Philobiblon

I’ve kind of known I would take this step for a while, but the recent spurt of publicity about the carbon impacts of the meat industry (and reading Prashant Vaze’s The Economical Environmentalist) has finally driven me to a decision: I’m going to become an almost-vegetarian. Using the Guardian’s carbon output ready reckoner, I calculated that my annual carbon output is now about 10 tonnes, around two-thirds of that of the average Briton, but still more than we all need to get to soon.

I don’t drive except in France (and then no great distances, and I’m looking to cut that down), don’t fly, use little gas and electricity, have been trying hard to cut down on my usage of disposable plastic containers, so it is hard to see where I can make further cuts, except in diet.

So almost-vegetarian it is.

I can see the eyebrows: “Almost?”

There are three reasons for that: 1. I can’t eat gluten, and given that the vegetarian option in restaurants is often pasta, I will be left with no alternative. There will be times when making a fuss and demanding to go off-menu just won’t be practical. 2. If the point of this is cutting carbon, then the occasional fried rice (favourite comfort food), containing a tiny smattering of pork, shrimp and chicken (or similar dish), is going to have minimal impact. (And I’m certainly not going to fuss about a Thai dish containing a dash of fish sauce.) 3. I want to allow myself room to slip up occasionally and not then feel that I’ve failed (and yes, I am going to declare oysters “almost-vegetarian”. I only eat them three or four times a year, and I LIKE them.)

Ah, but I hear the purists cry, shouldn’t I be becoming an almost-vegan? Well, yes, on carbon grounds, but sorry, I just can’t do it. I can go without meat without too much difficulty, I think, but cheese, yoghurt, butter, no!

Maybe one day, but not now…

On the other side of the sceptics’ fence, you might say that individual action is irrelevant, that major societal and government action is the only thing that can deliver real cuts in emissions. True – but you’ve got to start somewhere, and through my work for the Green Party I’m working on that too.

When you start reading Martine Segalen’s Love and Power in the Peasant Family: Rural France in the Nineteenth Century, you might think she’s taking on straw men. Surely no one believes any more that peasant families were unemotional, wholly practical alliances of economic value only, or that children were not loved or treated as human to quite an age, or that the views of the 19th-century folklorists about the “backwardness” of traditional cultures would be given any weight.

Then you look at the publication date (1980 in French), and the foreword by Peter Laslett which explains how Segalen set up the “magnificent” exhibition on Mari et femme dans la France rurale traditionelle in 1973, and you realize that you are reading a modern classic, a revolutionary text, one that well-deserved being translated into English.

As you get into the text you realize that it deserved to be translated not just because of the revolution in theory if helped to create, but also because it has a cracking good story to tell. One of Segalen’s main sources is traditional proverbs, sayings, rituals, and practices and what a rich storehouse they are, and often a surprising one too.

On courtship, she notes how the practices in most places – thought by the 19th-century observers to be crude, rough, even violent – were in fact a practical way for both sides of the potential relationship to test out each other. The romantic explanation (yes, the peasants did do romance) was that the force of the interaction reflected the strength of emotion, but as Segalen says, this was a practical test. “The sense of what is beautiful is guided by the essential prerequisites of a society based on manual labour applied with both strength and skill.” She quotes Henri Massoul “Beauty consists in being well-fleshed, glowing, plump and large. A ben groussiere (buxom) woman, a ben rougeaud (ruddy) man, this is the criterion of beauty.”

And she says that while in a society where words were rare and often little used, courtship often relied on gestures, and when words were used, “the metaphors were often borrowed from the world of peasant objects”. You might not want to try this Vendean effort out on your own beloved, but it certainly worked at the time: “I think you’re so lovely, my great big darling: and then you’re so fresh, that I can’t do better than compare you to a field of young cabbages before the caterpillars have been through.”
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I just did mine, and found that I’d been charged for “American Express Card Defence” (one of those services that allow you if your cards are lost or cancel all your cards with one call), despite my having cancelled it in 2008 because the service was so crap.

After 20 minutes waiting without answer on their telephone line, I rang American Express, to learn that “sorry, they have accidentally charged lots of cancelled people – but we will refund your money”.

What would have happened, I wonder, if I hadn’t noticed and hadn’t run up? (This was a charge made on September 30 – so they have had plenty of time to correct it themselves.)

