Today at the Anglican church I attend it was a mixed bag. Usually the pastor is really good, makes me think of famous medieval preachers (who unfortunately usually got into serious trouble). His main sermon was quite all right but not one of his best.
The church service had begun with a Remembrance Day (Veterans' Day for you Yanks) which was put on for the benefit of the Scouts, the Wolf Cubs, and the Girl Guides. This benefit I did not appreciate at all.There were quite a few of these kids and our pastor mixed with them, drawing them out in a humorous way.
Then it happened. He asked a group of maybe 12-year-old girls "What is it that girls your age talk about all the time?" And the girls answered in unison CARS.
Tell me, was I set up? This is Windsor, after all. Was somebody else set up?
I was not in good enough shape yesterday to draw attention to two things that meant something to me.
First was the 40th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). This obviously meant a lot to people at the time. Sadly, there is now an all-too-active right-wing movement in what used to be East Germany. Here's one report on that phenomenon. Angela Merkel grew up in the East and no doubt is discouraged that at the end of her political career she is still fighting the same fight.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRgjecnbqp0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRgjecnbqp0
Then I ran across a video of the group Genesis on YouTube, (link to be fixed)performing live in 1973, in Detroit, right across the river from me. Is there a direct connection with the Cold War? Or, for that matter, Brexit? But trouble was on its way. Oh, trouble was here.
I promised to repost some of my favorite essays from this blog, and this is certainly worth rereading. It's from Ursula K. Leguin,The Dispossessed.
Shevek, the anarchist from another planet, speaks to the dissatisfied people of the homeworld:
It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does
not obey the mind, and turns to hate when it is forced. The bond that
binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers and what we
share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in
poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have
had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one
another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And
the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You
possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you
are, and what you give.
I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made
200 years ago in this city – the promise kept. We have kept it, on
Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you
but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual
aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle
of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no
premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords,
no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have
much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us
is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is
the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty
hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into
the world, into his future, without any past, without any property,
wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the
Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the
Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
I just came across an article by John Gillingham, one of the best medieval military historians, where he argues that the laws and practices of war were not the same over the whole Middle Ages. Note what he says about surrender and ransom:
But it is important to bear in mind the exact title of [Maurice]Keen’s book – The Laws of War in the Late Middle Ages – and note that when he used phrases such as ‘in the middle ages’, he was not in fact thinking of the whole period, only of its last two centuries [i.e. the14th and 15th; Phase 2].The neglect of Phase One [up to about 1300] by historians of medieval war has not unnaturally led to them taking a cynical view of chivalry.. [since many people, during Phase One including women and children, were not allowed to surrender, but were killed or enslaved].
But had they measured the treatment of women, children and the poor by soldiers in the so-called ‘age of chivalry’[ Phase 2] against some ideal standard, but against the standards that had been regarded as acceptable and honourable in all previous ages, they might have taken a different view.
I was reading a Globe and Mail article on the inappropriatness of using (mainly indigenous)
imagery and costumes in a racist manner on Halloween. Then I remembered this engraved portrait of Pocahontas in Jacobean English formal (court) clothing. And I also remembered how astonished I was the first time I saw the portrait.
Quick quiz: So what was she calling herself at this point (1616)?
Guy Halsall is one of the most interesting historians of Late Antiquity/the Early Middle Ages. His main interests are "the Fall of the Roman Empire," Barbarian Migrations, and military history. This year he's in Tubingen in Germany, where he will be able to refine his unorthodox ideas. This week he delivered a provocative paper, of which this is an excerpt.
The
first thing I want to say – I seem to have to keep saying this – is
that the first part of my title should not be read as a statement or
claim that there were no Barbarian Migrations: no migrating barbarians.
It is a simple statement of what the paper is about, which is to say,
those barbarians who didn’t migrate or at least about those who, if they
did migrate, came home again: surely – in anyone’s estimation – the
overwhelming majority of ‘Barbarians’. It is concerned with the
territories north and west of the western Roman Empire between the later
third and the earlier seventh century, which you might see as the heart
of late antiquity, a ‘core late antiquity’, or even a short late
antiquity.
The
question before us – and has been posed by me and others before – is
whether there is a northern or north-western European late antiquity.
