The Secret of England's Greatness

This is a famous depiction of the British Empire by Thomas Jones Barker, 1861, 'The Secret of England's Greatness'. It is so called because it depicts the apocryphal story commonly told of Queen Victoria that, when asked how the British Empire had grown so strong, she pointed not to ships or guns but to the Bible and said, "Tell them that this is the secret of England's greatness." Here we see Her Majesty handing over a copy of the Holy Writ to an African envoy in the Audience Room at Windsor.

Some commentators suppose that the envoy is generic and that the implication is that the British lay claim to the whole of Africa. A sinister interpretation. More likely, he is understood to be or is based upon or alludes to Ali bin Nasr, governor of Mombasa. Victoria was on good terms with him. He had been invited to and attended her coronation in 1838 and travelled to England to see her again in 1842. The costume in the painting can be identified as specifically east African.

I point out that if this handsome African is (or is based upon) Ali bin Nasr then he is, obviously, a Muslim and that, therefore, he would acknowledge the Bible as one of God's Books and would understand Queen Victoria and the British as 'People of the Book'. It would therefore not be at all insulting or demeaning or imposing for him to be presented with a Bible. He would entirely expect her to give him a Bible. The scene, therefore, does NOT signify the imposition of Christianity upon heathens, which is usually how it is taken, or always how it is taken in post-colonial intellectuality.

I think that is a simplistic interpretation. No doubt it was understood as having that meaning at the time - it was a widely reproduced and very popular picture - but I doubt that it is, as it were, a simplistic endorsement of missionary Christianity in Africa. The British did not usually try to convert Muslims to Christianity. Like among the Muslims themselves, there was a distinction between 'People of the Book' and those deemed religionless, between 'Musselmen" and "savages". Savages were given Christianity. British missionaries worked to convert Muslims (they still do) but the task was more difficult and less urgent than was the baptism of savages.

I do not think this is a picture of a savage. I do not think it is a picture of a heathen. It is a picture of an African Muslim chieftan. He is depicted with considerable sympathy. He is not depicted as an ape or as sub-human, as Africans sometimes were in European ideas. He is regal - not some khalhari bushman. He is handsome, muscular, proud, dignified, strong, albeit kneeling appropriately before Her Majesty. But the British themselves knelt before her in exactly the same way. So rather than this being a depiction of raw subjugation and surrender, we see an African dignitary (with his dignity fully acknowledged by the painter) in an act that shows him as "one of us". This is the peculiarity of the scene. The Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, along with Prince Albert and the Mistress of Robes, look on watching the remarkable way in which the British Empire had brought diverse peoples - even Africans! - into a single edifice under a single sovereign.

That is how I understand this picture. I don't indulge in post-colonial demonizing of everything British. My world-view isn't formed by the resentful post-colonial Leftism that pervades the intellectual culture of my age. Of course this picture is about Empire, and of course it combines themes of patriotism and piety, and of course the polite deference of the chieftan disguises the fact that the British were probably stripping his country of natural resources, but it also celebrates those benevolent and benign aspects of the Empire that we no longer admit.

That is: as Empires go, the British Empire wasn't too bad. I remember talking to a guy in Java who told me how envious he was of the Malays. "They were conquered by the British," he said. "Lucky!" He complained that his country had been conquered by the Dutch, who were complete bastards, whereas any country that was part of the British Empire he regarded as enormously fortunate. I heard the same thing in India too - Indians who told me that they counted themselves lucky to have been conquered by the British and to have been part of the British Empire. I was sitting talking to a man in a Hindu temple outside of Bangalore. "What about Gandhi and all that?" I asked. Of course he revered Gandhi, but he didn't believe the British had been too bad. Indian nationalists had demonized them, but he said that most Indians were glad to have had that experience under the British. His mother loved the British, he added. The British brought tinned food. His mother regarded British tinned food as a veritable emblem of civilization.

I was educated in the usual post-colonial narrative. The evil British raped and pillaged their way around the globe in a racist rampage of colonial exploitation. The reality of travelling knocked that out of me. The reality was much more nuanced. I think this painting is more nuanced than we take it too. It is a good painting with which to deal with this post-colonial bias. It seems a straight-forward, heavy-handed paean to imperialist ideology, everything your standard post-colonial Leftist hates. It's got it all. Empire, religion, racism, monarchy, hierarchy. A picture we can love to hate. But if we understand that the African is a Muslim man, its' meaning alters just enough to make it interesting. (Notice, by the way, that  he wears a knife. He has not been disarmed.)

I do have to add here that the pervasive feminist treatments of this painting are vacuous and tiresome. Do a google search for 'The Source of England's Greatness'. Follow links in the first thirty or so results. All you'll find are people trying to find some "gender" angle in this painting. I don't think it has one, really. There's no cogent "women's angle" on this painting. But that doesn't prevent my gender obsessed contemporaries from inventing one. The 'Women in World History' page at George Mason University gets the prize for feminist stupidity this time. Regarding 'The Secret of England's Greatness' it states:

"Despite the frequent depiction of empire as a masculine world, the queen was the symbolic figurehead of the British Empire...."

That's really scratching. Apart from this being an utterly inane observation, as far as I can tell the Empire was always referred to and depicted as feminine. Britannia is female. Always. I'm so annoyed by this stupid comment that here's a couple of pictures just to prove my point - the British Empire is female:

- Harper McAlpine Black

Plato, Superman & Eugenics

There is a new film out, apparently, about the comic book hero, Superman. I've never been a fan of the character at all - the whole idea of a 'man of steal' is a ludicrous industrial mythology that I've always found repugnant - and so I'm not likely to see the movie, but there is chatter around on-line regarding its "Platonic" themes. There are, supposedly, lots of clues to this in the movie, including a scene early in the piece where mild mannered drip Clark Kent is reading a book and the word 'Plato' is visible on the front cover. What a giveaway! People who take popular culture and cinema seriously - I don't - are chattering about these celluloid (or digital) references to the ancient sage. Some people want to make a lot of it and see Plato all through the movie.

The themes they identify as Platonic are the very idea of a "superman" - the elite man -  and the theme of eugenics, to which there are extensive references in the film, so I'm told. Superman comes from a world - Krypton - where a race of superior beings with super powers have been bred and engineered. The back-story of the movie concerns the break-down of this eugenics system on the doomed world from which our hero has escaped or has been exiled.

I'm inclined to contest the idea that these are Platonic themes. First, the idea of the Superman - ubermensch - is Nietzschean, not Platonic, and owes a lot more to Nazi ideology than anyone is really comfortable with.  It is not an accident that the superhero was introduced to the world in 1938. It is clearly a pre-war Americanizing of a Nazi wet-dream. Plato has nothing to do with it. Superman's super power is his strength and might or, as Nietzsche put it, his "will". There is nothing remotely similar to that in Plato's depiction of his philosophical elite in the Republic. Are they endowed with super powers? No. The will to power? No. They are philosophers trained in geometry. Superman has no corresponding intellectual virtues. Clark Kent is as thick as a whale sandwich and Superman himself, while morally virtuous, never displays anything beyond an average IQ. He's strong, not smart. I don't see any parallels with Plato's philosopher kings at all, except for the broad concept of an "elite".

Second, the idea that Plato is the father of eugenics or selective breeding. This is an old furphy, but a persistent one. This is really the matter that I want to clarify here. There have been more misunderstandings about this than almost any other aspect of Plato, I suspect. In the Republic - Socrates' account of the ideal City - we find the extraordinary idea that the ruling class of philosophers are to own children in common. That is, the Republic includes provisions for sexual communism. Moreover, children from various classes can be identified, taken from their parents, and groomed as philosophers from an early age if they show signs of aptitude. Socrates admits that it is an extraordinary and arresting idea, along with an accompanying strange notion, namely that, in the City, men and women are regarded as equals.

This isn't eugenics. And nor does the sexual communism of the City's guardians have sinister motives. On the contrary, Plato's concern in this - as elsewhere in his political thought - is to try to separate self-interest from political power. The reason the Guardians are not permitted to know what children are theirs and the reason children are brought up communally is to prevent that oldest of political diseases, nepotism.  The Guardians are powerful, but their power comes at a high price. They are not allowed to own property or children. Why not? To minimize the danger that they will abuse their power and corrupt their decisions out of self-interest. The whole purpose of the Philosopher Kings in Plato is to produce a class of rulers who are objective and who govern in the interests of all. For Plato, the cause of corruption in a polity is that rulers act in self-interest or in the interests of the faction that sponsors them rather than in the interests of the whole City. In the Republic, Plato goes to extraordinary lengths to create a class of rulers who can rule objectively. That is the single greatest theme of the Republic, on my reading of it.

It stands in sharp contrast to our political systems today. Our system consists entirely of competing claims of self-interest. The Labour Party rules in the interests of labour. The conservatives rule in the interests of business and money. Then there are lots of other interest groups: the Shooter & Fisherman's Party, the Farmer's Party and so on. Our political system is a contest between competing concentrations of vested interest. But, as Plato realises, good government invariably involves decisions which are outside or beyond these vested interests. We recognize this. We call a politician who is able to rise above their own interests, and who often defies his own supporters, a "statesman" rather than just a grubby politician. A "statesman" can see the interests of the whole nation and puts those interests ahead of the narrow and sectional interests of any one group.

