Cannadine

From Mark Mazower's FT review of David Cannadine's Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences (Allen Lane, 2013) -

 I cannot think of another scholar who has so sweepingly dismissed the whole idea of history as identity politics. 

Let us give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, there is no use denying that however much on the side of the angels historians may be now, in the past they have done their fair share of rabble-rousing. The real issues raised by this book lie at a rather deeper level. Appalled by the Manichean rhetoric that emanated from the Bush administration after 9/11, Cannadine wants us to abandon Us and Them, and to eschew such polarised modes of thought, what he calls “the impulse ... to sunder all the peoples of the world into belligerent collectivities” that has been around as long as mankind itself. 

Yet this Age of Terror emphasis on binaries, on polarisation – between faiths, civilisations or nations – is more than a little misleading. For theorists of nation or class, for instance, those categories were often neither exclusive nor, indeed, terminal. Marxists believed that class struggle was necessary only so long as humanity’s basic goals remained unrealised. Heck, even Proudhon felt that way. The greatest 19th-century theorist of nationalism, the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini, told his many followers that to be a nationalist was to be an internationalist. This was precisely the reasoning that inspired the creators of great global institutions such as the League of Nations to give them the form of clubs of member nation-states and that allowed President Woodrow Wilson, one of Mazzini’s most ardent admirers, to be both a proud American patriot and a confirmed internationalist. 

Overcoming our differences sounds great. It is about as hard to denounce as Christmas. But might there not be losers as well as winners in this game? Try telling the unemployed they should focus on what they have in common with billionaires and reflect on who has gained or lost out from the collapse of the language of class. Categories that Cannadine finds wanting have underpinned many of the decisive struggles in our time. In one case, he accepts this – noting that in the second wave of feminism, women’s groups achieved lasting civil rights gains. Nothing so positive emerges from his chapters on race, nation or class. Yet it is often the relatively powerless who have chosen to name things the powerful would have rather ignored, and who in naming them have helped improve their lot. 

Class may have turned out to be a fairly useless category for some generations of historians. But it was a pretty indispensable part of the toolkit of organised labour and not irrelevant to the struggle to raise workers’ living standards. Race may have been invoked to justify slavery; but it was later asserted to win rights for slaves’ descendants as well. Nationalism was emancipatory before it turned into its own form of tyranny. And, for many centuries, solidarity itself was regarded as a virtue; in 1981, when martial law was declared in Poland, every good western liberal was in support of it. Now, The Undivided Past suggests, the only solidarity that is acceptable is solidarity with humankind: nothing less will do because anything more partial risks dividing us, and division means fisticuffs or worse. Yet is there not something ultimately quietist about writing off many of the conceptual vehicles that have previously allowed people to mobilise? Not all conflict, after all, is bad and justice sometimes may even require it. 

Behind Cannadine’s story of identities that need to be shrugged off is the interesting intellectual question of when we all got so hung up on this business of identity and started seeing it as something limiting rather than liberating. Nazism and fascism took the shine off nationalism for many European liberals. “Identity” began to be used in the contemporary sense sometime in the 1950s but it acquired a harder and more negative edge during the culture wars on British and American campuses. In an earlier book, Ornamentalism (2001), Cannadine criticised Edward Saïd’s influential account of Orientalism by claiming that in the British empire divisions of class trumped race. In The Undivided Past he seeks to do away with such categories completely, trumping them by an appeal to our common humanity. 

Yet terms such as “the human condition” are no less problematic than the six [religion, nation, class, gender, race and civilisation] he highlights and simply shift the identity problem to a new level. The cause of humanity has often lent itself to ideological misuse but these days, in particular, we face a bewildering proliferation of “the human” in global affairs – from human rights and humanitarianism to human security and human development. One therefore looks for Cannadine to provide more information than he does on the new kind of history that he has in mind to improve our lot.

Dotcom Fever

Andrew Odlyzko, whose perceptive studies of dot com fever I've noted elsewhere, has released Charles Mackay's own extraordinary popular delusions and the Railway Mania [PDF].

He comments that -

Charles Mackay's book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds enjoys extraordinarily high renown in the financial industry and among the press and the public. It also has an extraordinarily low reputation among historians.

This paper argues that Mackay's sins of commission were dwarfed by his sins of omission. He lived through several giant investment manias in Britain, yet he did not discuss them in his books. An investigation of Mackay's newspaper writings shows that he was one of the most ardent cheerleaders for the Railway Mania, the greatest and most destructive of these episodes of extreme investor exuberance.

Mackay's story provides another example of a renowned expert on bubbles who decides that "this time is different." His moves through a sequence of delusions help explain the length and damage of the Railway Mania. He was a free market and technology enthusiast, and faced many issues that are important today, such as government ownership or regulation, interconnection, standardization, structural separation, and analogs to net neutrality. A crushing national debt and high unemployment in an economy pulling out of a deep depression (and in perceived danger of falling into another one) were very important in shaping attitudes towards railway expansion. The analogies and contrasts between Mackay's time and ours are instructive.

He concludes that -

Always an enthusiastic supporter of technological and economic progress, as well as of free markets, he started out with moderately cautious expectations in the fall of 1844, but then developed into one of the most rabid proponents of railway expansion. He fully partook of the principal delusion of the Mania, namely that a huge expansion of the railway network could be carried out with profit to both the nation and investors. He never wavered in this belief, even as events and opinions of others led to him to modify some of his positions and fall into other delusions. He did not recover his senses during his time at the Argus.

Mackay’s blindness to the fatal defect of the Mania was essentially universal among his compatriots, and appears common during financial manias, part of the conviction that “this time is different” [39,45]. It is notable that while he put serious thought and effort into combating the poetry of Wordsworth and the warnings of The Times that he perceived as hostile to rapid railway expansion, he did not even bother refuting the (relatively rare) warnings that the new lines would be unprofitable. He apparently did not think they were credible enough to be worth attacking. Can bubbles be recognized before they they inflate too far? That is still an open question. However, it is clear that without searching for bubbles, one will not find them. Most observers of the past decade did not even look, and neither did Mackay.

Mackay’s enthusiasm for railway expansion was likely sustained from 1846 on by the prospect that the bountiful profits from this industry would relieve the burden of an oppressive national debt. This enthusiasm was probably also reinforced by his vision of being able to control undesirable behavior of an infrastructure monopoly through modifications of charters of the expected waves of new entrants. This vision enabled Mackay to stick to his laissez faire views. It is amusing that it was only the Sunday trains issue that led him to abandon his cherished doctrine and call for government intervention.

Mackay’s story helps explain why British investors were so slow to recognize and acknowledge their impending doom. At the height of the Mania, in the fall of 1845, the most prominent skeptics, such as James Morrison, James Wilson, and The Times, were warning investors that fast railway expansion would lead to declines in share prices through the pressure of capital calls and the disruption of financial markets. When share prices started to decline, as they predicted, the cause for the decline was assumed to be the one they had presented, namely the pressure of the “calls,” the demands from railways for money from shareholders. But the fundamental problem of the industry was that the new projects were not going to be profitable. Even after calls stopped, railway share prices remained at the depressed levels seen in 1849–50 in Fig. 1. The decline in prices visible in that figure was likely the result of increasing numbers of investors guessing or deducing that profits were going to disappoint. But public discussion was fixated on the issue of calls, and the realization of the size of the investment disaster was slow to come [40].

