But he built some beautiful autobahns

With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany there has been a massive overkill on this subject. I wasn’t going to add to all of this but then I saw an article by Seumas Milne in this week’s Guardian, which gave an interpretation of events which had me shaking my head. I do think that Germany is a fascinating case – it’s not often in political economy that you can observe an experiment in laboratory conditions but the division of Germany after WWII is the closest we are going to get to this. Germany in 1945 was a country destroyed by six years of war. Two political and economic models were tried and the results surely leave no room for doubt.

Well for Mr. Milne they do. He chastises his opponents their refusal to acknowledge that the communist system had benefits as well as obvious costs:

The German Democratic Republic was home to the Stasi, shortages and the wall, but it was also a country of full employment, social equality, cheap housing, transport and culture, one of the best childcare systems in the world, and greater freedom in the workplace than most employees enjoy in today’s Germany.

 What an idiotic argument! No government or system does everything bad. Of course, this defence of totalitarianism is asymmetric. I don’t here anyone saying about Hitler: “Well he had the gas chambers but boy did he build some beautiful autobahns.” This hypocrisy is typical. You only have to compare the insignificant number of documentaries and films about communist atrocities compared to those about Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust. In the article which I featured last week Murderous Idealism Paul Hollander points out a possible origin of these double standards:

The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as by-products of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques.

 

Milne also makes reference to ostalgie, the German term referring to nostalgia for life in the former East Germany. The citizens had such a warm feeling about the place that the government built a wall to keep them in. Well I realise that it was really an anti-fascist defence barrier. Anywhere between 40,000 and 200,000 fled the DDR. Perhaps Mr Milne has access to a list of West Germans who risked their lives trying to get into this workers’ paradise. The genius of capitalism has actually found a way of exploiting this nostalgic feeling and there is a thriving trade in ersatz products from the communist years. There is so much hypocrisy about ideological symbols. We have Soviet Chic but we don’t have Pinochet T-shirts. The Hammer and Sickle is acceptable but wearing a swastika is roundly condemned – this is asymmetric outrage.

The Berlin Wall came down twenty years ago but this has not ushered in the end of history. Conflict is all around us – that is the nature of human affairs. There are no definitive answers to how society should be organised. Given human predilection for folly I wouldn’t even rule out a return of communism. Unfortunately I fear the results will be similar. Capitalism has its own problems and we will never be able to abolish crises. What will be the result of the downfall of communism? As Zhou Enlai said of the long-term consequences of the French Revolution – it’s too early to tell. I believe in the chaotic random nature of history. Events now can have unforeseen consequences. Having said that, I think you could rewind and replay the video of world history over and over again and you would still get similar disastrous results with communism. Now it seems that the great hope of communists is Hugo Chavez. Maybe the results will be different in the developing world but I won’t be holding my breath.

East German Jokes

In Britain we tend to think of the term German humour as an oxymoron. But under the communist system people would tell some jokes and some of them were even funny. There are some rumours that the CIA were behind them. Typical topics were the scarcity of bananas, the infamous Trabant car, leader Erich Honnecker and the Stasi, the secret police. Of course, telling jokes could be dangerous as the Stasi had 91,000 employees and a network of around 189,000 civilian informants to spy on its citizens and you could end up in prison.  Here is a selection:

How can you use a banana as a compass? Place a banana on the Berlin Wall. East is where a bite has been taken out of it.

A West-German boy to a GDR-boy: Why is the banana curved?  The Ossie replies: What is a banana?   

How do you double the value of a Trabant? Fill up the tank!

 VEB Sachsenring brought out a new Eco-Trabi: Immediately available for delivery, extremely cheap, extremely quiet, extremely environmentally friendly – with electric power. Small problem: The extension cord is only 20 meters long and not in stock.

 A new Trabi has been launched with two exhaust pipes — so you can use it as a wheelbarrow.

 Why were there no bank robberies in East Germany? Because the robbers would have to wait fifteen years for the getaway car to arrive.

 A West German businessman is driving a Mercedes through East Germany on a rainy night when his windshield wipers stop working. He takes it to an East German mechanic, who tells him there are no Mercedes windshield wiper motors in the GDR, but he will do his best to fix it. When the businessman returns the next day, to his surprise the windshield wipers are working perfectly. “How did you find a Mercedes windshield wiper motor in the East?” he asks the mechanic. “We didn’t,” replies the mechanic, “We used the engine motor of a Trabant.”