Plato's solution to the blight of self-interest in a polity is radical, certainly, but the Republic is "an ideal writ in heaven" after all, not a platform for action. The same motive underpins the education system to which the Guardians are subject. They are drilled in objective sciences: maths, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy. Why? To preserve them from the influence of emotional and irrational arguments, once again so that their decisions are as objective as possible.

None of this has anything remotely to do with the stupid Superman comics. Or are they thinking of the section of the Republic called the 'Nuptial Number' which is, arguably, a form of eugenics, but certainly not as modern people imagine it? In the Republic there are carefully timed marriage festivals. The breakdown of the Republic and the on-set of social decay, Socrates tells us, occurs when the Guardians can no longer calculate the right times for such festivals. I have written extensively on this in other places. I point out that in most pre-modern societies there were efforts to regulate child-birth. This was to avoid having a glut of children when there was no food. Among some Australian aborigines, for example, there were times of the year when women-folk would separate from the main tribe. This was to avoid pregnancy at certain times. The health, social cohesion and continued existence of the tribe depended upon it. Socrates' marriage festivals and his 'Nuptial Number' is an extension of that idea. It had nothing - absolutely nothing - to do with breeding a super-race. The Platonic State doesn't control who marries who; it controls when they marry. Moreover, I point out that there is not the slightest hint of racialism in Plato. To lump Plato in with Nazi super-race theory is not just a misreading of Plato's Republic, it is a thoroughly grotesque misreading.

I didn't like Batman either. Or Spiderman. The Hulk gave me nightmares when I was a kid. I did like Lois Lane, and I liked the sexy mermaid in Marine Boy, but otherwise super-heroes are definitely not my thing. I've never understood the whole super-hero phenomenon in popular culture. Every one of them is ridiculous, but not quite as ridiculous as supposing that poor old much maligned Plato is their intellectual progenitor. As I say, I won't be seeing the movie.



- Harper McAlpine Black

Mortimer Menpes - Australian orientalist

Another Australian Orientalist, Mortimer Menpes (1855-1938) whose work I like very much. Menpes was born in Port Adelaide and began his art training in South Australian art schools. Like many other artists, though, he realised there is was no great future for him Downunder so he completed his training in Britain. After this, he toured Europe and made copies of European masters, such as this copy of Bellini's 'Doge of Venice':

Later in his life, Menpes donated these excellent copies to the National Gallery of Australia which is where they still reside. They were intended to form the nucleus of the national collection of the newly formed Commonwealth of Australia. In Britain, he became a student of the British-based American James Whistler. Here is a great sketch he made of the American:

Menpes also went to India and the Middle East. Here is a picture entitled 'Kashmiri Girl with Hookah':

But the main claim Menpes has to fame is that he journeyed to Japan in 1887 - one of the very few Europeans at that time to do so - and produced a large number of pictures there which were published in travel books. (I printed out one of his books on Japan today - all 600 pages of it! Fascinating.) He also had the rare distinction of studying under a Japanese master, the painter and printmaker Kyosai. Here are some of his watercolours from Japan:

Strauss on esoteric texts

Following up Renaud Fabbri's post on the esoteric text and Leo Strauss. (See previous post.) Renaud explains:

The works of Leo Strauss about the phenomenon of esoteric writing in a context of persecution is probably one of the most fascinating aspects of his legacy. The readers learn with him how to read political philosophy as a “detective story” The assumption that classical text should be « read between lines » proceeds directly from Strauss’s interest in the theologico-political question. The philosopher needs to justify himself, and the right of free enquiry, both in the eyes of the city and in the eyes of religion. To the extent that he deviates from orthodoxy or social accepted view he will have to conceal his real teaching, practice esoteric writings. Only a certain type of reader will be able to crack the code, to understand his real intention...

For Leo Strauss, it is because Liberalism has gradually come to prevail in western societies after the Enlightenment, that the phenomenon of esoteric writings has been progressively forgotten (and even denied by historicists). The beginning of modernity was characterized by a progressive collapse of the boundaries between esoteric and exoteric writings. The result is that most readers, even academics, will tend to remain at an exoteric understanding of the classics. The liberal dogma of public transparency has been extended even to those who could not afford it.

I want to take this thought up:

If Strauss is right about esoteric texts then the question becomes: what was it that required being kept secret? What was it that was so dangerous, so distruptive, so potent, that philosophers had to keep it secret or had to encode it into their works?

Whatever it was, Strauss reasons, then it must have been revealed by now because modernity, by definition, is the collapse of the distinction between esoteric and exoteric texts. We don't write esoteric texts anymore because whatever the secret was it doesn't need to be kept secret anymore. In our age, whatever it was, it must now be right before our noses out in the open. What, in modernity, did philosophers need to keep secret in the past?

Strauss concludes that the "great secret" hidden in esoteric texts must be the modern realisation that the universe is a godless, unrelentingly cold, hostile place that has no meaning and no comfort. In other words, materialistic nihilism. Religion, Strauss thinks, is a mask for this grim truth. But an entirely necessary mask. Because only philosophers - people rightly trained - are really capable of dealing with the horrible truth. The whole of civilization, Strauss thinks, is a systematic denial of the grim truth. For civilization to exist most people - non-philosophers - must believe the 'Noble Lie' of religion. So Strauss is that fascinating combination: an atheist who believes in religion.

This doctrine resembles Freud, doesn't it? Religion as sublimation. Society as repression. The oedipal horror. The truth is so ugly we just can't face it so we invent a 'Noble Lie' and conceal the ugly truth except from a small elite few.

The question becomes: if not this nihilistic vision, then what? If we agree there are esoteric texts, then what was it that was esoteric and why was it esoteric? What is this terrible truth that must be kept from the common man? Whatever it is, Strauss reasons, it must now be exposed, because that is what modernity is. Do we have an answer to these questions? If not the wasteland, what?


- Harper McAlpine Black

Strauss - non-believing Jews

(This blog should have been called 'It's more complicated than it looks'.) Leo Strauss' atheism is more complicated than it looks, simply because he was a Jew, and like other Jews, he remained a Jew while not being a believing Jew. It's a question that always arises when I teach Biblical Studies. Students ask: is Judaism a religion or an ethnicity, or neither, or both, or what? Here are a couple of quotes from Strauss. 

The kingdom is Yours, and You will reign in glory for all eternity. As it is written in Your Torah: "The Lord shall reign for ever and ever." And it is said: " And the Lord shall be King over all the earth: on that day the Lord shall be One, and His name One."

No nobler dream was ever dreamt. It is surely nobler to be a victim of the most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and to wallow in it. Dream is akin to aspiration. And aspiration is a kind of divination of an enigmatic vision. And an enigmatic vision in the emphatic sense is the perception of the ultimate mystery, of the truth of the ultimate mystery. The truth of the ultimate mystery — the truth that there is an ultimate mystery, that being is radically mysterious — cannot be denied even by the unbelieving Jew of our age. That unbelieving Jew of our age, if he has any education, is ordinarily a positivist, a believer in Science, if not a positivist without any education.

"Why We Remain Jews" (1962)

Science, as the positivist understands it, is susceptible of infinite progress. That you learn in every elementary school today, I believe. Every result of science is provisional and subject to future revision, and this will never change. In other words, fifty thousand years from now there will still be results entirely different from those now, but still subject to revision. Science is susceptible of infinite progress. But how can science be susceptible of infinite progress if its object does not have an inner infinity? The belief admitted by all believers in science today — that science is by its nature essentially progressive, and eternally progressive — implies, without saying it, that being is mysterious. And here is the point where the two lines I have tried to trace do not meet exactly, but where they come within hailing distance. And, I believe, to expect more in a general way, of people in general, would be unreasonable.

"Why We Remain Jews" (1962)

Strauss also said, somewhere, words to the effect: "philosophy should always been challenged by theology and theology should always be challenged by philosophy." 

Also on Strauss, Renaud Fabbri has made useful notes on Strauss at the link below:

Leo Strauss on the phenomenon of esoteric writing

Strauss for morons

Very few of us check facts. Who has the time? Accordingly, many things become established as facts even though they are not. I'm as prone to this as anyone. There are some things you just take on trust and look no further.

One of these things for me has been the evil and perfidious character of Professor Leo Strauss. I have known Strauss only as the author of a perverse reading of Plato and as the intellectual father of American neoconservatism. Not being a neocon myself, that was all I needed to know. The Straussians, I had learned, were a "cult" within right-wing American politics with Leo Strauss the evil genius presiding. Somehow, I also learned, he had been responsible for the Iraq War. Beyond that, I didn't have the time or inclination to actually read Strauss. There are countless commentaries on Plato to read; why bother reading one by the guy who taught Plato to Paul Wolfowitz?