Mackay was more gullible than most, as the discussion of Mesmerism and other topics in this paper demonstrates. However, even far deeper and more perceptive of his contemporaries, such as James Morrison and James Wilson, also suffered from the main delusion of the Mania. Railways were not just investments with promising profit prospects for individual investors, they were a dazzling new technology that was transforming society, “annihilating time and space,” in a phrase that was heard frequently at the time. Bentinck, Disraeli, and others credited them during the discussions of how to relieve the Irish Famine with having miraculously pulled Britain out of the deep depression of the early 1840s. Few were able to resist the siren song. The one who managed to stay sober the best was Dionysius Lardner, see [37]. His 1846 survey of the railway industry [22] pointed out most of the fatal defects of the Railway Mania. Lardner had once been an insider in the British scientific establishment, but then disgraced himself and ended up spending several years traveling in the U.S. At the time of the Mania he was living in Paris. His varied experiences, status, and location likely all contributed towards maintaining a distance from the British herd, and enabled him to see what was wrong.

The story of Mackay’s extraordinary popular delusions is amusing. But it is also instructive. It shows how crowd effects and personal biases influence decision making in times of rapid change and poor information. It suggests that it would be worthwhile to investigate the reactions of various other individuals from the Railway Mania period. There seemed to be a great reluctance among participants in this episode of extreme investor exuberance to even acknowledge their involvement in it and to analyze what happened. As just one example, John Stuart Mill’s publications and correspondence do contain a few interesting passages about railways, but we have to go to archival sources, as in [6], to learn that he was involved in some of the most speculative railway projects with the Glenmutchkin flavor. More investigations, especially in cases, such as that of Charles Mackay, where we can find extensive contemporary documentation about particular individuals’ thoughts and writings, could help illuminate the Railway Mania and lead to a better understanding of manias in general.

Gitout

From Janet Maslin's New York Times review of Destiny Of The Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President (Doubleday, 2011) by Candice Millard -

At an exhausting point when more than 30 ballots had been cast, [James] Garfield rose to speak out against the chaotic "human ocean in tempest” he was witnessing. He injected a voice of reason. "I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man," he said. "But I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea, from which all heights and depths are measured."

Delegates began unexpectedly throwing their votes to Garfield. He had not been a presidential candidate; now suddenly he was the Republican nominee. When he and his family were swept into the White House, Garfield wrote: "My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?"

Garfield particularly bristled at the calling hours a president then traditionally kept. During this time he met members of the public, many of them office seekers. He quickly noticed a particularly obnoxious visitor: Charles Guiteau, whose pestering was so extreme that Garfield cited him as an "illustration of unparalleled audacity and impudence." The grandiose and frankly creepy Guiteau wrote so many letters that he became enough of a nuisance to be noticed by other members of the Garfield administration and family. A former lawyer and theologist who earned himself the nickname "Charles Gitout," he met Garfield on numerous occasions before deciding to shoot him.

Guiteau, whose story has also been much overlooked, made no secret of his plotting. In a letter explaining his plans to the American people, he reasoned: "It will be no worse for Mrs. Garfield, to part with her husband this way, than by natural death. He is liable to go at any time any way." He scouted jails, deciding where he wanted to be incarcerated. He left instructions ("please order out your troops") for Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who would be marshalling troops for Guiteau. They protected the assassin from being killed by a mob before he could go to trial.

Apotheosis

From James Lundberg's review in Slate of Ken Burns' The Civil War -

The Civil War is a deeply misleading and reductive film that often loses historical reality in the mists of Burns' sentimental vision and the romance of [Shelby] Foote's anecdotes. Watching the film, you might easily forget that one side was not fighting for, but against the very things that Burns claims the war so gloriously achieved. Confederates, you might need reminding after seeing it, were fighting not for the unification of the nation, but for its dissolution. Moreover, they were fighting for their independence from the United States in the name of slavery and the racial hierarchy that underlay it. Perhaps most disingenuously, the film's cursory treatment of Reconstruction obscures the fact that the Civil War did not exactly end in April of 1865 with a few handshakes and a mutual appreciation for a war well fought. Instead, the war's most important outcome—emancipation—produced a terrible and violent reckoning with the legacy of slavery that continued well into the 20th century.

These are important realities to grasp about the Civil War, but addressing them head on would muddy Burns' neat story of heroism, fraternity, reunion, and freedom. It would also mean a dramatically reduced role for Foote, the film's de facto star. Foote's wonderful stories and synopses of the war's meaning, which manage to be at once pithy and vague, cast a spell on the viewer. When Foote tells us that "the Civil War defined us as what we are and … opened us to being what we became, good and bad things," we may not be quite sure what he means. But his accent, his beard, and his hint of sadness incline us to think there must be profound depths in his tortured language.

Too often, Foote's grand pronouncements and anecdotes become substitutes for more serious consideration of difficult historical dynamics. In the first episode, 'The Cause', Foote nearly negates Burns' careful 15-minute portrait of slavery's role in the coming of the war with a 15-second story of a "single, ragged Confederate who obviously didn't own any slaves." When asked by a group of Yankee soldiers why he was fighting, the Rebel replied, "I'm fighting because you're down here," which, according to a smirking Foote, "was a pretty satisfactory answer." In similar fashion throughout, Foote asks us to put aside the very troubled political meanings of the Confederate Lost Cause and join him in an appreciation of both its courtly leaders and its defiant rank-and-file soldiers.

Foote's powerful and affecting presence in the film would be less problematic if he shared airtime more equally with other talking heads. However, as he gets the starring role and the literal last word of the film, Foote creates an irresolvable tension at its center. As much as we want to remember the Civil War as a war for freedom, emancipation, and the full realization of American ideals, there is Foote calling us into the mythical world of the Confederacy and the Old South in spite of all they stood for.

Famous but smelly feet

'Couple to forge future of the British monarchy', one of the BBC's more fatuous items on yesterday's royal wedding indicated that "The House of Windsor, its power stripped away over the centuries, now survives on being noticed. It withers, if ignored". Oh dear, that sounds like 'famous for being famous', with the House of Windsor largely indistinguishable from celebrities such as David Beckham or Lindsay Lohan or the exhibitionists in the Big Brother House.

Having survived -

The corgis have been consumed at the afternoon reception, the crowds are beginning to diminish, and we are left with a fresh royal recruit - Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cambridge

- corgis being of course canapes - I was reminded of the recent ODNB profile of Jane Myddelton, who is characterised simply as a "beauty" and is famous for being famous, albeit with smelly feet.

The date of birth of Myddelton (née Needham) is unknown. She was baptised in 1646 and died some time between 1692 and 1703. She was married at the age of fourteen, as his second wife, to a man some ten years older than herself, Charles Myddelton as his second wife.

