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

PS (having realised that I posted too much of my letter--and pressed the complain button.. perhaps the moderators will do something)

But coming back to your "I certainly agree with your view that the Enlightenment failed to discover or invent any overarching principle that would extend the scientific method to the realm of socio-political phenomena." Again that is not quite right.. One of the bits that I extracted is all about the thesis put forward by T.B. Macaulay in his piece on History for the Edinburgh Review in 1828, in which he argued that the literature of the past 50 years had provided the basic answers and understanding, but that it needed to be married with the English genius for government by the Westminster Parliament.. He could look forward to the completing of the process of reform begun in what I have called the "unidentified English Revolution" of 1780-83.. The reform of parliament when complete would bring such young men as he into the Commons, and they would set up the process by which all the problems facing GB and Ireland would be carefully examined, information gathered, and then there would be genuine debates that would find the remedies.. The first fruits were a bit too radical, and Peel issued his Tamworth Manifesto putting forward the merits of "conservative" change, which led the Whigs to embrace "Liberal" change.. and it was the success of this approach that encouraged other countries (nb France, Russia, Germany and the USA) to believe that they could "fast-track" things a little bit because of the absence of the Parliamentary tradition and the presence of a tradition of Enlightened Despotism....When I wrote to Cameron I probably recommended him to look at "Disraelian Conservatism" by Paul Smith (1967) which found much to praise in that era, while heralding it as an essential step towards the inevitability of the Welfare State.. But was it "inevitable"? A few years earlier Dr. Kitson Clarke speaking about "The Making of Victorian England" quoted the Red Queen to Alice "My it takes all the running you can do to stay in one place"... He applied it to the magnificent response of the private sector to the challenge laid down in 1870 to provide a school place for every child, failing which the state would step in....But the challenge was based on a feeling that GB had to catch up with Prussia/Germany and give up English traditions and wisdoms for German ones...In 1913 George Macaulay Trevelyan (TBM's nephew) wrote a piece celebrating that this worship of things Prussian might be over, because of the Algiras Crisis of 1911, when Germany backed down from the Great War...Just another false dawn... But there have been some...

Cheers

Cass

Correction? I think that GMT may have been TBM's "great nephew"

CASSEROLEON:

I'm rather struggling to make sense of post 61; are you saying that it's not quite right that the Enlightenment failed in that project or that your view is different? Macaulay's opinion that fifty years of literature provided basic answers and understanding, renowned historian though he was, can hardly carry any weight given his almost Panglossian faith in the superiority of English progress. The ongoing debate in political philosophy over the grounds for a rational political principle would suggest his optimism was misplaced.

Chris

Well his optimism was very much in the light of the striking contrast between England in 1848-1851..I think that he returned to politics at Edinburgh around then, having perhaps done the work in India that is the foundation of the present Indian Economic Miracle, and made exactly that contrast.. And it was a belief in progress that was perhaps taken to heart too much in the continental spaces of Germany, Russia and the USSR where absolute central powers embraced "the Industrial Revolution" as the way to rapidly increase production and become the world saviours who would increase food production so much that the fears of Malthusian disasters of war famine and disease would not materialise... What they achieved was the destruction of the prosperous "working class"...And the mid-Victorian belief that the freeborn working man could raise himself by his own efforts, as could the lower middle class...The vast exploitation of continental spaces made safe for Capital Investment by purely Machiavellian use of Armed Force crushed the British world, but at the expense of creating a world that normalised world war...The Peace of Versailles tried to acknowledge this and change to a world that could know peace and prosperity... As we are currently living with a mild case of deflation we can begin to understand the impact of the way that the growth of those 3 superpowers reduced the global price of everything that could be got from the land (food, raw materials and commodities) by an average of 30% between 1870 and 1914.. It destroyed not only England's Green and Pleasant Land, but meant that freed African American and Indian slaves could never make a living, as well as poor white who settled on the land in the USA, and meant that Russian serfs who were given State mortgages with which to buy the land they needed to support themselves had not been able to actually pay off the loans by 1917. But the military power of the State establishments, and the basic sense of American, German and Russian identity saw violence and conflict, the great war machines that their continental spaces could support could keep them safe by terrorising any challenge from within or without....If you wish to understand the optimism of the Age of Progress I would recommend "The Age of Paradox. A Biography of England 1841-1851" written by John. W. Dodds in 1953...He is an American and he reads like one of those who must have come over during the war and just could not believe how this understated "David Niven" type of England had been able to stand alone against the might of Germany. The French intellectual Simone Weil was over here in 1942-3 too , and fell in love with England, where there was so much kindliness and good humour... So Dodds work is very American, and like many books I acquire it had to stay on my shelves for years before it got its turn...But in a way it is so quintessentially English in basically ignoring "Big Men" or rather mentioning them as just at the same level as "little men". And he just produces a vast amount of material year by year from 1841, Hard Times in GB and Europe, and just I presume trawled through all the press reports month by month, as you see the whole mood and nature of English life change ....