It was a mistake. I've been listening to lectures by Strauss on youtube and also jumping into a copy of his major work, The City & Man. I'm only just getting into it, but already I see what a challenging and useful way of approaching Plato Strauss offers. And so far, I am not finding any frothing-at-the-mouth neocon fascist, as expected. Scanning over the whole thing, it all looks exceedingly interesting and I wish that I'd found time to look into it years ago. Goodness, Strauss was lecturing in 1966. It's not new. I've just been lazy.

With my interest whetted, I have then been wondering why Strauss has the reputation he has. Is he really that evil? Perhaps I'm missing something? I discover that, in fact, the view of Strauss that I have had conforms to that found in the books of a Canadian academic named Shadia Drury. She has written several books on Strauss and it is she who paints Strauss as the sinister author of neocon political ideology. It is she who described the students of Strauss as an intellectual "cult" operating behind the scenes to orchestrate such diabolical acts as the Iraq war. This is exactly the view I had of Strauss. I've never read or even heard of Shadia Drury, and yet I am her mouthpiece. Somehow, her views on Strauss have become my views on Strauss. It filtered down through the internet and became a fixture in my intellectual furniture: the evil Strauss.

But not everyone is happy with Shadia Drury's portrayal of the old professor. A book published in 2009 entitled Straussophobia by Peter Minowitz takes her to task. He says that what we have in her work is nothing less than a fully formed entirely delusional left-wing conspiracy theory. The Straussians, according to this theory, are a secret club who have been running America. They were all students of Leo Strauss, who brainwashed them with neo-nazi ideology and sent them out to weazle their way into positions of power from where they could unleash their evil plans. In order to portray Strauss thus, Drury has misquoted and misunderstood Strauss and very often just fabricated ideas and connections. This estimation of Drury seems widespread. Thomas Pangle, a former professor of political philosophy at Yale, went all out and slammed Drury's portrayal as unscholarly and incompetent. Others describe Drury as offering "Strauss for morons."

It all becomes much clearer to me. Shadia Drury is a familiar type. Feminist, leftist, post-colonial studies, social scientist, lectures on "social justice". Oh dear. Strauss, I know, would be utterly anathema to such academics on any number of grounds. For a start, Strauss made himself unpopular by reinstating the study of Plato and Aristotle in the social sciences long after they had been expelled as boring, elitist old white males. In an age when the social sciences were mesmerised by Derida and co. , Strauss was heading in exactly the opposite direction. I taught Classics for many years. Our social scientist colleagues hated us. Why? Classics is everything they hate. The narrative of the elite. That is exactly what they are out to smash.

It seems that half the people Drury claims studied under Strauss never did, and of those who did half of them never had the power and influence she imagines. She claims that all sorts of people are members of the secretive Strauss club. Most of these claims don't seem to have any substance at all. It is Leftist mythology, a demonology. But it was all  eagerly lapped up by Leftists everywhere. Who knows? I probably read it first in George Monbiot.

But I'm not a moron, so I have decided to put aside Drury's fevered fantasies and have a good look at Leo Strauss. Already I know I am unlikely to agree with his conclusions, but already the reading I have done has been very worthwhile. Strauss is refreshingly free of the type of relativism - he calls it "historicism" - that infects so much contemporary thought. (My goodness, the post-modernists must despise him!) His approach to Plato gives proper account of absolutes. The first thing I take away from Strauss is this: he reads the Platonic dialogues in absolute time, not in a historical relativism. Goodbye Gilbert Ryle! and good riddance.

In The City & Man, Strauss writes:

Plato's work consists of many dialogues because it imitates rthe manyness, the variety, the heterogeniety of being. The many dialogues form a kosmos which mysteriously imitates the mysterious kosmos. The Platonic kosmos imitates or reproduces its model in order to awaken us to the mystery of the model and to assist us in articulating that mystery. There are many dialogues because the whole consists of many parts. But the individual dialogue is not a chapter from an encyclopaedia of the philosophic sciences or from a system of philosophy, and still less a relic of a stage of Plato's development. Each dialogue deals with one part: it reveals the truth about that part... Each dialogue, we venture to say, abstracts something that is most important to the subject matter of the dialogue. If this is so, the subject matter as presented in the dialogue is strictly speaking impossible. But the impossible - or a certain kind of impossible - if treated as possible is in the highest sense ridiculous or, as we are in the habit of saying, comical. The core of every Aristophanean comedy is something impossible of the kind indicated. The Platonic dialogue brings to its completion what could be thought to have been completed by Aristophanes.

That's a great place to start, a great way to look at the dialogues. Comedies, "in the highest sense ridiculous."




- Harper McAlpine Black

 

Leo Strauss on a Rainy Day

Rainy, cold days here in southern Australia, so my gardening activities are curtailed. Instead, cosy mornings by the wood heater watching Youtubes of Leo Strauss. Alan Bloom has been thoughtful enough to upload recordings of Strauss's famous lectures on Plato. I haven't heard them before. I've read bits and pieces of Strauss but mainly I know Strauss second-hand: his reputation proceeds him. He is often hailed - or demonized - as the philosophical grand-daddy of the Neocons. He is, in any case, the most influential (and controversial) reader of Plato of modern times.

His lectures are rightly famous. They are brilliant. And, my O my, his arguments are devious. I am particularly struck, just now, by the entire construction of his mode of reading. Strauss claims there is a very particular way in which the Platonic dialogues ought to be read. Here is an important lecture where he asks, 'How are we to understand Socratic irony?' His answer is extraordinary and alarming at the same time. He might be right.

Strauss on Socratic Irony

And here, in the same series, is a brilliant lecture where, in a few simple steps, Strauss completely demolishes the entire epistemological foundation of the modern social sciences. Devastating.

Strauss demolishes the Social Sciences

Race, words and magical thinking

Race - now there's a dangerous topic, and I'm not going to march blindly into that minefield today, but in the right-wing media yesterday there was a column by Theodore Dalrymple about which I feel bound to comment. Dalrymple was reporting on moves in France to remove the word "race" from all official documentation, including the French Constitution, and - moreover - including clauses and statutes that forbid discrimination on the basis of "race". The reason for these moves is that "race" is now regarded as an "unscientific" word, because, as Dalrymple explains, there is no scientific basis for dividing human beings up into "races". That is - scientifically speaking - there is no such thing as "race" and therefore there can be no such thing as racial discrimination. It is a strange argument, but it is now Left wing orthodoxy and the Socialist government in France is determined to legislate the word "race" out of existence. It is controversial because not everyone who is anti-racist is happy about it. The Socialists want to remove the word "race" from the constitutional clauses that forbid discrimination on the basis of "gender, nationality, religion and race"but those who feel they are indeed subject to discrimination on the basis of "race" feel that this is a bad idea. Supporters of the move point out that the word "race" was only added to the French constitution in 1939 and the current clause was added in 1945, specifically to outlaw Nazi racism. It is now argued that the word is redundant.

The issue that draws my attention here is, once again, the Left wing preoccupation with language and the political control of words. In this case, remarkably, the Left's war on words has even overcome the actual battle against racism; it has become more important to eradicate the word "race" than to actually acknowledge and do something about racism. In the strange contortions of Left wing logic, it seems that if we eliminate the word "race" then, somehow, we have eliminated the thing itself. This has raised some alarm among those who regularly experience the impact of racism. Louis-George Tin, founder of the Representative Council of Black Associations of France - very astutely noted that "to believe that it is sufficient to suppress a word to suppress an evil smacks of magical thinking."

I have always thought so. The New Left's obsession with controlling language is, deep down, rooted in magical thinking: the idea that words are power. The notion that removing the word "race" from French officialdom - because science tells us its an unscientific idea - as a move against "racism" (which cannot really exist because there's no such thing as "race") is in the same order of ideas as writing your enemy's name in a peace of paper and sticking it in your freezer, a common act of urban witchcraft. It is craziness. We can see where it is heading. Next it will be the word "gender" and, by extension, words like "man" and "woman". The argument goes that "gender" is unscientific. Like "race" it is purely a social construct. It has no basis in nature. Therefore, the whole idea must be eradicated from our language. There can be no discrimination on the basis of gender because there is no such thing as gender. This sort of logic now permeates New Left intellectuality.

I have a personal encounter to relate. Working in Academia, I have been at the forefront of these battles over language. One of the defining moments for me was in the late 1990s when a cabal of mad feminists tried to introduce University regulations whereby all instances of genderised language were to be treated as spelling errors. This was to be made compulsory and all academics in the Faculty had to comply. Thus, if a student submitted an essay in which they used the offensive word "mankind", it had to be treated as a spelling error and the essay marked down accordingly. Where a student is quoting someone who used the word "mankind" (or similar) then it had to be indicated as a spelling error by adding the Latin (sic) afterwords. Thus: "mankind (sic)". Since this regime was to be written into Faculty standards, academics who didn't comply might be guilty of academic misconduct.