 What would happen if the desert became communist? Nothing for a while, and then there would be a sand shortage.

 Why can’t you get any pins in East Germany anymore? Because they are being sold to Poland as kebab skewers.

 One night, Erich Honnecker was in the bedchamber having some pillow talk with his mistress. He was in a magnanimous mood and offered her a present of her choice. She thought about his offer for a moment and then replied, “Oh, Erich, if there is one thing I would like you to do for me, it is this: open the borders just for one day.”  Honnecker said, “Of course, my dear,” but was a bit puzzled by her request. He asked, “But why would you have me do such a thing?”  The mistress replied, “I want to be alone with you.”

 How can you tell that the Stasi has bugged your apartment? There’s a new cabinet in it.

 What’s the difference between an HO-sausage and Sputnik? They’ve officially confirmed that Sputnik 2 had a dog in it. (HO was the state grocery network)

Now that’s what I call history

I first heard about Big History around a year ago and it really caught my imagination. Big History is a new way of looking at the subject, which attempts to examine history on a large scale across long time frames through a multi-disciplinary approach. The starting point is the origins of the Universe some 13.5 billion years ago. And it continues with the creation of stars, planets, including our own Earth. Finally it charts the evolution of life on Earth and the appearance of humans, which is nearly halfway through the course. In fact really humans should appear much later in the course but it would probably be too much of a blow to our egos.

 I really like the multi-disciplinary approach. It draws on such fields as anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, biology, climatology, cosmology, geology natural history. You may find this too broad but I really enjoy this big sweep. Too often we compartmentalise things and we fail to see the interconnectedness of events. To limit history to the written word is a mistake; Big History makes use of all possible time scales – not just those used in traditional history. The biological, geological and cosmological time frames give us a much deeper understanding our place within the Universe and enable us to see the underlying unity of modern knowledge

As an academic discipline Big History began in the late 1980s. One of the pioneers was David Christian, who started an experimental course with help from scientific colleagues. He rather frivolously coined the term Big History but it stuck. Christian now teaches at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. The discipline was helped by some important breakthroughs that enabled scientists to date the origins of the universe. By using Radiometric dating techniques, scientists can construct a coherent and rigorous scientific explanation going right back to the Big Bang.

 

In order to explain Professor Christian uses eight thresholds, events which were real turning points:

 

Threshold 1—Origins of Big Bang Cosmology

Threshold 2—The First Stars and Galaxies

Threshold 3—Making Chemical Elements

Threshold 4—The Earth and the Solar System

Threshold 5—Life

Threshold 6—What Makes Humans Different?

Threshold 7—Agriculture

Threshold 8—The Modern Revolution

 

This gives you a good idea of the vast time scale of the course – events like The French Revolution hardly get a look in.  Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything touches on many of the themes in Big History. If you want to a more academic approach into the subject, Professor David Christian has a book called Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. There is a problem with this material – it can overwhelm you. I have big problems getting a handle on quantum mechanics or superstring theory; I was one of those people who hated science at school. But like the aforementioned Bryson I have now developed a keen interest in science. I know it’s not always possible to understand everything but you can still get some appreciation of the forces that brought us here.

Pirates and the invisible hook

Where there is a sea, there are pirates.  Greek proverb

 The average man will bristle if you say his father was dishonest, but he will brag a little if he discovers that his great-grandfather was a pirate.  Bern Williams

 Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality. Friedrich Nietzsche

             Blackbeard, Sir Henry Morgan, Anne Bonny, Black Bart Roberts, and Calico Jack Rackam – these names have become part of our collective consciousness. These pirates come from a different age but the word is also in vogue now. The other day I typed it into the Guardian search engine and got 438 hits just for this year. This is not just about those Somali pirates wreaking havoc in the Horn of Africa. The scandal about Westminster expenses is all down to a pirate disk that the Daily Telegraph acquired. Last April saw the conviction of Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Peter Sunde, the men behind Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious filesharing hub. And finally the worst news of all Hollywood is planning to unleash Pirates of the Caribbean 4 in 2012. Oh, I can’t wait for that one! What can you expect from a film that has its origins in a Disney amusement park ride? Give me the real stories about the pirates.

