Month: November 2020

Dissolution Of Commonwealths: Want Of Absolute Power

Amongst the Infirmities therefore of a Common-wealth, I will reckon in the first place, those that arise from an Imperfect Institution, and resemble the diseases of a naturall body, which proceed from a Defectuous Procreation.

Of which, this is one, “That a man to obtain a Kingdome, is sometimes content with lesse Power, than to the Peace, and defence of the Common-wealth is necessarily required.” From whence it commeth to passe, that when the exercise of the Power layd by, is for the publique safety to be resumed, it hath the resemblance of as unjust act; which disposeth great numbers of men (when occasion is presented) to rebell; In the same manner as the bodies of children, gotten by diseased parents, are subject either to untimely death, or to purge the ill quality, derived from their vicious conception, by breaking out into biles and scabbs.

And when Kings deny themselves some such necessary Power, it is not alwayes (though sometimes) out of ignorance of what is necessary to the office they undertake; but many times out of a hope to recover the same again at their pleasure: Wherein they reason not well; because such as will hold them to their promises, shall be maintained against them by forraign Common-wealths; who in order to the good of their own Subjects let slip few occasions to Weaken the estate of their Neighbours.

So was Thomas Beckett Archbishop of Canterbury, supported against Henry the Second, by the Pope; the subjection of Ecclesiastiques to the Common-wealth, having been dispensed with by William the Conqueror at his reception, when he took an Oath, not to infringe the liberty of the Church. And so were the Barons, whose power was by William Rufus (to have their help in transferring the Succession from his Elder brother, to himselfe,) encreased to a degree, inconsistent with the Soveraign Power, maintained in their Rebellion against King John, by the French. Nor does this happen in Monarchy onely. For whereas the stile of the antient Roman Common-wealth, was, The Senate, and People of Rome; neither Senate, nor People pretended to the whole Power; which first caused the seditions, of Tiberius Gracchus, Caius Gracchus, Lucius Saturnius, and others; and afterwards the warres between the Senate and the People, under Marius and Sylla; and again under Pompey and Caesar, to the Extinction of their Democraty, and the setting up of Monarchy.

The people of Athens bound themselves but from one onely Action; which was, that no man on pain of death should propound the renewing of the warre for the Island of Salamis; And yet thereby, if Solon had not caused to be given out he was mad, and afterwards in gesture and habit of a mad-man, and in verse, propounded it to the People that flocked about him, they had had an enemy perpetually in readinesse, even at the gates of their Citie; such dammage, or shifts, are all Common-wealths forced to, that have their Power never so little limited.

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Surviving the Stone Age: reviewed

I shamelessly enjoyed Surviving the Stone Age, which finished last weekend on Channel 4 It is the latest example of ‘experimental archaeology’ and far better than the others tried over the years, because they used subjects who actually knew what they were doing.

The Hobbesian attraction of the conceit is clear – this was re-enacting life in the earliest stages of society, not in a state of nature but shorn of all the accretions and presuppositions of developed society, to put the subjects within touching distance of that state of nature.

Yes, it was a bit of fluff to a large extent, as they all are – the ‘tribe’ know they were out in the wild for just a month with hot baths and full larders to follow and they knew that if something serious went wrong there was a camera crew and extraction team, but to their great credit this did not interfere too much.

It was a mammoth’s head and shoulders above previous efforts along the theme. Over the years, the good folk in tellyland have tried several times programmes along the lines “What if we take ordinary people out of their homes, put them in a Bronze Age / Iron Age village and see how they get on?” It was just reality-TV in roundhouses. One of those a few years ago was horrifying: the subjects plonked in the village knew nothing outside the comforts of running water and packaged food and the first time they tried to cook over an open fire, several of them were sent home with food poisoning, while others left after arguments falling just short of a fist-fight. It was just a freak show.