At the time, teaching in Religious Studies, I had two post-graduates writing theses in the field of Patristics - the scholarly study of the twelve or so volumes of ancient writings left to us by the so-called 'Church Fathers'. As you can imagine, these new language regulations impacted severely upon these students. Were they seriously expected to write (sic) every time they mentioned the 'Church Fathers'? I pointed this out to one of the academic sisterhood. "It makes the study of Patristics impossible!" I said. To which she said, "Good." It was, as I say, a defining moment for me. I suddenly realised that I was looking into the smiling face of feminist fascism. This was, I realised, a deliberate act of intellectual vandalism.

Until that moment I'd usually considered myself a moderate left-of-centre small l liberal. Suddenly, I looked around and realised that I was now stranded on the right-wing side of the political spectrum. This is not because I'd moved further into conservatism, but because the Left had moved further into loony land.

There are plenty of other instances one could cite. A recent one was the case of a fellow in Canberra whose seriously ill wife was in hospital. He arrived at the hospital and declared that he was her "husband" only to be told "No you're not, you're her carer." He begged to differ. "I am her husband," he insisted. They insisted that the word "husband" had been removed from all official documentation in the ACT and he was the poor woman's "carer" or he was nothing.

If, like me, you find that case just a bit fascistic, then - whether you like it or not - you are now on the right-wing side of politics. Regarding race, it used to be the case that left-wingers supported racial harmony and took steps to stop racial abuse. But the Left has now moved well beyond that very reasonable position. They've moved on to the Orwellean control of the very words we speak, even if it inadvertently makes a nonsense of the whole idea of "racial harmony". The New Left doesn't pursue "racial harmony" anymore because there's no such thing as race - there are no races to be in harmony. As Dalrymple observes,  Louis-George Tin's, Representative Council of Black Associations of France "could exist only on the assumption that black people have some interests in common on the basis of their blackness." The French Socialists seem to be saying: "What blackness? We don't see any blackness. All we see are people who all share 99% of the same DNA. Blackness is unscientific." Tell that to a black man who is refused entry to a restaurant or made to sit at the back of a bus.

The no-such-thing-as-race argument makes no sense in real life, regardless of how "scientific" it might be and how appealing to scientistic technocrats it might be. Although, in fact, even then, it is based on a spurious use of science. It is true, there are no solid genetic distinctions to be made between a white man and a black man. But so what? It is a spurious criterion. Human beings share 99% of their DNA with bananas. We live in times when soft-brained people are dazzled by all the discoveries of DNA, but in fact DNA is not a very useful measure of social realities, and often biological ones too. The point is that "race" may not have any genetic basis (although, in fact, it is the 1% of different DNA that makes all the difference) but it is, undeniably, a social reality. As Dalrymple says, "Even if races do not exist, racism does." Somehow, the Left have lost view of this stunningly simple fact. They've succumbed to magical thinking, a war on words divorced from reality.


- Harper McAlpine Black

Extraterrestrial life: Where is everybody?

A recent article by Amy Shira Teitel published by Al-Jazeera (here) has me on my high horse again about the myth of extraterrestrial life. The article caught my eye because the author attributes the first search for extraterrestrial life to the ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus, and in the same breath portrays both Plato and Aristotle as the enemies of science. This is a grotesque misreading of Greek philosophy in itself, but it is a standard furphy in the standard histories of science. The author casually rehearses some standard scientific myths, the main one being that the Epicurean doctrine of infinite worlds is the same thing as modern science's extended cosmogeography of the observable universe. This is not true, anymore than the similar doctrine found in Buddhism (well before Epicurus) is a precursor to the modern scientific cosmology, regardless of what Buddhist modernists will tell you. 

But it is not the distortions of Greek philosophy that have me going, it is the pervasive and entrenched idea that the search for extraterrestrial life is advancing in leaps and bounds, underpinned by the assumption that the universe is teeming with life that is just waiting to be discovered. This is the popular science-fiction inspired view of the universe. In the article in question, the author details the continuing discovery of so-called exo-planets, or earth-like planets circling distant suns in a familiar manner. The point of the article is that since we have discovered such distant worlds, the chances of finding life elsewhere in the universe are much enhanced. For the first time we have discovered places where terrestrial-style life might exist. 

This is all very well, but it does not change one iota one simple, overwhelming and exceedingly curious fact: namely that so far we have not discovered a single living thing - nothing - beyond the biosphere of the earth. The fact that we are discovering places where ET life is "likely" or at least "possible" only serves to underline this fact. We are finding places where life might be, but so far we have not the slightest indication that there is indeed life in any such places. Most people are unimpressed by this fact. They think it is just a matter of time. But there are others - like me - who are struck by the apparent lack of life in the universe as against the potential for it. 

On earth life absolutely irrepressible and ubiquitous. Life is everywhere. Life is found in every single nook and cranny of the earthly environment. We find microbial life that can survive in the most extraordinary places: the very deepest trenches of the ocean or even the insides of a volcano. There is virtually no place on earth where life has not adapted to the prevailing conditions. Some microbes can live on nothing but sulphur. Wherever we look, life. The evidence of the world around us is that life is amazingly adaptable; living organisms can survive in the most inhospitable conditions. 

This would lead us to the reasonable expectation that the rest of the universe would be the same, that life will have adapted to even the harshest environments. If microbes can live inside an active volcano, or at the bottom of the ocean where there has been no light or oxygen for thousands of years, then why not in the gaseous soups of the atmosphere of Venus, or the thin atmospheres of the Moon or Mars, or elsewhere? And yet, as soon as we step outside of the Earth's biosphere, what do we find? Nothing. Not a thing. Zip. 

The great Italian astro-phycists Firmi noted this. He asked, confronted with these facts, "Where is everybody?" For him, that is, the fact that we did not find any life - not so much as a single living cell - in space, on the moon or so far on Mars, is an extraordinary thing in itself. The contrast between the Earth and elsewhere could not be more stark. For Firmi, this requires an explanation. Why is life ubiquitous on Earth but totally absent outside of the biosphere? We know from terrestrial examples (such as microbes in volcanoes or in deep sea trenches) that life could conceivably adapt to conditions on the Moon or on Mars or on Venus or the moons of Saturn. In theory, it should be possible for forms of life to adapt to an environment as hostile as the surface of the Sun. We know that life *could* exist in such harsh environments. And yet, it doesn't. 

Even if, for example, we uncovered evidence that there had once been life on Mars (a fond hope among science types these days) it still begs the question: why, then, isn't life ubiquitous and profuse and irrepressible, as it is on Earth? That is the real mystery. But it is a mystery overlooked by science-fiction scientism. "Where is everybody?" It's a question no one asks. Articles like that of Ms Teitel only underline the problem. All the latest discoveries prove is that life *should* exist in abundance, but so far, as far as we know, it doesn't. These discoveries make it more probable, but as the probabilities go up the fact that we have failed to encounter any ET life so far becomes all the more remarkable. We may be left with the conclusion that, while the conditions for life are widespread, life itself is not. Why not? 

This situation is not likely to change any time soon. There is a very high chance that our best efforts to find life elsewhere in the solar system - even one single lousy bacteria would do - will come to nothing. On the other hand, there is a chance we might find evidence of life on Mars, or elsewhere, in the next few decades, but as I say, even if that is the case, it is likely to be an isolated instance that does not change the dramatic contrast between a living Earth and a dead solar system. We know already that the solar system is not teeming with life. Why not? That's the mystery. Why hasn't life adapted to other environments? We know that it can. Why hasn't it? If there is life beyond earth, why is it so thin on the ground? 

As Firmi noted, the evidence available to us on earth suggests that once life takes hold it can adapt to almost any circumstances. But that doesn't seem to have happened anywhere else in the solar system, and it is only surmise that it might have happened elsewhere. Outside of mathematical probabilities, and science fiction, we have no evidence of it at all. The facts are really quite different than what scientists feed to the popular imagination. The facts, rather, underline just how extraordinarily unique is life on earth. There may well be other life elsewhere - I don't deny it - but we already know that the universe - in contrast to the earthly environment - is not crawling with life. Life appears to be the exception. It certainly is in the solar system. Before space travel, people like Firmi had a reasonable expectation that life - in some form - would be the norm in outer space. We discovered that it isn't. 

Why is this important? My interest is to high-light the uniqueness - the miraculous extraordinariness of life on earth. The myth of ET life downplays this. It leads us to think that life is pedestrian, just as it encourages a mentality that thinks that if we mess up this planet we can all move to another one. There is no basis for that delusion at all. Indeed, all of our experience of space travel so far tells us that prolonged space travel is impossible for human beings. This is because human beings have a direct connection to the Earth. It is impossible for us to leave the Earth and remain human. Future space travel is likely to be done by robots and machines. Science mythology doesn't admit this fact, but it is true. The Earth is our unique home. That is never likely to change. On this, as on other things, science mythology is misleading. 