According to the courtier and writer Anthony Hamilton's ironic pen-portrait, Mrs Myddelton's beauty soon attracted many admirers, but she had an air of 'indolent langour' which not everyone found appealing, and her efforts to appear brilliant succeeded only in putting her audience to sleep. His acerbic comments may owe something to the failure of his friend the comte de Gramont to seduce her. Gramont, who arrived in London in January 1663, instantly pursued Jane Myddelton, as did Richard Jones, Viscount Ranelagh. Gramont soon desisted, the French ambassador reporting in August 1663 that Mrs Myddelton had ordered him to stop as it was both useless and disagreeable. Colonel William Russell, son of the Hon. Edward Russell, and grandson of Francis, fourth earl of Bedford, sent her presents and owned her portrait but only one of the admirers mentioned by Hamilton certainly became her lover - Ralph Montagu, master of the horse to the duchess of York and then the queen. Mrs Myddelton was painted by Sir Peter Lely in the early 1660s as one of a series of portraits of beautiful women to hang in St James's Palace. The portrait indicates she was blonde, with the fashionably full face, heavy-lidded eyes, 'bee-stung' lips, and rounded figure of the Restoration.

Alas, there's a canker in every rose, or in every disagreeable memoirist. The ODNB records that -

In 1665 the diarist Samuel Pepys saw Jane twice: on 22 March at Gresham College, when he called her "a very great beauty I never knew or heard of before", and on 10 April in Hyde Park, where she was the only "beauty" he saw that day. ... On 3 October Pepys was troubled to hear that she was "noted for carrying about her body a continued soure base smell that is very offensive especially, if she be a little hot", a problem referred to in two later satires Colin (1679) and The Ladies March (1681):

Middleton, where'er she goes,
confirms the scandal of her toes.

... Rumours circulated that Jane was to be appointed a dresser to the queen but, Browne wrote, "the conditions have not yett a mutuall consent and I am told hir last indisposition hath a little impaired hir esclat". Nothing seems to have come of the negotiations. Pepys saw Mrs Myddelton on 5 February 1667 at the King's Theatre in Drury Lane, and on 23 June that year he wrote that a previous rumour he had heard, that Mrs Myddelton was now a mistress of the duke of York, was untrue. Robert, second earl of Sunderland, commissioned her picture from Lely in 1666, Lorenzo Magalotti visiting England in 1668 included her in his list of English beauties, and the following year the French ambassador reported that the king was pursuing her, but again she seems to have avoided becoming a royal mistress.

Virtuous, it seems, or merely descreet, as well as beautiful. Her younger sister Eleanor became the mistress of the king's son James, duke of Monmouth, about 1674 and had four children with him.

Mrs Myddelton became friendly with both the king's mistress, the duchess of Portsmouth, and her rival the duchess of Mazarin, in 1676. In the summer of that year the French ambassador, Courtin, reported that Mrs Myddelton was the most beautiful woman in the kingdom and that the aged poet and philosopher M. de Saint-Evremond had fallen hopelessly in love with her, but that Ralph Montagu, who had been her lover for a long time, had now fallen for the duchess of Mazarin. Courtin was greatly attracted to Mrs Myddelton, who he claimed was not only a great beauty but most amiable. It was, however, difficult to get near her as she was surrounded by admirers and, moreover, Courtin did not think she could be seduced by money, having once refused a significant present from Gramont. Courtin's praise was such that the French minister Louvois requested her portrait.

The profile comments that -

From a protestant Welsh gentry background and married young into a similar family, not wealthy and with nonconformist friends such as the Angleseys, Jane Myddelton's image as a 'beauty', which she no doubt cultivated, gave her an entree to court circles and gained her many male admirers, although she in fact seems to have been attracted to relatively few of them. "Illustre entre les belles" ("Illustrious among beauties"; Steinman, 60), "handsomely made, all white and golden" (Hamilton, 109), for her own and subsequent generations Jane Myddelton was the epitome of the Restoration beauty, never mentioned without the epithet "fair" or "beautiful". Such indeed was the exclusive interest in her looks that she seems almost wholly defined by them and the person remains rather less accessible than the famous image.

Contemporary sources refer unkindly to "the notorious Mrs Middleton" and to "the fair one's funky hose".

Father Stalin, Look at this!

After the brilliance of Gomme I've turned to the mordant Ukrainian verse quoted in Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Bodley Head 2010) -

Father Stalin, look at this
Collective farming is just bliss
The hut's in ruins, the barn's all sagged
All the horses broken nags
And on the hut a hammer and sickle
And in the hut death and famine
No cows left, no pigs at all
Just your picture on the wall
Daddy and mummy are in the kolkhoz
The poor child cries as alone he goes
There's no bread and there's no fat
the Party's ended all of that
Seek not the gentle nor the mild
A father's eaten his own child
The Party man he beats and stamps
And sends us to Siberian camps.

Oh dear

'The Liar As Hero' by historian Benny Morris in TNR (17 Mar 2011) begins by stating -

At best, Ilan Pappe must be one of the world's sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two.

Morris' demolition of Pappe proceeds with comments such as -

Those who falsify history routinely take the path of omission. They ignore crucial facts and important pieces of evidence while cherry-picking from the documentation to prove a case.

Pappe is more brazen. He, too, often omits and ignores significant evidence, and he, too, alleges that a source tells us the opposite of what it in fact says, but he will also simply and straightforwardly falsify evidence

and

The disproportion also reflects Pappe's worth as a historian. Let me explain. To cover the history of Palestine—a geographically small backwater in the giant Ottoman domain—and the activities of its aristocracy and their interaction with the authorities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one would have to spend many months in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. There one would need to locate and pore over reports and correspondence from and about the relevant vilayets (provinces), Syria/Damascus and Beirut, and the relevant sanjaks and mutasarafliks (districts), Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre, in addition to the central government’s deliberations and decision-making about Jerusalem and its environs. Pappe, who lacks Turkish, has not consulted any Ottoman archives. There is not a single reference to any Ottoman archive, or any Turkish source, in his endnotes.

and

Pappe repeatedly refers to "Harry Lock" of the British Mandate government secretariat in the 1920s —b ut the chief secretary's name was Harry Luke. Pappe obviously encountered the name in Hebrew or Arabic and transliterated it, with no prior knowledge of Luke against which to check it: if he had consulted British documents, he would have known the correct spelling. Pappe refers to "the Hope Simpson Commission" — there was no such commission, only an investigation by an official named John HopeSimpson. He refers to "twenty-two Muslim ... states" in the world in 1931, but by my count there were only about half a dozen. He refers to "the Jewish Intelligence Service" — presumably the Haganah Intelligence Service — and then adds, "whose archive has been opened to Israeli historians but not to Palestinians". To the best of my knowledge, this is an outright lie. All public archives in Israel, including the Haganah Archive in Tel Aviv, which contains the papers of its intelligence service, are open to all researchers.

and

It is unclear what Pappe is quoting from. I did not find this sentence in the commission’s report. Pappe's bibliography refers, under "Primary Sources", simply to "The Shaw Commission". The report? The deliberations? Memoranda by or about? Who can tell? The footnote attached to the quote, presumably to give its source, says, simply, "Ibid". The one before it says, "Ibid., p. 103." The one before that says, "The Shaw Commission, session 46, p. 92." But the quoted passage does not appear on page 103 of the report. In the text of Palestinian Dynasty, Pappe states that "Shaw wrote [this] after leaving the country [Palestine]". But if it is not in the report, where did Shaw "write" it?

and so on.