              As the Greek proverb shows piracy goes back a long way – maybe the second ship that was ever built was built by pirates. Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates from Asia Minor as a young man. When the pirates asked for twenty talents, the future dictator was most miffed and suggested that they should actually ask for fifty. He warned them that they would pay for their illegal act. They were captured and Caesar had them crucified. The period we most associate with pirates is The Golden Age of Piracy a period spanning from the 1650s to the 1720s. This is where we get our image of the pirate.

             In his book The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, l Peter Leeson looks at pirates as economic actors. They may be operating outside the law but they still respond to economic incentives. They are businessmen who seek to maximise their profits. Violence had to be used in a calculated way. Your victims needed to know that if they resisted they would suffer the consequences but if they surrendered it was important to treat them well to incentivise this behaviour in the future. They preferred to surrender the minute they were approached by a pirate ship, seeing piracy as one of the costs of doing business. If there had been resistance, this would have been more costly for the pirates. A lot of the pirate cruelty shown in the movies did not really happen. Walking the plank seems to have been a myth. If the pirates had wanted to get rid of someone they would have just thrown him overboard.

            Pirates are also interesting terms of their organisational structure. One intriguing paradox is the parallels between our modern democratic constitutional government and in the institutions created by the pirates. Leeson points out that they created self-regulating, democratic societies aboard their ships, complete with checks and balances, more fifty years before the American and French revolutions. They also initiated an early system of workers’ compensation, health care plans, and in some cases they practised racial tolerance and equality. They operated in this way not out of the goodness of their hearts but because they needed to stick together in order to pursue profits. This is what Leeson means by the invisible hook, an obvious allusion to Adam Smith.

            Modern piracy is not really about getting booty – it’s about taking hostages.  Now we face the threat of the Somali pirates. The majority of them used to be fishermen. After the collapse of the Somali government in the 1990s, the coast around Somalia was subject to over-fishing. Some of the fishermen banded together to protect their resource. They armed themselves went to try to stop the over-fishing, making trawlers pay a toll. They soon realised it was a much more lucrative business and inevitably it experienced huge growth. Under maritime law it is illegal to carry weapons so these pirates could get easy prey. It is a hostage-taking business. In general they treat their hostages well – of the 815 people kidnapped last year by the Somali pirates, only four were killed. This is pure economic rationality. It looks like pirates will be around for many years to come.

Pirate code

I came across this agreement among pirates on the internet.  This is the pirate version of a written constitution and here are a few of the articles drawn up by the crew of Captain John Phillips in 1723:

 Every man shall obey civil Command; the Captain shall have one full Share and a half in all prizes;The Master, Carpenter, Boatswain, and Gunner shall have one share and a quarter.

If any man shall offer to run away, or keep any secret from the Company, he shall be maroon’d with one bottle of powder, one bottle of water, one small arm, and shot.

If any man shall steal anything in the Company, or game, to the value of a piece of Eight, he shall be maroon’d or shot. 

That man that shall strike another whilst those Articles are in force, shall receive Moses’s Law (that is 40 stripes lacking one) on the bare back.

 That man that shall not keep his arms clean, fit for engagement, or neglect his business, shall be cut off from his share, and suffer such other punishment as the Captain and the Company shall think fit.

 If any man shall lose a joint in time of engagement shall have 400 pieces of eight; if a limb 800.

 If at any time you meet with a prudent woman, that man that offers to meddle with her, without her consent shall suffer Death.

Sketches #4 John Law

The man who invented the stock market bubble

 

We have had an endless diet of financial scandals in recent years but there is nothing new under the sun as the case of the Scottish economist John Law demonstrates. Law was born into a family of bankers and goldsmiths from Fife in 1871. At the age of fourteen Law joined the family business, where he worked and learned the ropes, until the death of his father in 1688. This led Law to abandon the firm and go off to London where he lost a fortune gambling. Things were about to get worse for the young Law. On 9 April 1694, he fought a duel with Edward Wilson over the affections of one Elizabeth Villiers. Wilson was killed, and Law was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. This sentence was commuted to a fine for manslaughter but when Wilson’s brother appealed the sentence, Law was imprisoned.  However, he managed to escape to Amsterdam. At this time the city was the world capital of financial innovation – with the world’s first central bank and the invention of the company. This was the perfect place for Law and he was able to amass a huge fortune through financial speculation. It also gave his some ideas about financial engineering – he now needed a country where he could apply them.

