Coldspur

Another year of Commonplace entries goes in the books, as well as some updates to examples of Hyperbolic Contrasts, and references to Rolls-Royces. In January, I start my course for an M. Phil. degree with the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham. This will be carried out almost exclusively remotely, although I plan to go to the UK for some of the research. It will leverage some of the work that I have been undertaking into the thoughts and actions of Sir Isaiah Berlin (as yet unpublished!). What it will mean is that my reading in the next couple of years will have to be rather more focussed, and thus items deemed appropriate for entry in the Commonplace Book will not have such an eclectic range. I wish a Happy 2013 to all my readers.  (December 31, 2012)

One phenomenon that intrigues me is the representation of articles that appear in the press, and their appearance in electronic form on the Web. One might expect the New York Times, for instance, with its slogan ‘All the News That’s Fit To Print’, to take very seriously the journalistic record that it commits to posterity. Yet its editors sometimes display an unnervingly cavalier attitude to stories that have already appeared in the printed newspaper, emending the text  ̶  not always to reflect the evolution of the news, but to sanitize or even censor what has been published. On Sunday, November 25, the Times published a story titled ‘Israel and Hamas Are United in Seeing Scant Value in Compromise’. It included comments from Efraim Halevy, former chief of Mossad. The text ran as follows:                                                                                                                                   ‘Efraim Halevy, former chief of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, said that Israel had three alternatives in Gaza: to destroy Hamas, leaving the enclave to its more radical groups; to reoccupy the area, which it evacuated in 2005; or to start a process where the hostile environment is slowly reduced by preventing the influx of new weapons into Gaza while allowing Hamas to increase its civilian political role. “After the elections are over, Israel will have to sit down and ask itself, ‘Where do we go from here?’ ” Mr. Halevy said in an interview.  “If you aim for deterrence rather than trying to destroy your enemy,” he added, “that means you accept his legitimacy, I think.”’

Yet the on-line version has been dramatically changed (see http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-and-hamas-are-united-in-seeing-scant-value-in-compromise.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&smid=tw-nytimes&partner=rss&emc=rss. Among the changes is the omission of Mr. Halevy’s last remark about deterrence, one that could be considered quite controversial.  I questioned the Editors about this apparent act of censorship, but got nowhere. The Public Editor (who represents the readers, and writes a regular column), was a little more outgoing and sympathetic, through her assistant Joseph Burgess. He initially suggested that it had been removed ‘for space considerations’, but the final response I received from him was: “As The Times said to you earlier, The Times routinely adds and removes information throughout the day as a story develops.”

This is patently nonsense. There are no space limits on-line, and the extended quotation had nothing to do with the development of the story. I suspect someone drew attention to the fact that Mr. Halevy’s comments could be considered as being unduly hawkish and thus ‘unhelpful’ to the peace process. I suspect the editors of the paper thought it was something they could get away with.                                                                                                                                                               (November 30, 2012)

I cannot yet report progress or status on the project that has consumed me recently. Thus this month’s posting merely draws attention to new Commonplace entries, and a poem on Anthony Blunt: ‘To The Ramparts!’     (October 31, 2012)

The main event in September was my brother’s wedding in London. While I was in the UK, I was pleased to be able to meet Dr. Henry Hardy, the editor of Sir Isaiah Berlin’s works, in the Wirral, and Professor Anthony Glees, Director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham, in his university town. My research into Berlinian topics of pluralism and multi-culturalism resulted in an unusual set of quotations on various ethnic and religious practices in my September Commonplace entries. I also heard from the Woodland Trust that it had at last posted my poem on its website, and had tastefully added a few photographs to illustrate it. It can be seen at:http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/en/campaigning/woodwatch/woodwatchers/Pages/theenglishnamesforwood.aspx                        (September 30, 2012

This month has been consumed by a special project – about which more will be revealed soon. Meanwhile – the normal set of Commonplace updates. (August 31, 2012)