Does the ‘late antique paradigm’ apply to the regions beyond the
Rhine-Danube limes, Hadrian’s Wall and the Irish Sea? If it
seems uncontroversial to speak of late antique Persia or late antique
Arabia – areas beyond the Roman frontiers of course – why does it sound
strange to speak of late antique Denmark or late antique Pictland –
especially in an intellectual climate where we are encouraged to think
of a ‘global late antiquity? I don’t think that ‘global late antiquity’
(or for that matter the global middle ages) is an especially helpful
term, but that is a separate issue from realising that the Mediterranean
was not the centre of the world, that it was connected directly or
indirectly to most other regions of the globe and their own centres, or
that in some ways the various Eurasian imperial ‘centres’ – the
Mediterranean, China and India – were all peripheral to each other and
especially to the Eurasian steppe.
Of
course, what makes late antiquity tricky as a descriptor in all these
cases is that it is not merely a chronological term, but a paradigm or
problematic. To speak of the chronological period of the
third-to-seventh centuries of the Christian Era across, say, the
north-west of Europe – the far western Eurasian capes and islands as I
sometimes like to call them, to try to decentre Europe – is possibly
fine (I hope so as I want to write a book on that topic). But that is
subtly different from talking about ‘late antiquity’ in those regions.
No one needs reminding of the origins of the concept of late antiquity,
as a means of side-stepping the old idea that in the fifth century, with
the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, the ancient world ended and the
medieval world began (whatever that may have meant): a caesura in the
whole of European and Mediterranean history. Naturally, very famous
scholars had been questioning the nature and reality of that caesura
since the late nineteenth century, but the idea of a new periodisation
stressing continuity seems to have been new, from the 1950s onwards,
until – famously, classically – popularised in the general consciousness
by Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity.
Equally,
however, the notion has not gone uncritiqued. The paradigm works best
in geographical regions closest to the Mediterranean, especially the
eastern Mediterranean, and thematically in areas like those in which
Brown was most interested: religion and society; thought. There might
be something to the unity of the ‘short’ late antiquity I am discussing
in the economic sphere as well, even if not in the way that Pirenne
imagined – albeit before the notion of Late Antiquity had emerged.
However, the concentration of Late Antique scholarship on the East, and
on themes like Christianity, the church, ideas, society and the holy,
meant that the problem it had initially seemed to confront, that is to
say the supposed ruptures of the fifth century, were in practice rather
sidestepped. To what extent had people ever generally supposed a huge
rift in eastern Mediterranean society, religion, art and thought as a
result of the fifth-century Barbarian Invasions or Migrations and the
collapse of the Western Empire? (That’s not a merely rhetorical genuine
question, by the way.)
As
I see it, the politics of the fifth-century west have remained
something of a blind spot for the Late Antique paradigm. How to explain
the fact that the western Roman Empire existed in 400 but had at least
ceased to be effective by 500 and was generally recognised by
contemporaries to have disappeared by the middle quarters of the sixth
century? The solution appears to have accepted the paradigm of
‘barbarian invasion’ but to deny that this made much difference – in a
way similar to Pirenne’s or Fustel’s interpretation (you might call this
the ‘Weak Thesis’ of the Barbarian Migrations). Or generally just to
gloss over the problem. That solution does not appear to be effective.
The fact is that most low-income people don’t have a lot of
control over their diets to begin with, and the resources available to
them tend to offer little in the way of assistance with the barriers
that stand between them and health. I got a first-hand look at this when
I got my first job as a task rabbit at a food pantry. I naively
imagined smiling faces, neat boxes of food, and good feelings all
around. My illusions were shattered when I was asked to sift through
boxes of moldy cake and cookies, castoffs from a local grocery chain. I
asked where the produce was, and I was met with a sigh. This was what
was donated, so this was what we could provide.
Once I finished that, I had to hand out the go-bags. Go-bags
were shopping bags full of food for people living in “unstable
circumstances” – i.e., homeless. They consisted of anything that could
be eaten on the go. They usually had a piece of fruit, but they were
also full of slimy restaurant leftovers and cast-off pastries from the
donation boxes. Bad food that fills you up and makes you happy, and a
healthy snack when available. My family’s food pyramid, packaged to go.
I handed the first go-bag to a man my own age, a guy in a ratty
coat who wouldn’t look me in the eye. He may have been ashamed of his
situation, but I was ashamed that I couldn’t give him something better
than leftover pizza and a cookie I wouldn’t feed my dog.