 

In 1705, he returned to Scotland, and wrote a book – Money and Trade considered, with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money. The same year, he made a proposal to the Scottish Parliament for the establishment of a national bank, but his suggestion was turned down. He would have to take his schemes back to the continent.

 

In 1715, he settled in France, and soon came to the attention of the rakish Philippe Duc d’Orleans, Regent for the young king of France. Both Law and the Duke enjoyed frequenting gambling dens. In 1715 Philippe succeeded his uncle and would be Regent to the new king five-year old Louis XV, until 1723. Law now had his foot in the door. In 1716 he persuaded the Duke to allow him to set up the Banque Generale with the power to issue banknotes. Although it was a private bank, three quarters of the capital consisted of government bills and government accepted notes. The economic difficulties faced by the French government gave Law just the opportunity he had been waiting for to put his revolutionary ideas into practice.

 

We need to look at the historical context of these events. Under Louis XIV France had been at war with England for many years and this left the French economy with its rampant inflation shortage of coins and unstable prices, in a parlous state. It was on the verge of bankruptcy. Law’s plan was to convert government debt from fixed-rate annuities to shares paying a lower rate.  He was going to create the Dutch model but on steroids combining a trading company and a public bank.

 

In 1817 the Banque Generale became the Banque Royale. Not content with having the French money supply under his tutelage, he then sought the trading concessions of the Compagnie d’Occident and he also had the Royal Mint. This was not a good idea because it gave Law and the Regent the incentive to print money.  Law floated the Compagnie d’Occident as the Mississippi Company, which owned a quarter of what is now the United States in the Companie were originally issued at 500 livres, but rose to 10,000 livres in the course of 1719. When the Companie issued a 40% dividend in 1720, the share price rocketed to 18,000 livres, far-outstripping the capital base of the Companie. This was the biggest financial bubble in history, surpassing what happened in the United States in the 1920s before the onset of the great Depression. The atmosphere is captured by these observations from the time:

It is inconceivable what wealth there is in France now. Everybody speaks in millions. I don’t understand it at all. But I see clearly that the God Mammon reigns an absolute monarch in Paris.

 

The problem was that the Mississippi Company was based on marketing and had little fundamental value it was basically a Ponzi scheme. In 1720 after those spectacular gains, speculators resolved to take their profits and run. The share price dropped as dramatically as it had risen.  As panic set in investors sought to redeem their bank notes and promissory notes, but the Companie did not have the funds it and went bankrupt. In 1720 with a false passport in his hand, Law fled France returned to his nomadic existence, and died, penniless, in Venice in 1729.

 

What about the consequences for France? It set back French finances and Louis XV and Louis XVI were permanently hamstrung by a lack of resources, surely one of the most important factors behind the revolution of 1789. Interestingly Britain suffered a similar crisis, The South Sea Bubble, but it did not have the same disastrous effect. The British government took a too-big-to-fail stance, nationalising the company and a resolution was proposed in parliament that bankers be tied up in sacks filled with snakes and tipped into the murky Thames. The lesson I would draw is that is that venality is a constant theme in society but it is also important not to renounce financial innovation completely. Financial innovation has also created a lot of wealth and it would be a grave mistake to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Radio days

I never forgot that New Year’s Eve when Aunt Bea awakened me to watch 1944 come in. And I’ve never forgotten any of those people or any of the voices we used to hear on the radio. Although the truth is with the passing of each New Year’s Eve those voices do seem to grow dimmer and dimmer. From Woody Allen’s film, Radio Days

 It is imperative in the political interest of the state not only that the whole nation participates in broadcasting, but that the entire nation is ready to receive radio programmes at any moment. Artur Freudenberg, Nazi propagandist 

Radio is the theatre of the mind; television is the theatre of the mindless. Steve Allen