Local Government Referendum

The federal government's proposed constitutional change to recognise local government now appears doomed to fail. At the eleventh hour Tony Abbott, Leader of the Opposition, has qualified his support, and as history demonstrates no referendum for constitutional change has a chance without bipartisan support. In this case, there appeared to be bipartisan support and, indeed, the Opposition (or most of it) voted in favour of the proposal in parliament, and the plan was that it would be taken to the people at the forthcoming election with wide, bipartisan support and only isolated voices opposing. Yesterday, however, Tony Abbott said that he had serious reservations about the proposal, and the way it had been handled by the government, and he thought that people should vote against it if they had doubts and reservations. He gave a stock standard conservative line: if you are unsure about a change, oppose it in the first instance. At the same time, Chris Pyne - Liberal frontbencher - called upon the Local Government lobby to "pull" the referendum because it was now heading for defeat.

This, for me, is cause for celebration, because I am opposed to the proposal. On this issue I am with the 'nos' - I am against the so-called recognition of local government in the constitution, and all that entails. I am opposed to it on philosophical and practical grounds. While it is presented as an innocuous change that only acknowledges an existing reality, I fear, rather, that it amounts to a fundamental shift in the nature of government in this country. As I see it, it is a proposal that would centralize and engrandize federal government power at the expense of regional and local government. This is anathema to me. In principle, and in practice, I am pro-regional and pro-local government and opposed to the continuing drift of power to Canberra. I always favour small-scale, local and intimate government. I am always opposed to large, centralized, remote government.

This puts me in the company of the ideological right-wing of the Liberal and National Parties in this case. The Opposition, under Abbott, supported this proposal, but a good handful of opposition members crossed the floor to vote against it and a larger number abstained. These Lib/Nats have the same philosophical objections to the Bill as I do. The proposal would sanction the direct federal government funding of local government bodies - this is a de facto takeover of local government by Canberra. The federal government would be able to by-pass the states and turn local government into an extension of federal power. It is already doing this. The proposal would make the process formal and constitutional.

What's wrong with that, you ask? What it means is that the federal government would be able to manipulate, cajole, blackmail and bribe local governments. It does this simply by attaching conditions to funding. For example, the federal government might say to local bodies, your road funding is conditional upon  you meeting carbon targets, or your health services funding is conditional upon you removing by-laws that prevent abortion clinics operating in certain areas, or your garbage and recycling funding is conditional upon the rezoning of medium-density housing in line with federal government housing targets. And so on. It is my long and bitter experience that every single cent of federal government money comes with strings attached. Sometimes those strings are good, and sometimes they are highly objectionable. It always involves dictating aspects of local government from Canberra.

Philosophically, I support the exact opposite. In the best of possible worlds, in my view, it would all be the other way around. I think that all taxes should be collected by local government and that local government funds regional and federal government. That is, a bottom up model, not a top down model. The very idea that federal government funds and dictates to local government is deeply abhorrent to me, in principle.

So too for the Coalition rebels who crossed the floor and took up the case for a no vote. What has happened here, though, is that this group have, in the last few weeks, led a deeper rebellion against Tony Abbott on this issue, and now it appears Abbott has lost. The issues exposes ideological divisions within the Coalition. If you had been reading conservative blogs in Australia over the last few weeks you will have found a tide of frustration and outright anger directed against Abbott. Why is he supporting this centralisation of power to Canberra? I thought we supported small government? In some posts there was real anger over this issue. The conservative journal Quadrant reported that Abbott had seriously underestimated just how pissed off is the conservative base about his support for this proposal.

In the end, it seems, Abbott has given in. This leaves him in the silly position of having spoken in favour of the Bill in parliament only a few weeks ago, and now having to say the opposite, and explain why he has changed his tune. This is another case of Abbott actually being out of step with the base of the Liberal Party - he's not a real Liberal. And nor is he the 'conviction' politician he claims to be. His pragmatism knows no bounds.

What is at stake in this issue, by the way, is the notion of subsidiarity. This is one of the foundation principles of what is loosely called "conservatism" in all its many guises. Subsidiarity is the principle that tasks should be done by the smallest unit of organisation equipped to do them. For example, parenting should be done by parents, not by the United Nations. Schools should be run by local communities, not by Canberra. The people best equipped to run local government are locals. Federal government intrusion into local government in all its forms violates the principle of subsidiarity. In terms of constitutional reform, I'd like to see the whole thing heading in the opposite direction than how it is; more localism, less centralism.

At this time, at least it seems the proposed change is a goner. This, in fact, is the third time that this proposal will have been put to the people by Labor governments, and the third time it will have failed. There is some evidence, too, that it was heading for failure anyway. Opinion polls report only 47% popular support for the measure even with bipartisan support. A referendum needs about 60+% support to get up under the Australian system. And a good thing too.

Trolling Ed Husic

The trolls were out in force today, bombarding the facebook page of Ed Husic who, yesterday, was sworn in as the first Australian Muslim to hold a place in a federal government ministry. His page was attacked after he was sworn in by the Governor-General using the Koran for the oath. His page was attacked by Australians denouncing him as a Muslim and a "traitor" and a "terrorist". Someone named Aussie Sheila wrote "Shame! Shame! Shame!" and others agreed that it made them "ashamed" to be Australians.

As I have said in the past, you don't need to scratch too hard to find a racist bigot on the right side of politics. It is by far the aspect of right-wing politics that I find most deeply troubling and deeply obnoxious. On the left side of politics we find the pollution of gender politics, misandry and radical feminism. (The deformed New Left doctrine that men - not capitalists - are what is wrong with the world.) On the right we find racism and bigotry. It used to be anti-semitism. Now it is the blind, hysterical hatred of Muslims. 

In some instances, I understand this. I am in sympathy with people who find the influx of unreconstructed Muslim fundamentalists into Australia threatening. I find it threatening too. These are Wahhabi Muslim fanatics who have absolutely no intention of ever finding a stable place in Australian society. They form enclaves in our cities where they try to live as much by Sharia Law as they can. They have little or no connection to the rest of Australia. There are not "hordes" of such fundamentalists in this country, but there are some, and I find it as objectionable as anyone. 

But Ed Husic is not in that category. In fact, he is not even a *practicing* Muslim, merely a cultural Muslim with a Muslim background. In my view, he is the type of face that Islam in Australia needs. No beard. No funny hat. No seventh century Arabian clothing. Rather, he presents an altogether ordinary, mainstream image. I applaud this. I am in the school of thought that thinks that Muslims in Australia need to do much more to fit into Australian society. In this, I find myself in the company of these same right-wingers. But I part company with them when they fail to acknowledge cases like Ed Husic. This is a Muslim who has embraced Australia, Australian culture and the australian way of life. His Islam is residual and non-threatening. A terrorist? Get a grip on reality! Ed Husic is as Australian as meat pie and footy. If you are threatened by Ed Husic - gee, you have one serious bigotry problem. 

Because the posts on Husic's facebook today were bigotry pure and simple. Ugly, small-minded bigotry without any justification that I can see at all. If Husic was a Koran-waving Wahhabi clad in beard and kurta with four wives and a secret plan to uproot the nation's vineyards, then fair enough. But Husic is a mainstream Australian, and the fact that he is a Muslim is entirely incidental. Islam in Australia needs many more Ed Husics, and every one of them should be applauded and welcomed into Australian political life. 

Australia - let me say this for the millionth time - is not a Christian country, per se, and never has been. Indeed, the Australian Constitution makes this absolutely clear. There shall be no religious test for either citizenship or public office. Australia is, nevertheless, a Christian-majority country, which is quite a different thing. It is true that its history, culture and institutions have Christian roots. This fact should be respected and upheld against the worst excesses of multicultural relativism. I understand and sympathise with the anxieties of right-wingers on that point. But I don't sympathise with cases of naked bigotry, which is what we have here. 

I would hope that the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, would publicly acknowledge the historical milestone that is Ed Husic's elevation into the government, and roundly condemn bigotry and distance himself and his party from this type of ugly Australian, but I'm not holding my breath. My deepest concern about Abbott - and Howard before him - is that he deliberately allows this putrid stuff to fester on the right side of politics. He wouldn't condemn Alan Jones' appalling attacks upon Julia Gillard's deceased father and other instances of this redneck culture. He seems happy to win the tainted votes of ugly Australia. It is the job of any leader, I believe, to moderate the nut-jobs in their own ranks. 

I add, though, that among the things that renders me so-called "right wing" these days is that I have no desire to take the law to these bigots. I find their point of view objectionable, not criminal. There is now an equally disturbing culture on the Left that wants to criminalise such people for their views. Left-wing fascism. I don't believe in that either. Left-wingers have an obsession with controlling people's speech. I'm for free speech, even for bigots. The limits of free speech are incitement, slander, defamation and vilification, not merely "causing offence". The trolling of Ed Husic is a case in point. It is offensive, but I have no desire to make it illegal and in fact, at the end of the day, I'd side with the bigots every time against the people who do.

* * *

Postscript: Ed Husic responded to the attacks by saying that people had a right to question his decision to swear the oath on the Koran. I'm happy to say Ed stands by the right to free speech. I am also happy to report that a Liberal MP, Josh Frydenberg, leapt to Husic's defence and called the attacks a "disgrace." And for his part Tony Abbott at least said: "I respect his coice. I think the australian people should as well." That's as close to a positive statement on this as you'll get from Tony Abbott. 