Beware!

Welcome to the monthly carnival – a browse across the highways and byways of the past 2,500 years, or so, as recorded in the blogosphere.

Women’s history is rather my thing, so I’m going to start with them: the heroines, the success stories, and the (possible) murderesses.

On Indiecommons, you can meet four of the foremothers of photography – I doubt that you have ever seen such beautiful pictures of algae. No, really!

And on Zenobia, you can meet another ancient woman, the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, the subject, I learn of a new Hollywood movie, Agora. If you are planning to go to see it, you might want to save reading this until after that. No I haven’t seen the movie, just too many disappointing “historical” movie in general.

Another story of achievement, if of a rather different kind, is that of Eliza Jumel Burr, the daughter of a prostitute and a kept woman herself, who went on to become the richest woman in America.

And on Executed Today, the fascinating story of in England. Not at all a clearcut case…

On Strange Maps is the hexagonal map of London – designed to stop hackney cab drivers getting away with daylight robbery.

And the unmissable Diamond Geezer’s been visiting a fan museum in a Georgian house in Greenwich. As you’d expect, it’s rather small.

Opening out from my own interests, and starting in the ancient world, Memorabilia Antonius is reluctantly convinced that Nero’s rotating dining room has been found. And Aardvarchaeology has been seeing some fascinating, high-tech research on burial urns.

Going medieval, the historical fiction writer Elizabeth Chadwick on Living the History sets out what she knows about the life of John Marshall, a formidable medieval warrior. And Sound and Furry looks at sticks in my crow, really, it is crow, not craw, using it as a fascinating exploration of the relations between the birds and the aristocracy – “fetch me my hunting crow”.

I’ll use my host’s privilege here to point to one of my own posts – some very new archaeology revealing the history of the Chateau de la Perriere in Burgundy, its most famous owner being Nicholas Rolin.

And a little later in the dark ages indeed for humanity, there’s an account on Early Modern Whale of the martyrdom of the young Catholic priest Edmund Geninges in 1592. Not one for the squeamish.

Then there’s a small collection of 20th-century history: a letter from Verdun in October 26, 1918, and a more cheery post on Mary Beard’s A Don’s Life about the history of holidays.

And Daniel Finkelstein on his Times blog has some critical comments on The Boat That Rocked, a film about pirate radio stations. It’s whitewashing the role of the Labour government, he suggests.

Chapati Mystery is going back a little further, but also right up to date, wiith a post on the challenge of Securing Afghanistan – in 1842.

Then we ought to have a little bit of theory: Mary Kate Hurley has been reflect on methodolgy and medieval literature. And on Mercurius Politicius there’s the vexed question of reading pamphlets in electronic form. Is it really the same?

And finally, this is being just a little bit circular, but why not? The Ancient and Medival Carnivalesque, the special Halloween edition. Spooky!

You can find out more about the History Carnival on its home page.

Welcome to the perspicuous, the weird and the wonderful – a roundup of the British blogosphere, as nominated by you, its participants, this week.

Starting off, well there’s really only one subject that I could focus on – that well-watched, much-debated Question Time.

Clive Davis’ Confab (a new-this-month-blog) offers an overview from the “too much BNP” side of the debate. Constant Furious is, well, furious about the BBC’s approach, while feminazery considers Griffin was comprehensively hoisted on his own dogmatic nonsense. Writing in advance, that was what Juliet confidently predicted. The more light shone on the BNP the better, she suggests. But Jonathan on Liberal England thinks Griffin should have been given more rope.

Taking a broader view, James on Two Doctors remembers “the time I debated Nick Griffin, with some interesting thoughts on what makes the far right grow, while the issue of how to beat them has been pre-occupying Peter Cranie in the North West.

Cranmer takes an alternative approach, suggesting the programme provided the BBC with a clear way forward for saving money on Jonathan Ross (and also cutting their number of complaints.

You might need some light relief after that: I’d suggest visiting the bank with Mutley the Dog (he’s enjoying his huge share of the banking bailout in the form of chocolate peanuts); The Magistrate addressing the important issue of how to stay awake in court (as a former court journo I can sympathise with that one, the Diamond Geezer’s cunning plan to save Royal Mail; and, Jim on The Daily (Maybe) finds some generous rich Germans.