This time though we had something very different. There were no real ingenues: all those taking part were men and women who had taught themselves Stone Age skills and so knew what they were seeing and feeling and what to do. They had two Americans who had each lived alone wild in the primaeval forests and were exactly in their element; glorious. There was a former Royal Marine who had gone wild himself. As their voice-of-the-audience was a charming young couple whom you might imagine coming round to tea, but who were skilled hobby stone-agers. This made for realism and that made it watchable. When they wanted to eat, they had to find roots, berries, fish and flesh. Once they had it, they used every ounce they could, for meat or material.

The constant of life is food. We need to eat every day, and in the wild that means hunting and foraging every day for most of the day, and the only break in the pursuit is after a big kill that may last a few days if properly preserved.

The programme was filmed in one of the few empty lands left in Europe, in the Rhodope Mountains, an arm of the Balkans wreathed in mist and myth. There are no bureaucrats here and no petty regulations like that ruined the ’roundhouse telly’ of past years: they wanted meat so they stalked and shot a deer, or speared fish, without filling any forms in.

The challenge is for us to recognise that even for those hardened to the prehistoric life, that life is hard and precarious, and how could we have survived? Yet man did survive and thrive in the Stone Age. In the hundreds of thousands of years of humanity, all was the Stone Age except the last few millennia. In pockets of the world, as in deepest Amazonia and in the central lands of New Guinea and among the Andaman Islands, the folk live in the Stone Age still. The Stone Age not weird or a passing phase: it is modernity which is weird, and brief so far.

They could not in a month show anything but a glance of Stone Age life. New love, childbirth, injury, death were not going to appear. Neither did they compete bloodily for resources – they did not come across a tribe sent out by Canal+ and fight them with spears for the resources of the land.

War is the Hobbesian reality in cultures from the earliest days to our own. If there can be a state of nature, then it is a state of “Warre Of Every One Against Every One“, but the needs of survival require the formation of clan groups and tribes, which are the first forms of society. They in turn are at war with all others with whom they have no social contract. Within the clan group is all the comfort and support that is available, and anything we have in modernity is just a reflection of that ancient society.

We can shake that out of ourselves in the comfort of our advanced civilisation, or at least what seems advanced to us in this brief generation, with our abundant resources made abundant by the complex organisation of worldwide society, but it is only that society which supplies us and keeps us from what was the reality of mankind for almost all of our existence. We are still those people, the same in frame and mind as ten thousand years ago and more, sitting on a thin crust of civilisation. Surviving The Stone Age was attempting a glimpse at what we are.

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Are we at last to be free?

Crawling until we end Lockdown2, struggling, society dying. We can make it though through a week until it ends – but even then we are not free.

Actually, I have made this lockdown tolerable simply by ignoring it. Apart from the germ-sodden facenappy I am forced to clamp to my mouth when travelling and when entering less accommodating shops, it has been much as normal, apart from the absence of people in the open air, timid people anyway. I travel resentful, but when released from the train and I have coughed my guts up from the induced asphyxia, I am free again to ignore these paper rules.

Now the new Lockdown is coming to an end, the shops will reopen. Life will start to become normal, just a bit. Except that it will not: this is not a liberation – it is tiers before bedtime. The clampdown continues so that while venues can open, they must keep visitors six feet apart, which is not going to revive the cinemas or theatres or anything else really: pocket tyrants standing at the doors forcing you into a mile-long queue for an hour with no promise of being able to get in the door and no, I am not joining in. All these social and cultural venues will close and I have stopped caring about them because they are now a distant, forgotten world. I cannot see how they can come back when the world has moved on. They remaining shops will struggle to their feet again as there are always customers for frocks and whatnot, but art and culture must be our sacrifice for the new, horrid world we have created.

The cure has been far worse than the disease. Now we live with a strange new world of devastation following the plague as they did in the Middle Ages, but it was not the plague which devastated but the measures taken against it.

We can only thrive if we are free. Freedom brings endeavour and innovation. e are crawling towards it again. My worry is that some politicians are too fond of this unwonted power they now wield;  “in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death.” Maybe Boris is genuinely not comfortable with it, but that Matt Hancock, the most powerless become a great power, he always seem ready to tighten the noose around the neck. On the other side of the House, those even less powerful, have called for powers and restrictions, and commissars and whatever their cruel hearts imagine.