And he ends: In this accession of confidence it is best to leave the early Victorian- in their hopes, bedded with some lingering apprehensions, in their cupidities and philanthropies, their intellectual and emotional confusions, and their very real wisdom. If they have a comfortable sense that they are not as other people they mean it as a tribute to English character and not as a reflection upon God's handiwork elsewhere. Peace was here, and prosperity, and a queen still young was on the throne..."... But that had a great deal to do with the way that the English people had worked out how to keep the powers and ambitions of the Crown limited to just what was needed to preserve the peace at home and abroad. Something that the Welsh, Scots and Irish in these islands had never managed to do.. There is an real art involved in government which for example S.B.Chrimes of Glasgow University acknowledged as the particular genius of the English people in his "English Constitutional History" written in 1948...

PS.. Will now Copy just in case.. Are you doing that now.. It saves a lot of grief.

Cheers

Cass

Perhaps to just point to the "rational political principle".

By and large when the Reformed Parliament of 1832 began to look at the serious problems raised by the Age of Revolution they concluded that really so many of them came from the lack of any local government structures in place in the "populous districts" that were not too dissimilar from the "Jungle in Calais"..

Places like Liverpool Manchester and in fact the vast majority of the great industrial cities which were magnets as they always are, had no structures for urban government, and indeed were anxious to get the power to tackle their own problems.. The basis of English democracy has long been getting legal sanction from Parliament so that what each town or village wants to do can be done in the name of the law.. So the same local pride that got the businessmen of Liverpool and Manchester to get together to invest in the Grand Experimental Railway between these two massive "populous districts" was also reflected in the special powers for civic improvement that Liverpool got from parliament in 1829, which then led to the creation of a whole new process that created Cities where cities had never been. So they could have proper and effective local government. And then they looked at the new cities and the medieval ones and realised that all property was private, there were no public or communal facilities. So the modern Urban powerhouse was generated along with that passionate civic pride that (as you mention religion) makes football the religion in so many of those industrial towns and boroughs.. The whole British railway system was built on an "inter-city basis" as city after city wanted to get "on the map"... And the Great Exhibition of 1851 was a London City project with Londoners inviting the workers of the whole world to send their best work to this "Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All the Nations".. And the civic pride of all the great cities of Victorian Britain insisted that their city should (a) raise funds to support the project which would be a shop window for the whole of Britain, and (B) naturally enough made sure that they had their own local staple products to put on display so that their own citizens who travelled up via Thomas Cook could see their own city taking its place with pride.

It was a world destroyed by countries that did not play fair or recognise the human rights of other people, which the coverage of 1914 in 2014 chose to ignore. AS G.D.H. Cole wrote in 1933 in his guide to the World Chaos the pressure on British Society exerted by authoritarian and militaristic Germany, where the people could be hammered into submission and a world of only following orders, in a state capable of supporting slavery and genocide ( which meant all three superpowers) had created a widespread mood of "it is us or them", and Left Wing Irish, Scots and Welsh were inclined to believe that the "them" was the English ruling class, but most of the English thought it was the Germans because without them the mid Victorian road ahead would probably have worked...