What angered me then – and angers me still – is that we didn’t
have anything to be ashamed of. We weren’t the ones who made fresh food a
luxury and junk food an easily obtained comfort. We didn’t chase the
grocery store out of his neighborhood, and we didn’t ask the grocery
stores in the suburbs to fill the pantry with their uneaten pastries in
lieu of real food. We weren’t responsible for the poverty that was
eating the neighborhood like a cancer, leaving a generation of people
exhausted and malnourished. We weren’t the ones who had broken the
systems that punished us. All he’d done was fallen on hard times, and
all I’d done was try to help him. Our shame wasn’t earned. It wasn’t
fair.
That was when I decided to work my way up to a position where I
could help people like him get something they would be proud to eat.
Food justice is complex work. We want to give people healthy
food that is relevant to their tastes and needs, but we work in
neighborhoods where it hasn’t been readily available in decades. What
they want, what they need, and what they know how to prepare varies
wildly. Programs based on stereotypes or one-size-fits-all approaches
are doomed to fail.
I will summarize my view of the world in three simple statements. Things
are better than ever before. Things are still quite bad. Things can get
much worse. This adds up to a somewhat optimistic view because if you
realize things are better than before, this means we can make them even
better. We are not stuck in the same miserable position for all of
history. There are things we can do to improve the situation. But there
is nothing inevitable about it.
I’m not a believer that science and
technology will inevitably create a better world. Science and technology
guarantee only one thing. And this thing is power. Humankind is going
to become more powerful. But what to do with this power? Here we have
all kinds of options. If you look back in history, sometimes people use
power very wisely, and very often they misuse their power. One of the
most important forces in human history is human stupidity. We should
never underestimate human stupidity. When you combine the limitless
resource of human stupidity with amazing new powers that humankind will
gain in the 21st century, this can be a recipe for disaster.
I will summarize my view of the world in three simple statements. Things
are better than ever before. Things are still quite bad. Things can get
much worse. This adds up to a somewhat optimistic view because if you
realize things are better than before, this means we can make them even
better. We are not stuck in the same miserable position for all of
history. There are things we can do to improve the situation. But there
is nothing inevitable about it.
I’m not a believer that science and
technology will inevitably create a better world. Science and technology
guarantee only one thing. And this thing is power. Humankind is going
to become more powerful. But what to do with this power? Here we have
all kinds of options. If you look back in history, sometimes people use
power very wisely, and very often they misuse their power. One of the
most important forces in human history is human stupidity. We should
never underestimate human stupidity. When you combine the limitless
resource of human stupidity with amazing new powers that humankind will
gain in the 21st century, this can be a recipe for disaster.
I'm coming to it rather late -- it was published in 1951and has been famous ever since. (Do younger people know it now?)
Since first publication, it's been famous for a variety of reasons.
as an astonishing first novel
as the work of an obscure author who retreated to the country and wrote little else
as an expose of modern (post-WWII) kids
as a dirty book unsuitable for the teenagers it porported to depict, and thus a book time and again banned by school boards, mainly in North America.
as a source of slang and swear words
I heard a lot about The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager but never was required to read it, or forbidden to read it. I ddin't read high prestige books of that sort; I read science fiction.
But now I've read it, and you know what? It's very good.
American essayist Adam Gopnik was just on CBC radio's Sunday Edition arguing very cogently that what makes liberal democracy is not one big idea, like "the Nation" or "the Religion," but many, many habits and compromises that make possible for people to livetogether in a sane way. Gopnik's new book in fact is called
A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.
Fulani is an important language in West Africa -- it may have as many as 50 million speakers. However, it has never had its own script, one really suited to its structure. People have made do with the Arabic and Roman alphabets. This has limited the literacy of most uo f those millions.
So who is responsible for this useful innovation benefiting millions? Just a couple of kids!
I never saw this beautiful village -- Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia -- until the CBC ran a feature on small towns. This combination of waterfront and an old, impressive church is pretty typical. Bonfield, Ontario had one big church on the waterfront.
Of the many myths told about American slavery, one of the
biggest is that it was an archaic practice that only enriched a small
number of men.
The argument has often been used to diminish the scale of
slavery, reducing it to a crime committed by a few Southern planters,
one that did not touch the rest of the United States. Slavery, the
argument goes, was an inefficient system, and the labor of the enslaved
was considered less productive than that of a free worker being paid a
wage. The use of enslaved labor has been presented as premodern, a
practice that had no ties to the capitalism that allowed America to
become — and remain — a leading global economy.
But as with so many stories about slavery, this is untrue.
Slavery, particularly the cotton slavery that existed from the end of
the 18th century to the beginning of the Civil War, was a thoroughly
modern business, one that was continuously changing to maximize profits.