 Radio on the Internet is yet another world-shrinking example of what communications analysts call “death of distance.” Tim Jones

 It’s not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on. Marilyn Monroe

          Life used to be so much simpler. At school we learned that Marconi invented the radio but in researching this piece I have discovered that it is much more complicated than that. The invention of the radio was in reality a cumulative process and it is impossible to give credit to just one inventor; Hertz, Tessla, Popov, Edison, and Bose all made crucial discoveries at the end of the nineteenth century. The first proper broadcast took place on Christmas Eve in 1906, and was made by Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian working for Thomas Edison. It consisted of some violin playing and passages from the Bible. After the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, radio for communications became increasingly popular. The BBC radio services began in 1922, with the first outside broadcast a year later. In the General Strike of 1926 the BBC came into its own broadcasting five news bulletins a day at a time when no newspapers could be published. The golden age of radio was probably from the 1930s to the 1950s when news helped to inform people about the world and the music, quiz shows, comedy, sports broadcasts, variety shows, and dramatic programming helped take people’s minds off the economic turmoil and subsequent world war. Who cannot feel nostalgia for that period as the whole family gathered round those enormous radios built into large wooden cases and their vacuum tubes? Woody Allen lovingly recreated this period in his film Days of Radio. Probably the most famous programme from this glorious age was Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds, done as a series of simulated news broadcasts about an alien invasion, causing widespread panic. Although a lot of these tales of mass hysteria were urban legends and had little basis in reality.

           Nazi Germany was the first totalitarian state to use radio as a propaganda tool and they brought out a series of affordable two-band radio sets – the Volksempfänger (the people’s receiver), which had an eagle and swastika stamped on the front.  Between 1933 and 1939 over 7 million Volksempfänger were produced. With their state monopoly, the Reich Broadcasting Corporation, Goebbels, saw their massive propaganda potential. Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will is what we are most familiar with but most ordinary Germans would have first experienced the Nuremberg rallies on their own sets or through huge loudspeakers mounted in public places. There was no escape from Hitler and it was probably not a good idea to turn off your radio when the Führer was in full flight.

         When WWII broke out in September 1939, listening to enemy radio stations became punishable by a sentence in a concentration camp. All radios sold came with this chilling warning “Think about this: listening to foreign broadcasts is a crime against the national security of our people. It is a Führer order punishable by prison and hard labour.” The Gestapo ran campaign where it advertised for sale radios with short wave bands and then arrested and shot anyone who wanted to buy one as a traitor.

         I haven’t mentioned German overseas wartime propaganda, which was designed to discourage, and demoralise the allied troops and civilians. I am of course referring to the infamous Lord Haw-Haw who in fact was more than one person. You may well have heard of William Joyce but it also referred to other announcers including Wolf Mittler a Polish-German playboy with a British education who spoke and behaved like the fictional aristocrat, Bertie Wooster. Around a third of the British nation would tune in to Lord Haw-Haw’s programme. However, this should not be seen as an example of a propaganda success as most of the listeners treated it as a joke and it became compulsive listening.

         I must not forget the Soviet bloc. When I was a lad I remember many a night when I was unable to get to sleep and I would tune into one Radio Albania’s in English Language Service, which would announce another glorious grain harvest or the impressive figures for tractor production. Within fifteen minutes I would be out. There really should be a website where you can download this kind of stuff. It could be the end of insomnia within a generation.

           With the rise of television radio became marginalized but the digital revolution and the expansion of new ways of accessing information online has given a huge boost to this most traditional form of electronic media. If you are a regular reader of my blog you will know that I am a fanatic of internet radio and that I regularly recommend programmes from the BBC, NPR (National Public Radio from the US) and Australia’s ABC Radio National in the My Media Week Section. The beauty of radio is that it can be consumed very easily and it allows you to do something else at the same time. Now with podcasts it’s possible to listen to a programme anywhere you like.

        We have another example of the long tail (the term was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities.) Podcasting shows the increasing value of such niche entertainment and thematic content very specific tastes can be catered for rather than the generalised content that we had to put up with in the past. There are also a lot of challenges in creating viable economic models. The days of those awful, intrusive radio ads are hopefully coming to an end. There will have to be a more discrete, targeted form of advertising. The BBC, of course, will not be subject to such constraints and they have a lot of excellent content online. Although I do wish they would make more of their past programmes available as podcasts. The radio of the future then will be multi-channel and multi-format, with minimal infrastructure costs for creating new station. You will be able to listen by a multitude of media devices as is already possible today. Tune in and welcome to the exciting new world of radio.