There is now an increasing consensus that the urban powerhouse is "the way ahead", many Economists pointing to Singapore as a City State, and the current Chinese revolution seems to be based on super-cities rather than massive over-arching nationwide economic structures.

Cass

Simplex Sigillum Veri part 1

Having spent some time this weekend reviewing your articles and the backlog of this conversation, I have come to the conclusion that we are approaching this question from two pespectives that have several differences but also many similarities. Therefore I think that it would be profitable to explore these differences and similarities more directly; as you say in post 11, "unless we find what our collective future vision is going to be we will never harness all the drive and energy that the world needs so badly". In order to facilitate this I would like to start by making a clear statement of the ideological background informing my view that we should remain members of the EU and work towards the original guiding principle of ever-closer political union.

(part two follows shortly, I hope)

part 2

My experience of school was not a happy one and it has taken many years for me to understand both that this was because of the fear generated by being trapped in an institution filled with irrational creatures (no not the teachers, the children!) and that mine was not the universal experience of school (I'm now married to someone who enjoyed school so much that she became a teacher). Consequently I hated being forced to take part in team activities like football etc., and found refuge in running (yes, Alan Sillitoe's Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner will play a part in this story later) and philosophy. Also, unlike you, I failed my 11+ so I went to the local high school where physical survival was never guaranteed and university was never mentioned but I did eventually gain a place at college on the strength of my art work. At 19 I dropped out of art college, as was fashionable at the time, and emigrated to Australia after which I spent many years travelling the world and doing many different sorts of jobs before finally making the decision to go to university and study philosophy properly.

Here it became apparent that my view of school was not the only experience that I had mistakenly assumed everyone else shared; the existentialist view that every individual is alone in an alien world and must fill their existence with a meaning of their own choosing had always seemed quite normal to me and it came as a great surprise just how many of my fellow students found it either terrifying or simply not understandable. I was also surprised to find so many people who felt a genuine sense of national identity.

Now, my point in writing this is not to bore you with an unremarkable personal history but to illustrate the concepts that provide the foundations for my opinions on the future of the EU, some of which appear in my article here A5140829, which deals with ideas I know you are very familiar with. It's deliberately sketchy as I intended it to provoke a debate about postmodernism which of course it failed to do; however, it serves as a reasonable starting point.

(part 3 follows shortly)

Hi Chris

Interesting stuff... The key part of what you write about the EU is that people should work to make it work.. And my point of view will probably end up being that it is the job of the English to show them the way, because they can not do it.. This is heavily based on my own personal experience of having been married to France for 50 years: and after about 40 years of marriage when my wife was even crazier than usual thanks to medication that was supposed to be helping her to stop smoking, my mother-in-law said to me after 60 years of her own married life that in France they say that men and women were just not made to be able to live together... In fact it seems to me that "co-habitation" is fairly common.. and often seen as an ideal... You may have seen those French films where wives expect their husbands to have mistresses so that they can get on with life...One thinks of the English "open-marriages" of people like Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West..

And your man alone thing is something that I am just writing about in part two, which has taken Martin Luther's famous "Here I stand. I can do no other", which has been adopted as the rationale for exactly the scenario that you have described. Luther is reckoned to have created this idea that Man stands alone before God, as just an individual, an atom of creation, which means that those who do not believe in God are just an isolated life force... But this understanding of Luther does not really take account of who he was and how his reality was shaped by the "German problem", which I will be going on to.. For Western History conventionally has seen the Mediterranean as the Centre.. ignoring the Baltic which has had a life of its own... And, in fact, the present crisis owed a great deal to the re-emergence of a German Superpower which brought a great new economic impetus so that, as in Ancient Rome all the work and the wealth Creation was getting centres up on the Baltic, with the whole Mediterranean region being run in order to create retirement and leisure homes, where Greeks Italians etc. can make a living out of prolonging their life as "backward peoples" who make a nice back-drop for holidays back to the olden days... But German resentment over the begging and other normal things that go along with tourism based on a wide gulf between rich and poor, now blown up into the level of the EU itself may well trigger another German backlash, unless David Cameron can convince Merkel and others that English gradualism is "the way ahead".