There is resistance. The push back for freedom has come entirely from the Conservative benches. If they are accused of living in the past, good for them, for we were free in the past.

The self-justification of power must be broken. Then we can be free to thrive.

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Dissolution Of Common-wealths Proceedeth From Imperfect Institution

Though nothing can be immortall, which mortals make; yet, if men had the use of reason they pretend to, their Commowealths might be secured, at least, from perishing by internall diseases. For by the nature of their Institution, they are designed to live, as long as Man-kind, or as the Lawes of Nature, or as Justice it selfe, which gives them life.

Therefore when they come to be dissolved, not by externall violence, but intestine disorder, the fault is not in men, as they are the Matter; but as they are the Makers, and orderers of them. For men, as they become at last weary of irregular justling, and hewing one another, and desire with all their hearts, to conforme themselves into one firme and lasting edifice; so for want, both of the art of making fit Laws, to square their actions by, and also of humility, and patience, to suffer the rude and combersome points of their present greatnesse to be taken off, they cannot without the help of a very able Architect, be compiled, into any other than a crasie building, such as hardly lasting out their own time, must assuredly fall upon the heads of their posterity.

Amongst the Infirmities therefore of a Common-wealth, I will reckon in the first place, those that arise from an Imperfect Institution, and resemble the diseases of a naturall body, which proceed from a Defectuous Procreation.

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To the Extinction of their Democraty

Once the spell is broken, it cannot be woven again, and democracy relies on keeping a nation spellbound, just as autocracy does. (The rival systems enumerated by Hobbes differ from each other very little in this respect.) Democracy has been the most stable system as it absorbs shocks, but is breaking down and even in America there are whispers. The ‘Death of Democracy’ is a threat exaggerated by commentators by it is a moment’s work, and might be as much a part of the life of the system as its birth.

Mexico is a classroom for students of politics as its history has sampled every political system one might imagine. It has been relatively stable since about 1920; nothing like the cowboy-film version of old Mexico. It still teaches us. In 2006 a year of chaos followed the Presidential election. The losing candidate refused to accept his position, his supporters ran with that. They had reason to believe the election was stolen because in their own narrow bubbles all opinion was one way. Those protesting in the capital could not grasp that Calderón had enough support to have won, because in the capital he did not; outside their bubble he did. This shook the understanding on which democracy must stand, namely that each side accepts when it loses. Mexico is hardly a good example of a perfect, mature democracy because while it has been democratic for a hundred years, it was for most of that time a “guided democracy” in order to ensure stability.

In the United States it is meant to be different. Democracy has been unchallenged, even in the Civil War, for over two hundred years, and in fact to some extent since the first settlers on the eastern seaboard established colonies. There is belief in democracy; if there were not, the roots would dry up and the soil blow away. Where however a population draws itself in, each into his or her narrow bubble of shared norms, it is no different from the protestors in Mexico unable to comprehend that there are any who disagree, and therefore convinced that the election has been stolen.

There is a great deal more to be written on the destruction of political understanding. The danger is in the destruction of political acceptance.

No American President since the 1993s has had his legitimacy unchallenged, and this in a settled, accepted system: Clinton and his impeachment; Bush and the hanging chads; Obama and the “birther” theory; Trump with everything the other party could throw at him, including an attempt to subvert the Electoral College to keep him out; now Joe Biden’s elevation to office is being met in revenge with more law suits. Rumours of an attempt to subvert the College again appear to be smears, but we will see.

It is America though, and that counts for more than all the political shenanigans. Elections have been bought and sold many times in America, so I read, but the essential mindset in the common man, whatever party they support, if any, is that democracy unsullied is the American way, and that attempts to subvert it are despicable. That is mythology because the system has always been corruptible and corrupted, but America has always lived on self-myth, since the foundation of the republic. It is a necessity and the strength that will keep it going.

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