Thesis excerpt

Ending my teaching career, I might get time to revisit my PhD thesis. Here's a small excerpt:

There was a malicious story put abroad in the ancient world, probably originating with the satirist Timon, that on one of his journeys to southern Italy Plato had procured at great price a copy of Philolaus of Croton's one work on Pythagorean cosmogony, and on his return to Athens, plagiarised its doctrines for his own Timaeus. The figure of Timaeus, who by Plato's account was a leading citizen of Epizephyrean Locri, was believed to be a thinly disguised portrayal of Philolaus himself. In the Timaeus Plato presents the Locrian as visiting Athens, and, while enjoying the hospitality of Socrates during a festive season, giving a lengthy account of the creation and the wherewithal of the natural order. This, the story implied, was a fiction through which Plato hoped to present Timaeus as his mouth-piece and thereby claim as his own the cosmological teachings of the Pythagoreans. It was a story that held wide currency at one time - at least amongst those who were not admirers of Plato - and it was sometimes cited as evidence that Philolaus had indeed written a book on general cosmological matters.

What is instructive in the story for our purposes is that it acknowledges the Timaeus as the work in which Plato owes the greatest debt to Italian Pythagoreanism. In this respect the story is consistent with a widely held view among later generations that on his journeys to the western parts of the Greek world Plato had made contact with the Pythagoreans, and that the Timaeus, legitimately or not, was the fruit of that encounter. Plato's admirers, of course, told a different story of the identity of Timaeus and the origins of his doctrines as Plato presents them. They believed that the very purpose of Plato's travels to the west was to seek out Pythagoreanism in its heartland. This was in order to be instructed in its teachings, initiated into its mysteries, and to discuss his own philosophy with its living teachers. Timaeus, they believed, was one of those teachers, an historical figure, whom Plato had met and possibly studied under during his sojourn in the Magna Graecian cities. But it was never denied in these circles that he was a Pythagorean nor that the Timaeus was a thoroughly Pythagorean work. In the first century A.D. a document appeared called On the World-Soul and Nature which bore Timaeus' name. It was in fact an epitome of the Timaeus and obviously a neo-Pythagorean forgery but it was widely believed to have been the original document upon which Plato based his own work. Among those sympathetic to Plato and Platonism it was believed that, far from plagiarising Philolaus, the Timaeus communicated genuine Pythagorean science under the full authority of one of its greatest exponents.

It is not difficult to see how these sorts of stories developed, for the Pythagorean element in the Timaeus is certainly pronounced and it demands some explanation. There is a recognisable strand of Pythagoreanism throughout Plato's dialogues, but it is never as forthright as it is in this case. There is no explicit acknowledgment of Pythagorean influence in the work - Plato rarely mentions the Pythagoreans in any of his writings - but his use of Pythagorean ideas is unmistakable. Similarly, it is not explicitly stated that Timaeus of Locri is a Pythagorean, but the evidence we are given makes his philosophical affiliations clear. Locri, like Tarentum and Croton and many other of the city states of Magna Graecia, was a noted Pythagorean strong-hold. Plato tells us that Timaeus is one of its statesmen, as well as an accomplished philosopher, and, above all, an astronomer who has made the nature of the universe his special field of expertise. From this information it seems certain that he is to be understood to be a Pythagorean, or at least a philosopher under marked Pythagorean influence. This is confirmed by the general tenor of his teachings. The entire structure of his account of the creation of the world and the creation of man depends upon the correspondence between the macrocosm and its microcosmic reflection. Man and cosmos in Timaeus' world share a common order. What is true of the cosmos is true of man. The cosmos is a Living Creature, he teaches, and man is its reflection in miniature. This is the single most commanding idea in the Pythagorean cosmology, an idea that is given its most forthright expression in the doctrine of the harmony of the spheres whereby the order of the universe finds a resonance in the human soul. Timaeus' account of the construction of the soul of the world, which is one of his key doctrines, strongly bears this Pythagorean stamp. He describes how the World-Soul was made according to certain arithmetic and harmonic proportions, some of which correspond to one version of the Pythagorean's emblem, the tetractys. This is evidence enough of his Pythagorean credentials. There is little disagreement on this point in any case. Today, as in the past, the Timaeus is recognised as the most overtly Pythagorean dialogue in the Platonic corpus, and it is understood that its central character is portrayed as an Italian Pythagorean visiting Athens. 

This Pythagorean element in the Timaeus is arguably the work's most outstanding feature. No serious study of the dialogue can overlook the question of Pythagorean influence, nor can any credible attempt at interpretation fail to offer an explanation as to why it is so Pythagorean. The first and most immediate problems raised by the work stem from here - the question of the identity of Timaeus, for example, and of why Plato chose a Locrian to deliver the most important statement on cosmology and 'natural science' in any of his dialogues. A more general question is the extent of Plato's contacts with Italian Pythagoreanism. What precise bearing did his Pythagorean contacts in Magna Graecia have on his work? What did he find in the Italian Pythagoreans that attracted him? These matters are often so perplexing, though, that attempts by modern commentators to address them have sometimes given risen to hypotheses as unlikely as the stories told in ancient times. Taylor, for instance, whose commentary is one of the most thorough and extensive studies of the Timaeus in the twentieth century, was so impressed by the Pythagorean influence in the dialogue that he came to doubt that Timaeus' views were at all representative of Plato's own. Instead, he argued, the Timaeus is merely a record of Pythagorean beliefs, a type of anthology in which Plato sought to preserve the main tenets of old Pythagorean cosmological thought, without necessarily endorsing it himself. This, Taylor believed, is the only possible explanation for Plato writing a work that reproduces the doctrines of the Pythagoreans with such fidelity. The dialogue's value, he says, is not as an account of Plato's teachings, but as the fullest and most detailed account of early Pythagorean doctrine to survive to us. This view, however, has met with little or no support from other scholars and is today widely regarded as eccentric and unsubstantiated; but it is an understandable point of view nevertheless - like the ancient accusations of plagiarism it arises from the observation that the Timaeus is remarkably Pythagorean. This Pythagorean influence upon the work will be one of the main themes of this present study.

The Pythagoreanism of the Timaeus must, however, always be considered in a wider context. There is no contesting the fact of strong Pythagorean influence, nor of the importance of Pythagorean doctrines such as the microcosm's correspondence with the macrocosm to an understanding of Timaeus' teachings. We can say with confidence, however, that while Plato's use of Pythagoreanism is so plain and direct that he must have fully expected his readers to appreciate the work's Pythagorean background, it is not the only influence that can be detected. Without in any way underrating it, the Pythagoreanism of the Timaeus needs to be considered from the outset in the broader context of Plato's 'borrowings' from a much wider range of sources. 'Pythagorean' is, in any case, something of a blanket term and, in the context of the fifth and fourth century philosophical milieux of both Magna Graecia and Athens, it needs to be more carefully defined. This is the approach that Cornford argues for in his commentary. He acknowledges the Pythagorean component, but he emphasises the importance of two related yet distinct schools of western Greek thought, the Parmenidean and the Empedoclean, as well. "Much of the doctrine [in the work]," he says, "is no doubt Pythagorean..." but Timaeus also "sometimes follows Empedocles, [and] sometimes Parmenides." For general purposes it is sufficiently accurate to nominate Timaeus as a Pythagorean, but to be perfectly accurate this must be qualified by saying that his affiliations are with all three of the major philosophical schools of the western Greek city-states. It is true, of course, that all aspects of western Greek philosophy were under the sway of Pythagoras and his followers, and that both Parmenides and Empedocles may be counted as Pythagoreans themselves, but they nevertheless formed distinct and divergent philosophies of their own. Cornford's point is that Timaeus' debt to them is as evident, if it is not also as extensive, as his debt to what we know of the Pythagorean school proper. This is perhaps only a matter of emphasis, but it is also important. Timaeus' Pythagorean affiliations are among the most immediately conspicuous features of the dialogue, but on closer examination what he teaches is not entirely pure doctrine; his Pythagoreanism is supplemented by kindred doctrines from the two other main streams of Sicilian and Italian cosmological thinking. Cornford asks us to see Timaeus as representative not of one specific school of thought, but of the whole western Greek philosophical milieu.

In contrast to theories such as Taylor's, this broader approach to the Timaeus has met with widespread acceptance among the work's modern students. Timaeus' use of doctrines from Empedocles and Parmenides is as widely admitted as his primary affiliations with the Pythagoreans themselves. It is not hard to find evidence of his debt to Parmenides either, and, indeed, his adoption of Parmenidean teachings is often as undisguised as his use of fundamental Pythagorean ideas. Near the outset of his speech, for instance, he describes the cosmos as singular, finite and as "a sphere with its extremities equidistant from the centre." This conception is clearly taken from the Eleatic cosmology. "The argument [in this case] is Eleatic rather than Pythagorean," Cornford says, and notes that Diels regarded this part of the dialogue as "the best commentary" on Parmenides' comparison of the One with a perfect sphere. Similarly, later in his speech, Timaeus gives an account of the mechanisms of sight that have some obvious parallels with the theories of Empedoclean biology. The whole tenor of what Timaeus has to say on the structure and workings of the human body is in fact recognisably in debt to Empedocles' school of medical science. Timaeus is shown to be well-versed in Empedocles' teachings, and he makes extensive use of them.