The world’s oldest joke book

The other day I heard a fascinating programme on ABC Radio National, featuring Professor in classics at Cambridge University, Mary Beard telling jokes from the oldest collection of jokes in the world, Philogelos: The Laughter Lover. The collection, which contains 265 jokes, is written in Greek, and the language used indicates that it may have been written in the 4th century CE, according to William Berg, an American classics professor. The targets of the humour include teachers, students, eggheads and fools. You can also see comic Jim Bowen performing some of these jokes on YouTube. Here is a selection of these jokes: 

 

An egghead, falling sick, had promised to pay the doctor if he recovered. When his wife nagged at him for drinking wine while he had a fever, he said: “Do you want me to get healthy and be forced to pay the doctor?”

 

An egghead visiting his country-estate asked if the water in a well there was good to drink. He was told that it was good, and that his own parents used to drink from the well. The egghead was amazed: “How long were their necks, that they could drink from something so deep!”

 

An absent-minded professor is asked by a friend to bring back two 15-year-old slave boys from his trip abroad, and replies “fine, and if I can’t find two 15-year-olds I will bring you one 30-year-old.

 

An incompetent astrologer cast a boy’s horoscope and said: “He will be a lawyer, then a city-official, then a governor.” But when this child died, the mother confronted the astrologer: “He’s dead — the one you said was going to be a lawyer and an official and a governor.” “By his holy memory,” he replied, “If he had lived, he would have been all of those things!”

 

“An egg-head doctor was seeing a patient. ‘Doctor’, he said, ‘when I get up in the morning I feel dizzy for 20 minutes.’ ‘Get up 20 minutes later, then’”).

 

A misogynist paid his last respects at the tomb of his dead wife. When someone asked him, “Who has gone to rest?” he replied: “Me, now that I’m alone.”

 

A misogynist was sick, at death’s door. When his wife said to him, “If anything bad happens to you, I’ll hang myself,” he looked up at her and said: “Do me the favour while I’m still alive.”

 

A barber, a bald man and an absent-minded professor are taking a journey together. They have to camp overnight, so decide to take turns watching the luggage. When it’s the barber’s turn, he gets bored, so he amuses himself by shaving the head of the professor. When the professor is woken up for his shift, he feels his head, and says “How stupid is that barber? He’s woken up the bald man instead of me.”

 

A fellow says to a butcher from Sidon, ‘Lend me a knife as far as Smyma.’ ‘I don’t have a knife that reaches that far,’ answers the butcher.

 

This last one could be considered a direct ancestor of Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” sketch: A man complains the slave he has just bought has died. “By the gods”, answers the slave trader, “when he was with me, he never did any such thing.”

 

How stories made our world

In unsettled times like these, when world cultures, countries and religions are facing off in violent confrontations, we could benefit from the reminder that storytelling is common to all civilizations. Whether in the form of a sprawling epic or a pointed ballad, the story is our most ancient method of making sense out of experience and of preserving the past.  William Collins

 

Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories. Mary Catherine Bateson

 

Many people don’t realize the extent to which stories influence our behaviour and even shape our culture. Think about how Bible stories teach the fundamentals of religion and rules of conduct. Think of the fables and parables that moulded your values. Think of how stories about your national, cultural or family history have shaped your attitudes about yourself and others.  Lawrence Shapiro

 

The story was the bushman’s most sacred possession. These people knew what we do not; that without a story you have not got a nation, or culture, or civilization. Without a story of your own, you haven’t got a life of your own. Laurens Van der Post

 

We are constantly being bombarded with stories. Newspapers have their news stories. Cinema is based, almost exclusively, on dramatised fiction. Prime time TV is largely the same. Novels dominate the bestseller lists. Companies spend billions of dollars every year on advertising, trying to get their stories across to us, so as to influence us to purchase their products. Political leaders and states have also fostered stories about the past in order to construct a sense of community or nation. The founders of the world’s great religions understood the importance of stories, handing down our great myths and legends from generation to generation. Elaborate conspiracy theories intrigue us. Much of our conversation is taken up with anecdotes, jokes and of course gossip – all forms of story. Even when we go to bed at night, our dreams are stories produced by our sleeping brains. We are indeed storytelling apes.