My July reading was dominated by several volumes of memoirs, predominantly of the inter-war years. First was Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s The Way the Wind Blows, in which I was interested, primarily, in order to fill out my picture of the Prime Minister’s view of his education at Christ Church. Next was an item that had been highly recommended in some periodical or book – but I can’t for the life of me recall where! – Ronald Fraser’s In Search of a Past, subtitled The Rearing of an English Gentleman 1933-1945, an attempt, via both psychoanalysis, and recording of oral recollections, by an alienated adult to come to grips with his family and pampered background. The third was Goronwy Rees’s A Chapter of Accidents, focusing on the author’s acquaintance with Guy Burgess. I wanted to go back to the source to discover more clearly how Burgess was allowed to get away with his errant behaviour, and what Rees’s stance on Communism and espionage, and his relationship with Burgess, was. I picked up in a second-hand bookshop Frances Donaldson’s A Twentieth-Century Life; I felt it was a name I should know (biographer of Edward VIII and P. G. Wodehouse), but wouldn’t have been able to place her as a farmer who taught herself to write. Lastly was the extraordinary Snows of Yesteryear, by Gregor von Rezzori. Von Rezzori had dazzled me with his ironic Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, and I at last got round to buying this volume (the local public library’s copy is missing).

Each was pleasurable, but in different ways. Douglas-Home’s boyhood showed not a trace of the angst that dominates the others, but his largely anecdotal account of his political life reflects a wisdom to which his overall reputation does not do justice. Fraser’s account of his mother’s behavior, and the attitudes of the servants whom he engaged to invoke the past, is moving, but a little self-indulgent. Rees’s memoir is somewhat windy, but reveals a number of telling events and observations that deserve re-inspection after all this time, such as the friends he semi-identifies at Burgess’s wild parties. There was little of significance in the Donaldson book, although the claims of Donaldson and her husband for being socialists when they complain about having to hire servants, cheerfully exploit the Stock Market during the Abdication, sluice around the world at the taxpayer’s expense, and then buy a second house in a prime South Downs location, were a bit hard to swallow. (They did claim also that the Healeys were their friends – a relationship that Denis acknowledges, at least concerning Donaldson’s husband: see TheFriendsofDenisHealey).

The von Rezzori volume, however, is a classic work of recollection and imagination, primarily of his childhood in the Bukovina (part of Austro-Hungary ceded to Romania in 1918),  one dominated by another manipulative and neurotic mother, and influenced by a father who is a kind of Transylvanian Farve Mitford. It is beautifully written (and superbly translated from the German by H. F. Broch de Rothermann), and highly evocative. All five books bear the shadow of the Thirties in them, and the nervous wondering whether the twin monsters of Nazism and Communism might devour them all, on which perils each makes its unique commentary. I also read Erik Larson’s In the Garden of the Beasts, a very clever reconstruction of the life of the American ambassador’s family in Berlin during Hitler’s dictatorship. I have selected key passages from all these in myCommonplaceBook.

On June 23^rd, the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth, the Times published a Listener crossword puzzle by me, titled ‘SUM’, which celebrated him and the logical machine to which he gave his name.                                                                                                                                                                                (July 31, 2012)

A few years ago, I visited my old college friend, Derek Taylor, at his home in Stow-on-the-Wold. During one of our country walks, we started musing about all the English names for ‘wood’ (e.g. hurst, spinney, copse). The idea stuck in my mind, and for a long time I wondered how all those words might be celebrated. This spring, I concluded my research and composition, and the result can be seen in a new section of this website, Verses: The EnglishNamesForWood. I dedicated this piece to the Woodland Trust, an organization in the UK dedicated to the preservation of trees and woodland. It has been a bit of a struggle getting any response from this group, but I am hopeful that someone from the charity may actually read my piece in the near future.

Derek has recently published a very entertaining book, A Horse in the Bathroom, and I encourage any reader of this passage to visit his website athttp://www.derekjtaylorbooks.com/ , and then, of course, buy the book.                                                                                                                    (June 30, 2012)

I paid a visit to the UK in the second half of May. One of the highlights of my trip was a day spent in Oxford on May 23^rd, where my brother and I viewed a room at Oriel College dedicated to our father. I was also able to renew contacts with officers at the Bodleian Library.

Earlier this year, I had read Fullness of Days, the memoir by Lord Halifax, the British politician and His Majesty’s Ambassador to the US during WWII. One episode described by Lord Halifax is the conversion of Harvard into Oxford, so that the latter could confer an honorary degree on President Roosevelt in 1941. This required that ‘all who could be discovered in the United States with Oxford Doctors’ or Masters’ Degrees were got together; two Masters became proctors for the occasion’. The black and gold gown of Lord Halifax (sometime Chancellor of Oxford University) was brought over, etc. etc.