From this it is not only justifiable to claim that the Timaeus is Plato's most Pythagorean work; it is, viewed in a larger perspective, a testament to his affinity with the western cosmologists in general. The Timaeus stands as something of a tribute to the approach to cosmology of all the major schools of the western hemisphere of the ancient Greek world. This is indicative of Plato's usual philosophical sympathies. Like his attraction to Pythagoreanism, they are well-marked throughout his works. Parmenides and the Eleatic school had a strong influence upon him. It is significant, for instance, that in Plato's later dialogues the Stranger from Elea tends to replace Socrates at centre stage. The Timaeus, where the Locrian stands at centre-stage and Socrates' role is reduced to a minimum, is similar evidence of Plato's respect for the philosophers from the west. The Timaeus is a work that endorses, by adoption, their approach to the questions of cosmology, creation, man and the world. In its general Pythagorean orientation, and in its debt to the distinct branches of Pythagoreanism of Parmenides and Empedocles, we have a resounding reminder that of all the Presocratic philosophers the Italians and Sicilians were closest to Plato's own mind. The only exception to this was Heraclitus, who was also admired by Plato, as Aristotle tells us, but who came from Asia Minor. Speaking generally, though, we find Plato's major cosmological work is built upon the foundations, and substantially from the materials, of western teachings.

'Am I a True Conservative?' - Alan Jacobs

The following article by Alan Jacobs appeared a while back and I keep returning to it in my mind. So I've decided to post it here for future reference, and so i don't have to find it on google any more. It's an article that ticks a lot of boxes for me - a conservative who knows crony capitalism when he sees it.

AM I A TRUE CONSERVATIVE? 

by Alan Jacobs

Am I a conservative? Heck if I know. All I know for sure is that the good people here at The American Conservative are interested enough in what I have to say to give me a platform on which to say it. For which I am genuinely grateful.

I am not and never have been a Republican. I feel roughly as alienated from that party as I do from the Democratic Party. I hold a number of political views that strong-minded Republicans typically find appalling: I think racism is one of the greatest problems in American society today; I am not convinced that austerity programs are helpful in addressing our economic condition; I am absolutely convinced that what many Republicans call free-market capitalism is in fact crony capitalism, calculated to favor the extremely wealthy and immensely powerful multinational corporations; I think that for all of the flaws of Obamacare, it was at least an attempt to solve a drastically unjust and often morally corrupt network of medical care in this country; I dislike military adventurism, and believe that our various attempts at nation-building over the past decade were miscalculated from the outset.

So is there any sense in which I might plausibly be called a conservative? I don’t really know; I’ll leave that to others to decide. It doesn’t really matter to me whether I fit into any pre-existing political or intellectual categories. I can only say this: that I do have three overarching political commitments (or beliefs, or convictions) that are more important to me than any others.

The first is that I strive to be a consistently pro-life Christian. I am aware that many people believe that the whole notion of a “consistent pro-life ethic” is a way for liberal Christians to minimize the evil of abortion by wrapping it in a whole series of other issues, and that may well be true for many, but I do believe that there is such a thing as a consistently pro-life position and that that position involves an absolute commitment to the unborn and also to the weak, the sick, the elderly, the mentally ill, and all the others who find themselves at the margins of our society, generally unloved and uncared for. My models in this quest are the Cappadocian fathers of the Church.

My second steady commitment is to the principle of subsidiarity. I believe that almost all of our social evils and shortcomings can be handled better by small, local organizations and empowered persons than by national institutions or for that matter even state-level institutions. There is no question that local communities can be cruel and indifferent to sufferings in their midst, but they are also more subject to shame and other forms of correction than high-level political systems. They can be more easily altered, turned, reformed. A great deal of suffering in America today is caused by the evacuation of intermediary structures: the church, the family, voluntary organizations. These intermediary structures are in desperate need of renewal and that can only happen if there is a systematic shift of power, wealth, and influence from state and national governments to local units. Among my chief teachers on this matter is Robert Nisbet, and another is Patrick Deneen, so let me cite the latter writing about the former here and here. Nisbet himself simply identified conservatism with this tendency: “The essence of this body of ideas is the protection of the social order — family, neighborhood, local community, and region foremost — from the ravishments of the centralized political state.”

My third leading political conviction is that the wisdom of our ancestors is both deeply valuable and tragically neglected. On this let me cite Roger Scruton:

Our work, it seems to me, consists in what Plato called anamnesis — the defeat of forgetting. We cannot ask young people to live as we lived or to value what we valued. But we can encourage them to see the point of how we lived, and to recognize that freedom without responsibility is, in the end, an empty asset. We can tell them stories of the old virtues, and enlarge their sympathies toward a world in which suffering and sacrifice were not the purely negative things that they are represented to be by the consumer culture but an immovable part of any lasting happiness. Our task, in other words, is now less political than cultural — an education of the sympathies, which requires from us virtues (such as imagination, creativity, and a respect for high culture) that have a diminishing place in the world of politics.

So that’s largely what I believe about politics. And again, whether that qualifies me as a True Conservative I neither know nor care.

Some Thoughts on Scientology

"Scientology is NOT a church or even a religion. They pulled a dodgy move way back in the 60's when Henry Bolte banned them from this state because of their unacceptable activities. The law of the country says religions cannot be discriminated against so they got around the ban that way. A stupid law - otherwise we could ban Scientology and Muslims and all those murderous sects who have brought so much misery to the Western world. "

- MRJ Posted at 12:17 PM March 06, 2011, Melbourne Herald Sun

In recent years, as part of my job, I made a study of Scientology. It is part of my job to investigate such groups and to arrive at an independent, objective assessment of the place of such groups in contemporary religious life. Scientology has been around since the 1950s. It is a vast and complex topic. I do not regard myself as an expert on Scientology, but I do regard myself as sufficiently well-read in this field to have an informed opinion.

There is an extraordinary amount of hype surrounding this controversial topic; propaganda generated by Scientologists themselves, media sensationalism and virulent anti-Scientology propaganda generated by its detractors. My job, in part, is to sift through this material in search of the facts and in order to better understand Scientology both in itself and among other religious movements.

I do not have hardened and intractable opinions. Nor do I approach such studies with any hidden agenda, religious or otherwise. (I must stress that I do not have any links or affiliations with Scientology whatsoever. In fact, my personal affiliations are with traditional (conservative) religious systems in the Abrahamic faiths.) I am always prepared to change my position in line with new information and new research. The platform from which I make all my studies is a commitment to the spiritual autonomy of the individual, to a healthy religious diversity and to freedom of religion as a mainstay of a free, modern society.

Here are a few points about Scientology:

*I accept the ruling of the High Court of Australia which declared that, for all legal purposes, Scientology is a religion and is therefore entitled to the legal benefits that come with that status. Scientologists should be free to practice their religion under the rule of law just like any other group.

*Quite apart from the legal arguments offered by the High Court of Australia, I accept that Scientology is a religion in a wider sense. Although it has many unusual features that distinguish it from the more traditional religions, and in some ways it challenges conventional definitions of religion, its theory and practice is clearly of a spiritual nature. Its scope extends beyond a psycho-therapy and concerns the welfare of souls in eternity. It is therefore best classified as a religion.  (Note: I did not always hold this view. For a long while I argued that Scientology is not a religion. After further investigations I changed my mind.)

*I do not accept claims that Scientology is "just a scam" and “nothing but a tax avoidance scheme." After carefully examining the evidence, I do not accept the common claim that L. Ron Hubbard cynically set out to create a religion as a way of making money. Certainly, on any reading, the origins of Scientology are far more complex than that.

*I have made a particular investigation of the claims that the roots of Scientology are in “black magic” and occultism, and find them unsubstantiated. I find that Hubbard had little association with the Satanist Aleister Crowley and that his brief “occult” phase when he lived with a follower of Crowley, Jack Parsons, amounted to little more than dabbling. (In fact, in an extant letter Crowley described Hubbard as a “swindler” - a big call from Crowley, I must say - and it seems Hubbard stole both Parson’s girlfriend and money.) I detect no significant similarities between Scientology and Crowley’s own religion, Thelema. Nor do I detect any other satanic elements in Scientological theory or practice. I find that claims that the higher levels of Scientology are openly satanic have no more substance than the same claims brought against Freemasonry.

*I do not indulge in judgments about the character and motives of the founder of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard. The Church of Scientology’s account of his life is clearly hagiographical and should be understood as such. Some of the non-Scientological biographies of Hubbard I have read strike me as excessively hostile. I am inclined to believe that the truth is somewhere in between. He was obviously a colourful larger-than-life character of unusual intelligence, wit and imagination who often took liberties with his own life narrative. I do not regard him as a saint of cosmic proportions, but neither do I regard him as a personification of pure evil. I doubt assessments that would portray him as a lunatic. His facility with and deconstruction of language is cogent and often impressive, even attracting the admiration of such considerable authors as William S. Burroughs. (Speaking personally, the veneration of Hubbard is one of the least attractive aspects of Scientiology. All my dealings with human beings have made me rather disinclined to cults of personality.)