Cheers

Cass

PS

Perhaps I should also add to what I have said about the French that having chosen to teach in Inner City Comprehensives determined not to perpetuate the problems that you had in your own childhood, but also I suppose drawing on my own experience that children must be motivated to learn if they are to make progress and fulfil their potential that "work" had become a four letter word in the UK too...My elder brother had an RAF career as an Electrician before returning to civvy street and not too long before he died 10 years ago, in his last job using his skills management came to tell him that he was making the rest of the workers unhappy, because he made them look bad... So, as they had made the place "No Smoking", and sadly he still smoked (probably killed him), he offered to take a 15 minute break every hour to have a walk... And that kept everyone "happy"... Except that the German firm for who they were making their product realized that some machines were much better than all the rest, and asked if they could only have those.. They were of course those made by my brother...It was his last job as an electrician because the firm went bust...

Cass

CASSEROLEON:

Sorry for the delay but real life interrupted my train of thought. However, your reply is fortuitous as the next part went on to detail why my feeling any nationalist element to my identity has in a way made it easier for me to analyse why nationalism has been so important in the modern world and why it should disappear in the postmodern world. So I won't type in what I'd written but reply to your post instead.

It's fascinating that your post combines strict gender categorisation with a nationalist analysis. One of the good things about being a natural existentialist (and the next part is about the impossibility of deciding whether I was born like that or made) is tending not to see individuals defined by categories of gender, race, nationality etc., but taking people as you find them.

So, yes, it is possible to look at Luther's ideas from a nationalist point of view but it's also possible to choose to see Luther as part of a much wider movement. Basically what I'm saying here is that replacing the parochial universality of Catholicism with national identity certainly allowed the Enlightenment room to take off but at the same time it also tied it to the ground. As the contradictions inherent in the Enlightenment manifest themselves in the problems we find in the structure of society there is almost bound to be a movement towards restructuring society with a new universality that leaves behind the need for artificial national barriers.

Now, I know that this probably all sounds like airy-fairy nonsense but change does happen. In my first week at university in 1988, in a modern history lecture, the lecturer asked everyone which bits of history we were particularly interested in; some said the French Revolution, others the First World War but one student, tongue-tied at being asked to speak in public, got confused and instead of saying German Unification in 1866 said German Reunification and of course we all fell about laughing much to his embarrassment. I think it was less than a year later that the Berlin wall came down.

Hi Chris

But by and large it is only the English or "Anglo-Saxons" who have believed in "taking people as they find" them, and perhaps even and especially Oxford and the "Green and Pleasant Land"-- and it is interesting to note that your individual consciousness (like mine) has been shaped by "the West Country" and in your case Australia..

What is really funny is that I realise that I owe a debt to the widow of Preston Benson, journalist. About 40 years ago we were going to buy the house not far from here that he bought in 1924. His second wife on learning that I was a History teacher went up into their loft and found three books-- Including C. Delisle Burns "The First Europe" which I am now finally reading from cover to cover.. But going back to your previous comment about Stratford Upon Avon being a window on the world, it was only really on reading the Second "A Thousand Lives. An Account of the English Revolutionary Movement From 1660 To 1689", a few years ago, that my West Country heritage really clicked into place...

As you know John Cabot's voyage to Newfoundland was financed by Bristol, and Bristol remained the port for the Americas for more than the next 200 years... So the whole West Country Economy was the first to have an Industrial Revolution based on "The Domestic Industry" with the growth of a prosperous working class and local government that was essentially Middle Class in so far as it depended on trade and industry and the Atlantic trade...So Shakespeare's Stratford like my mothers Cotswolds was part of an economic system that spanned the Atlantic Ocean..

And I understood more of this when I read a very interesting biography of the Australian Nobel Laureate Patrick White, whose ancestors gave up sheep farming in Somerset in the 1820s and took a gamble on the chance of starting to farm sheep in Australia.. By the time that Patrick was born just before the First World War, in a hotel in England, because his parents were doing a "Grand Tour", his family were Australian aristocracy.