On the other big stories of the week, Bearwatch has what I’m judging to be a clever take on the GDP figures, Charles Crawford reflects on the Pope’s power grab, and Adopted Domain is considering how to vote in Edinburgh East.

Taking a broader view, Penny Red looks at the place of the blogosphere in British political life.

In other nominations, on The Final Redoubt there’s a view that the Copenhagen Summit will usher in ; on They’re Joking, Aren’t They, a consideration of the author Maurice Sendak; on Pro Liberi a consideration of brain programming by laser; and the Pirate Party blog tells of a woman who was almost made to pay for singing – and not by her neighbours.

Getting out into the “real world” of non-political (at least in the obvious sense) life, Jess McCabe on The F Word wonders what the woman in the woman in the bra has to do with consumer rights, Cruella considers the problem with miracles (why do they never involve the regrowing of a severe leg?), and to make you feel all warm and fuzzy (particularly if you’re tucked up warm at home and not in the Cotwalds rain) see what Stroud was doing for 350 day.

And staying with the birds and the bees to finish – even pigeons have bad dating days…

You can find out more about the roundup, and who’ll be hosting next, at Britblog central. You might find in this post some links to views you wouldn’t usually find on this blog – the rule of the Britblog is that all nominations are included, except for some clear exceptions. It does give a rather different view of the blogosphere, wherever you start from.

The title is Austerity Britain: 1945-1951. The cover image is of a grey and dreary Newcastle on Tyne from 1950, and it weighs in at a wrist-wearying 692 pages. You wouldn’t pick David Kynaston’s combined social and political history as a non-fiction bestseller, which it was.

But you don’t have to get far into its pages to find its combination of anecdotal accounts (drawing heavily on the Mass Observation Survey) and descriptions of a society trying to rebuild itself from the ground up, compelling. In fact I found it so compelling I devoted two days of a recent holiday to little else, skipping easily through its pages.

The interest is multiplied by the fact that many of the debates that fill its pages — about the form of the foundational NHS, about the nature of a more equitable schooling system, about housing shortages and the problems of building new communities, about Britain’s economic place in the world — are being revisited today – or perhaps were never adequately solved.

Some of the stories about the NHS should be force-fed to everyone who’s now trying to dismember the fabulous free-at-the-point service provision. Kynaston reports the words of Dr Alistair Clark, an “ordinary GP: “For the first six months I had as many as 20 or 30 ladies come to me who had the most unbelievable gynaecological conditions… at least 10 who had complete prolapse of their womd, and they had to hold it up with a towel as if they had a large nappy on.”

The biggest early pressures were on “drugs, spectacles and false teeth” – the first and last of these reflecting modern-day debates about drug costs and dental provision today.

The housing debate started from a very different place from today’s – in a Sunday Pictorial account of “100 Families” in July 1946, only 14 owned or were buying their own homes, but one big debate was about mixing the classes. Bevan placed much hope in this: You have colonies of low-income people, living in houses provided by the local authorities, and you have the higher income groups living in their own colonies. …It is a monstrous infliction on the essential psychological and biological one-ness of the community.”

Kynaston reports that in 1946 a patchy start to housing construction, handicapped in part by a desire to build quality rather than quantity, and marked by a significant squatter’s movement, but by September 1948 750,000 new homes had been provided. But several million more were needed, without even counting the renewed impetus in the slum clearance movement.
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Have been having a big autumn garden tidy up and replanting, on my balcony and in the communal pots in our informal community vegetable garden.

Found that a poor, struggling aubergine plant that barely reached 20cm in height had somehow produced a single offspring almost as large as itself (and found cherry tomatoes had insinuated themselves in every crevice and corner).

What I’ve replaced them with is the “mini veggie garden” from this seller, which arrived very greenly wrapped in hay (now forming a “fleece” around the seedlings.

It is quite a selection: broad beans, spinach, red dandelion, a range of winter lettuce, rainbow chard and more … we should be a well-nourished council estate, at least on the nourishment found in leafy greens, if they all flourish!