*While some features of the belief-system of Scientology may appear strange and is often subject to ridicule in the media, I find Scientologists to be perfectly sincere in their beliefs. Scientology tends to be heavily jargonized. When we look beyond the jargon and the strangeness of appearances, the belief-system is not radically different to aspects of Hinduism or Jainism or some schools of Gnostic Christianity. The "science fiction" ("space opera") aspects of Scientology tend to be sensationalized and over-emphasized by the media. It constitutes very little of Scientology, in fact. In any case, many (or most) religions entertain "strange" beliefs (eg. virgin births, angelic visitations, etc.) Scientologists ought not be subject to ridicule and discrimination just because others might find their beliefs outlandish. 

*I find some anti-Scientology campaigns extreme and unfair and impede the right of Scientologists to openly practice their religion. Scientologists - more than almost any religious group I know - are subject to misunderstanding, caricature, ridicule, suspicion, conspiracy theories and abuse. Many Scientologists feel the need to hide their religious affiliations because people will suspect them of nefarious deeds and hidden agendas. It is of great concern to me whenever any religious group (Freemasons and Mormons are examples that come to mind) become targets of widespread contempt and derision. No religious group should be beyond criticism and critical examination, but nor should any religious group be hounded to the point of persecution. Much anti-scientology material available on-line goes far beyond reasoned critique and expose; it is abusive hate literature. Sensationalized tabloid journalism brings this into the mainstream. It often amounts to religious vilification. I think the recent characterisation of the Church of Scientology as a "crminal organisation" by Senator Xenophon in the Australian Senate was excessive - it effectively labelled all Scientologists criminals - and an abuse of parliamentary privilege (an abuse that the Senator has since repeated in regards to other religious groups.)

*Unlike many critics of Scientology I do not find its objections to psychiatry a cause for blanket condemnation. Many people have legitimate and well-founded concerns about psychiatric practices; much of the history of psychiatry is indeed barbaric and many of its current practices - including its relationship with drug companies – is questionable. Through my own reading of R. D. Laing, Michel Foucault etc. I am myself sympathetic to critics of psychiatry. (This is an important matter in religious studies today. In some contemporary psychiatric literature there are very worrying moves to pathologize all religious experience and world-views.) While the views of Scientologists on psychiatry often strike me as over-stated, I note that there are many instances where Scientology has exposed serious abuses by the psychiatric profession. (An example in Australia is the Chelmsford scandal.) This is a positive contribution Scientology has made and continues to make to our society.

*I find the Scientological practice of "disconnection" - where Scientologists are ordered to disconnect themselves from family or friends deemed "suppressive persons" - objectionable and socially destructive. I object to the practice of "shunning" in all religions. I find groups where exclusion and shunning is a core practice (the Exclusive Brethren, for example) particularly problematic. I am concerned about any religious group that requires or encourages its members to turn away from their wider network of family and friends or that isolates people from the general community; isolation is always a recipe for trouble. Scientology does not do this in a systematic way but there are many documented cases where the practice of "disconnection" has caused trauma in families and has led to cult-like abuses.

*I do not take the cynical view that all Scientological organisations - including charities run by Scientologists or affiliated with Scientology or deploying Scientology "tech" - are merely "fronts" for the Church of Scientology. Programs such as Narcinon (drug rehab) and Criminon (criminal rehab) should be applauded wherever they do good work in the community. Such charities, of course, should be required to operate within appropriate guidelines set by law. Where this happens I think such charities should have the same status as charities run by, say, the Salvation Army. There is no basis for discriminating against properly run, legally appropriate charities simply because they have affiliations with Scientology. The same applies to other applications of Scientology "tech" such as "Applied Scholastics". There are no grounds for schools rejecting Applied Scholastics simply because it is based on ideas proposed by L. Ron Hubbard. Such systems as Applied Scholastics should be assessed on their own merits and according to objective (evidence-based) criteria.

*Against the Church of Scientology I support the rights of those Scientologists who endeavour to practice their religion outside of the control of the official organisation, i.e. in the so-called "Freezone". I find the Church's aggressive litigation against individuals in the Freezone, and the heavy-handed application of copyrights etc., disturbing. Usually in matters of religion my instinct is to support the rights of individuals over corporate and collective controls.

*In Australia there seems to be an on-going problem in the Church of Scientology concerning the distinction between paid and volunteer labour. There are persistent reports that suggest that the Church engages in exploitative labour practices. The emphasis on “upstats” driving employees to long hours of work and ever higher levels of productivity, easily leads to exploitative situations. In Australia at this time at least it is clear that the Church of Scientology needs to do more to adapt its practices to Australian labour laws.

*My deepest reservations about Scientology concern its practice of charging fees for many of its core services and persistent allegations of its financial exploitation of its members. I accept that many religious organisations charge fees for counselling and other services in order to recoup costs, but the corporate structure and ethos of the Church of Scientology seems to extend beyond this to an unseemly emphasis on profit. I note that many Churches demand tithes and financial contributions from their members and that this is not the case in the Church of Scientology, but it concerns me that spiritual advancement up the “Bridge” is, in practice, linked to capacity to pay. I am suspicious of any model in any spiritual system other than voluntary donation. In general, there seems to be a lack of financial transparency in the Church of Scientology which I regard as unbefitting to a religious organisation. A model of religio-corporatism (complete with a “Chairman of the Board”) invites suspicions of financial misdeeds. I belief that public authorities are quite right to expose the Church of Scientology, and affiliated charities, - and indeed all religious groups - to careful financial scrutiny. The number of ex-Scientologists who feel that they were subject to financial exploitation by the Church is a matter of considerable concern.

*I understand the Scientologist's "E-meter" device to be like various "biofeedback" devices common in counter-culture circles in post-war America. I do not regard scientific assessments of the "E-meter" relevant to Scientology as a religion. In context, claims that it is "unscientific" carry no more weight than claims that prayer is "unscientific". In general, I suspect that Scientology is ahead of its time in applying "biofeedback" as a psycho-spiritual methodology. I expect that Scientology - and other groups - should abide by appropriate legal guidelines in all claims made for the powers of such methods. I note that the "E-meter" is now classified as merely a "religious artefact" and that Scientology has not made extravagant claims about the powers of the E-meter for many decades.

*I note that most of the complaints about the Church of Scientology concern the behaviour and tactics of the administrating organs of the Church. The Church has a strongly top-down mode of organisation. Such hierarchical and tightly managed organisations are prone to a culture of abuse and at very least tend to alienate people. Free-thinking individuals tend to resent regimentation and heavy-handed central control. This is also true of, say, the Roman Catholic Church, but it does seem to be an on-going problem with the Church of Scientology. Some of the governing organs of Scientology, such as the RTC, attract a high level of criticism and, very often, respond to such criticism with aggression rather than self-reflection and contrition. I find that there is a disturbing lack of self-reflection in the upper levels of Scientology management. In some cases the financial and legal behaviour of Church management may be a legitimate concern for law enforcement agencies.

*I note a disturbing number of cases over many years where ex-members of Scientology have reported that it was difficult for them to disentangle themselves from the Church. There is evidence that the Church has often behaved like a "cult" in such cases. Ex-members, or members seeking to leave the religion, have often been subject to harassment and intimidation. This is not uncommon in minority religious groups, but it seems to be a particular problem in the case of Scientology. Where this extends beyond low-level peer pressure, some of the practices of the Church regarding ex-members or disgruntled members may sometimes be a legitimate concern for law enforcement agencies.

*Despite the top-down and very controlling nature of Scientology's structures, there does appear to be considerable local variations in the behaviour of the organisation. The behaviour of Scientology in America isn't necessarily reflected in the Australian organisation. On the whole, I find Scientology in Australia law-abiding and socially benign. The American context can be quite different. American religiosity is quite different. 

*While I note that there are plenty of complaints about Scientology from disgruntled customers, and the media is always ready to sensationalise such cases, I have met many people (both current and former Scientologists) who attest that Scientology has been a positive force in their life. I have met people who tell me, very sincerely, that Scientology helped them in a time of need, straightened out their life and gave them purpose. It is hard to argue with such evidence. Clearly, it works for some people. These are not robots with glazed stares. Often they are highly motivated, successful, intelligent people, perfectly sane and self-determining. (Actually, all of my dealings with Scientologists have been cordial and cooperative. They're nothing like how they are often portrayed in the media.) 

*Finally, I note that Scientology has probably reached its peak and is, if anything, in decline. It is very hard to find reliable figures. The heyday of Scientology was the late 1980s-early 1990s. Since then, it has contracted. I see it as now in a consolidation phase. I see it has having a modest future as a minority religion that will necessarily change and adapt to a changing social milieu. I suspect Scientology will be better off when the current leadership moves on through generational change. 

- Harper McAlpine Black