But what did that mean? Lord James Bryce in his account of Modern Democracies in 1921 described the working of the governments of Australia and New Zealand, observing that the immigration was "over-whelmingly" Anglo-Saxon, largely drawn from the prosperous working class who basically made both places huge "closed -shops" based on shared values of being able to prosper through hard work, which seems to be what you believe that should be the future of the EU.

PS. I have no notion of Martin Luther being a "Nationalist", such ideas were irrelevant in his time...But by the time that he said "Here I stand. I can do no other" he was aware of where he stood in relations to his father and forefathers, to the Holy brotherhood to which he belonged, to the congregation to which he ministered, to the students to whom he lectured on Law and Theology, and in fact to those who tried to govern the whole region the governance that had supported people in that part of the Baltic for perhaps thousands of years... Most people in Britain have probably never heard of the Hanseatic League, though most will have heard of Venice, Milan, Rome, and Florence...

Cheers

Cass

Last thoughts for the day

When you wrote "the contradictions inherent in the Enlightenment manifest themselves in the problems we find in the structure of society there is almost bound to be a movement towards restructuring" you fall into the Enlightenment trap of placing structures and systems where none existed.. There never was a Feudal System, there never was a Three Field System, There never was a Class System. There never were Nations, nor Races as we have been taught to use the word...Scientific rationalism was based on "post-mortem analysis" when you can look at something that was alive once it is dead, and impose your dead thinking on the living thing... Thus for example a Race for most English people most of the time was a dynamic flow of water and all that the water carries with it.. As we see in recent floods a Race can carry all kinds of things along with it, and the English people from eleventh century documents were recognised as people who could go and live amongst and do business with any other kind of people freely and without prejudice, and had well-established traditions that allowed other people to come and join in the effort of making England a dynamic place that was going forward. All based on local communities adapting to local conditions, including the particularities of each successive generation, just as a football team has to adapt its "systems" and "Structures" according to its own players and the opposition and the time and circumstances of the game... It is the adaptability of human beings that is our greatest asset, and for me it is only via the unique nature of the History of millions of unique human beings that we can begin to imagine just what humanity is capable of being and becoming.

Good night

Cass

CASSEROLEON:

In light of your previous two posts I'll temporarily abandon the attempt to write a straightforward explication of my view for the future of Europe and return to trying to answer your posts point by point. But, first, I would like to make it clear that my reason for joining this conversation was, in reading your posts and articles, I struggled to discern the central argument that seemed to be hidden in the abundance of references, quotations and historical snapshots. I felt that I could help make it easier for your readers to follow what you were saying if we could draw together some of those threads so any critical analysis will be intended as a positive aid in your reaching a wider readership.

I'm not sure where to start so I'll just take your last post first and work backwards from there and restrict myself to one or two points per post.

Morning Chris

Well I think it is stated quite clearly at the outset that that first part was all about the reasoning that went into the whole idea of creating "The Third Europe", and the state of the knowledge that largely shaped it....The lesson of Benthamite "Utilitarianism" that was very much associated with Macaulay's "English revolution" that could get under way in 1832 was that the "test of Utility" was far from perfect, because you can decide that something is no longer useful and scrap it, only to produce disastrous consequences...I would argue that this was the case with the English Poor Law that was scrapped in 1834, largely because (William Cobbett argued) of the noxious impact of "Scots feelosofers"...for neither Scotland nor Ireland had either the poor law nor the English social tradition of Commonweal and social solidarity which William Cobbett consistently tried to defend..The results of the scrapping of the English right to Poor Relief were in fact catastrophic because they created the crisis in Lancashire that was misinterpreted by Engels and then especially by Karl Marx as the inevitable consequence of Industrialization that would crush the working people subjecting them to ever greater pressure that, as in Lancashire in the 1830s, they could finally decide to fight back... And that would be the moment that Communists and Socialists could exploit offering themselves as the leaders with the blue print for change...which is why the Political Left in Britain and Europe have never been "progressive" but, as the French Historian Francois Furet brought out in his survey of the Communist Illusion in the twentieth century, have always tended to be fatalistic in the face of Marxist Scientific Inevitability...As I will be going on to explain this has tended to plague the Left in Europe because it sees the people as trapped by the geopolitical realities until the geopolitical realities change at which time it is possible to exploit the new dynamics....William Cobbett belonged to an English tradition in which someone of peasant origins like himself was capable of the "self-generated power" that is the birth right of every human being who has "the courage to be".