Decaffeinated murderabilia

Given my distaste for murderabilia - sketches, nail clippings, used underwear of serial killers and so forth - I'm saddened but not very surprised to encounter Collectible Spoons of the 3rd Reich (Trafford, 2009) by James Yannes.

The publisher explains -

Collectible Spoons of the 3rd Reich is a detailed, heavily illustrated reference book containing relevant historical exposition on many of the personal, organizational and commemorative spoons of the 3rd Reich period from 1933 to 1945. These spoons, unlike most other collectibles from this period, were actually owned and used daily by the people and organizations of those times. The book includes many spoon types, for example: Hitler’s personal silverware, Red Cross, SS, the U-47 etc. With over 200 photos / graphics and over 19,000 words of text, the book extensively explores the relevant historical highlights which in turn illuminate this unique period in history as reflected by the spoons. These spoons are history that you can hold in your hand and were once in the hands of the German history makers of the 3rd Reich era. As the years pass, the 3rd Reich era will move from the monster of history to just plain history as did the Napoleonic era and like Napoleon collectibles, there is increasing interest in acquiring 3rd Reich collectibles, although understandably relatively modest in our lifetime. Thus, this book should be of interest to the collector and educational for the casual reader of history.

What next? Boot polish tins of the Third Reich?

Secret squirrel solipsism

From a UK Press Association item on Julian Assange -

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange believes the publication of the Iraq war logs gave victims of the fighting a "sense of justice".

The whistleblower said disclosing 400,000 classified United States documents created a better understanding of how war can go wrong.

Speaking in an interview to be broadcast on Monday, Assange said he hoped the controversial move would dissuade people from engaging in "immoral conduct".

He said: "I hope it creates disincentives for engaging in immoral conduct in war. Disincentives for engaging in war crimes, in Iraq, in other places. It gives the victims of war in Iraq a sense of justice. A better understanding of how war goes and how war goes wrong."

We've learnt nothing, nothing from the hecatombs of last century - good intentions, muddle, uncertainty, mass murder - and are now being uniquely enlightened?

I can't help thinking that if we haven't got the message from the slaughter of 1914-18, 1939-45, the Armenian genocide, the activity of Pol Pot & Co, manmade famine in China, recurrent nastiness in Africa [etc] a few cables aren't going to have much long-term impact. So much for the Pentagon Papers. So much for Muehlon and for the Bolshevik publication of diplomatic documents. Mere release isn't the same as understanding.

away from magical thinking

Reading Ideology, Evidence and Competing Principles in Australian Indigenous Affairs: From Brough to Rudd via Pearson and the NTER (CAEPR Discussion Paper 289) (2009) [PDF] by William Sanders and the thoughtful 2011 Parliamentary Library paper by Matthew Thomas & Luke Buckmaster on Paternalism in social policy: when is it justifiable? [PDF].

The 31 page Sanders paper -

tracks the recent rise of ideology and evidence discourse as a way of describing good and bad Indigenous affairs policy. Expressing dissatisfaction with this discourse, it suggests a slightly more complex analytic way of thinking about Indigenous affairs involving three competing principles; equality, choice and guardianship. The paper suggests that dominant debates in Indigenous affairs balance these principles and move between them over time. Using a fourfold categorisation of ideological tendencies, it also suggests that different tendencies of thought about settler society and its relations with Indigenous societies occupy different positions in relation to the three competing principles. Finally, using the work of the Northern Territory Emergency Response Review Board as an example, the paper examines the role of evidence in Indigenous affairs. Evidence, it argues, always needs to be contextualised and is always a part of arguments or debates. The role of evidence in Indigenous affairs needs to be understood in relation to the much larger issue of balancing competing principles.

Thomas & Buckmaster comment in their 30 page paper that -

Governments are increasingly called upon to introduce paternalist policies — that is, policies that restrict the choices of individual citizens in their own interests and without their consent. Paternalist policies are often controversial, not least because they infringe a key principle of liberal societies; namely, that citizens are best placed to know their own interests.

While paternalist policies are often contentious, they are nevertheless ubiquitous. This suggests that the main issue is not whether or not paternalism itself is justifiable, but rather the conditions under which particular paternalist policies may be said to be justifiable.

This paper argues that paternalist policies may be considered justifiable under circumstances where high stakes decisions are involved, the decisions being made by individuals are irreversible and it is possible to identify failures in people's reasoning. It is further argued that if paternalist interventions are able to be justified in terms of people's own values and preferences, then this adds weight to their acceptability given that they do not undermine people's autonomy.

Relatively little scholarly attention has been devoted to the questions of what particular forms of paternalism may be deemed to be appropriate. This paper suggests that the principles of discrimination, proportionality, accountability and efficacy provide a framework with which to consider the appropriateness or otherwise of various forms of paternalist intervention.

The emphasis on making sense of evidence is continued in a GeoCurrents post on 'The Failure of the Failed State Index'.

The author of that post comments that -

If the Failed State Index is a promising but problematic analytical tool, the map that accompanies it on the Foreign Policy website is something else altogether. At first glance, it appears the cartographers have mapped sovereign states from red to green, while using white as an unmarked category to include both dependent territories, such as Greenland and Puerto Rico, and key disputed lands, such Western Sahara and the Hala'ib Triangle (claimed by Sudan, administered by Egypt). Closer inspection, however, reveals a stunning lack of consistency. The regions depicted in white turn out to have nothing in common. Some are dependencies and a few are disputed territories, but others range from autonomous areas, to insular portions of sovereign states, to fully independent countries. Meanwhile, the world's hottest territorial dispute, Kashmir, is essentially invisible: the area controlled by India is mapped as part of India, the area controlled by Pakistan is mapped as part of Pakistan, and the area controlled by China (Aksai Chin) is mapped as if it were a lake (or perhaps desiccated lake, given that it is portrayed exactly like the Aral Sea!).

A few of the oddities on the map deserve special mention. The cartographer's most glaring gaffe is the excision of the island of Newfoundland from Canada. France too is shorn of most of its islands; the map implicitly refutes French sovereignty over all of its overseas departments (Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion), even though they are as much parts of France as Hawaii and Alaska are parts of the United States. In the Caribbean, several independent island countries (Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia, Dominica, and more) are denied sovereignty, mapped instead as white splotches. Further south, Chile has been divested of its half of Tierra del Fuego. Some autonomous island groups, such as Portugal's Azores and Finland's Åland Archipelago, are mapped in white, but not Denmark's autonomous Faroe Islands. Taiwan, a de facto sovereign state not recognized by most other independent countries, is shown in white, but Kosovo, which fits the same category, is colored. A too-large West Bank is mapped in white, but in the accompanying tables it is aggregated with Israel. Elsewhere the mapmaker takes islands belonging to one country and assigns them to another. The coloration scheme shows Socotra as part of Somalia rather than Yemen, Rhodes as part of Turkey rather than Greece, and the Florida Keys as part of the Bahamas rather than the United States. Similar errors abound. Have the editors of Foreign Policy and the creators of the Failed State Index never checked their own map?

Poujadist donuts

A spot of poujadism in NSW, with announcement that the Outdoor Recreation Party (ORP) is campaigning against what it says is the growing intrusion of government, in particular restrictions on doing burnouts (ie making lots of noise, smoke and mess on a public road).

