a nerve in our society by violating a number of its strongest taboos.

I’d have thought that any healthy society very reasonably should have taboos against murder, paedophilia, sadism, and incest. I am neither a prude nor a killjoy, yet rules against these things seem sensible to me. But the author of this student guide to Lolita apparently feels otherwise, suggesting, in accord with his antinomian principles, that the proper function of literature is to overcome such taboos. And perhaps in the case of paedophilia it has succeeded.

Lionel Trilling discussed Lolita in Encounter in 1958. A critic of high moral seriousness, he made it clear that he wished to avoid a “correct enlightened attitude” or “to argue that censorship is always indefensible.” The stakes he said were high—too high for grandstanding about artistic values regardless of social costs. Detachedly considering Nabokov’s literary achievement, Trilling found that Lolitabelonged to a tradition of tales about hopeless erotic infatuations going back to medieval times.

Yet to know this literary fact was not enough. After every extenuating aesthetic argument had been considered, it remained the case that Lolita “makes a prolonged assault on one of our unquestioned and unquestionably sexual prohibitions, the sexual inviolability of girls of a certain age (and compounds the impiousness with what amounts to incest).” It might be true, he writes, that Juliet was fourteen when she gave herself to Romeo, and that we all now regard ourselves as sensibly clear-eyed about sex after the enlightenment of Coming of Age in Samoa.

But let an adult male seriously think about the girl as a sexual object and all our sensibility is revolted. The response is not reasoned but visceral. Within the range of possible heterosexual conduct, this is one of the few prohibitions which still seem to us to be confirmed by nature itself.

The sexualizing of everyday life

Not any more—or not in certain circles. Trilling’s is plainly a voice from the past. Today the debate is more likely to concern the acceptability of public copulation or pubic display. If it’s okay for Paris Hilton to make a video of herself having sex and to share it about in cyberspace, why shouldn’t Susie and Jim make one too? A glance at any newspaper shows how each libertine advance ratchets up another without anyone knowing where to stop.

A mass-market color supplement to Sydney’s Sun-Herald for October 29 2006 has the Hilton sisters on the cover, while inch-high yellow lettering shouts “Hedonism is Back, How to Party Celebrity Style”. The following 30 pages promote celebtrashery as a way of life.

Spectrum, a literary supplement of the Sydney Morning Herald edited and written largely by women, moves up a cultural notch and features a story about the female author “of a best-selling erotic novel”. This cites “a man who wishes women would make more noise in bed, and a divorcee in her 50s finding sex on the internet.” Reviews follow, a scene from the film Suburban Mayhem showing a chesty chick in thigh-high leather who, we are told, is “mistress of the SMS, and the local boys are her Praetorian Guard.” Reviewer Sandra Hall reports that “Wanna Fuck? is their call to arms” and that the young woman in question “usually obliges.”

Some relief from this brazen brutishness is provided by the writer Elizabeth Farrelly. Her essay “In search of a cure for paradise syndrome” questions the concept of illimitable human desires, and quotes Raymond Tallis’s thoughts on this subject. But only pages later there’s a full-color cartoon of a pole dancer getting her rocks off—if that’s the expression I need.

Not wanting to unfairly target a single Sydney newspaper I looked at The Weekend Australian Magazine for November 11-12. The cover is a bold come-on for an article asking if it is right or wrong for women teachers to seduce male pupils. No particular moral stance is adopted, and a number of court cases are examined. Yet by only the second paragraph we are treated to a vivid description of a 37-year-old woman who “wound up in the front seat of her car giving one of her boys oral sex… His friends thought he was ‘a bit of a legend’. He let them in on juicier details, like her glasses fogging up.”

Civility and common sense

Now then. Let us stop for a moment and consider. Put yourself in the position of conventionally respectable immigrants from some traditional culture—Sri Lankan Buddhists, Colombian Catholics, Eastern Orthodox from the Ukraine—who are used to certain standards of dress and appearance, who go to buy a weekend newspaper, and who are confronted with this sort of thing. We might also mention the good Rabbi and the pious Lubavitchers over my back fence, whose views of female decorum are in all important respects indistinguishable from the sheik’s.

What conclusion can they possibly draw from the daughters of billionaires fornicating on the web, cries for more noise in bed, shouts of “Wanna Fuck?” from movie stars, a female pole dancer engaged in public masturbation, and Australian women teachers who seduce their pupils and provide them with oral sex? Sheik al-Hilaly is a boor and a pest. He undeniably has a wider political agenda. But if these are not examples of white western women calling for action, what exactly are they?

Thomas Mann’s premonitions have come about. With the expansion of media mimesis in every direction the numbers of those who write and film and act and transform reality in a thousand more-or-less artistic ways has steadily expanded, the boundary between life and theatre has blurred, and what were once the values of a picturesque social fringe have taken over. Many of the people in our Theatrical Industrial Complex are very sick people indeed.

Getting the balance right between the animal and the civil has been a problem since civilization began. It hasn’t been easy. There has been a perpetual strain between the puritan tendency and the libertine, in China, in Japan, in India, and in the West as well. Some cultures and some eras veered to the voluptuary; some to the ascetic. Alexander Pope saw this perplexity as part of Man’s condition. Created half to rise and half to fall,

He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused…

For Europe’s educated classes the situation in the 18^th century may have been as near as we are likely to come to a secular world where mind and body, thought and passion, were in some kind of balance—the various worlds of Hume and Rousseau, of Gibbon and Voltaire, of the Baronne de Warens and Madame du Chatelet—a world where both the conventional Johnson and the promiscuous Boswell could separately thrive and flourish.

Be that as it may, the usual way of dealing with this matter involved a common sense separation of realms. You didn’t publish entertaining accounts of oral sex provided by female teachers for their male pupils in family magazines. You didn’t have leading novelists advertising the joys of paedophilia. Though one should expect, in a free country, that such matters may be discussed and argued about—the pros (few) and the cons (many)—it has usually also been assumed that this would be constrained by a thoughtful choice of time, place, and occasion.

That’s where we seem to have gone wrong. An abandonment of the common sense rules to be found in hundreds of traditional cultures, and a foolish refusal to confine the sexual world to where it belongs, has led to its being indiscriminately mingled with everything else, 24/7. A burly Middle Eastern peasant in a nightshirt may seem an improbable source of moral guidance, yet in a way that’s what the outspoken sheik is—and he’s calling the shots as he sees them. But shooting the messenger is hardly the answer. Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly and his followers are what they are. We are what we have fatefully become.

[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.