But I suppose I have been at fault in our exchanges in taking the opportunity to sketch out some of these ideas, except that I always hope to have exchanges that enable me to explore two lots of ideas my own and the person or people (especially in my years of teaching)with whom I am exchanging.

Cheers

Cass

post 72

"...you fall into the Enlightenment trap of placing structures and systems where none existed."

If I'm reading this correctly are you suggesting that the medieval world was non-reflective (that is one in which individuals just got on with their lives without attempting to analyse what was going on around them too much)? If so, I don't think this is historically accurate as there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate the underlying tensions in medieval society resulted in exactly those structures and systems that the Enlightenment invented as tools to look at what was wrong with society.

Those mental structures and systems do now exist (in the same way that I can talk about Superman and you will probably have a mental picture of a man dressed in blue and red with a cape) so, unfortunately, we have to deal with them.

post 72 second point

"...it is only via the unique nature of the History of millions of unique human beings that we can begin to imagine just what humanity is capable of being and becoming."

This takes us back to existentialism and actually what I was coming to in my personal history was that existentialism is a dead end. This was the problem that Sartre could never get to grips with; that of having started with the idea of the autonomous individual how to account for the fact that it was only through social interaction that humans can find meaning in their existence. So, I'm very much in agreement with your vision of local communities adapting to local conditions which is why I'm finding it difficult to reconcile that with the idea that I keep coming across in your writing that seems to suggest only 'the English' can show the way forward.

post 71

"...who basically made both places huge 'closed-shops' based on shared values of being able to prosper through hard work, which seems to be what you believe should be the future of the EU."

I'm not at all sure what you mean by this. When you say 'closed-shops' are you referring to Australia's whites-only policy? Or that Australia was dominated by an English working class culture (this might have been the case before the First World War)? My (very distant) dream for the future of Europe is that a single European government should replace all the national governments and be set up in such a way that it allows a strong system of local communities to flourish. The EU guiding principle of closer political union may or may not prove to be a step towards that but for this referendum it's the only one we have.

Hi Chris

(a) All structural analysis is "post mortem"-- based on the ability to find rational patterns in things that have happened which might lead one to try to identify common factors, and therefore causes...Many years ago my wife did an MA equivalent in France. A thesis in English on "Time and Structure in the works of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf", the title owing much to her French supervisor who insisted that she study 'Structuralism'. But of course what was so special about the work of Virginia Woolf, apart from the exquisite use of words and images, was her unique "Stream of Consciousness" method that was immediately recognised as the way that our deep subconscious mind works. And as Virginia Woolf summed up in a letter that she wrote most people do not have the opportunity to live her kind of Highbrow existence (which produced recurrent spells of insanity, which actually she was then able to draw upon in her "own post mortem" analysis).. Most people have to be Lowbrows just too busy doing all those things that just have to be done, and doing them expertly, that is in response to time and condition.

(b) The first "book" that emerged from my decades of writing tried to hone down my questions to "How is it possible for an individual to life happily in this world?".. And titles ranged from "My Struggle" that was impossible for obvious reasons, to "History Lessons", only to end up as "English Peace"...And we can only offer the world what we have, but as an historian with a wide-ranging interest in world history, it is difficult to think of anywhere else on Earth where people have been able to create Peace...In these islands the Scots, Welsh and Irish are proud of their failure to do so, happy to blame England for the fact that they have never been able to establish their own government strong enough to maintain an enduring peace at home, while also offering peace and security to their neighbours. This goes right back, in written form, to the 12 th century account written down by "Gerald of Wales" of the prophecy of Merlin the great bard at the court of Arthur 6-700 years before....

