Category Archives: Arts

Arts, History, Philosophy

Philosophy: On Reason and Experience

AGE OF REASON AND ENLIGHTENMENT

“Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” – George Washington (1732–1799)

IN the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason – characterised by thinkers such as Descartes, Hobbes and Locke during the seventeenth century – brought about a seismic shift in emphasis in philosophical thought. Massive advances were made in the natural sciences and this in turn led to a questioning of old certainties and a rush of new and often competing ideas concerning everything from how knowledge and truth can be acquired and tested to the first seedlings of notions of democracy, representation and civil liberties. The floodgates opened, characterised best by Kant’s imperative in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” The human mind was emerging from the darkness of infancy and maturing like that of an enquiring child, while Kant urged people to “dare to know”. Reason and experience became the watchwords in this new philosophy, which was more concerned with how things actually are rather than how they could or possibly should be.

However, not all enlightenment was positive. There were darker consequences of this new awakening, as evidenced by the reign of terror following the French Revolution and by the work of possibly the most morose thinker of all time, Arthur Schopenhauer, who once wrote in an essay that everyone should swallow a live toad for breakfast to guarantee they wouldn’t have to experience anything else quite as dispiriting again for the rest of the day. It would also be a mistake to think that the status quo embraced the new enlightenment with open arms. The preface quote for this article is taken from George Washington’s farewell address to the American people and illustrates that although there was an explosion in free-thinking in some quarters, the old guard – the protectors of religious-based morality – were deeply suspicious and frightened of these new ideas about how to live in and view the world.

Reading the great thinkers of reason and experience shouldn’t be difficult. Most of what they had to say seems pretty self-evident today, obvious even, yet somehow their arguments can be difficult to follow. This is largely due to the intellectual zeal with which they approached their investigations and their fervent search for one over-arching, all-encompassing system of thought. It didn’t help either that this spirit of competitiveness led to petty rivalries. The German philosopher Schopenhauer had a hatred of Hegel bordering on the pathological. This drove him to take up a position at the University of Berlin, where Hegel had a seat, just to try and prove his ideas were more popular with the students (but he failed spectacularly). Nonetheless, readers should appreciate that the philosophers of the ages of reason and enlightenment represent a pivotal point in the history of philosophy.

“Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond… Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

HEGEL

Hegel was a major figure in German idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality was revolutionary at the time and a major factor in the development of some radical threads of left-wing political thought.

Hegel was born on 27 August 1770, in Stuttgart, Germany. He studied philosophy and classics at Tubingen, and after graduation became a tutor and explored theology. Hegel taught at Heidelberg and Berlin, where he wrote and explored philosophical and theological concepts.

His major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit (or mind), was published in 1807 and his ideas developed in other deeply complex works until his death, from cholera, in 1831.

Almost everything that Hegel was to develop over the rest of his life is prefigured in the Phenomenology, but the work is far from systematic and generally accepted as difficult to read. The Phenomenology attempts to present human history, with all its revolutions, wars and scientific discoveries, as an idealistic self-development of an objective Spirit or Mind.

His mark on history has been profound, in that his influence has spread throughout both left- and right- wing political thought. In fact, the interpreters of Hegel split into “left” and “right” camps. Marx drew inspiration from Hegel by developing the idea that history and reality should be viewed dialectically and that the process of change – the struggle – should be seen as a transition from the fragmentary towards the complete. This is a skewed development of what Hegel tried to suggest in phenomenology. However, in practical terms it is likely that Hegel may have approved of Marx’s revolutionary interpretation, as he was witness at close hand to revolutionary Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century. It is even said that he celebrated Bastille Day every year.

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Arts, Books, Culture, History

Book Review: On Savage Shores

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: How indigenous Americans discovered Europe

IN 1528, Hernan Cortes, the Spanish conquistador, returned home from his travels in South America with “a large group of Nahua nobles”, along with entertainers, tumblers, dwarves, jaguars and an armadillo.

He also brought a team of about a dozen men who played a game of ullamaliztli, “the traditional Mesoamerican ball game”. They were brought home for the entertainment of the King of Spain. In the words of one Spanish observer, the ball itself was “made from the sap of certain trees and other mixtures, which made the ball bounce greatly”.