To grow the cotton that would clothe the world and fuel
global industrialization, thousands of young enslaved men and women —
the children of stolen ancestors legally treated as property — were
transported from Maryland and Virginia hundreds of miles south, and
forcibly retrained to become America’s most efficient laborers. As they were pushed into the expanding territories of Mississippi and Louisiana,
sold and bid on at auctions, and resettled onto forced labor camps,
they were given a task: to plant and pick thousands of pounds of cotton.
The bodies of the enslaved served as America’s largest financial asset, and they were forced to maintain America’s most exported commodity. In 60 years, from 1801 to 1862, the amount of cotton picked daily by an enslaved person increased 400 percent. The profits from cotton
propelled the US into a position as one of the leading economies in the
world, and made the South its most prosperous region. The ownership of
enslaved people increased wealth for Southern planters so much that by
the dawn of the Civil War, the Mississippi River Valley had more
millionaires per capita than any other region.
In recent years, a growing field of scholarship has
outlined how America — through the country’s geographic growth after the
American Revolution and enslavers’ desire for increased cotton
production — created a complex system aimed at monetizing and maximizing
the labor of the enslaved. In the cotton fields of the Deep South, this
system rested on the continuous threat of violence and a meticulous use
of record-keeping. The labor of each person was tracked daily, and
those who did not meet their assigned picking goals were beaten. The
best workers were beaten as well, the whip and other assaults coercing
them into doing even more work in even less time.
Read that again:
The
best workers were beaten as well,
As overseers and plantation owners managed a forced-labor
system aimed at maximizing efficiency, they interacted with a network
of bankers and accountants, and took out lines of credit and mortgages,
all to manage America’s empire of cotton. An entire industry, America’s
first big business, revolved around slavery.
“The slavery economy of the US South is deeply tied
financially to the North, to Britain, to the point that we can say that
people who were buying financial products in these other places were in
effect owning slaves, and were extracting money from the labor of
enslaved people,” says Edward E. Baptist, a historian at Cornell
University and the author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.
This makes me want to teach Early Modern History again...
I love our river. It is ours not because we live on it (we don’t), or
because we covet ownership of a beauty spot, but because this water
flows through our family life. Our stretch of river lies between London
and Oxford; it is technically the Thames and not quite the Isis; it is a
gentle roar, a rushing calm, a city-country icon that feels deeply
personal.
When I first moved to our south Oxfordshire hamlet, 16 years ago, the
river’s appeal was clear: every yard of it is picture perfect. Cross
the weir, past the mill house and over the lock, past the weeping
willow. Walk on with fields to your right and the river to your left,
fringed by greenery that is mature yet exuberant (like many of the
locals) and tiny beaches where anglers sit, nodding away the dogs who
come sniffing at their bait.
I go in the water whenever the mood takes me: I have dunked myself to
chill out a fraught afternoon and to commune with the dawn. I have been
in with boat-weary friends, my husband, and – ill-advised, of course –
alone (usually an angler is within shouting distance). To have a regular
routine would kill the magic for me. The impulse, like the water, must
be wild and free. When I do go in, it is always in summer – I marvel at
those with hardy, moon-white bodies who smear themselves in goose fat
and launch into wintry seas. I will never be one of their number. Even
in a heatwave I mince in, arms bent and aloft, waiting for the cold
water to stun my broiling core. Waist depth is optimum; I feel freed but
embraced; I think about dipping my head under for a while. No earrings,
no watch, offline. I’m ready.
I emerge each time alive but more so, skin teased and tingling,
braids dripping, my mind washed of dark clutter; I am, if not quite
reborn, then absolved by unseen river gods for as long as the water
drips down my calves. Our river restores, rewarding even the most timid
dip with cool inspiration. And so, in I go.
Today on CBC Radio's comedy show "The Debaters" was in Calgary, and much of the debate was on the desirability of building a new arena. Big issue in that city.
One question thrown out to one of the debaters was to finish a famous quote by Montreal mayor Jean
Drapeau in his promotion of the 1972 Olympics:
"The Olympics can no more lose money than a man can have a baby."
Of course the Montreal Olympics lost millions. And just about everyone quoted Drapeau if they had any motivation to oppose a sports boondogle.
I was surprised, then, that the Calgary crowd didn't react at all.
Of course, these were Albertans being indifferent to Quebec; and I think the Debaters appeals to a younger crowd; and by no means do I count as young.
But it is another lesson in the dangers of assuming you know that "everybody" knows what you know, even recent historical events.