The ABC reports that the Party was initially formed "to represent four-wheel drive enthusiasts" but "now under new management" it's more broadly opposed to the nanny state.

Candidate David Leyonhjelm says speed limits are a case in point.

"We have revenue raising, masquerading as safety," he said.

Mr Leyonhjelm says all speed limits should be removed temporarily so they can be re-calibrated naturally.

"Measure the speeds at which drivers travel and drivers will travel at what they regard to be a safe speed," he said.

"Then you set the speed limit at the 85th percentile."

Mr Leyonhjelm also says motorists should be free to do burnouts.

"Law enforcement should not be worried about people doing silly things that endanger only themselves," he said.

"It should focus on danger to other people".

"So if you are doing a burnout and all that's likely to happen is you'll ruin your car, damage your tyres and leave some black marks on the road that's no business of anybody, especially not the police."

Mr Leyonhjelm appears to have been a candidate and Treasurer for the Liberty & Democracy Party, the libertarian microparty that attracted attention because its ACT Senate candidate Lisa Milat was the sister-in-law of convicted serial killer Ivan Milat. He doesn't seem to have been keen on seatbelts, bicycle helmets, gun control (the Howard Government restrictions were dismissed as "illogical and unjust"), restrictions on access by 4WDs to national parks and - of course - taxes. En route to the ORP he's apparently been a member of the Libs and NSW Chair of the Shooters' Party. "When the Shooters Party was deregistered by the AEC just prior to the federal election in 2004, he enlisted the Outdoor Recreation Party to run a team for the Senate and marginal NSW seats."

Diplomacy

Gathering info for my ANZSOG 'Wikileaks' paper in breaks from work on the Legal Practice Manual FOI chapter. Useful rhetoric from one L Trotsky on 22 November 1917 -

Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level. The struggle against the imperialism which is exhausting and destroying the peoples of Europe is at the same time a struggle against capitalist diplomacy, which has cause enough to fear the light of day. The Russian people, and the peoples of Europe and the whole world, should learn the documentary truth about the plans forged in secret by the financiers and industrialists together with their parliamentary and diplomatic agents. The peoples of Europe have paid for the right to this truth with countless sacrifices and universal economic desolation.

The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy. The Soviet Government regards it as its duty to carry out such a policy in practice. That is precisely why, while openly proposing an immediate armistice to all the belligerent peoples and their Governments, we are at the same time publishing these treaties and agreements, which have lost all binding force for the Russian workers, soldiers, and peasants who have taken power into their own hands.

The bourgeois politicians and journalists of Germany and Austria-Hungary may try to make use of the documents published in order to present the diplomacy of the Central Empires in a more advantageous light. But any such attempt would be doomed to pitiful failure, and that for two reasons. In the first place, we intend quickly to place before the tribunal of public opinion secret documents which treat sufficiently clearly of the diplomacy of the Central Empires. Secondly, and more important, the methods of secret diplomacy are as universal as imperialist robbery. When the German proletariat enters the revolutionary path leading to the secrets of their chancelleries, they will extract documents no whit inferior to those which we are about to publish. It only remains to hope that this will take place quickly.

The workers’ and peasants’ Government abolishes secret diplomacy and its intrigues, codes, and lies. We have nothing to hide. Our program expresses the ardent wishes of millions of workers, soldiers, and peasants. We want the rule of capital to be overthrown as soon as possible. In exposing to the entire world the work of the ruling classes, as expressed in the secret diplomatic documents, we address the workers with the call which forms the unchangeable foundation of our foreign policy: 'Proletarians of all countries, unite'.

Trotsky, as first People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, had reportedly earlier announced: "My task is a very limited one - to publish secret treaties and close down the shop".

Dubya

From Eliot Weinberger's 33(1) LRB (2011) review of George Bush's Decision Points (London: Virgin 2010), characterised as "the perfect Christmas gift for one's Republican uncle".

... in the mere two years since he left Washington, Bush is beginning to seem like a reasonable man compared to the Republicans who have now been elected to higher office. Unlike them, he was not a 'family values' Christian who liked to have prostitutes dress him in diapers; he did not have to pay a fine of $1.7 billion (yes, billion) for defrauding the government; he does not advocate burning the Quran; he does not believe that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim allied with terrorists who is building internment camps for dissidents; he does not believe that people of Hispanic origin should be randomly stopped and asked to prove their immigration status; he does not support a military invasion of Mexico or a constitutional amendment stating that the United States cannot be subject to Sharia law or an electric fence along the entire Canadian border or the death penalty for doctors who provide abortions; he does not believe that bicycle lanes in major cities are part of a plot by the United Nations to impose a single world government. The Palinites and Tea Partiers are getting the publicity, but the old-fashioned neocons still hold the power, and they may well run the ever patient Jeb Bush – practically the only Republican left with both dull conservative respectability and national name recognition – for president in 2012.

Rat trails

A perspective on Wikileaks is provided by Richard Breitman & Norman Goda's lucid 110 page Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War [PDF], a report for the US National Archives that is drawn from a sampling of 1,100 CIA files and 1.2 million Army counterintelligence files declassified after the 2007 final report from the interagency group created by Congress to identify, declassify and release federal records on Nazi war crimes and on Allied efforts to hold war criminals accountable.

The authors conclude that -

This report discusses only a sample of newly released records, hinting at their overall richness. The 1.3 million Army files include thousands of titles of many more issues regarding wartime criminals, their pursuit, their arrest, their escape, and occasionally, their use by Allied and Soviet intelligence agencies. These include files on German war criminals, but also collaborators from the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, and elsewhere. These files also include information on Allied and non-aligned states that had an interest in Axis personalities, including Great Britain, France, Italy, Argentina, and Israel.

The 1,110 re-released or newly released CIA name files are in most cases far more detailed than the files of the initial CIA release in 2001 and after. They contain a trove of information on Nazis who eventually worked for the Gehlen Organization or as Soviet spies after the war. They hold information about important Nazi officials who escaped and became figures of security interest in other countries spanning the globe from the Middle East to South America. Together, the Army and CIA records will keep scholars of World War II and the Cold War busy for many years.

The new files also have postwar intelligence on other subjects. The CIC kept close watch on other suspect groups, such as German communists, and kept thousands of files on them. They kept watch on politically active Jewish refugees in displaced persons camps. Indeed, there are many hundreds of newly released files concerning the remnant of European Jews who searched for a new life in Palestine or the United States. Thus the new records are of great interest to those researching a very broad range of topics from international Communism to the Jewish diaspora to the history of mass migration.

The declassification of intelligence-related material is a controversial subject, involving as it does the release of records formerly of national security interest. The current releases show, however, that the passage of years lessens the information’s sensitivity while providing researchers access to raw information that is simply not available elsewhere. By their very nature, intelligence agencies attain and record information that other government or non-government organizations cannot. None of the chapters in this report could have been written without declassified intelligence records, nor could the many articles and books that will emerge as a result of the current release. The funding for declassification and the assurance that intelligence records are opened to the public thus preserve key aspects of world history. In the interest of understanding our past Congress should, in our view, ensure that such openness continues.