Caroline Dodds Pennock’s utterly original new book, On Savage Shores, is full of such remarkable stories.

Her aim is to show us a kind of mirror-image of our familiar history: not of Western travellers in the New World, but of the remarkable number of native Americans who also made it over here. There were far more of them than most of us realised, and among other things, they may have introduced us to the joys of the bouncing rubber ball.

But in this great and often tragic clash of cultures, there are inevitably sadder stories of people lost, uprooted, or stricken with strange new diseases.

In 1576, the English explorer, Martin Frobisher, lost five of his crewmen, perhaps murdered, off the coast of Baffin Island, northern Canada. A year later he returned, still hoping to find his lost men – along with the legendary North West Passage to the Indies.

TOUCHING FRAGMENTS

AS a kind of bargaining chip, he seized a native man, woman and her baby, and brought them back to Bristol in October 1577. The Inuits’ names were Kalicho, Arnaq and Nutaaq, the baby’s name meaning, “Someone New”.

Pennock says Kalicho quickly became a local celebrity. Portraying the image of an Inuit hunter in Elizabethan Bristol, she writes: “Paddling up and down the river Avon at high tide in his canoe, and hunting ducks with bow and harpoon.”

Their lives were not long ones, however – nor were Elizabethan lives generally. Kalicho fell ill, tended by one Dr Edward Dodding, and died singing hymns “like the swan who foresees what good there is in death”. He was buried in St Stephen’s, Bristol, along with Arnaq, who probably died of measles.

Little Nutaaq was sent to London but had probably contracted measles as well. He was buried after only eight days in the churchyard of St Olave’s, in the City of London.

It is a touching fragment. But, as with so many stories uncovered here, it offers only a glimpse. Of the inner thoughts and lives of our New World visitors, we know nothing. Did they even want to go back? It’s unclear.

The author claims they were marginalised, silenced or even “erased” by their European hosts. A much more likely explanation is that they didn’t record such things in writing. Incidentally, we know barely anything of Shakespeare’s views and opinions, either.

Closer to us in time is the superbly sardonic account written by a Chippewa chieftain, Maungwudaus, who was part of a travelling show in the 19th century.

He was distinctly unimpressed by the apparent fragility of English gentlewomen: “English women cannot walk alone; they must always be assisted by the men.”

They are brought to the tea table “like sick women”, where they hold their knives and forks with two forefingers and thumb, the other two fingers of each hand “sticking out like fish-spears”.

Priceless. But the gentlemen fare little better, their luxuriant Victorian moustaches making them appear “as if they had black squirrels’ tails sticking out on each side of their mouths”.

The thorough-going bias of the book is tiresome. Pennock rightly criticises the old habit of calling native Americans “savages”, and then in the title applies it herself – to Europe!

An even-handed account would have been much better, with all those centuries of misunderstandings and conflicts, followed by treaties and other trade agreements.

One might prefer the account of Sir Walter Raleigh and his devoted native manservant, Harry, for an example of how people can transcend their narrow views and prejudices and become simply friends.

When Raleigh fell from grace in 1603 and was confined to the Tower, an indigenous man known only as Harry stayed with him for two years as his manservant. Later, it seems, Harry was given his freedom and returned home to the Americas.

When Raleigh was finally freed in 1616, he sailed again, “in one last search for gold and glory”.

Arriving at the mouth of the Cayenne River, “I sent my barge ashore to enquire for my servant Harry the Indien [sic]”.

Harry duly arrived with enough provisions for the English for at least a week. Raleigh, somewhat sick from the exhausting voyage, was carried kindly ashore and rested in a tent, eating pineapples, roasted peccary and armadillo.

He records his deep gratitude at “being fedd and assisted by the Indyans of my ould acquaintance with a greate deal of love and respect [sic]”.

As such anecdotes show, history is multi-faceted, and people are complicated.

Sometimes European colonists cruelly chained and enslaved native Americans; sometimes they actually rescued them, as the author hurriedly admits, from being sacrificed and even eaten by their own people.

Retrospective finger-wagging, or dividing the historical past into Goodies and Baddies, is just daft. Still, if you can put up with the authorial one-sidedness, there is much to learn and enjoy in this unusual history of a forgotten corner of our past.