Unfortunately, the President was indisposed and unable to attend, so he asked General Watson (Pa) to deputise for him, which meant that Pa had to read the President’s speech. Halifax then states that “After his death Mrs Watson gave me the typescript from which her husband had read
the President’s acceptance speech and which is now lodged in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It is historically interesting, not only for its connexion with what I believe to be a unique occasion in the history of Oxford University, but also for the marginal note by the President near its end. ‘Here Pa will sing ‘Take me back to Old Virginny.’” I could find no reference to this speech in the many biographies of Roosevelt on hand at the UNCW Library in Wilmington, and emailed the Bodleian to determine whether the document was inspectable. They were at first very surprised at my request, but, after a few weeks, were able to locate the document – in good condition, and I was thus privileged to be able to view it in the temporary vault set up while the New Bodleian is restructured.  It does not reveal much of significance, the bulk of the address consisting of a quotation by the then US Ambassador to Great Britain, John Winant. An obvious incongruity is the note of levity introduced by Roosevelt’s marginal note, which is in sharp contrast to the very solemn tenor of the speech.                        More on my visit in next month’s report.                                                                                                                          (May 31, 2012)

Reading Eric Hobsbawm’s selection of essays, On History, was a puzzling experience. The committed Marxist historian and unrepentant member of the Communist party can show a light touch, and vivid insights, but can also write clunking sentences that would never get past an alert don at a Cambridge tutorial. His narrative is frequently strait-jacketed by vague personifications and the dismal Marxist categories of class that dominate his thinking. For example, he rightly states that there is no such thing as black history, or women’s history, or homosexual history – only history, but then undermines his whole philosophy by insisting that Marxian insights are alone what give history its structure and purpose. Thus I was also surprised by Tony Judt’s plaudits for Hobsbawm in the former’s Thinking the Twentieth Century, a book comprising conversations between Judt and the historian Timothy Snyder shortly before Judt died in 2010. Judt, a declared ‘man of the left’ himself – although what that means apart from a belief in state welfarism is not clear – identifies the damage that influential historians have performed in ignoring the massacres that have consistently occurred in the name of Marx, Engels and Lenin, or treating them as unfortunate mistakes in the Great Socialist Experiment, but appears to exclude Hobsbawm from his targets. Judt has an appealing iconoclastic bent: he is overall incisive and refreshing about the role of the public intellectual in laying open the truths that lie behind politics, and fulfils that job well. Unfortunately he shares with Snyder an apparent belief that intellectuals can therefore be experts in everything – while asserting that most economists (not all?) just confuse the public. The conversations conclude with some wishy-washy and fashionable observations on ‘the crisis of capitalism’, calling for greater intervention and regulation by the governments of the liberal democracies without analyzing their failures in contributing to the problem by virtue of unsustainable deficits. It seems to me that such an observation crisply encapsulates the hollowness of leftist intellectualism, which a) assumes that the fruits of wealth-creating entrepreneurialism can be taken for granted; b) presents what are really aspects of political spending choices as moral, instead of pragmatic, questions; and, c) overlooks the fact that the Law of Unintended Consequences will almost certainly play a dominant part in any decisions made. A rich sample of quotations, showing the strengths and weaknesses of both writers, appears in this month’s Commonplace entries.                                                           (April 30, 2012)