If you look at the subtitle of Edward Vallance’s A Radical History of Britain, it’s clear where he’s coming from. He’s, in his own term, a radical, and sympathises greatly with those before him who he regards as falling into the same camp. The good news is, this has not destroyed his critical faculties. He’s wary of painting the present too closely on the past, of regarding former radicals as “just like us”, and keen to point out that many fond legends of the left, and the right, such as the exact place of the Magna Carta in “British freedom” (largely constructed in the 14th century, when Parliament passed six acts that reinterpretted chapter 29 far beyond its original intent and since, making, for example “lawful judgement of peer” mean trial by jury).

Vallance clearly explains his aims in the introduction for the book: “First, it aims to evaluate radicalism in its specific historical contexts, uncovering in many places the formerly secret history of both its successes and its failures. Second, it evaluates the enduring power of the idea of a ‘radical tradition’, by examining how each age has reinvented it to suits its own ends.”

Some of the names and events here will be familiar, at least in outline, to anyone with a smattering of school history: the peasants; revolt, the Levellers, Thomas Paine, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the suffragettes. Yet most will have little more than a sketch of these events – and often an inaccurate one.

So Vallance concludes that the Peasants’ Revolt had a different impact that suggested by the “bitter invective of the boy-king Richartd, often invoked to show the futility of popular insurrection”. In fact, wages rose after the revolt, many serfs were released from villeinage, rations improved,with labourers’ rations at harvest often including up to a pound of meat a day, and life expectancy rose to about 35 (higher than industrial workers in the mid-19th century). And for the first time, Vallance said, there was an awareness in the elite that the Commons had a place in public life, as the anonymous poem ‘God Save the King and the King’s Crown’ said: “The leste lygge-man with body and rent/He is a parcel of the Crown.”

But the core of this book, as any book about English radicals, is around the Revolution. and the core of that is the Levellers, subject of much historical revisionism, antirevisionism, anti-anti-revisionism, etc… This is Vallance’s conclusion: “…the key Leveller writers, Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn and John Wildman, were at the centre of the political turmoil of the civil war and the revolution. Far from being marginal figure, individuals like Wildman were, in fact, well connected to radical MPs within the Commons such as Henry Marten and Thomas Rainborowe. By cautioning against seeing their politics as reflecting a simple dichotomy between radicals and conservatives, recent work has also directed our attention to those moments when the army grandees themselves seriously considered radical solutions, suc as the Levellers’ various Agreements of he People, for settling the nation.” I
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It’s an academic tradition so often observed that it’s practically a rule: if you’ve been a star in your field, a creator of new paradigms, new fields, new genres, soon after your death (or possibly before) your reputation will fall into a precipitous decline. The nature of the Western academic method, that new intellectual stars arise by entirely revising, if not reversing, the direction of their teachers, guarantees it.

Yet few can have suffered quite such a precipitous fall from grace as Keynes, the man who after the Second World War most of the governments of the world with their economic prescriptions (maintain full employment and growth on a steady keel), and the medicine to do so (government intervention to stabilise markets).

So it was that in 1971, America’s President Nixon famously said: “We are all Keynesians now.” Yet, less than a decade later, Keynes was deposed by a coterie of neo-liberal economists, who restored a much older doctrine, that markets were naturally self-correcting and only the intervention of governments made them behave badly.

It was a doctrine that was to have two decades or more basking in the sunshine of political, regulatory and (to some degree at least) public approval – until the crash that has felled economies around the globe struck. Now, suddenly, Keynes, or perhaps it had be better said neo-Keynesianism, is back in fashion.

The speed of that reversal is illustrated by the frank declaration of Robert Skideslsky, author of Keynes: The Return of the Master, who explains that he sat down to write the book on January 1 this year, at the suggestion of his agent and finished it on July 15. It hit the shops on September 3, the publisher no doubt desperate to pre-empt what will surely be a flood of books on the now back in fashion economist.
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I’ve been watching a rather good fringe Macbeth,

… reading about how the world’s poor live on $2 a day

…and hearing about the role of women in Africa’s new wars

Green Political Thought is clearly a textbook, a survey of the current state of the field intended, I’d judge, for a senior undergraduate course. Given that Andrew Dobson’s text is in its fourth edition, it is clearly a successful one, but how does it work for an “ordinary,” non-student reader, looking for an overview of a fast-moving field?