The NY Times comments that -

Like earlier reports generated by the group, this one paints a grim portrait of bureaucracy, turf wars and communication gaps among intelligence agencies. It also details blatantly cynical self-interested tactical decisions by Allied governments and a general predisposition that some war crimes by former Nazis and their collaborators should be overlooked because the suspects could be transformed into valuable assets in the more urgent undercover campaigns against Soviet aggression. ...

"Tracking and punishing war criminals were not high among the Army’s priorities in late 1946", the report says. Instead, it concludes that the Army's Counterintelligence Corps spied on suspect groups ranging from German Communists to politically active Jewish refugees in camps for displaced people and also "went to some lengths to protect certain persons from justice".

Dr Muehlon, I presume

Amid brouhaha about Wikileaks, 'open secrets' and Julian Assange I'm reminded of outcry last century about Dr Wilhelm Mühlon (1878-1944).

Mühlon gained a PhD in law in 1904 and after posts in the German consular service was a director of the Friedrich Krupp conglomerate, concerned with war materials. He resigned from Krupp in late 1914, claiming to have freed himself "from the profession he loathed". In 1915 he became Special Commissioner of the imperial administration of the Balkans (ie representing the Wilhelmstrasse in Bucharest, Sofia, Vienna and Budapest regarding grain and oil negotiations). After ineffectual efforts to shape German policy through gatherings of uper-class liberals and litterateurs Mühlon migrated to Switzerland, from where, on 7 May 1917, he sent a memorandum (later published in France and Switzerland) to Imperial Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg "repudiating the German government and all its works".

In subsequent denunciations he drew on his diary and on a cache of Krupp documents, inevitably (given hysteria as the great Wilhelmine train crash proceeded) being denounced as a traitor, person deserving of assassination, a cad and otherwise a person of unsavoury habits.

During a Reichstag meeting on 16 March 1918 Franz von Papen characterised Mühlon as "pathological" and as a "neurasthenic who could not even come into a room if it contained a few gentlemen with whom he was personally acquainted". By June 1918 he was reported as having "bought a good deal of land and an old country house near Berne" and settled in Switzerland with his family, ignoring call-up for German military service -

Dr Muehlon has thought it best to remain in Switzerland, although by doing so he constitutes himself a deserter, and although the position of deserters in Switzerland is not altogether a pleasant one.

Somewhat more pleasant, of course, if you have a private income and are not parked in a wet trench with cadavers and rats while people try to kill you.

Mühlon published his 1914 diaries - Die Verheerung Europas: Aufzeichnungen aus den ersten Kriegsmonaten [The Devastation of Europe: Notes Written During the First Few Months of the War] - now a forgotten best-seller. He was reported as explaining that

Dr Muehlon did not intend to publish the diary until these statements were made about him in the Reichstag and now, when people read the book the world in general will be able to laugh at to scorn the notion that of a mentally unbalanced man having clear, direct, and logical a style ... Nothing appears more clearly from this diary than the fact that Dr Muehlon considers – for excellent reasons – based on fact, which he cites in detail – that Austria, her intolerance and lack of conciliation generally, were mainly responsible for outbreak of the war, and the individual most responsible for rushing Europe into it was the German Emperor.

Translations as The Vandal of Europe and as Dr Muehlon’s Diary promoted Mühlon as a successful businessman and as thinker who was "highly sensitive to moral considerations and placed moral values above material success".

Mühlon was in contact with - and often sponsored - figures such as Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Ernst Bloch, René Schickele, Hermann Staudinger, Annette Kolb and Hugo Ball. He was also in contact with 'opposition' inside Germany. In early 1919 he was invited to Munich by the Bavarian government and offered a ministerial post, which he sensibly declined, concluding that "the outlook seems so hopeless that he has decided to remain in Switzerland for the present". He remained in Switzerland until his death, being vilified in 1933 by the Nazis for financial support of the catholic Rhein-Main. Volkszeitung. By 1937 he was being denounced in German courts as "probably the biggest and meanest traitor that has ever been born on German soil" and, like the self-involved and unpleasant Mr Assange, was facing recurrent death threats. His diaries of the early 1940s - humane, perceptive, indignant - are a minor masterpiece that deserves to be better known.

The current significance of Wikileaks - as with Mühlon's revelations - is the consequence of disclosure and what responses to disclosure tell us about public perceptions of diplomacy and 'inner politics' rather than access to anything that's particularly new, exciting or disturbing. (That may change, of course, if future disclosures reveal the identity of informants in Afghanistan and elsewhere and put those people at risk.)

One contact commented to me that he inferred from reading the Economist and New York Times that Sarkozy has a thin skin and that the Karzai administration is riddled with corruption: no great revelations there. Paul Ginsborg and other scholars have indicated for over a decade that there are fundamental grounds for doubting the probity of Italian government: again, we didn't need Assange. Do Middle East states love Iran? Does Iran love them? Not much news there.

What is disturbing is the outrage, approaching hysteria, among some circles in the US - reminiscent of hyperbole about Mühlon - and the naivety, even irresponsibility, evident among fans of Wikileaks.

The Economist commented that -

It's telling that Mr Assange hasn't placed his servers in some technically capable autocracy with a desire to thumb its nose at the world, say Iran or Venezuela. He needs liberal democracies. Their laws guarantee the safety of his information. And when trying to solve what looks like a digital problem, the best path is to consider where the problem is physically vulnerable. Anti-spammers, for example, have finally notched up some successes in the last two years by going after server locations; spammers need servers in places like America, which has reliable networks and vast fields of vulnerable personal computers. But America also has laws, and ways to enforce them.

My gripe against Mr Assange is that he takes advantage of the protections of liberal democracies, but refuses to submit himself to them. If he wants to use the libel protections guaranteed by New York State, then he should live in New York, and commit himself to all of the safety and consequences of America's constitution. If he wants to use Sweden's whistleblower laws, then he should return to Sweden and let its justice system take its course. This, as we've written in the paper, is what distinguishes Mr Assange from Daniel Ellsberg. Mr Ellsberg did not flee America after releasing the Pentagon Papers; he stayed here and stood trial. Regardless of what you think about Mr Ellsberg's motives, he followed the basic tenets of civil disobedience: break a law, then publicly accept the consequences. Mr Assange just protects himself.

Julian Assange has created a legal structure that allows him to answer only to his own conscience. This is an extraordinarily clever hack of the world's legal systems. But it makes his pretense at moral authority a little hard to take seriously. And it also points toward a solution. If America feels threatened by WikiLeaks, then it should lean on its allies—Sweden, Iceland and Belgium—to strip the organisation of the protections it so carefully gathers as it shifts its information around the world. Mr Assange has suggested that he might be hounded all the way to Russia or Cuba. If he has to take all of his servers with him, it wil be harder for him to act so boldly.

Cold water

From Richard Betts' 'Conflict or Cooperation?' appraisal in Foreign Affairs (2010) of Fukuyama, Mearsheimer and Huntington -

Like most red-blooded Americans, Fukuyama rejected the sour realist theory of international relations, which sees history not as a progression toward enlightenment and peace but as a cycle of conflict. Epochal threats made realism persuasive during much of the century of total war, but at bottom it is alien to American instincts and popular only among some cranky conservatives, Marxists, and academic theorists. (I have been accused of being among them.) Most people happily pronounced it passé once the communist threat imploded. "Treating a disease that no longer exists," Fukuyama claimed, "realists now find themselves proposing costly and dangerous cures to healthy patients."