My March reading was dominated by four books concerning the decade that interests me the most – the 1930s. First was Edmund Wilson’s To The Finland Station. This item had been on my prescribed reading-list when I went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1965, set by my Russian don (a priest at Merton). I never read it, and the Fontana paperback has travelled with me ever since. If I had read it then, it might have helped with my analysis of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, and Dostoyevsky’s Devils, but it was hardly essential. Wilson gives a leisurely and insightful account of the development of socialist thought – written before Trotsky’s assassination in 1940 – and it seems that it would be difficult for anyone to be taken in by Marx’s nonsense on reading this work. But many were – including, for a while, such future vigorous opponents as Hugh Trevor-Roper, and, apparently, Pope Benedict XVI, who indicated recently that Marx’s economics indeed had validity at one time. Next was Deadly Illusions, the uncovering of the deceptions and crimes of the KGB spyhandler Alexander Orlov, by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, using the archival sources of the KGB from the 1990s. Orlov, wakening to Stalin’s terror, never deserted his Bolshevist beliefs, and artfully deceived the CIA and FBI after escaping to the West in 1938, and, officially defecting some 14 years later. This is an extraordinary book, and its references to the unnamed members of the Oxford Ring that rivaled Orlov’s famous Cambridge Ring have recently been updated by identifications in the British press. Lord Halifax’s memoirs, Fullness of Days, showed the dying culture of the aristocrat/politician who tried to come to grips with Hitler and Mussolini, and whose view of the good life revolved round the Church and the racing calendar. It was exactly that type of life that J. B. Priestley railed against, as was shown in his second volume of memoirs, Rain at Godshill. I recall my father having a copy of J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment With Time, that so absorbed Priestley. I could make no headway with it, barely in my teens, but I do recall listening to, and being mesmerized by, Priestley’s An Inspector Calls on the radio in the late 1950s. Priestley was the eternal searcher, full of paradoxes and contradictions, with an inquisitive mind and a limpid writing-style that reflected his earnest thoughts. With an evident chip on his shoulder, and rather vaguely identifying the malaise of the 1930s, he never really found the Truth he was looking for, but these memoirs, full of common-sense and accurate observation, summarize the generic puzzlement and confusion that seemed to rule the average intellectual in the 1930s. A rich assortment of quotations from these works appears in my 2012 Commonplace Book. (Extracts from Priestley’s first volume of memoirs, Midnight on the Desert, appear in my 2004 Commonplace Book, under December.)                                    (March 31, 2012)

In a New York Times article this month about Ron Paul, the libertarian candidate in the Republican presidential primaries, the following statement appeared: “It was ‘The Road to Serfdom’ by Friedrich Hayek that became the ur-text of Mr. Paul’s emerging ideology, introducing him to Austrian economics and its Manichaean choice between laissez-faire capitalism and a government-run economy destined for disaster. (Mainstream economists have long dismissed the Austrian school, but it retains a devoted following among libertarians and some conservatives.)” This provoked my thinking about what ‘mainstream economics’ was. To begin with, Hayek did not write in Manichaean terms. He saw a significant role for central government, and was far from believing that there was a simple choice between the Good of private enterprise and the Evil of statist control of economic resources. On the other hand, the Times’s notion of ‘mainstream’ anything is notoriously left of center, and I imagined that the reporter was probably taking his cue from the newspaper’s eccentric but highly self-regarding columnist, Paul Krugman. Krugman, who expresses a constant nostalgia for Roosevelt and the New Deal, regularly promotes and classifies as ‘Keynesian’ the very unKeynesian notion of adding to a deficit of $16 billion in order to defy ‘austerity’ and encourage consumer spending. Moreover, the Times’Public Editor, Arthur S. Brisbane, has had to respond to critics of the paper who (rightly) accused it of not giving enough attention to Ron Paul in its coverage of the Republican candidates. Richard Stevenson, the Times’ political editor, rather sniffily told Mr. Brisbane in December: “Not all candidates are created equal. We do not feel compelled to treat every candidate with the same intensity or seriousness as we do others.”  Ron Paul is clearly not ‘mainstream’ enough in the Times’s eyes: it has essentially prejudged the candidates on behalf of its readers.

But there is another culprit – Wikipedia. Its entry for ‘the Austrian School’ states: “The Austrian School’s views are outside of mainstream economics, and mainstream economists are generally critical of their methodology”. In the entry for Mainstream Economics, the author explains that “Mainstream economics is a loose term used to refer to widely-accepted economics as taught in prominent universities”, and that “the term came into common use in the late 20th century. It appears in the seminal textbook Economics of 1948, by Samuelson and Nordhaus.” Furthermore, “present-day mainstream economics stems from the neoclassical synthesis, which was the post–World War II merger of Keynesian macroeconomics and neoclassical microeconomics”. Mainstream economics is thus the comfortable theory of current dominant and influential economists, no matter how questionable their opinions might be. Anyone who ventures to question their orthodoxies should be wary.