– On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock is published by Weidenfeld, 320pp

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Aid, Arts, Government, Society, United Nations

It is the poor who bear the brunt when calamities strike

SYRIA-TURKEY EARTHQUAKES

Intro: Far too often, “recovery efforts” and international aid do not reach those who need it most

THE massive earthquakes which struck southern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6 inflicted ghastly damage across a geographic region that has already borne a great deal of earthly devastation in recent decades. The ongoing war in Syria has produced millions of refugees, many of whom find themselves victims of seismic activity in the Turkish south.

The death toll from this week’s quakes quickly jumped into the thousands and will no doubt soar to far more. An untold number of people remain buried beneath the rubble. Traumatised survivors contend with frigid temperatures and the aftershocks, and refugees contend with the loss of any semblance of refuge.

The natural disaster has served once again to underscore what should hardly by earth-shattering news: that life for the global poor is extremely precarious and plagued by multiple, simultaneous crises from which recovery is often futile.

The dwellings inhabited by the have-nots are structurally less reliable and potentially more vulnerable to tectonic tumult – as was seen, for example, in the Peruvian earthquake of 2007, when homes collapsed across impoverished neighbourhoods in the province of Ica. But in a world structured upon capitalist foundations, precarity goes much deeper than shoddy construction materials or a blatant disregard for building codes.

For a start, capitalism’s insistence on acute inequality and the tyranny of an elite minority means there are major global fault lines between rich and poor – ones that are becoming ever more pronounced in the era of climate change and ecological calamity. And while aid pledges and donations inevitably pour in after high profile disasters, they often only exasperate the divide by lining the pockets of the aid industry rather than benefiting the disaster-stricken areas themselves.

There is also the stark realisation that, for much of the world’s precarious population, life constitutes more-or-less a continuous disaster, but one that generates no attention. In June last year, The New Humanitarian news agency noted gross disparities in disaster relief, with almost half of all emergency funding for 2022 “going to only five protracted – and largely conflict-driven – crises”. Citing a recent United Nations estimate that the number of annual disasters will increase to 560 by the year 2030, the agency described how victims of under-the-radar disasters are often forced to remain in unsafe locations – thereby setting the scene for new crises.

Let’s take the case of Afghanistan, where an ongoing dependence on aid has done nothing to make the country safe. Last August, floods killed more than 180 people, just two months after an earthquake had killed more than 1,000. Save the Children, an NGO, reported that the country was suffering its “worst hunger crisis on record”, with nearly 50 per cent of the population going hungry on account of a raging drought and continuing economic breakdown.

Such are the toxic legacies of more than two decades of a US-led “war on terror” that devastated the lives, livelihoods and futures of millions of Afghans and sucked in billions of dollars of “recovery funds”.

For a further illustration of how politics, greed and mismanagement overlap with and compound environmental catastrophe, we need look no further than the Caribbean nation of Haiti, where in 2021 a devastating 7.2 magnitude earthquake was followed by a deadly storm and landslides. More than 2,200 people were killed and some 130,000 homes destroyed, in addition to a number of schools and hospitals.

This came just over a decade after a 2010 earthquake killed 220,000 people and rendered 1.5 million homeless. Only a smidgen of the billions of dollars that flowed in to rescue Haiti actually reached poor Haitian earthquake victims. The bulk of the aid went to aid organisations, security forces, and other supposedly competent bodies – like the UN peacekeepers who promptly unleashed a cholera epidemic upon the nation.

During the ensuing years, US support for official corruption in Haiti has made the terrain extra fertile for political crisis, while further eroding the country’s ability to respond to natural disasters.

Things are getting more precarious by the minute, as capitalism breaks new ground in the field of obliterating all aspirations toward a common humanity or planetary wellbeing – and the “disaster relief” industry concerns itself with maintaining its own viability while poor communities lurch from one disaster to the next.

While the rich insulate themselves from the fallout, the poor bear the brunt of military conflict, economic upheaval, climate-related havoc, and the coronavirus pandemic. It has left the have-nots on even shakier ground.

As with all other present earthly afflictions, this week’s quakes in Turkey and Syria will hit the poor the hardest. A total seismic shift in a world where profit for the few means precarity for the many is urgently needed.

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