            We may not feel comfortable with the idea of applying human evolution to the understanding of literature and narrative in general, but it can undoubtedly provide many valuable insights. We can say this for two reasons. Firstly, storytelling goes back a long way, pre-dating not only the invention of writing, but of agriculture and permanent settlement as well. We do not know exactly when humans developed language but a 100,000 years ago is as good a guess as any. Secondly, storytelling is ultimately a product of the human mind, which itself is the product of evolutionary pressures.

Storytelling has grown immensely in its scope and power from its origins – telling stories around the campfire. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. Freudians have their three stages of psychosexual development, the oral, anal and phallic; in terms of narrative Walter Ong, a linguist and narratologist described the oral, print and media stages. It is a good idea to get an idea of the time scales involved. If we began using language 100,000 years ago, the print and media stages represent a mere blink of the eye.

What are the functions of storytelling? Within evolutionary science there is a debate as to whether it is an evolutionary adaptation or a by-product of the human mind I favour the latter but whoever is right stories serve an essential role in our society; they can teach morals, cultural expectations, and behavioural norms. The knowledge we acquire through storytelling vastly outweighs the firsthand knowledge we have about the world. Stories are indeed a wonderful teaching tool. It is clear that we respond far better to stories than we do to graphs and numbers. Thomas Sowell’s book Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy contains no graphs or mathematical formulae. It does however contain lots of stories that really bring the dismal science to life. Mathematician John Allen Paulos tries to do similar things with mathematics. We need to be given a context and stories are wonderful at doing that.

            However, stories have their dangers. Life is not a Hollywood narrative. It does not imitate art. Many events have no meaning and are purely arbitrary occurrences but humans need to try to impose order on all this chaos- we have a need to use the word because; we are a pattern-seeking species. This is why we’re all so riveted by stories of any kind – we can’t live without explanations so we make up all kinds of theories with insufficient information and a blatant disregard for empirical evidence. This has been called narrative fallacy and we are suckers for it. In at the beginning of a Hollywood film we see someone buying a gun we know that that he will use it very soon. If someone coughs, it is because they have a terminal illness. In real life many things occur but they have no particular connection to what comes after they are merely random, meaningless events. In economics we often hear stories about how individuals are affected by a particular factory closure but we don’t see the overall effects. We hear from the most vocal groups but we won’t hear from people whose future jobs will be destroyed by protective tariffs. Anecdotes are not necessarily the best way to carry out an economic policy. Anti-semitism is an example of a terrible story that has been handed down from generation to generation culminating in the horror of the Holocaust.

            So, stories are all around us. We cannot escape from them. They do many wonderful things but we should also be aware of the dangers.  I would like to claim the wisdom to be able to see beyond them but we will probably never be able to transcend all our biases and see things in an objective way. 

Sketches #2 John Wilmot

You will not like me – John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester

 

            John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, was born at Ditchley in Oxfordshire on either April 1 or 10 1647. This was a tempestuous time in English history. Just two years after his birth King Charles I of England was beheaded and England was without a monarch for ten years. Society was divided politically and religiously and Rochester’s own family reflected these divisions – his father was a Royalist and his mother was a Puritan.

           As a child, Rochester had a very solid education; he attended the Burford Grammar School but was also taught by a tutor at home, and was generally considered a model pupil. At the age of 12 he went to Wadham College, Oxford, where, away from his mother’s strict control, a different side of his personality began to emerge, as he started to frequent taverns. At the age of fourteen he received his M.A degree from his uncle, the Earl of Clarendon, who was Chancellor to the University. Then, as was the fashion amongst the English Aristocracy for nearly 200 years, he was sent to round off his education by going on the traditional Grand Tour, taking in Italy and France.

