h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Sounds very Assyrian to me - those societies existed for many millenia prior to Marx and they certainly gave a lot."

Well certainly according to Genesis Abram of Ur of Chaldea felt that he and his were having to give too much in order to be able to live in what was then a great Metropolis with its Ziggurats and priestly precincts all demanding offerings to the various Gods in a very uncertain world. Abram took his whole tribe to live a nomadic life, but, like the Prophet Mohammed, what they were doing is developing the trade potential of the "Middle Man" across the Middle East- and with that developing the use of highly portable wealth in "jewellry", which they also used in the worship of their own Gods. It could be argued that the ongoing tragedies of Jewish History with periods of "Babylonish" and Egyptian captivity, the long exile of homeless aliens and the ongoing problems of Israel are all consequent upon that initial opting for a "Rolling Stone" existence.

But rather like the Merchant Adventurers of England and then Great Britain, they made their money by trading things of value produced and invented by others in the great Civilizations bordering the regions they traversed, as well as those with which those great port cities traded.

Then the English and the British invented how to make these imported high value goods more cheaply through the Industrial Revolution, which became Britain's great export to the world. But, because of the built in obsolescence of Science and Technology, (a) places with equally low levels of popular culture to the British (but lower expectations in terms of Human Rights and Liberty) have been able to undercut the old British industries, while (b) countries with higher expectations of culture and education have been able to produce new goods and new technologies leaving the British feeling aggrieved at the loss of their status. To some extent modern Germany since the 1860's has variously been both (a) and (b)


Amongst the aggrieved Britons perhaps that sense is most noticeable among some Scots who always knew that they were the basis of the cultural elite within the UK. And are now suffering from being tied to a culturally impoverished England.

Cass

Maria

Apologies I did not see your post. Perhaps what I have written goes some way to answering.. Take the example of the Five Towns that became known as Stoke.

Josiah Wedgwood a local potter realised that there was a great demand for Chinaware imported from China to all the great stately homes and palaces of Europe. He personally found and developed the ways and means to produce equally good porcelain in the Stoke region where there was a tradition of artisan potters. The Wedwood factory became a huge and successful enterprise producing a full range of chinaware that suited all kinds of purses and budgets. e.g. Katherine the Great of Russia had a huge hand painted dinner service produced by Wedgwood Potteries, but such goods could also come within the range of the "common people". The huge growth of the Staffordshire Potteries made the five towns grow so much that they became one city providing employment for an ever-growing population. It was the kind of thing that meant that with industrialization the British economy provided employment that allowed the UK population to double in 100 years, a population growth that historians also attribute in part to the health benefits of new products like glazed porcelain that was much easier to keep clean than old stone- and earthenware.

In fact the economic transformation made possible by the use of English wealth in promoting global trade does seem to have coincided with a growth in population in many areas with "working class" families in particular profiting from greater longevity, and in particular significant falls in infant and child mortality. This was all so heavily linked to the benefits of free trade- as promoted by Adam Smith- that this became a British mantra until the 1930's.

Almost a hundred years before, however, population growth without either domestic economic growth, or a feeling of community between the "common people" and the "ruling class", resulted in the over-exploitation of the potato plots in Ireland, the terrible blights that became endemic because of monoculture and over-exploitation, and the tragedy of the famines because of the largely unbridgeable gulf of mutual hostility between the Roman Catholic and the Protestant populations.. It was such Irish feelins amongst the large Irish immigrant communities in Lancashire that Frederick Engels desribed as part of the "new order" that made it possible to portray the old Irish religious wars as just another "class war" in which "the workers" had always been held down to be "mere hewers and drawers of water".

But in fact it was the initial purchasing power of the English common people that actually made it seem worthwhile for people to try to find ways and means of producing for popular consumption the kind of luxury goods that were being imported from the much more advanced economies of Asia.

Cass

>>And are now suffering from being tied to a culturally impoverished England.<<

What utter rubbish.