For "peace" is not "quiet" or "isolation". Those are descriptions of conditions defined by absence not presence. Strolling by the Avon the young Shakespeare was free to daydream in a way that required isolation and retreat from the rest of the world elsewhere.. But it was in conditions of English Peace in the Eighteenth Century that England became an incredible forcing house of improvisation and innovation, in which each village town, etc was its own think tank with the skilled working class "manufacturing" (creating by their own hands and intelligence) the kind of thing that they needed to tackle the immediate challenges of their lives... It was my heritage from my lorry driver father, who knew the British Economy as only a lorry driver could, and who belonged to the proud English tradition of trying first to make what you need yourself, especially if the equivalent does not exist, or is terribly expensive. Hence he built furniture for our family needs, and when I was 9 he appeared on the TV inventors club, and we were part of the "Inventors Club" stand at the Ideal Home Exhibition.

But the idea that England showed the way in the Modern World is a very common one.. Just last year French TV was reminding its viewers that "The Enlightenment" really all started with Voltaire's "English Letters" describing what an unimaginable place England was by the 1720s compared to the rest of Europe..And more recently this has been the theme of much of the work of Niall Ferguson especially "Empire. How Britain Made the Modern World"...with Stratford upon Avon playings it part through the seemingly universal appeal of the work of its own Bard.

Cass

post 71

"I have no notion of Martin Luther being a 'Nationalist', such ideas were irrelevant in his time..."

This exchange started in post 68 where you say, "But this understanding of Luther does not really take into account who he was and how his reality was shaped by the 'German Problem'.

I wasn't sure what you meant by the German Problem but I assumed you were using a nationalist narrative to make sense of Luther's life so I certainly wasn't suggesting that he was a nationalist. However, as for such ideas being irrelevant in his time I would've thought that the act of Parliament making Henry VIII supreme head of the Church in 1534 made them quite relevant.

Chris re your question about Australia and your EU vision it seems appropriate just to lift this from what I have "written ahead" because it seems incredibly relevant to the present migrant crisis that seems almost inevitable when a region manages to establish superior conditions that do not appear to be justified by any considerations of merit.

Much of this was possible because both Australia and New Zealand were so far away from any other close sources of supply of goods, services or Labour: and in short Australia and New Zealand were run, as far as possible, as massive “closed shops”, where Labour exploited its power as a different kind of oligarchy to the oligarchy of the rich that exploited its power in the USA. And in a purple passage reflecting on the “British whites only” policy for immigration, even in New Zealand which had its own unique character shaped by the treaties signed with the Maori people, Bryce wrote:

“Fifty or sixty years ago, Democracy was thought to be, almost by definition, and above all else, humanitarian. The sympathy of the common people- so recently admitted themselves … to their full rights of citizenship- would go out spontaneously to the rest of humankind, altogether in one fraternity, with no distinction of race or country. All were equal; all had an equal right to the pursuit of happiness, all interested in the well-being of others. The development of socialism increased these feelings amongst the wage-earners, and one hoped even that this would add up to a powerful guarantee for universal peace: 1914 showed the vanity of these fine hopes. Today, in Australia and New Zealand, the mass of working people, or amongst them the socialist groups, do not show the slightest desire to share the advantages that they have won with the workers of Europe. No more universal humanitarianism, not even for white men who want to improve their lot! And the same tendency can be clearly seen in the USA and Canada, countries that have been more exposed to an influx of people from the Old World. But there the law only excludes immigrants who are considered really undesirable from considerations of character or health, or who could become a burden on the public purse…Nothing, in the politics of Australia and New Zealand, can surprise and upset the European observer as much as this apparently anti-social attitude of the leaders of the working class…[who] seek to stop their brothers in Europe from coming to share their prosperity. And that simply because they fear that the new arrivals would compete with them in the Labour market…The “Class solidarity” that they call for so loudly does not stretch their sympathies as far as the members of the same class in foreign countries.” (page 344)