Mearsheimer, however, is an unregenerate realist, and he threw cold water on the Cold War victory. Bucking the tide of optimism, he argued that international life would continue to be the brutal competition for power it had always been. He characterized the competition as tragic because countries end in conflict not out of malevolence but despite their desire for peace. In the absence of a world government to enforce rights, they find it impossible to trust one another, and simply striving for security drives them to seek control of their environment and thus dominance. If peace is to last, it will have to be fashioned from a stable balance of power, not the spread of nice ideas. In short, there is nothing really new about the new world.

Mearsheimer was a party pooper, defying what seemed to be common sense. Many found it easy to write him off when he claimed the revival of traditional conflicts would soon make everyone nostalgic for the simplicity and stability of the Cold War. But realism can never be written off for long. This school of thought has always agitated, even angered, American liberals and neoconservatives (who are in many ways just liberals in wolves' clothing). The theory falls out of favor whenever peace breaks out, but it keeps coming back because peace never proves permanent. Mearsheimer's vision is especially telling because it is an extreme version of realism that does not see any benign actors in the system and assumes that all great powers seek hegemony: "There are no status quo powers ... save for the occasional hegemon that wants to maintain its dominating position."

not dead, just on holidays

From the ODNB biography of Edward II (1284-1327) -

Although the official account said that Edward had died of natural causes, it was soon widely believed that he had been murdered. Murder is the most likely cause, perhaps following a conscious decision by Mortimer to rid himself of the embarrassment of a former king, or even in a moment of panic by Edward's gaolers when yet another attempt to free him was reported. However, a natural death, possibly from a pre-existing and painful condition (which might account for the lurid chronicle accounts of his death) or from ill treatment or from the mental shock of his deposition, should not be ruled out. But it was also rumoured that Edward had after all escaped from Berkeley, so much so that in March 1330 Edward's half-brother, Edmund, earl of Kent, was executed for plotting to restore the late king. In September 1330 the pope wrote to the king and to Isabella expressing amazement that anyone could believe 'that he, for whom solemn funerals had been made, could still be alive' (CEPR letters, 2.499).

In September 1338 a certain William le Galeys ('the Welshman') appeared at Cologne claiming to be Edward II and was escorted to Koblenz where Edward III was then meeting the emperor, Ludwig of Bavaria. This episode may have some connection with the astonishing letter preserved in a fourteenth-century register of the French diocese of Maguelone (now Montpellier) and apparently written to Edward III between 1336 and 1338 or at the latest 1343 by Manuele Fieschi, an Italian cleric with good connections both with the English court and the papal curia who ended his career as bishop of Vercelli in Italy. According to this, Edward had wandered across Europe after his escape, visiting Ireland, England, Normandy, Avignon, Paris, Brabant, Cologne, and Milan, before ending his days as a hermit at Cecima, near Voghera in Lombardy. A tomb of earlier date which is wrongly claimed to be that of Edward II can even be seen in the nearby abbey of Sant'Alberto di Butrio. Although there is no reason to believe that the circumstantial story told in the Fieschi letter is based on fact, the mystery remains of how and why the letter came to be written.

If some believed that Edward lived on after 1327, others wished to present him as a candidate for canonization. Such feelings were probably inspired both by a desire to counter the moves to canonize Edward's former opponent, Thomas of Lancaster, and by the rumours about the hideous mode of Edward's death - his bowels burnt out with a red-hot spit or poker inserted at his anus - which were given literary expression by the unknown author of the Brut chronicle and by Geoffrey Baker. Some of Edward's old allies and sympathizers among the Dominican order may also have played a part. There is no evidence of any systematic attempt to have Edward canonized until Richard II petitioned the pope in 1385; a book of Edward II's miracles was compiled and presented to Pope Boniface IX at Florence early in 1395. The process however lapsed with Richard II's own deposition in 1399, never to be resumed.

Head Porter

From Richard Evans on John Grenville in Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009) 129-130 -

John Grenville [known prior to migration as Hans Gubrauer], middle-class son of a lawyer whose fortune had been destroyed in the prewar inflation, left Germany in 1939 on a Kindertransport at the age of ten. After just over two years at a boarding school, where he learned English and became, by his own account, a passable slow left-arm bowler, Grenville, at the age of thirteen, was taken out of school by the children's refugee committee, who would not allow him to get an academic education despite his father's support for it, but expected him to enter a trade. His scientific education at the Cambridgeshire Technical School, another boarding institution, was not successful: he got chemical poisoning and was told to get an outdoor job to recover. So he became under-gardener at Peterhouse, where he read voraciously in History in his spare time. 'My request for permission to use the Peterhouse library', he wrote later, 'caused consternation. I was finally given permission, but only on condition that I would not attempt to enter Cambridge as a student'. The Master was sufficiently amazed by a College gardener reading books to arrange a weekly session over cocoa and biscuits at which they discussed what Grenville had been reading. At eighteen, Grenville was accepted to read History in evening classes at Birkbeck College, London: on hearing the news that he was leaving, the Bursar of Peterhouse told him that the Fellows would have liked him to stay because, as he said, 'you have the makings of a Head Porter'.

Grenville went on to become a Professor of Modern History.

Beaglehole

Reading 'JC Beaglehole: Reputation, Fortuna and Biography' [PDF], a gracious tribute by Doug Munro to the underrated John Beaglehole(1901-1971) in 2 Journal of Historical Biography (2007) 1-32.

Munro explains that -

This essay is not intended as a review article of A Life of J.C. Beaglehole, although I engage with the biography here and there. My purpose, rather, is to trace the trajectories of J.C. Beaglehole’s reputation, using the biography as the empirical bedrock, but drawing on other sources as well as on my wider experience. The word "trajectories" is used quite deliberately to signify that reputations have multiple dualities—earlier and later, contemporary and posthumous, public and private, intellectual and activist—and to indicate that reputation is both unstable and often contested. Beaglehole was initially made to suffer for being regarded in conservative circles as a dangerous young radical, but a change of government brought patronage and preferment. This, in turn, leads to an examination of the extent to which individual reputation is a function of the wheel of fortune and of the degree to which the interplay of institutional and intellectual structures is predicated on personal preferences toward an individual. Finally, I look at Beaglehole’s posthumous scholarly reputation and make observations on the role of biography in raising or lowering a reputation, as the case may be. There is a certain irony in discussing Beaglehole and reputation in the same breath, because his unusual combination of self-assurance and genuine modesty rendered him remarkably indifferent to what others thought about him. He was not devoid of ambition — far from it — but he avoided the limelight, resisted celebrity status, and just got on with the job.

Munro had earlier commented that -

There is no question that Beaglehole’s scholarship was highly regarded during, and immediately after, his lifetime. He was, Gavan Daws told a group of Pacific historians at a seminar in Canberra in 1973, “the greatest of us all.” But reputation is unstable and has a chimerical quality: it comes and goes as fancy chooses, a victim of changing fads and fashions. Or as Stefan Collini has put it:

There is an inescapable indeterminacy about all questions of reputation where literary and intellectual figures are concerned. Membership of the jury is heterogeneous and potentially infinite; the various parts of a writer’s oeuvre or achievement may merit different ratings from different categories of reader; it is almost impossible to maintain a clear distinction between questions of merit and neighbouring territories of celebrity and utility; and at any given moment judgement is almost inevitably contaminated by hearsay, selective recall, and cultural lag.