Well might the Austrian school challenge these ‘truths’. These are the truths of the liberal consensus – belief in large, activist government and an expensive welfare state, a suspicion of markets and the individual decisions that drive them, too vigorous a reliance on mathematical models  that have no relevance in a global economy, and a blind trust in the availability of wealth to fund their programs that would make Ayn Rand cringe. All in all this is the socialism of the 21^st century that self-confidently and smugly points out that ‘capitalism doesn’t work’. But capitalism is not really an ism:  it has no ideology, is not a ‘system’. Certainly it is not a system of government – a categorization mistake made continually by professional historians who ought to know better, when they compare the Western democracies to totalitarian states. And it is of course essentially unstable, subject to creative destruction. It fails to ‘work’ only in the sense that those who practise it cannot predictably provide enough wealth (or employment) to satisfy the hungers of their respective governments. Today’s crises of national budget deficits in the Western democracies are characterized by bloated government bureaucracies (including such phenomena as ‘government jobs for life’ in Greece, and inflation-proof pensions); out-of-control entitlements, with career politicians handing out other people’s money to those who placed them in power, or as aid out of some earnest moral conviction; attempts to stabilize ‘systems’ that are essentially disorderly, accompanied by misguided regulation and inappropriate interference in markets, all frequently abetted by ‘crony’ relationships between public and private sectors. In Europe, of course, such phenomena are intensified by quixotic strivings for economic union without political integration. But wealth is not something waiting to be re-distributed: it has to be re-created every year, every week, and every day. And the main creators of the wealth that these countries want to distribute or consume are now to be found overseas. When the history of the crisis of the early part of this century comes to be written it will not be of the failure of capitalism and the Austrian school, but of leftist welfarism, romantic aspirations for European unity, and ‘mainstream’ economic thinking.                                                                                                                                                                                                   (February 29, 2012)

The phrase ‘in our DNA’ has replaced ‘community’ as my Number One linguistic bugbear. A few years ago, people might have said that something was ‘in their blood’, as a weak metaphor for a) a somewhat dubious show of behaviour that they were unable or reluctant to eliminate (such as cock-fighting or fox-hunting), or b) a practice in which they took some tribal and differentiable pride in (such as folk-dancing or idol-worship). And sometimes these emotions of self-esteem and sheepishness merged. Of course, a devotion to such practices is not inherited: it is a purely cultural phenomenon. After the Double Helix was decoded, however, the phrase ‘in our blood’ was gradually replaced by ‘in our DNA’, giving such claims an utterly spurious but more impressive-sounding scientific cachet. For example, Silicon Valley firms boast about certain principles or commitments of their business model that are ‘in their DNA’, as if they were something that will inevitably endure.

But such claims are nonsense. DNA may pass on biological tendencies – such as a susceptibility to certain diseases, or a general aptitude for athletic activity, but anyone who was transplanted from one country to another at an early age will confirm how hollow the pretense is that cultural traits are passed on genetically. The day on which I started to write this piece, an article appeared in the New York Times about an adopted child who did not discover that she had been adopted until she was an adult in her 40s.  She had “always believed that she had inherited her looks and mannerisms from her father, and that her appreciation for tradition and old-fashioned gentility stemmed from her parents’ Southern roots” – until the secret came out. In the January 2012 edition of the magazine Prospect, the biographer of Margaret Thatcher rolled out the following mumbo-jumbo: “Like her or loathe her, Margaret Thatcher is in the DNA of everyone in Britain over the age of 35.” What neo-Lamarckian claptrap! Margaret Thatcher may have got under many peoples’ skins, but there is no way that she entered their DNA. Abuse of the term just weakens any argument.

As for my January reading, it turned out that Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live or A Life of Montaigne, which I read at the end of last year, was an excellent hors-d’oeuvre to The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt (the Shakespearean scholar who wrote the excellent Will of the World), which puts the re-discovery of an original copy of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things by an obscure medieval papal officer in a rich historical context. Also stimulating was Adam Sisman’s biography of that flawed genius, scourge of mysticism, and crispest of debunkers of Marxist historians, Hugh Trevor-Roper, which for some reason was retitled An Honourable Englishman in the US.  In his essay “Macaulay and the Glorious Revolution”, Trevor-Roper wrote: “The crown of  a man’s career is his biography”. This work does great justice to such an aphorism. Please see a new Commonplace folder started for 2012.                                                                                                                                                                                        (January 31, 2012)