The answer is “surprisingly well” – although with the inevitable frustration of a textbook meant to direct the student to further readings: you want more – more explanation, more details, more background.

Four key points, in particular, left me scrabbling in the bibliography, underlining and adding to my “must read” list:

1. Bruno Latour’s theory of “hybridity” – spreading the capacity to “speak” across the human and non-human realms. Sounds odd – but then his claim that some parts of nature “speak” very loudly – charismatic megafauna such as polar bears and orangutans (through influential organizations) – much louder than of what many humans are capable. This avoids many problems of the human/nature binary that Dobson briefly outlines. (Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Harvard University Press, 2004)

2. The distinction between self-reliance and self-sufficiency – Greens almost invariably adopting for the former, not the latter (Albania’s lesson enough there) – the argument being that communities (or “bioregions”) should try to satisfy needs and wants locally, and only look outside when that is unavoidable. (Ekins, ed. The Living Economy, Routledge, 1986)

3. The claim that Habermas sees women’s movements as offering the only group that seeks “fundamental change from a universalistic standpoint” – that women can be the vanguard party of change, being the only group sufficiently disengaged from the current system to resist colonization by the system. (Roderick, Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory, Macmillan, 1986)

4. The claim that the call by some ecofeminists for women to embrace traditional female values is deeply dangerous to the liberation of women, what Plumwood calls “uncritical reversal” – “to use ideas that have already been turned against women, in the belief that, if they are taken up and used by everyone, a general improvement in the human and non-human condition will result. If they are not taken up, then women will have ‘sacrificed themselves to the environment’." (Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Routledge, 1993)

But another reader, interested in different aspects of the past three decades (the framework Dobson identifies as marking the history of “ecologism” so far), might well light on an entirely different selection – for this is a wide-ranging text.

The basic thesis, which Dobson says has only crystallized since previous editions (this may be one case where the latest edition of the textbook is essential – far from often the case) is that ecologism is now a standalone bank of political thought that deserves to be considered in the same arenas as socialism, liberalism or feminism (and one chapter has a handy checklist of how it significantly differs from each of those).

This is primarily a book of theory, not practice; anyone engaged in practical Green politics won’t find a lot of tactical guidance, although plenty of food for thought, and Dobson does engage with a couple of key practical issues. He briefly surveys the ways in which the German Greens have struggled to maintain their critical edge in coalition governments. He then considers in the conclusion the ways in which the radical philosophy might play out for practical, electoralist reformers.

But perhaps the most interesting “practical” part of the book is his discussion of the potentialities and possible pitfalls of basic income – the idea that each member of a society should be given a basic decent income, no strings or means tests attached, which has been adopted by a number of Green parties, including that of England and Wales. As Dobson notes, this is far from an exclusively Green policy: backers have come from across the political spectrum. Dobson makes it very clear of the potential advantages of collapsing the distinctions between the informal and formal economy, and beyond that between work and paid employment, as well as any brief outline that I’ve read.

So what about a reader coming to this cold, someone who has no knowledge of Green political thought, or indeed politics in academia at all? Well here Dobson deserves particular credit, for a good 95% of the book requires no specialist vocabulary at all, which for a politics text published in 2007 is little short of miraculous. The only places where jargon does intrude is when Dobson and the Greens are engaging with Marxist political structures – and there is something about Marxism that somehow seems to make it impossible to talk about it in plain English.

There’s a lot in this book that readers of non-Green political persuasions would find interesting (and possibly infuriating); there’s a lot of food for thought particularly for “light greens” of other primary political persuasions, but most of all there’s a lot here for Greens – really everyone engaged in Green thought should read this book, then follow the angles within it that most fit their interests.

It is to the early 19th-century reformer Major John Cartwright that we owe the innovation of having individual sheets of paper for mass petitions, which could be spread around the country – previously they’d always been on one long sheet (with obvious logistical difficulties). His tour of the country in 1813 gathered 130,000 signatures in support of a taxypayer franchise.

Although he didn’t have a lot of effective success – most of his petitions were dismissed by parliament as inadequately framed. “Petitioning continues to this day to be regulated by an act of 1661 agauinst ‘tumultuous’ petitioning, and by 18th-century notions of ‘decent and respectable language.

(From Edward Vallance, A Radical History of England, p. 297)