>>>>And are now suffering from being tied to a culturally impoverished England.<< <<

>>What utter rubbish.<<

I do get the impression that more English people claim to be British than English ... and proud to be British than English. It seems that many see "Englishness" as an embarrasment. It may be wrong but I do get this impression of others. In comparison Scots tend to be proud Scots, Welsh proud Welsh etc.

What wonderful cultural stuff has religion/spirituality given us?

alt.flame.relgion



PS: Don't know if that usenet group ever existed but it would be cool if it had!

>I do get the impression that more English people claim to be British than English ... and proud to be British than English. It seems that many see "Englishness" as an embarrassment. It may be wrong but I do get this impression of others. In comparison Scots tend to be proud Scots, Welsh proud Welsh etc.<

You are just talking about impressions without giving any examples. I don't know anyone who is embarrassed to be English. Where I live there are many races and cultures. They are connected to their cultural roots..and they know I am. We can share as equals and it enriches all of us. The cross of St. George has been re-claimed around here..and only a few extremists live in their fantasy world of it signifying something racist or extremist..or trot off to their EDL nonsense. The right as usual try paracitisize where they can.

Carrabean people freely use the word 'English' to refer to me.

The media have made a big thing this year I noticed with getting interviews with folk parroting, 'proud to be British' at the Jubilee thing...now they do it with the Olympics. But it bears very little relationship to my real life experience.

I think we are living through a transition era..and its quite confusing at times...but I'm not embarrassed by my love of the English poetical tradition which is deeply connected to landscape...qand now more people of all races want to learn about that because they feel the same connection with the homeland of their grandparents etc. We can share.

But my area is just one little 'village' amongst many many in England...and I wouldn't presume that my 'impressions' have any sort of universality really.

But I do find h2g2 stiflingly 'British' quite often. I'm not going over that again though as I've brought it up a few times before. I can stay or go if it all gets too much for me...and it is getting that way for me here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/jun/13/britishidentity.ameliahill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people#Relationship_to_Britishness
http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/06/30/england-and-the-st-georges-cross-writing-english-identity-on-the-flag/
etc

Well I tend to agree with Matthew Arnold who argued that England had benefitted from distancing itself from the terrible "Pandorra's Box" that opened in Europe with the Renaissance and Reformation. The conflict between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism for "the way ahead" for Europe produced a period of disaster which the English managed to avoid thanks to English traditions of commonsense, in spite of the best efforts of Stuart Kings and Scottish lackeys to bring England into the European fold, as happened with the religious conflicts in Scotland and Ireland.

Because of "English Peace" England was able to hold off the European tyrannies and become the basic foundation for a State that was dedicated to concepts of peace, mutual toleration, the Rights of Man and the Sovereignty of the People. In 1948 S.B. Chrimes "Reader in Constitutional History in the University of Glasgow" wrote " Just as some peoples of the past are renowned still for their contributions to human achievements, such as Greece in the sphere of art, literature, and philosophy; Rome in the sphere of law; Israel in religion; so England, we may surmise, will be identified with the art and practice of government in ages yet to come".

Unfortunately the cost of creating the United Kingdom was the need to have a convergence of English ideas and traditions of government with those of Scotland and Ireland, which has left us with a people that no longer have sovereignty and in which many people expect the State to support them and their communities, when T.B. Macaulay, in praising the English tradition that his Scots ancestors had espoused, said that everyone knows that it is the people who support the government- not the other way round.

This modern idea that the people can depend upon the possibility first created by the English National Debt that a State can borrow on future expectations and therefore spend now the wealth that is yet to be produced lies at the heart of the modern economic crisis.

But T. B. Macaulay who began the educational revolution in India would have agreed with Matthew Arnold that by the 1850's-1860's English progress based upon commonsense and native wit, without any real education or learning, was at a serious disadvantage compared with countries like France and Germany which already had national schooling systems. The proof Macaulay argued was there in what happened to the Scots after they started their own educational revolution in 1699. From being the lowest people in Europe, by the middle of the Nineteenth Century, he said, the Scotsman was in the top position, or the second in any part of British society, economics, politics etc. And indeed the Scots have a proud record of being the inventors and developers in fields that actually required in depth education.