Cultural lag is an appropriate term: it would be fair to say that Beaglehole, whose scholarship was so highly regarded in his lifetime, is out of favour in some quarters and that his reputation among Pacific historians is not quite what it once was. In the three and a half decades since his death, shifts in the way historians view the past have sometimes been unkind to Beaglehole. As Jane Samson has put it, “a new set of church fathers and scriptures has been proclaimed, and the usual search for heretics is on.” The other side of Beaglehole’s reputation is based on his civic engagement as a public intellectual, and this aspect of his life met with a mixed reception among contemporaries. Revered in some quarters, this introspective and somewhat retiring man was viewed askance in anti-intellectual circles and by New Zealand’s conservative National Party government. ...

That reputations come and go was graphically illustrated in a 2005 poll, conducted by Prime Television New Zealand, to identify and rank "New Zealand’s 100 History-Makers". Those polled placed the scientist Lord Ernest Rutherford, another New Zealander who has been admitted to the Order of Merit, at number one. Beaglehole missed out altogether, although two other historians were ranked sixty-third (Michael King) and eighty-seventh (Keith Sinclair). Neither, were they still alive, would have ranked himself ahead of Beaglehole. The omission of Beaglehole reflects the sheer capriciousness of such media circuses — for example, there was a comedian on the panel and two comedians were among the chosen one hundred. It also illustrates the extent to which reputation can be unrelated to actual achievement, how a posthumous reputation is apt to slide, and how people are unconsciously inclined to withhold recognition from those in walks of life different from their own. All the same, the aberration of Beaglehole’s omission may not have come about had the major biography by his historian-son been published a year earlier, in time to have brought Beaglehole to the panelists’ attention.

Biographies, of course, can be reputation-breakers as well as reputation-makers. For politicians, the so-called accolade of a biography can cut both ways — notable examples being the disintegrating effect that successive biographers have had on the once-high reputation of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin and the recent attempts to rehabilitate Baldwin’s successor, Neville Chamberlain. Biographies of historians are comparatively rare, typically expressions of avowal and affirmation, and distinctly elitist in the sense that only major historians enter the hall of biographical fame. Despite a roll-of-the-dice element in who gets chosen, the very fact of a biography is a measure of that historian’s significance. Sometimes they are rescue missions, attempts to restore to proper prominence historians who, in their biographer’s view, have been condemned to unjustifiable abeyance. Conversely, there are attempts to explain and celebrate the recrudescence of a reputation. Tim Beaglehole’s biography of his father, who was a major figure in New Zealand cultural and intellectual life as well as an outstanding historian, fits neither category. But it does invite reflection on the role of a biography in matters of reputation.

Sadly unimaginative

Leon Trotsky, patron saint of socialist romantics, condemned Tsar Nicholas II as profoundly unimaginative rather than evil. In considering the latest brouhaha over claims of systemic cover-ups or indifference among senior Roman Catholic clergy in relation to proven abuse of minors it is tempting to conclude that the institutions have been unimaginative, unable to think outside traditional responses - particularly shuffling miscreants from parish to parish - in responding to problems that involved real human suffering.

A news item from the ABC indicates that some senior personnel in the Church have missed the point. The item states that -

The child sex abuse crimes of individual priests are not the fault of the Roman Catholic Church as a whole, a top Vatican cardinal said overnight, lamenting what he called "unfair attacks".

"Christians feel rightly hurt when there is an attempt to embroil them in the serious and painful matters of some priests, transforming individual faults and responsibilities into collective ones", said Angelo Sodano, the dean of the Vatican's College of Cardinals.

"Now the accusation of paedophilia is being brandished against the Church", Cardinal Sodano said in an interview with Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.

He added: "In the face of these unfair attacks we are being told that our strategy is wrong, that we should react differently. The Church has its own style... the only strategy that we have comes from the Gospel".

Also Tuesday, Vatican Radio warned of what it called an "anti-Catholic media campaign of hatred".

The paedophilia of some clergy is arguably not the fault of the Church or of all Roman Catholics. (Not all Christians, with apologies to Cardinal Sodano, are members of that belief system and thus not all will necessarily share his deep sorrow at "an attempt to embroil them in the serious and painful matters of some priests".)

However, it is clear from both internal and external studies, such as those concerning abuses in Ireland, that senior personnel have on occasion failed to deal effectively with serial predators. The apparent inability to acknowledge that failure is at best unseemly, an unseemliness exacerbated by claims of persecution and recourse to comparisons with anti-semitic persecution.

The latter is particularly egregious considering the Vatican's failure - again, arguably a failure of imagination or the inhumanity consequential on thinking sub specie aeternitatis - to vigorously (or merely explicitly and recurrently) condemn both the Holocaust and the active involvement of individual Roman Catholics (including clergy in Southern Europe) in the racially-based industrial slaughter of millions of people.

The same lack of imagination is apparent in Easter rhetoric by Anthony Fisher OP, DD, BA (Hons), LLB, BTheol (Hons), DPhil, Bishop of Parramatta, who - presumably informed by possession of an exclusive truth unavailable to the godless - informed the faithful that the effects of atheism are devastating and that people falsely believe they can build a better life without believing in God. The evidence for that claim?

Last century we tried godlessness on a grand scale and the effects were devastating: Nazism, Stalinism, mass murder, abortion and broken relationships - all promoted by state-imposed atheism.

Let us not, of course, mention a millennium or two of nastiness imposed by believers on other believers and pass over the fast-tracking of canonisation of Pius XII.

Vatican-bashing is indeed unfair but unsurprising in the face of resolute denial and claims of victimisation. Bishop Fisher and Cardinal Sodano would do well to recall the comment in the Eire report -

The Dublin Archdiocese's pre-occupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid 1990s, were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church, and the preservation of its assets. All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities. The Archdiocese did not implement its own canon law rules and did its best to avoid any application of the law of the State. ...

The authorities in the Archdiocese of Dublin and the religious orders who were dealing with complaints of child sexual abuse were all very well educated people. Many had qualifications in canon law and quite a few also had qualifications in civil law. This makes their claims of ignorance very difficult to accept. Child sexual abuse did not start in the 20th century. Since time immemorial it has been a "delict" under canon law, a sin in ordinary religious terms and a crime in the law of the State. Ignorance of the law is not a defence under the law of the State. It is difficult for the Commission to accept that ignorance of either the canon law or the civil law can be a defence for officials of the Church. ...

In addition to their clerical education, many of those in authority in the Archdiocese had civil law degrees or occupied prestigious appointments in third level education. Monsignor Sheehy, Bishop O'Mahony and Bishop Raymond Field were qualified barristers. Bishop Kavanagh was Professor of Social Science in University College Dublin where both Archbishop Ryan and Archbishop Connell held high ranking academic posts. Despite their participation in civil society, it was not until late 1995 that officials of the Archdiocese first began to notify the civil authorities of complaints of clerical child sexual abuse.

All very sad. Time to say sorry in a meaningful way or not complain while critics score a few direct hits.