           This very polished and sophisticated 18 year-old, then joined the newly restored new court of Charles II, the greatest centre of cultural patronage of its day. This was a period of many cultural, social and gastronomic innovations in England – the first stage actresses (various of whom Rochester would bed), the man’s three-piece suit, those distinctive periwigs, tea, coffee champagne and ice cream. There was a glorious cultural explosion with such figures Dryden, Purcell and Wren to name but three.

               Rochester decided he needed to find a wife but he was far from conventional in how he went about it. The target of his affections was one Elizabeth Mallet, an heiress who had caught his eye because of her beauty, intelligence, and immense wealth. Fearing that another suitor might get his hands on her fortune, Rochester decided to kidnap her. Amazingly Elizabeth was impressed by his tactics. The King though was displeased and had Rochester put in the Tower and Elizabeth returned to her parents. It was only a temporary sojourn for Rochester and he finally married Mallet two years later.

           The Earl lived a double life – a loving father and family man in the country and a hell-raising boozer and womaniser in London. Rochester’s relationship with Charles was a difficult one. Charles II, whose father had been executed, and who had only escaped capture himself by hiding in an oak tree, was a cynical and pragmatic monarch. After the dour years of Oliver Cromwell’s commonwealth, Charles sought to bring back some splendour to Britain and the Court. He surrounded himself with scientists, architects and he rogered just about any woman who met his gaze. Rochester was not afraid to lampoon Charles to his face and many times the king would banish the disrespectful poet to the country, but he would always relent and invite him back to London, because, despite all his many faults, Rochester was witty and fun to be around. He was an member of the infamous ‘Merry Gang’ at the Court, a sort of seventeenth century “rat pack” who went around getting drunk, brawling, playing pranks and generally raising hell. When he was exiled from Court he would often assume different identities, the most famous one being Doctor Alexander Bendo, a German quack, specializing in fertility treatment. His unconventional treatment would produce positive results – he had soon cuckolded half of London.

           On Charles’s death Rochester couldn’t resist sticking the knife in:

Here lies a great and mighty King,

Whose promise none relied on;

He never said a foolish thing,

Nor ever did a wise one.  

               But Rochester also had his artistic side and in his lifetime he produced sexually explicit poetry. Signor Dildo is the classic example of his bawdy poetic style. The background to this poem is interesting.  In 1673 a petition was presented to King Charles, protesting about the proposed marriage of the heir to the throne, Charles’s brother James, Duke of York, to Mary of Modena, an Italian Catholic Princess. They could foresee dangerous consequences of a marriage to a Catholic and urged him forbid any wedding. Wilmot had an alternative take, anticipating the benefits of the aforementioned union, which would see the mass importation of Italian dildos to the delight of English ladies:

You ladies all of merry England

Who have been to kiss the Duchess’s hand,

Pray, did you not lately observe in the show

A noble Italian called Signor Dildo? …

            His one play “Sodom or the Quintessence of Debauchery” was banned for obscenity and printed copies were destroyed. The characters have names such as Bolloximian, Cuntigratia, Prickett, and Buggeranthus, which leave little to the imagination. On 16 December Sotheby’s 2004 sold one of the few surviving copies for £45,600.

            But his works were much more than just lewd verse. His poem. “Satire Against Reason and Mankind”, with its cynicism about man and rationalism, owes much to the works of philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who died when Rochester was 15. The unifying themes of his poetry are a honesty and a dislike of artifice. They seem to reflect his philosophy of life:

All this with indignation have I hurled

At the pretending part of the proud world,

Who, swollen with selfish vanity, devise

False freedoms, holy cheats, and formal lies

Over their fellow slaves to tyrannize

            His constant drinking and wenching were to take their toll on his body and his last few years were full of suffering as he rotted away, afflicted with syphilis and cirrhosis among other illnesses. He finally died on 26 July 1680. He seems to have been an atheist but on his deathbed his mother was anxious for him to repent and it was later claimed that Rochester had returned to the path of righteousness.

            In his ‘Lives of the English Poets’ Samuel Johnson gave a damning verdict on Rochester:

“Thus in a course of drunken gaiety and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious obligation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness; till, at the age of one-and-thirty, he had exhausted the fund of life, and reduced himself to a state of weakness and decay.”

            I have to disagree with Johnson. I’m not sure I can say that I like Rochester but the world would have been a duller place without this quintessentially English rake.