The English have been - for most of my life and teaching career- quite happy to "Buy in" such expertise and performance ability from abroad- with the Olympics on at the moment a case like Laura Robson being just one of many: Elena Baltacha too for that matter.

Cass

Here you can listen to some songs produced in
the medieval Spain by the three cultures
that could live together for much time,
Jew, Christianity and Islam:
http://youtu.be/R8s0Qqd0sjg

The instruments are reproductions of the original ones.
The lyrics represent different
languages spoken in those times,
galaico-portugués, sephardí...


The songs are about friendship, love,
the virgin Mary (Cantigas de Santa María)...


Nevertheless, I´m pretty sure that art
would have been produced anyway, with
or without the religion. Art is wired in
humans, consider those pieces of pottery from neolithic...

but... I remember now that some anthropologists
say that religion is also wired and point at those ancient graves...

Thank you for that link, Maria. The music is wonderful and so transporting somehow to that time. It made me feel happy.

Maybe it's 'story' that is hardwired. I mean that in its widest sense. We can only approach reality through our biological organs indirectly, so in a sense everything is a sort of story.

Here's a link to the 'Mappa Mundi' in Hereford cathedral. It is more than just an apparent medieval concept of the geographical world..but is also about the world inside us.

http://www.herefordcathedral.org/visit-us/mappa-mundi-1/

Thanks for those links Maria and Effers. The Mappa Mudi seems to be an example of Gesamtkunstwerk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesamtkunstwerk

I feel I should mention at this point that the Mappa Mundi is entirely symbolic and was always intended as such... nothing at all to do with the Medieval perception of the geographical world, although it is often thought of as such which gave rise to the myth that Medieval scholars thought the world was flat.

> nothing at all to do with the Medieval perception of the geographical world,<

How can you be so certain Mr. D? I'd always heard it was both because like many cultures still today the medieval mind perceived the connection between outer and inner and that the very stuff of the world..landscape and seascape are connected to the stuff we are made of.

It's only relatively recently that a hard and fast distinction has been made between inner and outer. Personally I can't relate to that though. I have a strong sense of connection between inner and outer. That was something I learnt a very little about from Australian aboriginal culture...My mind wasn't really able to grasp it though as I have grown up in modern western culture.

But I really must visit it sometime..to be actually in the same physical space as the object.

The thing is that even by the crude standards of the Middle Ages mappae mundi are pretty useless as navigational aids, which is pretty much the purpose of a geographical map. They were symbolic representations of the known world and the treasures contained there in, with Jerusalem at the centre and (space permitting) various other bits intended to help the observer with knowledge and learning; they were more like pictoral encyclopedias than maps as we know them.

There is simply no evidence that they were supposed to represent the world in geographic terms. Compare this map of Britain from c. 1360 http://instructors.dwrl.utexas.edu/taylor/node/46 with the representation of Britain from the Hereford mappa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hereford_Mappa_Mundi_detail_Britain.jpg. In the first, Britain is clearly recognisable, if a little wonky (due to lack of modern surveying techniques, etc.) whereas in the mappa no attempt has been made at all to give an accurate shape to the island... only around 60 years separates the two works, which given the pace of the developlement of Medival knowledge isn't really that long, and during that time none of the things which alledgedly shewed Medieval scholars the error of their thinking regarding the shape of the world had happened (and still wouldn't for over a century).

The mappae mundi apparenty show a flat Earth but Medieval scholars already knew the Earth was not flat so why portray it as such if not for purely symbolic reasons?

(as an aside I like how the map of Britain seems to have much less effort put into it the farther north it goes, you can almost hear the illustrators saying "well, it's just a bunch of mountains and savages up there, so let's not bother" )

But you're taking it literally..Would you say Australian dreamings, which are maps connected with important sites on landscape to show where certain foods are found and contain 'directions'...but are also deeply sacred and spiritual are just not to do with 'mapping'?

Not all maps of landscape and terrain..big areas or small..have to views from above as it were.

Any yes that's a different tradition...but artists in our culture make abstracted maps that don't look literally like something you'd see in an atlas.

I don't know I'm right or am arguing with you...this kind of knowledge isn't easy to sum up traditionally in academic textbook..you need to have a cultural contact to try to understand, but yes also read books...also use your own instincts. Much of this knowledge has been hidden and repressed, as were aboriginal ideas. Indeed they got so fed up with being understood when white fella arrived they kept much knowledge to do with understanding the dreamings hidden...and still do.

You maybe more right than me Mr.D. But this convo is fun to explore ways of looking at it.

Hmm... I think we may be working on different interpretations of 'literally'. To me taking mappae mundi literally would require the thought that they're not just symbolic.

Can't really comment on the Aboriginal Dreaming , as it's not something I've particularly studied...

And yeah, I have seen that modern artists also do abstract maps, but those are also meant to be symbolic rather than geographic, surely?

(another aside: I think I want to try doing a Mappa Mundi for the world the LRP game I mainly play is set in, that'd be an awesome project).

>> England, we may surmise, will be identified with the art and practice of government in ages yet to come". <<

Henry VIII I am read to believe was a catholic but his desire for a male heir and his "instinct" for his progeny to rule after him took precedence over his hegemony to the pope. It also allowed him to take for himself the wealth accrued in the monasteries. Thomas Cromwell seems to have been Henry's great fixer until Henry fixed Cromwell over his poor choice of match making (apparently?).

The English / British Empire was a strange construct - effectively British companies grabbing large tranches of land and native labourer - slaves around the globe for the purpose of making money. They also appropriated cultural resources, relocated them elsewhere in the form of plantations plus relocated cheap / slave labour to work these plantations. One certainly gets the impression that history can be understood through a materialistic lens. However the British, with Scots engineering and genius did help to usher in the modern era.

Well, if I dare to get the convo off the subject of England and back to the part of Map , Effers have you read Maps by Nuruddin Farah - a prize winning Somali author? It is truly fascinating but not a light read. What does growing up in Somali do to young men and women. It is a brilliant novel. In addition to being post-colonialist it presents a picture of a very complicated cultural picture of a rogue nation.

I hope that the situation in Somali is improving. I know from the BBC that the capital conditions are here is an item on the new constitution .

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-19099442

DG and I met a lovely young man from Somalia when we taught English in Germany. He spoke English with an Italian accent from having been brought up where Mussolini had taken over. He told us of the joys of drinking camel milk and how poor people ate lobster and how he was one of 21 children born to one of the four wives of his father.

No I haven't read that Electra, but it sounds up my street; one of many books I probably won't get around to reading, but am pleased exists.

Yes maps. In my youth I did a big trip all around the east of Turkey. We visited many of the former Greek city states. One of them, Miletus was a centre of learning and culture which was important in the rise of rational and sceptical thought...the historian Heradotus was very contemptuous of Hecataeus. They both made 'whirled maps'. And yes Heradotus' map was indeed more accurate.

He said as a dig at Hecateus.

'I laugh when I see that many have designed maps of the earth, yet no one has been able to present the matter in an intelligent way. They draw an Ocean flowing round the earth, which they present as exactly circular, and they make Asia equal in size to Europe.
[Herodotus, Histories 4.36]

from,

http://www.livius.org/he-hg/hecataeus/hecataeus.htm

The link has little drawings of their two world maps. Poor old Hecateus also tried to systematise the impossible convolutions of Greek myths. But that was the dawning cultural atmosphere in Miletus..which we see the continuation of in our own future with its roots in the Graeco Roman tradition.

For myself when visiting, I was mostly taken with the statue of Meander, the Greek god of rivers. The river Meander..flowed close by and was noted for its impossibly convoluted meanders, (as we now use that word).

http://www.livius.org/a/turkey/miletus/miletus_faustina_thermae2.JPG

And there are some myths of Meander having an underground connection with the river Alpha

Err that should be west of Turkey. Fine geographer I'd be